In Praise of Paper Books

The world seems to be moving towards eBooks.

At this point, Amazon sells more eBooks than paper books. There are now multiple devices available at all different price points for purchasing, storing, reading, and sharing these books. In my own unscientific sampling, people who take the early morning train with me seem to be gradually converting to reading from little tablets in their hands rather than the old-fashioned paper books

An eBook is a great innovation. One can store a whole library of books in the memory of a little device. They can be downloaded on a whim and discarded without leaving a trace. One cannot think of an environmentally sounder way to exercise one’s mind. Add to that all the benefits of having built in dictionaries and such, what is not to like in an eBook?

Hmmm.

Why is it then I keep buying paper books? Once again, as I mentioned in my previous post, I am not a Luddite and I do use my iPad, and sometimes iPhone, to read magazines and newspapers. It is with books that I seem to have drawn a line.

Yes, I like the feel of holding a paper book. However, this nostalgic, and often cited, reason feels like an excuse that does not fully answer why I like books.

I think the explanation lies in what I do with a paper book when I am done reading it. It ends up on one of my bookshelves. I like gazing at the bookshelves and think about the contents of individual books as I notice them individually. I like to randomly pick up and leaf through books. Some of these are coffee table books with beautiful large pictures (generally of mountains or some barren land, in my case) that continue to fascinate me.

Try to do all that with a Kindle.

Even more important is the fact that visitors to my house look at my books and sometimes even show interest in what I am reading. I let people judge me by what I am reading. I jealously guard my books, making sure that the borrowed ones are returned. This is even though I may not read most of them again. Why would I do that were it not for the fact that these books on my shelves contribute to my personal branding!

Until they come out with innovations that satisfy these other reasons, it is going to be paper books for me.

In Praise of a Radio

Recently, my old Sony Walkman radio died. I went to a department store to look for a replacement.

The sales clerk was mildly amused by my request but did help me find one. There, among shelves displaying snappy new MP3 players and iPods, was a tiny area devoted to radios. I picked up a Walkman---which looked almost exactly like the one I was replacing. I guess, not too much effort had gone into developing a refreshed version of this dying product.

That’s too bad.

I like my radio and would rather listen to it rather than an MP3 player when I exercise in my gym. I am not a Luddite---not at all. I own all the gizmos, iPad2, iPhone and all that. However, the radio provides me with something thse other products do not.

First, there is a friendly voice guiding me through the music I listen too. I generally listen to the Western Classical music, and the short summary provided by the announcer gives me useful context and enriches my knowledge base. An MP3 player does not do that.

Second, no matter how large is my library of music, I can not match what a radio station has. So, I listen to selections I would not have otherwise encountered if I were attached to listening just my collection on an MP3 player.

The most important reason I like a radio is the word “like”. By definition, the stored music on my iPod is what I have liked. That means I would not listen to something I have no knowledge of and, therefore, has no preordained “like” associated with it.

How can I prevent my taste from stagnating if I do not explore something new? With a radio, it is just the matter of moving the dial---so to speak. I can listen to anything I want, and then decide if I like it or not. If I wish, I can always down load the best of that new “like” on my iPhone. Yes?

Radio---what is not to like?

A Tale of Two Cities

San Francisco is a beautiful city. With steep hills, spectacular views of the ocean and crazy streets and boulevards, it is a place that is immediately endearing. Add to that the famous weather pattern, which keeps the temperture around comfortable 70 degrees, and the city becomes utterly desirable to many.

On the other hand, and on the other coast, Boston, where I live, has severe winters. There are days when the thermometer dips to zero degrees (and that is Fahrenheit) and the wind is howling. This is not the comfortable and predictable West Coast weather.

Boston is a pretty city but does not have the same spectacular beauty of SF. What it does have is a great deal of culture, history, and education. Money is of course important, just as everywhere, but somehow it does not seem as important in this city, which emphasizes what you know rather than what you own. The presence of two world famous universities of course adds a great deal to the vitality of the city by filling it with young students

Even its weather has its own charms. The beautiful white coat of winter ice melts as new buds start emerging on plants and trees. The light green shades and beautiful flowers are soon replaced by dense greenery and warm sunshine. My favorite time of the year is fall, when trees break out into all glorious colors and the days become crisp and clear. When you get used to these changes, the routine of same old same old on the West Coast would get boring for some of us.

