Notes from the Underground

Phir Mile Sur Mera Tumhara

2010-01-28T12:58:00.004+05:30

Everybody is cribbing big time about Phir Mile Sur Mera Tumhara (Part 1, Part 2) - snarkmax but funny putdown here.

Let me stick my neck out and say that I liked the video.

First, let me get the obvious out of the way: Bollywood definitely
used this to feed their ego - SRK, Aamir, Salman, Deepika in skimpy
dress, Ash and Abhi, Sonu Nigam (!), Shahid, Ranbir, Amitabh - don't
need *so* many of those in there, with their own segments that too.
And excluding Sachin, Dravid & co. from the video? That pisses me off too.

But you can see how the video tries to clearly make the point that we
have a new and different India from the one 25 years ago. India is
nowhere exoticised (the original Mile Sur did exoticise India a wee
bit), and in general we see a much richer, cleaner, posher looking
India. Even with the much abused Shiamak Davar - Shobhana
Bharatanatyam segment; I can clearly see how they're trying to make the
point the new India is not
competing but is coexisting and is sort of paying homage to the
traditional India (although the execution was poor, because Davar sucked big
time and Shobhana was all awesomeness). And then there's the new, urban, hip India - being represented by the
Shahid Kapoor segment, as well as the funky instrumental segments
- Rahman, Sivamani, another couple of guys with shades I don't know in
the 2nd part.

There was also criticism
that by showing mostly the children of stars - Anoushka, Abhishek,
Deepika, Amjad Khan's sons - etc. were they suggesting that only the
people of the already successful can make it big in India? I think the point
was to show generational change, passing of the baton etc., and
showing parents and children together is the most universal way of
showing that.

I definitely loved that the various regional language segments are now
longer, and the segments of Telugu, Tamil did sound nice to my ears (the
lyrics of the Telugu segment have changed, and are quite good). And
although Salman did his best to ruin the segment with the deaf/mute
kids, I still found that scene quite touching.

And the video having its cheesy bits is, on the whole, not that bad. Indian
movies are hajaar cheesy anyway, so SRK, Aamir and Salman doing their
respective stereotypical acts is kinda appropriate, no?

Why I don't dig libertarianism that much any more

2009-09-08T02:46:00.005+05:30

Over the last 3 years, the strength of my belief in libertarianism has waned. I still am libertarian enough to have Hayekian moments every time I go to the grocery store, and I shed an internal tear of joy every time Bryan Caplan writes another blog post arguing for immigration reform. But still. I've found myself disagreeing more often with people and writers I once admired; I've given up reading Reason.com and Cafe Hayek and Amit Varma for the most part. This doesn't at all imply that I am fan of govt. regulation all of a sudden; that is a separate issue.

Here are bunch of reasons why this may have happened, in roughly increasing order of importance, I think.

1. Signaling (the cynic's explanation): As I come across more and more libertarians, may be the philosophy doesn't seem as exclusive as it did before, and I consequently derive less signaling benefit from holding such beliefs. In short, libertarianism is no longer cool.

2. Simple indifference to politics: I am less interested in politics and self-righteous debates than before; politics is the mind-killer.

3. Research funding: Given that for the last 3 years, I've been supported as a grad student by the U.S. govt., a principled stand against govt. spending is a bit hypocritical, no? In general, research on today's scale simply needs govt. funding; and while the many inefficiencies of current academia is a topic I'd love to talk about, I'll spare you for now 'cause that's a separate topic.

4. Foxes vs. hedgehogs: Philip Tetlock studied for 20 years the predictive accuracy of political experts and wrote a widely acclaimed book about it. Basically he found that experts who were skeptical of grand theories and used "local", ad-hoc models ("foxes") were generally more accurate forecasters than experts with overarching grand theories to explain all developments ("hedgehogs"). Now this doesn't carry over cleanly to policy debates, but it does suggest that attachment to simple, elegant theories in social science is not such a great idea. Among the major political ideologies libertarianism is probably the simplest and most elegant one, and all of a sudden this doesn't seem like praise. (May be this explains why engineers and geeks, with their training in math, are overrepresented amongst libertarians.)

5. Corporate social responsibility: I no longer accept the Friedmanite view of corporate social responsibility - that a company can do whatever it takes to maximise profit so long as it obeys the law. It was right and proper that De Beers be pressured to stop putting "blood diamonds" out on the global market, even though the company may not have technically been breaking any law. In general, companies will cut corners, lie, and indulge in all sorts of manipulative behaviour that even 6 year olds know are wrong. Turning a blind eye to all of this just because it's technically legal seems quite callous to me.

6. Defer to the experts: Frankly, no matter how intuitively appealing free market economics ("Econ 101") may feel, I should shut up, realize there's economics beyond Econ 101, and simply believe in whatever the average expert on any given topic believes. E.g. when Ron Paul comes along arguing for the gold standard - I don't even need to know the technical arguments as to why this is loony; all I need to know is that practically no reasonable economist thinks this is a good idea. This strategy is very sound as far as it goes, except that there are topics where it is non-trivial to figure out what the average expert believes in, and there are topics which are a combination of ethics and empirical knowledge (corporate social responsibility, the role of the govt. in protecting the environment, abortion etc.) and therefore there are no clear experts to defer to.

7. The recent financial crisis: Beware those who are not surprised by surprising seeming data; the scale of madness displayed by Wall Street in the subprime crisis can fail to surprise only if you are a investment banker yourself or you've made a thorough study of human irrationality. (Judge Posner surely deserves some credit for having the guts to revise his life-long beliefs, although I haven't read the book.) The main surprise is not even that investment bankers were greedy, but that they were *flat-out stupid*. Having their own careers, financial security and reputation at stake was not enough incentive for these people to act rationally. *That* is what scares me; greed is widely reviled, but greed has predictable consequences, one can turn greed around to society's advantage (which is how markets work when they do). On the other hand it is stupidity that has unpredictable consequences; there is no saying how things might turn out when you deal with mad men. The only philosophy that's survived this whole mess is Nicholas Taleb's, and his theories have nothing at all to do with libertarianism.

So there you go. Today's piece of tangentially related advice: it's a good strategy usually to hold off on proposing solutions until you have understood the problem at hand properly.

Motion koan

2008-12-29T22:15:00.002+05:30

The world is still
Motion is in the mind
If you don't believe me
Ask Julian Barbour

Why Apocalypto is awesome

2008-12-20T11:02:00.009+05:30

I just finished watching Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, one of my all time favourites, for the second time. The movie is set in a Mayan village of hunter gatherers in the 16th century. The jungle that surrounds the village forms a beautiful backdrop to the movie throughout, and it is almost as if the jungle were a character itself. The dialogue is entirely in Yucatec Mayan, and adds to the authenticity (this tough choice not to have the characters speak English shouldn't come as a surprise, once you realize that it was a Mel Gibson movie - his earlier Passion of the Christ after all, was also entirely in Semitic languages. For all of Mel Gibson's wackiness, you still gotta hand it to the guy for being an awesome, tenacious filmmaker.) In other words, the movie is a period piece. But it's also a superb action movie, with almost the entire second half of the movie consisting of an adrenaline-pumping extended chase scene. Except for some cliches - like the little girl who foretells the future in portentous tones, and the important
plot element that is lifted almost verbatim from a Tintin story - the plot twists and turns realistically. And although I would have prefered the visuals and background score to have been a bit subtler, they on the whole definitely add to the movie's experience.

But wait, this is not all there is to this movie. Apocalytpo also beautifully illustrates a couple of ideas that my other topic of this post - Jared Diamond's first book The Third Chimpanzee - makes quite emphatically. And those ideas are:

1. Genocide is a human universal: As kids, we learn how our rise to modernity has been scarred by various horrors - the genocides committed by the Nazis, the British imperalists, Stalin etc. are learned from early on enough that they are now cliches. However, there is always this seeming impulse to set these incidents out as somehow being aberrations; as being worthy of remembrance because of their perceived extreme deviance from the norm in the history of our species. At the very least, the idea that genocide has been a universal feature of humans through time and space, is something that is never said in our history books, and it is something I attained a dim realization of only after watching this movie, and a better understanding was to come only after reading The Third Chimpanzee. Humans throughout the ages, be they hunter-gatherers or European colonizers, have been unhesitant to methodically kill humans en masse if it suits their purpose, and they didn't need special evil in their hearts to do that. There was no golden age of innocence for humanity when genocide was not common. Now, this point may either seem melodramatic or obvious to you, but this movie brought it home to me for the first time.

2. How hunter-gatherers were gradually vanquished, and how that has been bad for humanity: One of the revelations when I was reading The Third Chimpanzee was that farming was not, as is commonly presumed, an unambiguously progressive step for humanity. Jared Diamond, in an essay for the Discover magazine that would eventually be incorporated into the book, calls the turn from hunting gathering to agriculture "the worst mistake in the history of the human race". Why so? For starters, the groups of humans who retained their hunting-gathering ways were in fact much healthier than those groups that opted for agriculture:

Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunter-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5'9" for men, 5'5" for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B.C. had reached a low of 5'3" for men ,5' for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors. (link)

The reason was that turning to agriculture deprived our diet of the diversity that hunting-gathering provided it with, and turned it into a diet excessively dependent on a few carbohydrate-rich cereals. Besides, diseases was rife in the dense populations that became possible only with the advent of farming.

But this was not the only, or even the main cost of turning to agriculture. That was to be the creation of gross social inequalities :

Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources like orchards or herds of cows. Instead, they live off the wild plants and animals that they obtain each day. Everybody except for infants, the sick, and the old join in the search for food. Thus there can be no kings, no full-time professionals, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others.

Only in a farming population could contrasts between the disease-ridden masses and a healthy, non-producing elite develop. (from the book, no online link)

This is not to say that there would have been no conception of social status at all among hunter-gatherers. For sure, the more skilled hunters in a hunter-gatherer group would have got more respect, but the scale of inequality would have been nowhere near that between a pharoah and a Jewish slave in ancient Egypt - to take an example from a society made possible only by agriculture.

And Apocalypto illustrates this idea beautifully - the contrast between the egalitarianism and the health of the hunter-gatherers, versus the emaciation and social inequality of the kingdom (a kingdom that could only have been built on the basis of agriculture) they are abducted to, couldn't be greater.

So why did humans turn to agriculture at all?

One answer boils down to the adage "Might makes right." Farming could support
many more people than hunting, albeit with a poorer quality of life. (Population densities of hunter gatherers are rarely over one person per ten square miles, while farmers average 100 time that.) [..]

As population densities of hunter-gatherers slowly rose at the end of the ice ages,
bands had to choose between feeding more mouths by taking the first steps toward
agriculture, or else finding ways to limit growth. Some bands chose the former solution, unable to anticipate the evils of farming, and seduced by the transient abundance they enjoyed until population growth caught up with increased food production. Such bands outbred and then drove off or killed the bands that chose to remain hunter-gatherers, because a hundred malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter. (link)

And so the process has continued, so that we now live in a world with hardly any communities that practise hunting gathering.

***

Anyway, so that was a long post. If you have not seen Apocalypto yet, I fear I may have filled your mind with interpretations that you may well not see in the movie. And I shall return to post about The Third Chimpanzee again - it's a really fascinating, fundae-packed book.

Explaining the enthu of first-year college students

2008-12-12T00:38:00.006+05:30

(Enthu is slang for enthusiasm.)

It is customary for graduating (final year) students in my undergrad college to make an "year video" or a "batch video" - something that was meant to capture various aspects of the graduating batch's 4 years in college. In the batch video of one of the batches senior to us, I remember there was a joke on the naivete of students in their first year. The scene shows a first year guy with his shirt tucked in, hair neatly combed, wearing shoes and carrying a bag (ostensibly full of books) leaving from his hostel room after the day's classes were over. His room-mate asks him where he is going, and our hero replies, in all sincerity: "Library yaar, sessional pandrah din main hai!" (Library dude, the midterms are in fifteen days!). The scene would provoke much laughter among the gathered 3rd years or final years watching this video, not only because to study for a midterm from 15 days before is ridiculous, but also because they realise that many of them were in fact like that back in the first year.

Anyway, the point of this story was to illustrate the fact that in Engineering colleges, first year students have way more enthu than more senior students. For me, and for many of my friends (studying in colleges other than mine as well), plotting the aggregates across the 8 semesters showed a nice monotonically decreasing function. My first semester aggregate was in the mid 80's I think, and by my last semester it was in the late 60s. Heh. First years are also the major takers of most of the "general aptis" and "C aptis" (apti is short for aptitude test) and various mutants of these two general forms that were informally organized in our college.

So why are first year college students so much more hard working? (Throughout this post, I'll be talking about the average student. There'll always be exceptions - people who retain their enthu through all 4 years or people whose enthu actually increases over time.) Or to put it another way, why does enthu drop so much with years in college? The straightforward explanations are that first year students are "naive"; that people get jaded with time in college; that people get sidetracked with other obsessions (gaming, movies, drinking etc.). W.r.t the last explanation - I think it's likely the students get sidetracked only because they have already decided that studies aren't worth their time and are looking for other things to pursue.The explanation that students become jaded with time is also a bit circular - it is just another way of saying that they lose enthu, which is the phenomenon we are trying to explain here. Another explanation that someone from my college might come up with is that seniors restrict the lives of first year students as a part of ragging - preventing them from going out of campus, drinking etc. But this fails to explain why the pattern of declining enthu holds even in colleges without much ragging or even a hostel.

As you might have guessed by now, I have a different explanation, but I have to digress a bit first to introduce it.

It is well known that when a brood of chickens is first assembled, they fight for the first few days until a status hierarchy or "pecking order" gets established. This is the pattern not just in chickens, but other animals including monkeys as well. Researchers who want to artificially induce stress in a group of monkeys (in order to see what effect stress has on their health, say) introduce a new monkey into the group every now and then, so that there will be renewed fighting to figure out where the newcomer fits into the hierarchy. The point of the status hierarchy is actually to prevent future conflicts - once hen B knows that it is weaker than hen A it won't mess with hen A anymore and both A and B will save themselves the costs of fighting in the future.

I think something slightly similar may be happening when students first enter engineering colleges - the main difference being that the considerations according to which humans accord status are subtle and culture/peer-group dependent. When students first enter college, they don't know the abilities and skill levels of the others - they don't know who among them is the smartest, who is good at speaking English, who is good at sports, who is witty etc etc. This is an unstable situation - people want to know what their status in various spheres so that they can save energy by not taking part in status games where they are likely to lose. But this situation also provides a great opportunity for first year students - may be you are better than most others in your batch at something or the other! Students who get admitted into elite colleges will be particularly susceptible to overestimating their chance at being better than their new batchmates - for these students would have been at the top of their respective heaps before joining the college. Hence the "naive" enthu of batch after batch of first year students - besides studying hard for their coursework, they take part in aptis, quizzes and any other crazy-ass competition evil clubs invent to make money.

This also explains why students lose enthu over time. Once it is relatively clear who are the winners in the various status games, others know better than to waste their time competing. If you've determined that you are only mediocre in your class (even if you were a topper before coming to college), there is no longer much point to studying hard (even though what you are studying now - in your third year - is actually much more important to your job prospects as well as your general competence as an engineer). You might as well save yourself the energy.

There are probably other factors - such as social proof (which basically says people will do things that they see others doing,) - that amplify this phenomenon. And there's always noise that may either amplify or weaken the phenomenon for short periods - e.g., the enthu among students in the month before recruitment season (when everyone is busy mugging English word lists and C programming fundae) is way higher than what the long-term trend alone would predict.

Review of "Slumdog Millionaire" (Short version: It rocks!)

2008-12-05T10:34:00.004+05:30

I wasn't too sure of how Slumdog Millionaire would turn out. It got rave reviews, won awards, but the premise of the movie seemed a little cheesy to me. But then again, it was a movie by Danny Boyle - the same Danny Boyle who made Trainspotting, the genre-bending classic of the 90s. But then again, the movie is wholly set in Bombay, and who knows if Danny Boyle won't make a few blunders in his portrayal of India? I was looking forward to seeing the movie, but I was also preparing myself for a letdown.

I needn't have feared. "Slumdog Millionaire" is a zesty, fast-paced movie with some brilliant acting, especially by Dev Patel, who plays the protagonist Jamal Malik. (I won't summarize the plot here, go to IMDB for that.) The writing always has a light, humorous touch - as kids Jamal and his brother Salim go through some very grim (the word Dickensian comes to mind) experiences, but there is never a portentous air to the narration. Nor is there ever a hint of a cliche, despite the fact that there are enough common elements in the story from previous Bollywood movies. Jamal and Salim feel like real kids to you, with their ability to produce an unexpected kind of humour at unexpected times. By the time Jamal and Salim grow up, you as audience have bought into the characters enough that it doesn't matter that the plot from then on is simply concerned with (the time-honoured) aim of bringing Jamal and the love of his life together.

The movie has definite parallels to Trainspotting in that the narration does not give too many hints to the tragic elements in the story, what with the spontaneous humour and outward cheeriness and fast background scores. (Oh, and A. R. Rahman composed the music btw.) I do wish the whole of the movie was in Hindi though - the characters converse in Hindi as kids, but speak in English with suspiciously good accents once they are around 12. Except for this bit, there is little to complain in the movie on the ever-prickly topic of authenticity (the credits mysteriously list Loveleen Tandan as "co-director (India)", so I am sure that helped).

On the whole, the movie has lived up to the hype. Watch it if you can.

Slang as signaling

2008-11-26T22:29:00.003+05:30

(This post was originally a comment on a blogpost explaining the usage 'jai'. Yuppies and college students in India have an extensive collection of slang - 'pseud', 'put', 'level', 'light', 'set' etc. etc. See Aadisht's blog for more examples in natural usage.)

Not to be an asshole, but the constant invention and ostentatious usage of slang by a lot of yuppie Indians strikes me as a signaling mechanism. Its point seems to be to advertise membership of a select (or at least self-perceived select) group. The corollary is that once there is widespread adoption of a particular slang, people feel the need to invent new slang to differentiate themselves once again from the uncool masses.

Linguistically or communication-wise, there is little point to the slang. I do not claim that it makes the speakers more stupid (I am not that kind of a language maven), but there are simpler, more unambiguous, and probably more elegant ways to communicate than to use such slang. This gives me all the more reason to suspect that slang usage is signaling - the costlier a signal, the more credible it is (think peacock’s tail or a deer’s stotting). Slang usage is made costly by overloading the meaning of the slang, making the usage itself grammatically unconventional, and by making the meanings counterintuitive.

Btw, I am not dissing or criticising slang usage by saying all this. Signaling explains a lot of human behaviour, and this just seems to me to be another instance of it.

Book review: Thomas Sowell's "Race and Culture"

2008-11-22T04:35:00.004+05:30

Thomas Sowell's "Race and Culture" is a mostly compelling and occasionally irritating defense of the anti-cultural-relativist thesis: "The differences between cultures are not inconsequential - on the contrary, they are important for understanding why some groups are rich and some are poor, and some are developed while others are not." In support of his thesis, Sowell frequently cites various examples of ethnic immigrant groups who arrive in a foreign country with little money, but accumulate significant wealth in a few generations. Examples abound: the Gujaratis in East Africa, Lebanese in West Africa, Chinese in Malaysia, Germans in Brazil, and of course, the Jews in various parts of the world at various points in history. Other sociologists, and the natives in such cases themselves, often see such groups as "mere middlemen" who get rich by bleeding the rest of the society around them. (A recent tragic consequence of such attitudes being the expulsion of thousands of South Asian families from Idi Amin's Uganda.) Sowell forcefully argues for the contrary: such immigrant groups often create real value in the native economies, and furthermore, they are able to do so because their cultures are advantageous in certain respects - e.g. they encourage hard work, thrift, a willingness to forego current consumption for future gains and so on.

While Sowell clearly acknowledges the superiority of certain cultures over others (to the extent that they lead to better lives for the people following them), he is also keen to use the historical record to show that cultural superiority is often temporary, and in no way implies racial superiority. Whereas Britishers in the 18th and the 19th centuries gave birth to the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, they were considered too ill-disciplined and barbarian to be worthy as slaves during Roman times. While much of Christian Europe was foundering through the Middle Ages, Muslims in the Middle East had a much more progressive, knowledge-seeking culture.

Besides this, the book covers other interesting aspects - how race and ethnicity play out in politics; the relation between race and intelligence - a part I mostly skimmed over because I had had enough of the IQ controversies. A particularly interesting chapter on slavery shows how European cultures are not the only ones guilty of slavery, and that slavery has been a universal phenomenon throughout history. The norm in history until the 19th century has been that the races which happen to be strong at any given point enslave those that are weak and conveniently close by. (The only exception, perhaps, is India - although we Indians made up for it by outcasting a quarter of the population as untouchables.) Although societies differed (in space and time) in how they treated slaves, slavery as a practice itself was considered perfectly normal. The *real* surprising thing is how civilized opinion in Western Europe changed from pro-slavery to anti-slavery in the matter of a few decades. Whereas Britain was the biggest slave-trader in the 18th century, by the 19th century popular opinion had turned so much that they were actively using their imperial and military might to *stop* the slave trade.

The irritating thing about Sowell is that he frequently attacks the sociologists who have defended the wrong theories for reasons of political correctness. While such sociologists may deserve criticism, these attacks also quickly grow repetitive and tiring. Give me the substance and spare me the drama, is what I say.

Book review: Robert Wright's "The Moral Animal"

2008-11-22T04:32:00.003+05:30

Beginning in the 1960's with the work of George Williams, there has been a revolution within evolutionary biology with the development of theories that employ what can be intuitively understood as the "selfish gene" or the "gene's-eye" view. If Richard Dawkins' 1976 best seller "Selfish gene" was a wonderful introduction to the public at large of this revolution, then "The Moral Animal" is a worthy sequel where the full implications of applying the gene's eye view to human evolution are hammered out. Many aspects of human behaviour - how we select our mates, how men and women are promiscuous in their different ways, the love-hate relationship between siblings in a family, the importance we (men in particular) attach to social status, self-deception, altruistic behaviour - can only be understood by keeping in mind that our behaviours are the product of natural selection, and in particular by employing the gene's eye view of natural selection. Robert Wright has a lucid, albeit simplifying, writing style, and he uses a clever strategy to keep readers' interest from flagging - for each significant idea or theory he introduces, he illustrates it in the next chapter using incidents from Charles Darwin's life. (Is there a more apt subject for a case study in evolutionary psychology?)

Robert Wright's content and approach are on the whole, I think, different from later popularizers of evolutionary psychology such as, say, Steven Pinker. Whereas for Pinker (and John Tooby and Leda Cosmides before him), attacking the "blank slate" concept of human mind is all important in every discussion of evolutionary psychology, this issue hardly surfaces in "The Moral Animal". Personally, I was quite sick of reading about this topic, so its absence was a welcome relief.

Zolf Bar Baad (Tresses in the wind)

2007-09-04T17:46:00.000+05:30

Sometimes gems turn up in the unlikeliest of places, like this Persian song, blogged about by Language Log. (Do click that link for some charming stories behind that song.)

Here's the English translation. Here's a superb essay on the difficulties of translating from Persian to English.

On the morality of non-vegetarianism

2007-08-24T06:19:00.000+05:30

The subject of animal rights has come up again, but I don't even have a definitive opinion on animal rights (let alone the definitive argument), so I'll talk about a slightly different issue - killing animals for meat. I am quite against the killing of animals for meat (or for any other reason other than self-survival, basically), and especially factory farming. I am against it, but not enough to say that the govt. should step in and outlaw factory farming (partly because I am a libertarian, the type who sees unintended consequences everywhere).

However, non-vegans can soon be spared the nagging moral doubt that they are doing something horrible everytime they're eating meat. The solution is cloning of animal meat tissue using stem cells. Here's Ray Kurzweil, a visionary if there ever existed one, on the benefits of stem cell cloning:

Another exciting opportunity is to create meat without animals. As with therapeutic cloning, we would not be creating the entire animal, but rather directly producing the desired animal parts or flesh. Essentially, all of the meat--billions of pounds of it--would in essence be from a single animal. What's the point of doing this? For one thing, we could eliminate human hunger. By creating meat in this way, it becomes subject to the "law of accelerating returns," which is the exponential improvements in price-performance of information-based technologies over time. So meat produced in this way will ultimately be extremely inexpensive. It could cost less than one percent of conventionally produced meat. Even though hunger in the world today is certainly exacerbated by political issues and conflicts, meat will become so inexpensive that it will have a profound effect on the affordability of food. [link]

Disregard all the hyperbole about "the law of accelerating returns" and solving human hunger in one fell swoop. The basic point is that using stem cell cloning can be used to produce meat much more efficiently than it is today, and besides it will solve the problem of animal flatulence contributing to greenhouse gas emissions. Once meat can be produced this way, factory farming will stop and people will accept much more easily that killing animals for food or pleasure is just plain wrong.

To me, this is a classic example of how technology can make moral progress (in addition to material progress i.e.) possible where all the preaching in the world wouldn't get you there.

A vision to kick Google's ass

2007-08-23T22:24:00.000+05:30

Do take a look at the keynote talk by Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia, at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference. He talks about how he intends to "democratise" web search, so that one can create web search engines as easily as one can set up web servers today using the LAMP stack. He's an awesome speaker, with a fluency that clearly tells you he's spent a lot of time researching and thinking about what he's saying. One big problem I see with private players being the only big guys in search is that research gets hampered because of lack of access to the kind of data that Google or Microsoft have. If crawls of the web become open source, and so do user clickthrough logs (after suitable privacy preserving transformations), I would expect grad students and research teams to hugely benefit from such data. Good news for me!

I heart Jimmy Wales larger philosophy - I think there are rich enough parts of the world that can afford to provide public goods that can benefit everyone, including themselves. I have been thinking for a while now that the quality of a society is nothing but the quality of its public goods - these things are too important to be left to the governments alone to produce.

And while you're at it, you may also want to check out Steve Yegge's super funny talk on branding

2007-03-23T11:11:00.000+05:30

I was checking out the McCullough effect when it struck me that my (alleged) red-green confusion could be making the experience different for me. Many of my friends are sure I am colorblind, given my general hesitation in refering to objects using their colours, but so far I've been rationalising it away as the fault of my kindergarten teachers who never taught me which colour was which. (Heh.) Then I decided to test myself and indeed I turned out to be color-blind - I saw exactly what the test said the red-green colourblind would see. Now, I am sure you know this, but just in case you don't, the typical red-green colorblind person *can* see colours other than black and white - it's just that they have trouble distinguishing some hues of red and green. Although I think I have trouble conjuring up vivid and colourful imagery in my mind's eye - but that's probably an entirely different issue.

Next time you are making a presentation that involves distinguishing colours (like a histogram or a pie-chart or some other sort of graph), think of the red-green colorblind too. (And what if some are blind? Don't ask me.) You should care because around 7-10% of males are colourblind.

And if you are colorblind too, drop a comment and make me feel better.

300

2007-03-12T03:46:00.000+05:30

So I finally watched it the night before last. Don't read all those pompous reviews which seek to cast the film as racist and almost neo-Nazi for various reasons. Forget the political message the movie conveys unintentionally - watch it for the style, the gorgeous cinematography, the sepia tones and revel in atavistic tribalism at the Spartans' triumphs. What kind of fool would take this kind of movie for a moral/historical/political lesson and decide that eugenics is good (the Spartans kill all unhealthy babies) or that Persia stands for tyranny and mysticism and so on? One can read such messages even from Tolkein's ~~garbage~~ verbiage (the white elves represent all that is Good and the disfigured, black Orcs represent Evil). Just take a break and enjoy 300 for all the visual artistry, the testosterone-pumping background score and the great narrative.

Some wisdom on paternalism

2007-03-03T09:10:00.000+05:30

Paternalism is the idea that the government should restrict citizens' freedom for their own good. Examples abound - prohibitions on alcohol/smoking/drugs, prohibitions on risky financial investments etc. Paternalism leads to a special case of government regulation - the kind which is intended to benefit the individual, rather than "society" or nation (examples of the second kind are restrictions on free trade, and other innumerable economic regulations).

Robin Hanson, over at the Overcoming Bias blog, says that paternalism is about bias:

... bias claims seem to be central to paternalism; regulators and citizens each think the others are biased.
To evaluate if paternalism is good or bad, we need more than the sort of evidence that would convince regulators that they are less biased than citizens, or that would convince citizens that they are less biased than regulators. After all, we expect each group to be biased in underestimating their own bias.

Without such evidence, paternalism is just arrogance, i.e., an unsupported presumption by regulators of their own superiority.

It's good to see him highlight the bias of regulators, but it's an argument that has been made before by libertarians, albeit in stronger language.

Eliezer Yudkowsky (who's the author of the highly recommended article - Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks (pdf)) makes some excellent observations in a comment on the post. They say a fool and his money are soon parted - regulation is an uphill battle against this. Regulation happens because society is unwilling to accept that they can't altruistically restrict the choices of fools without doing greater harm to the rest of the society (and even to the the fools, the intended benefit group itself).

The brutal tradeoff: You can open stores for banned products, but people whose sole fault was to be born stupid will shop there and get hurt. There would be social benefits too, like the ability to use important medications that the FDA will take another five years to approve. These benefits will accrue to more people than just the cognitively advantaged. But there are stupid people and they will get hurt and they don't necessarily deserve it. This is what people can't face - they don't wish to think of themselves as uncompassionate - and this is why society tries to impose regulations regardless of the cost-benefit tradeoff.

I don't think all regulation is bad, nor that we should see all regulation through the same lens - i.e., for example, one can't just use the same arguments against alcohol prohibition and against drug prohibition - the usage patterns of drugs and alcohol, have been historically different and are different now also, there is different levels of societal acceptance to alcohol and drug consumption, and they have different effects on the mind and body. I wouldn't be convinced by arguments that treat one as analagous to the other - what I would be convinced by are cost-benefit calculations showing that both prohbitions are damaging to the population at large.

But that's me. What Eliezer is saying is that utilitarian arguments just won't cut it with the rest of the society. Most people wouldn't care to understand the ultimate effects of regulation - they would rather comfort themselves with the thought that they have done *something* to help people.

2007-01-22T11:32:00.000+05:30

The latest issue of the Economist is about globalisation and inequality. The leader article talks about the various options and difficulties in addressing the inequalities due to globalisation without killing the golden goose that is free trade. There's also an article on cotton farmers' suicides in India - the Economist thinks the ultimate problem is the absence of an active enough labour market for farmers to move from farming to other sectors. And then there's a survey - much of which unfortunately, is behind the subscription wall - about why CEOs' pays have been raising so drastically in the last decade, . But you can read the overview article atleast. Excellent stuff, on the whole.

Snow, at last!

2007-01-22T09:43:00.000+05:30

Random hodge-podge post

2007-01-17T10:41:00.000+05:30

Apparently, people are dying for me to resume blogging again. The thing is that I am inundated with quality material to read in my spare time.

First, brief reviews of the books I have been reading:
-> No Two Alike: This is Judith Harris' second book, after her widely successful and controversial The Nurture Assumption, where she argued that parents have zero long-term effect on the personality of their kids, once you control for the genes that they share. (Here's a Malcolm Gladwell article on the book that I haven't read. I recommend this Edge interview for a justification of her seemingly extreme views.) In this book, she picks up from where she left off in her previous book - most components of personality have a heritability of 0.45 - what explains the remaining 55% of the variance in personality? She frames this as some sort of mystery (which I found rather tedious) for which she eliminates the mainstream explanations one after the other. She builds her final hypothesis using the tools of Evolutionary Psychology, and the end result is too complicated for me to explain here. (Go read the review on gnxp, if you want the details.) I find her hypothesis reasonably plausible, but I am reading another book that is a critique of Evolutionary Psychology, so I might rethink my opinions soon.

-> Saving capitalism from the capitalists: Still reading. The point of the book is to first convince the reader of the net benefits of well-developed financial markets, and then try to understand the actual circumstances under which financial markets are likely to develop, which can be useful for framing public policy. The main case study here is the U.S. economy , which has seen an explosion in the kinds of things that are done on financial markets in the last 30 years. In this time, mutual funds, hedge funds and a whole ecosystem of financial derivatives have been born , and credit, broadly defined, has become vastly easier to obtain. The result has been an increase in the number of enterpreneurs and the rate of innovation (most visible, ofcourse in IT), more competitive markets, bigger markets for skills, resulting in more choice for the someone to choose who they want to work for. The approximate causal chain for how this happened is this - a surge in academic research about financial markets and how one can make more money out of them (making them more efficient), which led to removal of regulations that until then prevented people (and businesses) from making "risky investments" and other regulations that were unfavourable to institutional investors , which led to greater institutional ownership of stocks, which meant that resources are used more carefully, because institutional investors have enough incentive and clout to ensure that companies do not waste their money for frivolous reasons. Obviously I am skipping out on a whole lot of other reasons they go on and on about.

The second part of the book is where they conjecture about under what circumstances markets (in general) emerge, and the part I am currently reading. Specifically, the question is - when do governments enforce property rights and tax their citizens, instead of arbitrarily stealing from them? There is a killer chapter where they examine England from the time of Henry the VII to the time of Elizabeth I and trace how the arbitrary power of the monarchy declined and enforcement of property rights improved. It is, along with David Friedman's essay, the best stuff I have read on property rights. I promise to return to this at greater length.

Time for online stuff now:
-> My favourite new blog: Overcoming Bias
There was a wonderful post sometime back there, titled The cognitive architecture of bias

Research from psychology and neuroscience shows that your brain has organizational characteristics similar to this caricature of the Bush Administration. There are systems that are responsible for powerful, simple emotional reactions that serve to focus other systems to give fine-tuned attention to your brain's priorities and preferred outcomes. Most of the detailed systems don't care much about why they have the jobs they are given; they just do the work of carrying them out in a highly distributed, bureaucratic way. And you -- the conscious, chatty you -- are that dimwitted patsy, the misinformed press agent. The conscious you is not the President and you're certainly not Karl Rove. You are the Scott McClellan for your bureaucratic brain. You're constantly being duped into believing public-friendly stories about yourself, because your entire job is to tell stories handed to you by ruthless, clever, unconscious communications systems. You're not the whole head; you're just the talking head.
You can't even trust your own introspection, because your press agent simply doesn't have direct access to the Oval Office. The best you can do, even with your own behavior, is to try to piece together hypotheses about the hidden motives at work based on what the person actually does, situated in the context of things you know are generally true of why people might want to do those things.

I have not quoted the first parts of the analogy - go read the whole post.

To get a good understanding of what these people mean when they say biases and why understanding and overcoming biases is important, you really should read - "Cognitive biases potentially affecting judgment of global risks." (That's a Google cache - the site that hosted this pdf, the Singularity Institute, has mysteriously disappeared - which is a pity, because it had some great content.) Update: The site is up. You can access the pdf here.

-> Drifting to cognitive science, when was the last time you thought about the symbol grounding problem and symbolic vs connectionist cognitive architectures? Go read this and start thinking about it again. Other cognitive science links can be found at Mixing Memory

A (belated) tribute to Milton Friedman

2006-12-14T01:22:00.000+05:30

As those of you who live on this planet know, Nobel winning economist Milton Friedman passed away around a month back. Falstaff put it best when he wrote:

Friedman managed the incredible balancing trick that every academic / social scientist secretly dreams of - a formidable contribution to theory matched with an important influence over real world policy. The point about Friedman wasn't whether he was right or wrong, it was that he mattered, in a way that few of us ever will.

I don't know enough economics to appreciate his theoretical contributions. But his writings about public policy have influenced me a great deal, and his mixture of moral and utilitarian arguments for the free market I thought was optimal. His espousal of the free market made him a hate figure for some on the Left, but these people use an additional accusation to smear Milton Friedman: that he "supported" the Fascistic Pinochet's regime in Chile. This is what Friedman himself said to such accusations:

Trebach: This question says you supported Pinochet or advised Pinochet.

Friedman: I never advised Pinochet. I never supported Pinochet.

Trebach: We'll throw that one away.

Friedman: But hold on. No, I don't want to evade the question.

Trebachi: All right.

Friedman: Chile was a case in which a military regime, headed by Pinochet, was willing to switch the organization of the economy from a top-down to a bottom-up mode. In that process, a group of people who had been trained at the University of Chicago in the Department of Economics, who came to be called the Chicago Boys, played a major role in designing and implementing the economic reforrns. The real miracle in Chile was not that those economic reforms worked so well, because that's what Adam Smith said they would do. Chile is by all odds the best economic success story in Latin America today.

The real miracle is that a military junta was willing to let them do it. As I said to begin with, the principle of the military is from the top down. The principle of a market is from the bottom up. It's a real miracle that a mititary group was willing to let a bottom-up approach take over. I did make a trip to Chile and I gave talks in Chile. In fact, I did meet with Mr. Pinochet, but I never was an adviser to him, and I never got a penny from the Chdean government. But I will say that that process led to a situation in which you were able to get an election which ended the military junta. You now have a democratic government in Chile. There is as yet no similar example from the world of entirely socialist states.

So, I was not an adviser to Pinochet. I was not an adviser to the Chilean government, but I am more thanwifling to share in the credit for the extraordinary job that our students did down there. (link)

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Here is the tribute to him from the Catallarachs, here is a selection of Friedman's writings and quotes from the Wall Street Journal.

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My favourite quote from Milton Friedman:

Indeed, a major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it [..] gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want.

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His book Capitalism and Freedom is not a light read, but it's a libertarian classic, and it's probably the fastest way you can acquaint yourself with the main arguments of libertarianism (it's pretty slim - less than 200 pages). The first two chapters are something everyone who has an opinion on the role of government must read. And in the chapter Occupational Licensure, he gives a great argument as to how regulation almost always benefits the incumbent and the powerful against the interests of the customer.

Link Roundup

2006-12-11T03:12:00.000+05:30

I am done with my exams and am free for 20 whole days. Got a bunch of new books I am starting off on (see the reading lists on your right) and planning to get Simpsons and SouthPark DVDs too today. Straining to keep the drool from escaping. Also, did I tell you how much I am enjoying my MacBook? I just use SpotLight for everything. The terminal has all that you get in a Linux terminal (and the copy-paste works much better than it ever did in Linux ones). Close the lid and it goes off so obediently and silently to sleep - I don't remember the last time I shut down this thing.

I plan to get out some "real content" in the next few days. Some links in the meanwhile. (Tip: Use delicious or something if you think something is interesting, but don't have the time to read now.)

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The Stanford Prison Experiment - a proof, if it were needed, that power corrupts even good-intentioned humans. If you are too bored to go through the slideshow on that page, try the Wikipedia page, although the Wiki page lacks the sense of drama. Note the interesting parallels with Nazi generals.

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Great post from Ravikiran on the roots of the Singur controversy.

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One of my favourite essays from Richard Dawkins - Gaps in the Mind. No particular reason for linking it now, I just remembered it from when I read his essay collection, and found it on the web.

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Also, some new blogs that I have been reading recently
-> Mixing Memory, a psychology blog - check out a recent post on the psychology of religion;
-> the Economist blog - who have their usual excellent fare of opinion and analysis, and via who I heard that Google is running sponsored videos on its Google Videos, and so is YouTube (somewhat) ( in other news, YouTube has removed tons of copyrighted videos from it's site)

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On the Google Research blog, Peter Norvig (you'll recognize his name if you've studied AI sometime) gives us their list of top 20 videos of talks at Google - I watched the the first one, by Sebastian Thrun of Stanford AI group, about how they won the DARPA Grand Challenge, and it is superb.

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Why multiplication is commutative? and other intriguing essays by Tim Gowers, a Fields Medalist and Math prof, many of which I haven't read yet.

Update on books and stuff

2006-10-30T10:57:00.000+05:30

I am near the end of my mid-quarter breather from studies. Grad school so far has been fun, and I have been immersed in things in a way I haven't been for a while. The flip side is that I am progressing through my extra-cirrucular reading far more slowly than usual (btw, updated reading lists on the right side - hover your mouse over the links and check out the neat little popups that are finally working! (I hope)). Nonetheless, I am done (or nearly done) with a few books. Here is a short review of one:

The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker: (Amazon link, Pinker's homepage)
This is the book that made Steven Pinker famous, and deservedly so, in my opinion. It's an excellent and entertaining introduction to the mechanisms underlying language. Pinker's position is that human brains possess an innate and universal capacity for language - the "language instinct" - which evolved through good ol' Darwinian selection. The book is about language, but it's also about convincing the reader of Pinker's position, and he convinces me, at any rate. Along the way, he explains some of the charming regularites in languages (why do we say higgledy-piggledy instead of piggledy-higgledy? why does abso-bloody-lutely sound better than ab-bloody-solutely?), demolishes some of the common myths about language ("language shapes thought" - the dreaded Whorfian hypothesis), and does a neat job of explaining how meaning and understanding can arise in a blind symbol-processing system (a.k.a. Physical Symbol System hypothesis), among other things. Towards the end of the book, he has a short attack on the standard social science model of assuming the human brain to be a tabula rasa and instead puts forth as an alternative the model of Evolutionary Psychology, something he returns to in more detail in The Blank Slate. The jury's still out on Pinker's particular brand of evolutionary psychology, so it's good we don't have to read a lot of it. (That last link is also good intro to EP.) It's a pretty big book (430 pgs) and I don't have much time so I will leave it here. All in all, it's a book I highly recommend if you're interested in language or are a general science junkie.

I also planned to write about Pavan Verma's Being Indian (link in the sidebar), but it's too late and I keep editing away whatever I type so I'll do it in a later installment.

Plus, I saw "The Departed" yesterday. Decent entertainment, although Matt Damon was pretty wooden-faced and technically it wasn't as slick or smooth as I hoped it to be. Also saw the trailer of the awesome 300, the movie adaptation of a graphic novel by Frank Miller and someone else about a war between Spartans and Persians. It's done in a black-and-white, high-fantasy, over-the-top style - in typical graphic novel style, in short. (It's a pity I am too impatient these days to read a whole graphic novel..) I generally am a sucker for such slick, stylistic action movies, and graphic novels will hopefully ensure a pipeline of such movies (we had Sincity and V for Vendetta before this one )

Woo-hoo!

2006-10-24T10:22:00.000+05:30

That thing I am holding ever so carefully is an Apple MacBook (check out the gallery for a closer look.) (And believe me, that grin is totally non-faked.) You can check out the config and the details for your heart's content at the Macbook page (er, same link). Additionally I got a 1 Gig Ram and 80 Gig Hard drive. Cost me 1450 bucks including the taxes and the student discount.

Now to becoming a Mac power user!

P.S.: We also had the season's first snow fall today! Today was a doubly "yay!" day!

Photus from Columbus

2006-10-17T04:50:00.000+05:30

Here. The slideshow feature in Picasa rocks.

P.S.: I am going to buy an Apple Macbook (hopefully) real soon. Yay!

In which I gaze at my navel..

2006-09-14T05:04:00.000+05:30

Figuratively, of course.

But it's all the Lalbadshah's fault.

I am thinking about: whether I like a laptop or a desktop better. Which one should I buy?

I want to: watch Roger Federer live, preferably at the Wimbledon. I am going to start saving seriously now.

I wish for a boxful of Simpsons DVDs. Oh, and I also wish for all these things. No, more relevantly, I wish I had the time to read all these, without affecting my 15 credit hour 10-week quarter, and without losing touch with more of my friends and without missing any more good movies, and without missing my "daily workout" (heh) and without missing updating my blog regularly and blah blah blah.

I hear: fingers tapping on keyboards at the computer centre I am in. (check out the cool map.)

I wonder why I wonder. (Ok, that was copied from Feynman.) Or how I wonder.

I regret: hmm.. no regrets right now.. I am fully charged and optimistic. (Although I might regret a few years later that I went for a PhD :) )

"I" am: the sense of continuity and unity that a set of neurons frantically maintain so that "I" can "focus my attention" on those aspects of the environment that need to be processed and "thought about". "I" am a fiction that some genes have found it useful to construct in order to process information more efficiently which can ultimately help perpetuate themselves further. But am "I" fictitious, really? "I" am real enough within "myself" - in fact, nothing is more real to "me" than "myself". The world just plays itself out in the theatre that is "I".

(Update: This stuff is mostly inspired by this fantastic anthology I read some time back - The Mind's I. Read the Wikipedia article on the book. Also, don't take the above stuff too seriously.)

I hate sycophants. Just to clarify, I also hate wife-beaters and the like , although I dont completely agree with this interesting story about wife-beaters.

I dance: with my eyebrows knit, looking a little like George Bush, apparently. Needless to say, I also dance pretty bad.

I sing with a distinct nasal tone. I think its because I thought Kumar Sanu was the coolest singer in the world when I was young, and tried singing like him for a lot of time, and now am stuck with a nasal tone. Apparently I even talk with a nasal twang.

I cry when I see some kinds of sentimental movies, even though the rational part of my brain is all "what the crap is going on in this movie!" I cried when watching Black, that Rani Mukherjee movie where she plays a blind girl, all the while thinking what a cheesy and manipulative movie this was.

I am not always: so pretentious.

I write: so I can look back at all this ten years down the road and laugh at myself.

I confuse: Koreans, Chinese and Japanese. I thought distinguishing them would be easy before I came to OSU (implicitly), but now that I had the chance to test myslf with larger samples (the campus just brims with Asians - Mongoloids outnumbering Indians by maybe 3 to 1), I find that I do no better than chance. Test yourself if you are too confident about your abilities, I bet you would find it tougher than you imagined. Once they talk you can figure out better - if they struggle with their English, they are probably Chinese or Japanese (but there are quite a few exceptions ofcourse.)

I am: done!

Any reader who wants to be tagged, can consider themselves tagged. Heh. Aint I clever? Or maybe I am pathetic. Whatever.

The best lines I read today

2006-09-11T07:39:00.000+05:30

Nonethless, even before investigating carefully, you can be confident that the politicians are up to no good. After all, has it EVER happened that politicians required the recitation of something uncontroversial and of unquestionable educational value, say the laws of thermodynamics? Of course not.

That's from Bill Poser - one of the diligent folks over at the superb Language Log - writing on the Vandemataram hullabaloo. More wisdom from GreatBong on the same issue.

A note to comparers of religion

2006-09-10T13:24:00.000+05:30

(Very soon, I'll be putting up a personal update. Short note: I am doing good, and am more or less settled, except for that I dont have a phone nor a computer at home and therefore no net access at home.)

(This post has been waiting in the drafts for a long time.)

I have been in a lot of arguments where people try to compare religions and claim that this or that aspect of Islam or Christianity is inferior compared to the ancient wisdom of our Vedas. I have a lot of issues with the claim that the Vedas are a repository of ancient wisdom, and it seems to me that the Vedas contain as much crap (although of a different kind) as any other religious text. But I won't try to argue that here. I have a more substantial point to make: we should stop evaluating religions based on their scriptures and start evaluating them on the practices of those people we normally understand as followers of that religion. In the case of Hinduism, for example, the relevant way to evaluate it would be to look at the practices of Hindus through the centuries and see if they were right or wrong. Similary for Muslims and Christians. It won't do to cherrypick verses from the Upanishads or the Gita and then triumphalistically claim how secular or tolerant your religion is. If you dont agree with the religious practices of Hindus through the centuries, then stop making the vague claims that "Hinduism is a great and tolerant religion". If you call a population who have relentlessly hierarchified and stratified their society and denied basic human equality to a quarter of their fellows "tolerant", then you'll also have to call the apartheid regime in South Africa tolerant - and make no mistake, the system of untouchability has survived for far longer than the apartheid regime. Yes, yes, there are voices that have shouted out against this in our history, but to me what is remarkable is how acquiescent the large majority of the population was in the face of such practices, and how far and few in between such dissenting voices were. It is not just the caste system that bothers me about Hinduism. Recently I've been reading a book called "Being Indian" by Pavan Varma (a former IAS Officer). There are a lot of interesting ideas and observations (both positive and negative) in the book, but one of the ideas is that Hindus/Indians care less about morals than power and wealth, which is somewhat true of most humans but spectacularly true for Indians. Mystical crap about the Brahman and the Atman that no one understands is hardly important when contrasted this blatant amorality and immorality.

Deadly cartoon

2006-08-31T09:13:00.000+05:30

From Cafe Hayek:

Post - farewell blues

2006-08-24T17:10:00.000+05:30

Am in Atlanta now. The roads are wide, the houses are big, the trees are tall and I am wiping my bum instead of washing it.

Farewell blues (?)

2006-08-21T20:01:00.000+05:30

On my last day (well, almost - I am actually flying tomorrow, but it would ruin the effect if I said last but one day, wouldnt it?) in India I thought I would write a post waxing eloquent about what these changes meant to me (to non-regular readers, I am off for a PhD at the Comp. Sci. dept in OSU). But now, um, I cant seem to think about anything but the possibility of my luggage exceeding the weight limits of Lufthansa. And, besides, all the happiness experts say that we regularly overestimate our future sadness, so, well, I am not so sad. Go figure :D.

Anyway, for no particular reason, here's a pic of the Godavari banks on Rajahmundry. No particular reason.(Click to enlarge.)

2006-08-17T23:01:00.000+05:30

Why the barmaid is an atheist. It doesnt get simpler than this.

On libertarian vices

2006-08-11T18:16:00.000+05:30

Tyler Cowen explains the Libertarian Vice succinctly for us. (This was something that has been going on in my mind for some time now, and I am glad I didn't have to clumsily express it myself. ) Libertarians tend to treat all governments with the same broad brush of lack of incentives and lack of information - which is not very faithful to reality, because there are occasions when govts have got things done right.

But the bigger libertarian vice, imho, is something else - one that was also pointed out by Tyler.

Another conservative and libertarian vice is come up with some better means of helping people — usually involving markets — and if that doesn’t happen, to be content with doing nothing.

(link)

I think there are a whole lot of things that can generally help shift the balance against governmental power, like siding with more mainstream virtues such as accountability and transparency. Free markets arent going to come about by magic and until such time we must limit governmental damage in whatever way we can. In general, I think, a wider alliance with left liberals is possible. I think it is fully libertarian to be against the Narmada Dam, e.g. and the Right to Information Act is also something libertarians should be happy with. (I mention these not because Indian libertarians dont hold such opinions, but because the contrarian left liberal /activist types are more strongly identified with such stances.) If you send out signals that you too are strongly in support of such issues (as the RTI Act, i.e.), then fewer people will be freaked out with libertarianism and stop assuming all kinds of blather about it. I first began to think about this when Will Wilkinson wrote some time back (although in the American context) a brilliant post that I think is a must-read for libertarians:

The cause of classical liberalism as a really existing possibility for political reform has been harmed by bundling free markets with a ban on transfers. This package deal has influenced people who think justice requires transfers to eschew free markets. If we had spent the last forty years hammering away at liberal fundamentals like transparency and generality instead of the natural right to not be taxed, our society would now be closer to the free market, limited government ideal.

Update: Will Wilkinson has yet another beautifully articulated post on this subject.

Feeling like a techie again..

2006-08-06T21:11:00.000+05:30

.. after reading Steve Yegge most of today. This guy got plugged twice from Joel in successive articles, so obviously he was bound to be funny and be able to tell great stories. Scroll down his page a bit and you'll see a list of articles.

Some funny stuff that had me in splits..
"When C++ is your hammer, everything starts to look like your thumb." (link)
And, um, other funny stuff. Just go and read.

Highbrow timepass

2006-07-29T11:13:00.000+05:30

Reviews of books on everything from Cellular Automata to "Market Socialism" to Cognitive Science - by Cosma Shalizi, an Assistant Professor of statistics in CMU and an "egalitarian liberal". Erudite and snarky.

The subtler point about EU subsidies

2006-07-27T23:18:00.000+05:30

If anyone ever mentions the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), its almost always to rant about how the massive subsidies given to European (and US) farmers hurts the exports of poor African farmers. Daniel Davies argues otherwise in The Guardian's blog Comment is Free , saying that the subsidised commodities (sugar, grains etc.) wouldn't have been produced more efficiently by Africans anyway and that these subsidies make food cheaper for the global poor. There's a caveat: cotton subsidies *are* evil, because poor countries like Mali and Ghana *do* have a comparative advantage in cotton production but are unable to capitalise on it because of these subsidies. [Another caveat from me: the said subsidies are good for the African poor, *not* for resident Europeans.]

(Thanks to Crooked Timber, which I am finding more and more interesting.
Update: Daniel Davies also has an interesting post about a paper from the "Maharishi University" that talks about the effects of Rishis meditating on peace in the Middle East.)

Blogistics

2006-07-26T20:37:00.000+05:30

I have finally removed the verbose and confused sidebar profile I had upto now. I have also decided to put images of the books I am reading - to add some color to the blog. I spent more than two hours yesterday trying to get this right - my idea was to put those Amazon links where hovering the mouse on the link will produce a nifty little intra-window popup which has an image of the book and its price details etc. (If it is not clear what I am talking about, check out this page.) I am still not sure if the links on my page will behave that way. (Apparently Amazon is conducting this controlled experiment and half the visitors to my page will see the nifty little pop up and the rest half won't. Braindead buggers.) BTW, if you see those popups let me know.

Personal trivia: I've quit my previous job and in a month's time I'm leaving India to do my PhD here.

[Did that kind of linking irritate you? Did it, dit it? Huh? It irritates the hell out of me. Always Name What You Are Linking To. (Search for "4. Links".)]

This and that

2006-06-23T21:19:00.000+05:30

What if Microsoft designed the iPod package? (link via Rory Blyth, who has a humongous post about the recent changes in MS and what it needs to do. Too lengthy, I say.)

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The best Dilbert strip for sometime now. Incidentally, if you dont use a feed reader, the unofficial Dilbert feed is a good reason to start using one. You can find lots of other comic strips' feeds here. Here's a good PJ from Jesus and Mo.

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Net neutrality could neuter the Net, and I am sympathetic with this view, no doubt because of confirmation bias. Here's a good summary of the economics of net neutrality. I've already said my position is libertarian on this issue, but I still am curious to understand what Lawrence Lessig, one of the best known experts on the topic and a net neutrality proponent is exactly saying about this. He's written voluminous books on this and related topics, but I cant seem to find clear summaries of his arguments w.r.t. net neutrality. I just read the preface of his "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace" (you can read the whole book there), and I cant share his paranoia.

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That sidebar profile makes me feel stupid everytime I look at it, and yet I cant drag my ass to change it. What the hell is that first sentence supposed to mean? Why is it so weirdly constructed? WTF is the epigraph of my blog trying to say anyway?

Understanding libertarianism better

2006-06-03T01:13:00.002+05:30

Annie Zaidi has a post where she says that endorsing libertarianism is a way to escape the fact that we are hurting each other all the time, in the guise of greater liberty. (Link via Uma.) I'll try to refute some of her arguments here. Here, I am trying to present libertarian thought as I understand it; I dont have the space here to explain the nuances of my views regarding the individual points. But I mostly agree with what I write next. Consider this as a mini libertarianism introduction.

Annie begins:

I took a test, and it turns out I’m libertarian.
[..]
Yet, on the face of it, who isn’t a libertarian?

If the essential guiding philosophy of libertarianism is ‘liberty’, then I certainly am one.

Freedom - of the individual, of the community, of the mind, of the body, of the species, of other species, of speech, of action, of thought, of expression, of enterprise, of art, of science, of trade, of service – is precious.

If there is one thing worth fighting for – it is freedom. The right to live as you choose. The right to say what you think. The right to do what you will – as long as you’re not hurting anybody.

But that is a bit of a stumbling block - this business of 'victimless' living. It is so easy to assume that you’re not hurting someone else, and so impossible to believe it. Like the poet said, ‘No man is an island…’

[Emphasis hers.]

Her definition of libertarianism itself is flawed, and it leads to much of the confusion later on. Libertarianism holds that you ought to be free to do whatever you want to do as long as you do not infringe on other's rights to do whatever they want; not that you can do whatever you want to do so long as you are not hurting anybody. It doesnt say anything about not hurting someone else. It does say something about not coercing others. The distinction between hurting and coercion seems obvious enough to me. I can easily hurt the "religious sentiments" of some communities by exhibiting the paintings of M. F. Hussain or screening the Da Vinci Code; but I will not have coerced anyone by these acts, because no one is obliged to watch them.

It is important to understand that libertarianism is more a political philosophy than a moral philosophy. It attempts to explain what ought to be the rights of an individual rather than say what is correct for an individual to do in a given situation.

Also, libertarianism is not some kind of hedonism which tells the individual to only maximise his own pleasure and forget about others. As I said, it does not ask you to do one thing or the other. It says that you are the best person to decide what you want to do with yourself and your life. It merely says that someone sitting 600 miles away in Delhi in an AC hall called the Parliament and dreaming about his next kickback does not have the right to decide what you can and cannot do with your life. It is first and foremost, an expression of humility; humility that one distant group of persons cannot decide what values a large and diverse society should live by.

To get back to Annie's post, her confusion between hurting someone and coercing someone becomes more apparent as one goes through all her "real-life examples" that can apparently put libertarians in a bind.

You want a divorce.
Your husband doesn’t. Would a libertarian go ahead with the divorce? Because the husband is going to hurt like hell... What’re you going to do?

[Emphasis hers.]
You wont be breaching libertarianism whether you divorce your husband or not. The thing libertarianism is concerned with is that you have the right to divorce. It is totally upto you to decide what is moral.

She goes on to give similar examples which have nothing to do with libertarianism -- which attempts to delineate what are the rights of individuals -- but which have a lot to do with moral philosophy. Libertarianism is not, I repeat, a moral philosophy.

The next interesting example is this:

Let’s say you drive a car.
You need this car. You may have worked your backside off to acquire and fuel this car. You might drive very carefully, following all the traffic rules, but what will you do about pollution? Pollution in a major city might translate into a toddler being exposed to the equivalent of twenty cigarettes a day. If there are one million cars and one million toddlers…?

This again is a decision the individual must make. But since this is the classic externality argument that crops up everywhere and implicitly favours government intervention, let me attempt a defense of the usual libertarian arguments against such intervention.

The externality argument says that, since an individual may not have to bear the full consequences of his/her acts, such acts may impose "negative externalities" on the rest of the society. Negative externalities are the most commonly cited class of market failures, and present a plausible case in which the liberties of an individual ought to be constrained for the "greater common good".

In response, there is the argument that there is no such thing as market failure; only a failure of transient business models. I agree somewhat with these arguments, but one can always counter-conjecture that it might be too late until we wait for new business models that do not suffer from the failure of earlier business models (like, for example, in the case of Global Warming, it might be too late for us to wait until the majority of the world shifts to cleaner fues).

The argument I like better is this: merely establishing the existence of negative externalities is not reason enough for curtailing the liberties of individuals. One must establish that curtailing the liberties of individuals will actually solve the problem at hand. In particular, one must weigh governmental failure and market failure, keeping in mind whether government interventions in the past have actually solved the market failure they were intended to solve. We should also take into account the opportunity cost of the lost trade, the higher barriers to entry due to regulation and the resulting greater likelihood of monopoly, and the possibility that we might have regulated out more promising business models/technologies that might have solved better the original problem that the government was trying to solve.

Let’s say you live next door to an unhappy Muslim woman who wants a divorce but is not getting one, because she will lose custody of her children. It is none of your business, so you do not interfere. You are not a Muslim woman so you will not campaign for changes in the Sharia, nor fight to change the law of the land.

Have you hurt nobody?

This again, shows the confusion between what one ought to do and what one ought to have the right to do. Libertarianism does not answer the former question -- which is what Annie is asking here -- but answers the latter, saying that you ought to have right to speak out your mind, period.

Let’s say you set up a cola factory in a rural district where there’s only one source of fresh water. You set up shop, you pay your taxes, you put your little profit in the bank. It is true that there’s less water available for the villagers’ drinking, bathing, cooking, irrigation…

But nobody’s getting hurt, surely?

The reference is to the Plachimada controversy. I am not aware of the full details here, but I'll put in a point or two. The understanding of property rights evolves in the direction of whatever minimizes conflict between people. The very point of property rights is to avoid wasteful conflicts. Coca-cola had infringed on the property of the villagers near the plant by polluting their water; ergo, it violates their rights as per libertarianism. Also note that real libertarians (as opposed to strawmen who categorically accept all libertarian fundas), such as the Center for Civil Society have argued for community and ward-level ownership of water resources (pdf) for long.

Next, we have this:

Let’s say you’ve got a girlfriend in another city. With cheaper airlines, it is absolutely glorious being able to fly down every weekend… and let’s assume that you’ve been convinced, beyond your ability to doubt, that human self-indulgence has led to climate change. That every decade of our development leads to rivers receding, polar bears dying, Amazon rainforests shrinking, deserts expanding, more frequent floods and hurricanes. The events that in the long history of planet earth used to occur at intervals of a thousand years, are now occurring at intervals of a hundred years, and by the time our kids grow up, will by happening every few years. There is more drought, more famine… and there’s cheaper air travel. Now, you just want to hold onto your girlfriend. You don’t want to hurt anybody.

The good old development vs environment debate! Firstly, in this case, libertarianism does not say that you must visit your girl-friend; you might not visit your girl-friend and still call yourself a steadfast libertarian.

Secondly, yes, almost everyone agrees that global warming is happening.I am a little more skeptical about the other scary scenarios about forest loss, species loss etc. The question is: how does one tackle these problems? Broadly and simplistically, we have two approaches: one is to have stringent regulations by all the governments of the world to prevent something that we are not sure we can even prevent; or two, to promote greater economic growth through more free trade that can lift millions out of poverty, and who can , with their money, improve their environments themselves or atleast protect themselves better from the disaster, if and when it strikes. As is probably obvious from the spin I put on that sentence ;-), I prefer the second solution.

She ends with this:

The argument that we need to stop, and think about all this ‘growth’ and where we’re headed. To think about reversing some of our damage, and to acknowledge the victims of our passivity, to acknowledge the need to make amends when we do cause damage. That argument, nobody wants to buy.

Totally agree. To me, freedom and greater choice are both more important than "growth". It just happens that "growth" also lifts a lot of people out of poverty, and richer people have greater control over their lives (loosely speakin) so I end up speaking in support of growth, even though what I am really arguing for is freedom - economic, social and political.

No god but God

2006-05-29T23:11:00.000+05:30

That is the name of the book I'm currently reading, and it is subtitled "The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam" (Amazon link). I am through some 100 pages, and it has been a revelatory and exhilaratingly easy read upto now. It never entered my mind that it might be available in India, and it was almost by accident that I saw this book in Walden, the bookshop right next to my office, during my weekly browsing. Finding this book made me happy enough to buy Hinduism, by Kshiti Mohan Sen, a book I'd been thinking of buying but was somewhat reluctant to buy (I'll come to that later hopefully).

The one thing that was again driven home to me in my reading thus far is how insignificant scriptures are when compared to the people who actually interpret them. No matter what the scriptures say, the "real" religion is determined by the exegetes. The interpreters themselves are, ofcourse, motivated by their own material incentives.

Let me explain through a series of excerpts from the book:

Perhaps nowhere was [Prophet] Muhammad's struggle for economic redistribution and social egalitarianims more evident than in the rights and privileges he bestowed upon the women in his community. Beginning with the unbiblical conviction that men and women were created together and simultaneously from a single cell (4:1, 7:189), the Quran goes to great lengths to emphasize the equality of the sexes in the eyes of God:

God offers forgiveness and a great reward,
For men who surrender to Him, and women who surrender to Him,
For men who believe, and women who believe,
For men who obey, and women who obey,
For men who speak the truth, and women who speak the truth,
For men who persevere, and women who persevere,
For men who are humble, and women who are humble,
For men who give alms, and women who give alms,
For men who fast, and women who fast,
For men who are modest, and women who are modest,
For men who remember God, and women who remember God.(33:35)

At the same time, the Quran acknoweledges that men and women have distinct and separate roles in society; it would have been preposterous to claim otherwise in seventh-century Arabia. Thus, "men are to take care of women, because God has given them greater strength, and because men use their wealth to provide for them" (4:34).

With a few notable exceptions (like Khadija [Muhammad's wife]), women in pre-Islamic Arabia could neither own property nor inherit it from their husbands. Actually, a wife was herself considered property, and both she and her dowry would be inherited by the male heir of her deceased husband.
[....]

However, Muhammad - who had benefited greatly from the wealth and stability provided by Khadija - strove to give women the opportunity to attain some level of equality and idnependence in society by amending Arabia's traditional marriage and inheritance laws in order to remove the obstacles that prohibited women from inheriting and maintaining their own wealth. While the exact changes Muhammad made to this tradition are far too complex to discuss in detail here, it is sufficient to note that women in the Ummah [the first Islamic community Muhammad founded in Medina] were, for the first time, given the right both to inherit the property of their husbands and to keep their dowries as their own personal property throughout their marriage. Muhammad also forbade a husband to touch his wife's dowry, forcing him instead to provide for his family from his own wealth. [..]

The chapter goes on in this vein, explaining the reforms Muhammad instituted in his drive for a more equal and just community. Judged in the context of the society Muhammad was born into, the reforms he was calling for were nothing short of revolutionary.

[..], Muhammad clearly accepted polygyny (within limits) as necessary for the survival of the Ummah, especially after the war resulted in hundreds of widows and orphans who had to be provided for and protected by the community. "Marry those women who are lawful who are you, up to two, three, or four," the Quran states, "but only if you can treat them all equally (4:3; emphasis added). On the other hand, the Quran makes it clear that monogamy is the preferred model of marriage when it asserts that "no matter how you try, you will never be able to treat your wives equally (4:129; again, emphasis added). [..] Essentially, while the individual believer was to strive for monogamy, the community that Muhammad was trying to build in Yathrib would have been doomed without polygyny.

And yet, how was the Quran interpreted, in the years after Muhammad's death?

It would be no exaggeration, therefore, to say that quite soon after Muhammad's death, those men who took upon themselves the task of interpreting God's will in the Quran - men who were, coincidentally, among the most powerful and wealthy members of the Ummah - were not nearly as concerned with the accuracy of their reports or the objectivity of their exegesis as they were with regaining the financial and social dominance that the Prophet's reforms had taken from them. [..]

Thus, when the Quran warned believers not to "pass on your wealth and property to the feeble-minded(sufaha)," the early Quranic commentators - all of them male - declared, despite the Quran's warnings on the subject, that " the sufaha are women and children .. and both of them must be excluded from inheritance(emphasis added).

When a wealthy and notable merchant from Basra named Abu Bakra claimed, twenty-five years after Muhammad's death, that he once heard the Prophet say "Those who entrust their affairs to a woman will never know prosperity," his authority as a Companion was unquestioned.

[...]

And finally, when the celebrated Quranic commentatory Fakhr ad Din ar-Razi interpreted the verse "[God] created spouses for you of your own kind so that you may have peace of mind through them" (30:21) as "proof that women were created like animals and plants and other useful things [and not for] worship and carrying the Divine commands ... because the woman is weak, silly, and in one sense like a child," his commentary became (and still is) one of the most widely respected in the Muslim world.

The fact is that for fourteen centuries, the science of Quranic commentary has been the exclusive domain of Muslim men. And because each one of these exegetes inevitably brings to the Quran his own ideology and his own preconceived notions, it should not be surprising to learn that certain verses have most often been read in their most misogynist interpretation.

Ponder on that for a few moments as I rest my knuckles.

[Now its time for some Randian rhetoric.]

However, one cannot always blame vested interests for institutionalised oppression such as this. The explanation that one group oppressed because it could derive benefit out of it is true, but insufficient. The bigger factor is the unquestioning believer, he who considers tradition superior to reason, and who is obedient to authority figures, because God is the ultimate authority figure and he fears God. All institutions that have authority as their core element - authority that is "legitimate" because they've been elected by people, or legitimate because it is "granted by God" - will result in oppression, unless that authority is constantly countervailed by skepticism and cultural norms that emphasize the individual's rights and responsibility to fashion one's own morality and life.

On to more pleasing affairs..

2006-05-13T23:18:00.000+05:30

David Friedman is rapidly becoming one of my favourite thinkers. He is probably most famous as the author of The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism, a book which laid out how we might get to a society without government as we know it today and which I am dying to lay my hands on. (See my wishlist, which I've put in the sidebar too.) The first part of his book starts with a poem, the whole of which I'll shamelessly reproduce here:

A saint said "Let the perfect city rise.
Here needs no long debate on subtleties,
Means, end,
Let us intend
That all be clothed and fed; while one remains
Hungry our quarreling but mocks his pains.
So all will labor to the good
In one phalanx of brotherhood."

A man cried out "I know the truth, I, I,
Perfect and whole. He who denies
My vision is a madman or a fool
Or seeks some base advantage in his lies.
All peoples are a tool that fits my hand
Cutting you each and all
Into my plan."

They were one man. [link]

Nothing else I have read captures so succinctly and precisely the two inextricable sides of collectivist utopianism, sometimes called Fascism, other times called Communism.

Anyway, David Friedman is a witty, lucid and persuasive writer. Here is a very readable piece where he explains Ronald Coase's famous analysis of externalities, for which Coase won a Nobel in Economics. Here is a short piece where he lays out the pre-requisites for an anarcho-capitalist society. Here's a well known article where he responds to Tyler Cowen (of MarginalRevolution), who argues that anarchy might soon relapse into a situation with collusion or cartelisation among private law enforcement agencies. Here's a Usenet posting where he provokes environmentalists on the soundness of the precautionary principle.

Finally, here's the online edition of his Price Theory, which is intended as a text book and hence needs a little more energy to absorb.

************

A long piece by Jane Galt written long ago on why legalising gay marriage is fraught with risks (although she herself takes no particular stance). Very well written, but I am not totally convinced.

************

Here's the most kickass dialogue ever delivered by any fictional character:

Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is it vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified, and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition. The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose so let me simply add that it's my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V.

I got this from the quotes section of the imdb page on 'V for Vendetta'. The quotes of V are simply terrific: all those Shakespeare stuff, and then this exchange at the last scene:

Creedy: Whatchya gonna do, huh? We've swept this place. You've got nothing. Nothing but your bloody knives and your fancy karate gimmicks. We have guns.
V: No, what you've have are bullets, and the hope that when your guns are empty I will no longer be standing, because if I am you will all be dead before you've reloaded.

When super-heroes are shown in a certain style, there is no way you can hate them - ask Rajni Kanth's fans. I loved the super hero and his mask, and I loved the theme of the movie, plenty close to my own political ideals.

On the flip side, the earlier quoted speech is not included in the movie adaptation (unless it is in the first 20 minutes, which I missed, but which is unlikely, because V meets Evey after the first 20 minutes, and this speech is evidently how V introduces himself to her.) [Update: Bappi tells me the speech is infact there.] Tut tut - bad adaptation, bad adaptation. But this was not the worst thing about the movie - Natalie Portman was a terrible, terrible actress and her fake accent was a total turn-off.

*******

And while we are on the topic of anarchy, here's a fine piece by Eric Raymond that I read long ago on 'The Myth of Man the killer'. Ok, its not directly related to anarchy, but you should take a look at it nevertheless.

The iterant irritants of life - nasal voice edition

2006-05-13T01:27:00.000+05:30

You might claim that Himesh Reshammiya "is the saviour of pop culture and the last hope of the catchy tune", but it is of no consolation when you wait in a barber's shop (box would be a better description) for 40 minutes, all but stupefied due to the heat, the sweat, the congestion and one of those MTV clones repeatedly playing the screechiest and nasal-est HR numbers. These channels have perfected the art of invading your brain with earworms; each song plays for just the right amount of time, around 30 seconds, and then comes back a few minutes later to re-establish its claim on a mind thats slowly losing its ability to defend itself from parasites. Bleed by a thousand cuts, immaculately demonstrated. It wasnt as if the channel consciously pursued a policy of playing HR songs; it just had no other choice. HR is the God of these small things. Others are discussing genius germs, but we in India must discuss this Genius at producing g-ear-ms.

When privatisation goes wrong

2006-05-06T18:18:00.000+05:30

Pablo of The Other India documents one case of water privatization, and Ennis of Sepia Mutiny tells the story of Indian workers with private military contractors in Iraq.

I put my thoughts over at The Other India blog.

I am often frustrated when opponents of privatisation jump from describing the bad ground situation caused by the daft contracts the govt enters into, to lofty statements about how water is an essential good and no private entity should own it. If anything, it seems to me that because water is so essential, we must try to create an efficient market where the prices reflect the real cost of producing water, which thereby ensures that there exist proper incentives for supplying it and disincentives for misuse.

Policy approaches to education

2006-05-05T21:43:00.000+05:30

[By this time, you must know that my posts hardly live up to their grandiose titles. I like keeping such names though. *Grin*]

This post is a response to Kuffir's response to my response to his original post. :-). Do read the last comment he left, the one I am responding to, if only to get some idea about what this post is in response to.

Kuffir, I largely agree with your observations. Change in favour of libertarianism is indeed hard; it would be naive to expect the government to devolve power of its own accord. It is also true that the best opportunities for change are crises, like in 1991. (Reading your comment made me smile, because just last night I was reading Milton Friedman say the exact same stuff in "Capitalism and Freedom".) It is also true that, when the crisis moment comes, a policy framework should be in intellectual currency for any chance of getting implemented. For this reason, I think it is important to keep alive and respectable the policy implications of libertarianism -- smaller governments and free-er markets -- no matter how bleak their chances appear today.

[A small digression. You say:

individuals can only coax,nudge and cajole the state to run along a certain course that would lead to more, and more devolution of power. and individuals would have to, paradoxically, work in groups to achieve this.

If by the use of the word paradoxically, you imply that individuals working in groups is somehow against the grain of libertarianism, I will have to disagree. It is only natural that a free man should associate with a fellow free man in order to better serve his own interest; there is nothing paradoxical in this.]

Now to get to what you were really leading upto: your idea that forcing the government to concentrate on primary education would lead to a reduction in governmental spending elsewhere. You say the powers-that-be have realized investment in education needs to be raised to around six percent of the gdp. This is news to me. The current spending has averaged 4% and, given the rate at which our GDP is increasing, it will get tougher for future governments to get closer to the 6% figure (source).
I think shaming the government into action over education will be tough when we have failed to shame it into action on child malnutrition or narmada rehabilitation . Hell, even the moral overlords over at The Other India havent yet come around to talking about education. That is all the more reason to talk about education louder, yes, but I am not optimistic that the government will give this a priority.

The almost default choice left for the government is to let private players come in. And the government must be less jealous about letting them in than is usual. Already private players seem to be doing a good job. Basically, I dont see why there wont be more private schools if more people are willing to pay money for education. Which brings me to the question of poverty hindering education. I still think poverty needs to be tackled if we are to think about reducing illiteracy. Human needs can be ranked: food, water and shelter are all more important than education and for the poorer families the choice is rather obvious. Any money/vouchers you give to poor people will be diverted to other, more pressing needs. The only way out is to subsidise fees, and you get shoddy government schools, which are still better than nothing anyway.

Dont get me wrong: I would love it if you pointed to me news that the government is definitively increasing its spending on education, if that means it is reducing spending elsewhere. It would only be a good first step though: as we get richer, I expect more private schools to come up, and I would hope for the government to scale back its presence (dream on!). I am just too cynical to get my hopes up though.

Perspectives on Iraq

2006-05-04T11:14:00.000+05:30

Three years after the Americans officially declared victory in Iraq, here is retrospection and reflection from three analysts with different perspectives on the situation. I particularly liked Tom Palmer's "Six facts about Iraq".

Tolerance and religious principles

2006-05-01T19:47:00.000+05:30

A good friend of mine recently pointed to me an article (thats the google cache; the original link wasnt working at the time of posting) which claims that polytheistic religions are more tolerant generally than monotheistic religions. The corollary is that a globalised world needs Hinduism, the most popular polytheist faith.

Obvioulsy, as the long history of rioting and caste-related violence in India proves, this isnt necessarily true. Let me put together a few thoughts:

1. People arent motivated by religious beliefs so much as they are motivated by local circumstances and their own self-interest. All politics is local, and religion is most commonly a tool for people wanting to grab power or show power. The recent intoonfada demonstrated this well, as Matt Mcintosh argues here. Playing the religion card has worked wonderfully well for the BJP in India, and it is arguable that Narendra Modi allowed the Gujarat pogrom only because he calculated that it would vastly increase his chances in the coming year's elections, and boy, did that move bail out his sinking ship.

2. Religious beliefs of most people are shallow, and most religions have wide enough doctrines that its adherents can choose whatever principle is most convenient for them at the moment. If they want to kill (for whatever other reasons), the would-be killers just point out that part of the scriptures that justify killing, etc.

3. Obscurity and ambiguity of Hindu morality. I bet Hindu rioters are not even aware of what their religion is actually trying to say. I wouldnt blame them; nobody knows whats really written in the Vedas; and the Gita is too dense and esoteric. Perhaps the only central doctrine of Hinduism is a social one -- that of the caste system. Lay Hindus derive their morality from the epics, but both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are ambiguous at best. In particular, violence is nowhere denounced; it is quite easy to justify violence by drawing naive parallels with the Ramayana or the Mahabharata.

I am not exactly sure how we can get to a peaceful and tolerant society. All I know is that religious principles are woefully inadequate to take us there.

Quote for the day

2006-05-01T12:18:00.000+05:30

"A true liberal is one who is fearful of concentrated power."

That's from Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom, which is my first online purchase, from FirstAndSecond.com.

What happens when you take decentralisation of power to its logical extreme? Individuals have power over themselves only and over no one else - a.k.a. libertarianism.

[I'll have more to say about the book, hopefully. And sorry for not blogging all this time, it has always been a fits-and-starts thing for me.]

The first Web 3.0 product

2006-03-23T11:17:00.000+05:30

This is just what the doc ordered! (HT: Kerabu)

Filter-blogging: Monday morning snarkiness edition

2006-03-20T00:11:00.000+05:30

A voice spoke, chillingly close. "Do not move."

On his hands and knees, the curator froze, turning his head slowly.

Only fifteen feet away, outside the sealed gate, the mountainous silhouette of his attacker stared through the iron bars. He was broad and tall, with ghost-pale skin and thinning white hair. His irises were pink with dark red pupils.
Just count the infelicities here. A voice doesn't speak —a person speaks; a voice is what a person speaks with. "Chillingly close" would be right in your ear, whereas this voice is fifteen feet away behind the thundering gate. The curator (do we really need to be told his profession a third time?) cannot slowly turn his head if he has frozen; freezing (as a voluntary human action) means temporarily ceasing all muscular movements. And crucially, a silhouette does not stare! A silhouette is a shadow. If Saunière can see the man's pale skin, thinning hair, iris color, and red pupils (all at fifteen feet), the man cannot possibly be in silhouette.

A linguist picks on all the stylistic blunders that Dan Brown committed in his You-Know-Which-One book. As if the writing itself wasnt egregious enough (here's another one to convince you, though its slightly more jargon ridden), you had to contend with the mediocre plot, with its steady stream of cheap twists. It would have been convenient if no one had read it; but no, the way things were sometime back, you had to suffer every fool telling his opinion about the book and asking you what you thought of it. In retrospect, I wish some crackpot group claiming to represent some fringe community had protested against the book in India, which would have led to the immediate banning of the book by our ever-sensitive government, and we would have been spared much agony.

[There. I am in a somewhat better position to handle my Monday now.]

[And ofcourse, no disrespect meant to anyone who liked the novel. We just have different priorities.]

No sir, its not wasted beauty

2006-03-17T23:39:00.000+05:30

Touch, brush, caress. Ever so lightly. Drown. And, explore.

(Oh-so-thankful, Pi)

Update: Chetan, in the comments, points me to another awesome site,Ashes and Snow. Again, just Explore. Wordlessly. I've been doing it for an hour now. And do put on your headphones/speakers.

Inequality discussion on Cato

2006-03-15T21:27:00.000+05:30

[I am very late in linking to this. I've been trying to put together my own thoughts on inequality, which, in the end, I decided are neither very original nor well expressed, so I just ended up being a week late.]

Cato Unbound's latest issue, talks about whether inequality is important. In the lead essay, David Schmidtz makes a very clear-headed argument against obsessing on equal opportunity:

In a race, equal opportunity matters. In a race, people need to start on an equal footing. Why? Because a race’s purpose is to measure relative performance. Measuring relative performance, though, is not a society’s purpose. We form societies with the Joneses so that we may do well, period, not so that we may do well relative to the Joneses. To do well, period, people need a good footing, not an equal footing. No one needs to win, so no one needs a fair chance to win. No one needs to keep up with the Joneses, so no one needs a fair chance to keep up with the Joneses. No one needs to put the Joneses in their place or to stop them from pulling ahead. The Joneses are neighbors, not competitors.

Schmidtz's essay ends by asking "which inequalities are ours to arrange". This is, I think, the question to ask. If inequality really is an emergent side-effect of division of labour and voluntary exchanges between individuals, does anybody have the moral authority to "force" equality? Tom Palmer's response picks up on this and dissects some of the approaches to and justifications for redistributionism. (Indeed, this essay and one of its footnotes helped clarify my thinking on the claim that wealth is created "jointly" by societies.)

For balance, read this from crookedtimber.org. The comments thread is in that post is quite interesting.

Some cricket trivia

2006-03-14T15:40:00.000+05:30

The week culminating in the ides of March has always been a great time for cricket, apparently. Most recently we've had the greatest one-dayer ever; exactly five years before today was a day no Indian fan will ever forget. Cricinfo has more.

India is gonna grow leaps and bounds

2006-03-13T11:49:00.000+05:30

Our Minister of Commerce tells us why. (Thanks to India Uncut)

Property, ownership and collectivist pitfalls

2006-03-12T12:23:00.000+05:30

Spot the fallacy in the following:

A medical researcher might make a discovery of great commercial value. He might have worked terribly hard to bring it off. But even so, who trained him? Who moved the subject to the point where the discovery became possible? Who built their lab in which he worked? Who runs it? Who pays for it? Who is responsible for the enduring social institutions that present the commercial opportunities? One who cleverly exploits the social framework has both his cleverness and the framework to thank.

So, whats wrong with the above argument? I, for one, was stumped. I knew that there was something sneaky about this argument, but I just couldnt put my finger on what that was. I knew that if one accepted the above argument, it was a short step from there to socialism and then to hell. Yet I couldnt just muster my thoughts properly in the moment; it was a rhetorical stranglehold, albeit a temporary one.

There are two fallacies in the above argument actually:

There is a minor and a major point to recognise. The minor point is that the "framework" is not a person, natural or legal, to whom a debt can be owed, "institutions" do not act, "society" has no mind, no will, and makes no contributions. Only persons do these things. Imputing responsibility and credit for accumulated wealth, current production and well-being to entities that have no mind and no will is nonsense. It is a variant of the notorious fallacy of composition. [Me: This is a fallacy that humans commit all the time: ascribing intentions/responsibility/credit to entities which dont have minds, if only for lack of a better explanation.]

Once this is understood, we can move on to the major point. All contributions of others to the building of your house have been paid for at each link in the chain of production. [Me:in the above example, all contributors to the discovery of the medical research have been paid for at the appropriate links in the chain of production.] Value has been and is being given for value received, even though the "value" is not always money and goods, but may sometimes be affection, loyalty or the discharge of duty. In the exchange relation, a giver is also a recipient, and of course vice versa.

.. In a voluntary exchange, once each side has delivered and received the agreed contribution, the parties are quits. Seeking to credit and debit them for putative outstanding claims is double counting.

(Emphasis mine)

All the extracts are from "Your Dog Owns Your House", by Anthony De Jasay, a well-known libertarian philosopher.

My two links on the Oscars

2006-03-08T00:54:00.000+05:30

(Er, the title is my attempt at snowclonising an idiom: "my two cents".)

[Note:It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in posession of a good net connection must be downloading and watching a lot of movies. Unsated with such wanton infringement of copyright, such men may also proceed to further fritter away their time by reading others opinions on the said movies, or worse, proffer their own unsolicited opinions and betray their philistinism. It can be of little doubt that you are currently perusing such a gentleman's journal; let it not, therefore, be said that you were not forewarned.]

[Note2: Obvious links not provided; benefits not apparent enough to me, at 2 in the morning]

Here is some polemic on why Crash is simplistic to the point of delusion. (Link via Daniel Drezner)

Cowritten by Haggis and Robert Moresco, "Crash" directly contradicts what we know about how race plays out in the U.S. today, not just in Los Angeles, but all over. In the name of Big Drama, it ignores the chilling effect of political correctness, which compels everyone who's not a fringe-dwelling hatemonger or a person pushed to the edge of his or her rope to express racist thoughts in code.

Ignoring this psychological given, "Crash" is set in Archie Bunker World, a nostalgic land where race is at the forefront of every consciousness during every minute of every day, where elaborately worded slurs are loaded into everyone's speech centers like bullets in a gun, ready to be fired at the instant that disrespect is given. The characters are anachronistic cartoons posing as symbols of contemporary distress.

You dont need to live in the US to have your bullshit alarms going off many times during the movie. It just feels too slick and, at times, cloyingly ironic.

[Update: Evidently, even Google was very disappointed with Crash winning best movie. Image from this Language Log post. I wish these dudes would post less often, its just too good to miss.]

Brokeback Mountain, while being cinematically perfect, doesnt sustain your interest well in the latter half. The real reason why it didnt win Best Picture is left for Tyler Cowen to explain:

Hollywood controls system, not fixed but rigged to favor picture with greatest elasticity of profits with respect to favorable publicity. Too many people won't see BBM, plus fear that Hollywood looks out of touch, Crash!

Would that be why Titanic won so many Oscars?

Also watched "Pride and Prejudice". I feel that the greatest joy of reading Jane Austen comes not from her plot (which always ends happily, a minus in my book), but from her wonderful sentences and the superbly witty conversations between the characters. (The note at the start of the blog, btw, was a pathetic attempt at some Austen pastiche.) That means that I lost out on a whole lot of the experience of reading the book, but the movie has its own compensations as well. You get to see drawn-out chapters in the book compressed into short, torrid scenes where the leads come perilously close to kissing each other(gasp!). You lose out on the sentences but you have the challenge of processing the characters' utterances in real time. (Consider this dialogue that Matt Macfadyen, playing Mr. Darcy, delivers in said torrid scene : "Perhaps these offences might have been overlooked had not your pride been hurt by my honesty in admitting scruples about our relationship.") The movie has a smooth, taut pace that is very resonant of the way the book itself reads. A downside of a movie adaptation is that the story feels a tad too real: you dont want the characters to be so literally shown, you realise you liked them best when they were in that semi-crystallised state, as comfortably disembodied souls. Once you go back to the book, you feel cheated that your own mind's eye movie is so much more different, and (out of what? just childish stubbornness?) you grant greater authenticity to your own pallid mental images.

What happens when you put Jesus and Mohammed together?

2006-02-23T21:06:00.000+05:30

You get a rollicking comic strip. The latest one is among the best until now.

Here's the archive. Lot of in-your-face atheism there, so if you are among the mushy types better not visit it.
Here's the pithiest philosophical dialogue on religion ever. This one's great too.

The middle complementing the tail..

2006-02-22T23:23:00.000+05:30

..Or the post which is just an excuse for patching together links.

Technorati has got out its state of the blogosphere report (hat tip: SophistPundit), with the usual long tail graphs. There's a lot of information there, in case you care about these things. The thing that struck me the most was what the writer calls The Magic Middle.

I want to go a level or two deeper than just thinking about the blogosphere as an A-List and The Long Tail -- for that's far too simplistic, and leaves out some of the most interesting blogs and bloggers out there.

This realm of publishing, which I call "The Magic Middle" of the attention curve, highlights some of the most interesting and influential bloggers and publishers that are often writing about topics that are topical or niche like [mentions a lot of topical blogs]

Well, there's nothing startling about this, except for that most people arent (I think) actively searching for that topical blog which they will love. If you have time, you can try out the technorati blog search sorted by "authority".

I regularly read a couple of topical blogs that are witty, informative and not too restrictive about their domain: Language Log and Marginal Revolution. Language Log's run by a group of linguistics professors from some top universities in the US, and you're sure to enjoy it if you've ever thought WordSpeak in the Hindu was decent. Here are a few representative samples. (Rajat, dont scream. I am just being lazy.) Marginal Revolution, ofcourse, I have linked to previously in a couple of previous posts. Its not quite correct to classify MR as an econ blog, there's all kinds of weird stuff that's posted there. There is a lot of stuff that goes over my head in that blog, but it still makes for great reading.

You might also want to check out TechCrunch, a beautiful looking blog that reviews new webapps (sometimes fancily called "Web 2.0" products). (Wanna know what makes something a Web 2.0 product? Check here) Kerabu is another great blog that looks at the web from an enterpreneur's eyes and is generally full of little wisdoms about what makes products click, UI, open source, the long tail, enterpreneuralism etc etc.

What? Ofcourse I have a job. You thought I was jobless?

Apparently, you can search code

2006-02-18T18:36:00.000+05:30

I didnt know this before, but there exist search engines for finding code that you can reuse. They didnt seem intelligent enough to me, and my being a first time user probably didnt help matters. (I am becoming a bit of a UI buff these days; I noticed that there ought to be checkboxes, rather than radio buttons or drop-down boxes for selecting languages within which to search.) I was trying to find some decent javascript code for doing generic form validations, and it took me a few tries before I could find one to my satisfaction. The problem seems to be that the only things there to be searched are the comments and the code themselves, and there are many ways of writing the same thing. E.g., isInteger(), checkInt(), validateInt(), intCheck() etc etc all do the same thing, and the search engine doesnt know well enough to return them all for the search 'validate form'. Still, I guess you can extract some value out of this by understanding how this usually works.

I got to know about this from a Wired article, that talks about Krugle, a new code searcher thats about to be launched. (Thanks to the SophistPundit)

The new service joins other source-code search engines like Koders and Codefetch, but Krugle intends to differentiate itself by allowing developers to annotate code and documentation, create bookmarks and save collections of search results in a tabbed workspace. Saved workspaces have unique URLs, so developers can send an entire collection of annotated code to a co-worker just by e-mailing a link.

Cool.

Krugle also contains intelligence to help it parse code and to differentiate programming languages, so a PHP developer could search for a website-registration system written in PHP simply by typing "PHP registration system."

Duh. Intelligence to recognise the language? Even my paleolithic VI can do that.

A PJ for today

2006-02-17T15:34:00.001+05:30

Q: James Bond gave only Rs.1.5 to the autowalla despite the meter showing Rs. 4 (It was long ago, when auto fares were in the single digits.) What reason did he give the autowalla?

Heh. To know the answer, select between the quotes with your mouse: "Dhai another day"

It's a bit dated..

2006-02-17T12:59:00.000+05:30

..but you might still like this essay by Clay Shirky about how categorization breaks down in the Web. These ideas have been going around since quite some time, but given my current obsession with the long tail , I thought I might just put it up. An excerpt to egg you on:

It comes down ultimately to a question of philosophy. Does the world make sense or do we make sense of the world? If you believe the world makes sense, then anyone who tries to make sense of the world differently than you is presenting you with a situation that needs to be reconciled formally, because if you get it wrong, you're getting it wrong about the real world.

If, on the other hand, you believe that we make sense of the world, if we are, from a bunch of different points of view, applying some kind of sense to the world, then you don't privilege one top level of sense-making over the other. What you do instead is you try to find ways that the individual sense-making can roll up to something which is of value in aggregate, but you do it without an ontological goal. You do it without a goal of explicitly getting to or even closely matching some theoretically perfect view of the world.

These commercialised times.. sigh

2006-02-16T23:53:00.000+05:30

Kalpana Sharma writes in the Hindu's leader page article:

.. even as the Sena and the NCP speak of morality and the corrupting influences of Valentine's Day or dance bars, they seem to have no problem with the real corruption of consumerism that has gone out of all control. If proof were needed, one only had to read the newspapers on the day after Republic Day. There were reports of a mini-riot in one part of the city. This was not between Hindus and Muslims, or between Shiv Sainiks and others, or between Dalits and the police. The scuffles were between security guards and thousands of people trying to force their way into a shopping mall that had announced huge discounts to celebrate Republic Day. Who would have imagined that 56 years after becoming a republic, the day would be reduced to a maha-sale.

The other aspect that stares you in the face is the ostensible desire of all these political groups to protect "Indian culture." Each party seems to want to outdo itself to protect some imagined "real" Indian culture when all around us we are being reduced to a culture of uniformity and sameness — a culture of malls, fast food and mass entertainment. Ironically, none of these parties opposes a pattern of modernisation that actively eliminates all other "cultures" that have survived and that differentiate one city from another and within cities, one locality from another.

It is amazing how Kalpana Sharma, while pillorying the Shiv Sena for their moral policing, in the same breath indulges in moralising about how the times are all commercialised. Nothing demonstrates better than this how the Left and the Right, for all their antagonism, share the same pessimism about the world, and for entirely bogus reasons. It is unclear exactly what is wrong with having a maha-sale on the occasion of Republic Day. It is unclear how exactly we are being forced into this culture of "malls, fast food and mass entertainment". When she talks about cultural destruction (which is a true enough phenomenon*), she completely neglects the far bigger raise in cultural production that is occuring with greater globalisation. As people get richer, they can afford to spend more time producing and consuming culture. The rise of the Internet and computer penetration (meagre as it may be) has lead to many more different cultures being born, and many more cultural artifacts (such as blogs, articles, podcasts, movies etc) being produced and consumed. I have a great choice and diversity among TV channels to watch, it is easier than ever for me to find the books I want, there are more avenues for me to know more about Telugu literature, there are quality outlets for listening to classical Indian music all the time, there are more kinds of clothes to wear, greater variety of foods to eat etc etc. And yet, none of this is visible to Kalpana Sharma. All she sees in this is a "uniform culture". What she really sees is a super-culture - ever-hungry to spread whereever it can, fueled by freer markets - that gives people greater choice than ever before as to how they want to lead their lives (that is, assuming the Shiv Sena thugs and the Kalpana Sharmas of the world let them to).

Update: How could I forget to mention The Long Tail, which documents the expanding niche markets in various areas, facilitated by technology and the Internet, the foremost drivers of globalisation? (Also take a look at the Wikipedia article on the long tail)

*Let me quote Tyler Cowen yet again:

As the world becomes more integrated, we lose a lot of dysentery and diarrhea and malaria and women dying in childbirth who don’t have to. There’s a whole list of benefits that we’re all familiar with, and those to me are most important. But in terms of culture, there is a loss. For instance, it’s absolutely true that a lot of languages are dying. There’s a gain because you bring people into a broader language network where they can write for others and they can read things by others. I don’t have a problem with that trade-off, but I don’t want to deny that something is lost. These vanishing languages are rich, and they’re interesting. There’s a net gain, but you can’t just paint a picture of an advance along all fronts. It’s not the reality.

(link)

Around the blogosphere

2006-01-31T21:59:00.000+05:30

Rory Blyth has a rockacious-hilarious post on his experience with French Canadians. It does not belong in his "louvre", but is still just as funny. And if you're visiting his blog for the first time, then boy, do I envy you, for you have a lot of laughing to do. My personal favourite is the one on Excel sheets.

(Dratted blogspot. It does a publish post when you do Ctrl+S, which in about every other application in the world means "Save", not "Publish" or "Print".)

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There's a new blog in the Indian blogosphere that's attracting a lot of discussion. Its called the How the Other Half Lives, and purports to fill the vacuum left behind by the mainstream media (and the mainstream blogs, presumably ) regarding the true state of India. Take a visit and see the comments, if you are interested in this kind of thing and are relatively jobless. Some of the comments are good, such as this.
Oops, sorry, :-D. I meant to link to this.

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Gaurav Sabnis has put up a quiz which the quizzers amongst my reader(s?) might be interested in. At first glance, I knew only the 13th one. Ofcourse most of the non-googlable ones are stuff that I wouldnt know regardless of how many glances I took (unless I used .

Tyler Cowen on the global exchange of cultures

2006-01-30T20:46:00.000+05:30

In a previous post, I made a glib statement which I did not try to substantiate:

Look at any culture close enough and you'll find that the search for what is "authentic" in that culture can be very elusive.

Well, there couldnt be a better exposition of that idea than this lecture (pdf) that Tyler Cowen gave at New Zealand, called "The Future of Culture in a globalized world".

What makes a cultural product ‘count’ as being from a certain region? New Zealand has two very well-known opera singers, Malvina Major and Kiri te Kanawa. Now, both Dame Malvina and Dame Kiri have sung in Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro, among other famous operas. When you look at Don Giovanni, you know it is not New Zealand culture, and certainly it is not Maori culture. But what is it? The language is Italian. Mozart was from Austria, although not the Austria we know today. The libretto was written by Lorenzo Da Ponte, an Italian Jew. It is believed the story came originally from Spain and the opera Don Giovanni enjoyed its greatest success in Prague. Of course, you can trace many other influences, for example where the instruments came from – often from the Arabic world and also from China, further east. So, again, we have this idea of a cosmopolitan product.

Tyler Cowen has written a book on this subject, Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World’s Cultures. Here's an interview he gave to Reason about the book some time back.

On what drives cultural protectionism (from the interview):

reason: If this sort of hybridization [of cultures] is so striking and central to cultural production and exchange, why isn’t it more widely acknowledged, much less celebrated?

Cowen: I think a lot of it is pride. People want to take pride in either a country, an ethnic background, or a place of origin. In order to construct an identity, a story, a sense of pride, you need tales about how your group, your region, your nationality -- your whatever -- is somehow special, different, apart, and imbued with a particular kind of meaning.

I think these stories are actually quite useful. Such beliefs motivate people; they give people comfort. I don’t wish to strip them away from people. But if we take those stories too literally and start basing policy on them and forget about this other truth, then we’re in deep trouble. We’ll start thinking that the nation or the group is special and that you need to protect the group.

I particularly like that last paragraph.

Overheard at a restaurant..

2006-01-30T15:03:00.000+05:30

.. "I analysed myself and found that I was an asshole".

Snuggling in the overcoat

2006-01-29T18:26:00.000+05:30

Picked up a short story collection by Nikolai Gogol, that includes the famous "The Overcoat".

Evidently the incomparable Dostoyevsky himself said about Gogol:

We all [future generations of Russian novelists] came out from under his Overcoat

I have a lot of ground to cover in 19th century Russian literature: havent read anything by Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev (with his famous nihilist protagonist in Fathers & Sons) or Chekhov. (Franz Kafka is another guy who doesnt belong here, but my mind always slots him in with these people). Oh, and Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky. Havent read that too.

The evolution of religions

2006-01-25T14:39:00.000+05:30

Alex Tabarrok has a few things to say about how religions adapt:

My point is not to argue that Christianity or Islam are either more or less compatible with capitalism or liberal democracy. In my view all religions of reasonable age and numbers contain traditions and teachings compatible with modernity and all religions of reasonable age and numbers contain traditions and teachings incompatible with modernity. Call it the completeness theorem.

It's how religions adapt and evolve to modernity that is important. Religions are constantly changing, emphasizing certain features, downplaying others, creating new interpretations. Given enough time, I believe that any religion will evolve towards compatability with modernity because it's the memes that combine modernity and religion which will survive and prosper.

The problem is that Christianity has had hundreds of years to adapt itself to modernity while Islam has had modernity thrust upon it.

(Italics mine.)

I think the line that I emphasised is even truer of customs and traditions, (represented by the catch-all "culture") i.e. only such cultures which better adapt and evolve will survive for any length of time. Look at any culture close enough and you'll find that the search for what is "authentic" in that culture can be very elusive.

How to thrive using fear: a case study in environmentalism

2006-01-24T00:16:00.000+05:30

[..], I began to recall other fears in my life that had never come true. The population bomb, for one. Paul Ehrlich predicted mass starvation in the 1960s. Sixty million Americans starving to death. Didn’t happen. Other scientists warned of mass species extinctions by the year 2000. Ehrlich himself predicted that half of all species would become extinct by 2000. Didn’t happen. The Club of Rome told us we would run out of raw materials ranging from oil to copper by the 1990s. That didn’t happen, either.

It’s no surprise that predictions frequently don’t come true. But such big ones! And so many! All my life I worried about the decay of the environment, the tragic loss of species, the collapse of ecosystems. I feared poisoning by pesticides, alar on apples, falling sperm counts from endocrine disrupters, cancer from power lines, cancer from saccharine, cancer from cell phones, cancer from computer screens, cancer from food coloring, hair spray, electric razors, electric blankets, coffee, chlorinated water…it never seemed to end.

Here's the whole thing. I am going to be a little respectful towards Michael Crichton, despite the fact that he writes only so that his books can be made into movies. Atleast he sees how neither the environmentalists nor the media have any clue as to what really is the matter with our world, if anything at all.

(Hat tip to the Commons blog)

A meta-post

2006-01-20T22:10:00.000+05:30

I am finished with some of my modifications to the template of this blog. I am not completely satisified with the colours though, I have a suspicion they look awfully weird. Also, I dont like the sharp corners at the edges of all those boxes that my blog is composed of, but Blogspot has an awful way of rounding the corners: putting background gifs that have the corners in them. And I cant let those gifs remain once I decided that the width of all my boxes would be percentage-specified, rather than pixel-specified so I'll have to live with the sharp corners. Any suggestions here are welcome.

Bah! Just me being a fuddy-duddy here.

RSS Salvation, at last

2006-01-17T19:41:00.000+05:30

After some painful market research, I think I can safely say that Newsgator is the best online feed reader around. It has great folder management, (with drag-and-drop); you have a link which you can add to your bookmarks toolbar (in Firefox) and which automatically subscribes you to the site/blog you are currently viewing (provided you are logged in); and their display is aesthetically pleasing. Great stuff.

Earlier, I had tried out Bandit,( which is decent but is a winodws desktop app, meaning you cant access it from different comps and thats a great disadvantage); Google reader (which was pretty, but pathetic beneath its prettiness; slow, dim-witted regarding folders; but, in time, by putting the right functionalities in the right places on the screen, it can be Gmail-level) and Bloglines (which seemed like everybody's favourite, but again it had non-existent folder management).

A compendium of links

2006-01-11T19:18:00.000+05:30

I've decided that if I cant be disciplined enough to write a proper post by myself, I should atleast post links regularly.

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From the The Skeptical Environmentalist:Measuring the Real State of the World

In a highly interconnected world, statistical short-term reversals are bound to occur in long-term trends. If we allow environmental arguments - however well-meaning - to be backed merely by purported trends of two or three carefully selected years, we invariably open the floodgates to any and every argument. Thus, if we are to appraise substantial developments we must investigate long periods of time. Not the two or five years usually used, but as far back as figures exist. Of course, we must be aware that a new tendency may be developing, and we must also be extra careful to include and analyze the latest available figures. But insisting on long-term trends protects us against false arguments from background noise and lone swallows.

If you (even in a vague, unarticulated way) believe that technology or modernity or capitalism or what-have-you are rapidly, mercilessly screwing up the planet, then you definitely ought to pay attention to this book.

Here's the review of the book in the Economist.

Here's a good post on the methodology that this book follows (I found this in a long session of link-following that yielded a lot of good blogs).

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Nobody has done more to popularise open source and bring it into the mainstream than Eric Raymond. His Cathedral and the Bazaar was the first essay that really convinced me about open-source. It also alerted me to the way bottom-up processes are so much more efficient at solving large-scale problems than traditional top-down solutions. Think Evolution vs Intelligent Design, Capitalism vs Communism, traditional encyclopedias vs Wikipedia and whole a lot of other processes.

(Rajat also pointed me sometime back to another good essay, Open Source-onomics: Examining some pseudo-economic arguments about Open Source. )

Why have I suddenly brought up ESR? Jaron Lanier, a pioneer of Virtual Reality recently wrote , IMO, a very muddled-up essay whose point it seemed to be to pan the Internet, Microsoft and Capitalism, all in one go. ESR responded to it, and the response is far more worth reading.

I have begun reading his Homesteading the Noosphere, and its been a gem until now. His fundamental insight is that open source development, like any other human activity, is best explained by understanding the incentives that drive its programmers. He has some great insights as to the unspoken taboos and customs among open source communities and why they have arosen.

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Christof Koch is a Prof in Caltech who has been working with the late great Francis Crick on finding the neurological bases for consciousness. If you have a great net connection, you can acces videos of his lectures from here. A few days back I could access all the chapters of his book too, but I cant find it today. Anyway, do read the first chapter, it's got to be the smallest synopsis of all the important philosophical positions on consciousness.

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In case you havent much idea about all the fantastic developments going on in bio-technology, then this debate on its promises, perils can fill you in. I myself dont know too much about the specifics , but I've been told by a friend whose friend is working in the field that all sorts of unimaginable things (such as an injection performing eye surgery) may soon start becoming reality. The debate on what it really holds for the future is great food for thought. My own outlook is decidely optimistic, but its justification will need a proper post that I am, as usual, postponing to a later date.

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This can do for now. I have to get back to writing suck-letters to profs.

Update: You can in-fact, access all of Prof. Koch's book chapters from here

Tim Harford speaks on aid, free trade and environment

2005-12-20T13:30:00.000+05:30

The much-talked about author of the much-talked about book, now speaks on price-gouging, free trade and why "if you would like to be rich and have nothing change, then you will be disappointed".

That free trade can actually be helpful to the environment is something that never struck me, and it pulls the rug from beneath the feet of the many moralising environmentalists.

The countries that have the highest trade barriers, Japan and Korea use so much fertilizer.

..

And then countries like Brazil that don’t have a lot of agricultural protectionism don’t use much fertilizer either. And when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. The protectionism is necessary because the land is not good. And the fertilizer is necessary because the land is not good. So free trade in agricultural products is -- well it’s good for a lot of reasons. But one of the reasons is it is good for the environment.

Read the interview. He gives a lot of pithy explanations for why we must embrace free trade and change, how all aid need not necessarily be bad and how businesses are fleecing us all the time through price targeting. His tone is even, un-hysterical, un-moralising and his arguments make sense. Unlike much of the arguments made on either sides of the debate on globalization.

Linus flares up on GNOME UI

2005-12-14T16:13:00.000+05:30

Linus talks about what is wrong with GNOME's GUI. Some worthy points in that thread.

Opening salvo:

I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE.

This "users are idiots, and are confused by functionality" mentality of
Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will
use it. I don't use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long
since reached the point where it simply doesn't do what I need it to do.

Please, just tell people to use KDE.

Linus

Another juicy one:

The fact is, developers don't know what their users are going to need.
That's a very fundamental issue in any software engineering. The other,
almost as fundamental issue, is that asking users is usually not very
productive either, because (a) different users will give you different
answers and (b) users often don't even know.

So when you ask "which flexibilities do you consider important", you're
pretty much BY DEFINITION asking for something senseless. It's akin to
asking how many angels dance on the head of a pin.

But the fact that users and developers don't know does NOT mean that
customization is bad. Quite the reverse. It means that defaults make
sense, but since you don't know what they'll be doing, you should always
strive to have ways to let _them_ make the choice when they have some
reason the default doesn't agree with them.

Those users may not know before-hand (which is why asking them is
pointless), but people actually _like_ twiddling around, changing fonts
and personalizing their machine. It may not be "productive", but it sure
as hell is user-friendly.

I havent followed the whole thread. If you see anything more worth reading, sure point me to it.

(Hat tip to Praveena)

FOSS in India

2005-12-13T10:57:00.000+05:30

Rajat points me to an analysis of why contribution from Indians to the FOSS community does not meet expectations. Some interesting theories there, especially in the comments.

If you shoot yourself in the foot, why shouldn't I?

2005-12-10T00:03:00.000+05:30

Reading this piece about the massive "trade-distorting" agricultural subsidies given out by the US and the EU to their farmers, or indeed any article in the Hindu about this subject, you would think that the developed West is hurting us a great deal through such policies. I too was a sucker for this argument, until around an hour ago, when a few comments to a post on the Indian Economy blog woke me upto reality.

This Tech Central Station article does a good job of explaining the shoddy logic and the empty rhetoric of all the protectionists, the essence of which is that:

Evil rich countries (Europe, the U.S. and Japan) refuse to cut their agricultural subsidies and tariffs, which, in the words of Oxfam, "amount to robbery against the world's poor." Noble poor countries, meanwhile, righteously refuse to dismantle their own trade barriers unless the rich countries move first.

Hence, we are told, we are to go on shooting ourselves in the foot by continuing to have tariffs and artificially increase prices just because the rich countries are doing that. But, what if, we regain our senses for a bit, and decide to unilaterally remove trade barriers?

The World Bank has found that the total gain to the global economy from trade liberalization in agriculture -- the sticking point in Hong Kong, where I'll be next week -- is $248 billion. Of this total, the gain to rich countries is $106 billion; to poor countries, $142 billion.

But out of the $142 billion gain to poor countries, the gain that comes from removing trade barriers in rich countries is only $31 billion. The gain to poor countries that comes from removing their own barriers is $111 billion -- nearly four times as great.

(Italics in original).

There is more stuff in the article that would surprise you if you did not already understand free markets. And there is no dearth of such people in this world. Given political "pro-poor" rhetoric on the one hand, and the insidious socialist propaganda of the mainstream media on the other, it is not to be wondered at.

Individualism from the 18th century

2005-12-08T17:53:00.000+05:30

Found this on the Liberty and Power blog

Be no man’s lackey. Do not let others tread with impunity on your rights. ... Do not be a parasite or a flatterer or (what really differs from these only in degree) a beggar. ... Bowing or scraping before a man seems in any case to be unworthy of a man. ... Kneeling down or prostrating oneself on the ground, even to show your veneration for heavenly objects, is contrary to the dignity of humanity .... One who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterward if people step on him. ...

Self-esteem is a duty of man to himself.

You can be forgiven if you thought that was an Ayn Rand quote. It actually happens to be an extract from Immanuel Kant's The Metaphysics of Morals.

Do you have free-will? Or are you a zombie?

2005-11-27T18:21:00.000+05:30

I am currently reading "The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul", and its worth every penny I spent on it. As its name says, its a collection of some wonderful (even if somewhat dated) fantasies and ideas on minds and souls.

I will blog on the book in greater detail later, for now I just want to talk about a brilliant dialogue included in the book:"Is God a Taoist?", written by Raymond Smullyan.

One of the classic questions of Western philosophy (but not eastern) is the one concerning free-will and determinism. The apparent paradox is this: in a scientific view of the world, by understanding the laws of nature, one must be able to predict the future (atleast in principle. We are very far away from being able to do this in practice). But then, if I have no say in what I do next, to what extent am I to be held responsible for my actions?

Part of the answer lies in this insight, taken from "The Mind's I": "Free will is in the eye of the willer, not in the eye of the God above. As long as the creature feels free, he, she, or it is free." Thus, we humans are what the philosopher Daniel Dennett calls "choice machines" in this interview where he explains this resolution of the problem. We are programmed to make choices, but the determinism does not in any way reduce our free-will.

The other part of the answer is that there's a wrong assumption underlying the formulation of the problem; the assumption that we can cleanly separate this world into subject and object, an assumption so basic to western philosophy. Consider this extract from the dialogue:

[..] the confusion is largely caused by your bifurcation of reality into the “you” and the “not you.” Really now, just where do you leave off and the rest of the universe begin? Or where does the rest of the universe leave off and you begin? Once you can see the so-called “you” and the so-called “nature” as a continuous whole, then you can never again be bothered by such questions as whether it is you who are controlling nature or nature who is controlling you. Thus the muddle of free will versus determinism will vanish.

The subject/object distinction is one which is very useful in our daily lives and for that reason it is very tough to get rid of. I, at any rate, prefer to understand eastern monism only in the abstract, for it somehow seems to me that I will lose all sense of self and soul if I really, truly understand it. Thank god for my ignorance.

You are welcome to give your own ideas on this or give more links..

Preface to a Blog

2005-11-27T13:23:00.000+05:30

I am having this great egotistic urge to show everyone how clever I am, so I decided to start a blog. Everyone's having one, so I too must have, I guess.

I just have these many thoughts that are floating around in my head, and they are simply too much trouble to have them all the time in this anarchistic fashion. I need to organise them, but I have been too lazy. I am hoping that this blog will force me to think my thoughts through properly. A blog also seems a convenient place to put links to readable stuff on the web.