I completely accept the fact that this is all a matter of taste and priorities.

As a popular saying goes---gentlemen prefer blonds, perhaps even if they are not too bright. As long as they are gorgeous and smile a lot, everything is forgiven. Many men will agree with that.

However, some others may prefer brunets who are pretty but not perfect. Those with depth, culture and smartness---and mood swings to keep things interesting---unlike the case with the fixed smile bimbos.

Managing Risks

We all take risks.

“Risks are events or conditions that may occur, and whose occurrence, if it does take place, has a harmful or negative effect.” That does not sound good, and most rational human beings would like to figure out how to manage risks.

Before thinking about how to manage risks, it is very important to classify them into two categories: involuntary or voluntary and recognize that they need to be managed differently.

An involuntary risk is that associated with event over which you have little or no control. Lightening strike, car accident, health and house fire are some of the examples. Eliminating this type of risk has no negative consequences, and generally one can purchase an insurance to cover these risks.

The goal of an individual’s risk management strategy then should be to reduce overall involuntary risk to an acceptable level at a minimum cost. How does an individual manage the risk of his house burning down? Purchase an adequate coverage at minimum cost.

A voluntary risk on the other hand, is that associated with activities undertaken voluntarily, as the name would suggest. Ice climbing, diving, investing in stocks, and purchasing a house are examples of activities that involve voluntary risks. These risks are acceptable because they are by-products of activities that create benefits. Ice climbing creates pleasure, so what if there are risks involved? Generally, insurance firms will not cover these risks.

The goal of an individual should be to maximize overall benefits while taking acceptable risk. When put in practice, this would imply reducing the risk for a specific activity, of course. One should not attempt ice climbing without crampons. But it would also imply adding risk if the commensurate benefit outweigh the additional risk. Sitting home may be safe but could also be very boring!

So the strategy for managing risks that we face boils down to:

• Reduce the involuntary risk to an acceptable level at minimum cost, and at the same time,
• Maximize the benefits provided by voluntary risks while taking acceptable risk overall.

Seduction of Simplicity

I just finished reading a book titled “Life Ascending” by Nick Lane. It talks about ten great inventions of evolution. For a person with a limited background in biochemistry and biology, this is a fascinating account on how some of the major inventions by nature---like hot blood, sight, photosynthesis or DNA--- could have evolved. Each of these inventions followed the basic rules of evolution, and took millions of years to play out. The result is this extraordinarily complex diversity of plants and animals, and of course us, the human beings.

This book clearly illustrates that years of painstaking research are required to explain how something as complex as the evolution of human being. Occasionally, wrong pathways are followed before the likely hypotheses start emerging. It also requires faith in science and its ability to explain.

For a majority of people, however, there is a simple explanation on why we are what we are---God created us in his image over a period of seven days. End of mystery.

What I am wondering is whether this is strictly driven by their faith in God and his existence or is it due to an innate belief that there has to be a simple explanation to life’s mysteries.

Are simple solutions and explanations that seductive that they can trump reason? I think so.

This, of course, is not restricted just to science. A huge chunk of our population believes that a simple solution for the financial mess we find ourselves in is reducing the size of the government and getting it out of our lives. Of course it does not bother these people that they, at the same time, want the same government to help them with retirement and pay the medical bills.

A solution that would work requires a reasoned approach, balancing the complex needs of the society with the financial pain that we all need to share. However, this is not reducible to a few sound bites and slogans, and therefore not appealing to this very vocal segment of the society. I believe that they too are seduced by the elegance of what they propose and not by their understanding of macroeconomics.

I feel the same way about the failed experiment of communism. It was such an elegant solution that provided an alternative to the messy process of democracy. It was easy to explain and enforce. (I bet their regulations and tax codes were not as massively complex as ours!). It was seductive to a great number of people.

The only problem was---it did not work.

July 2011

Fasting as a weapon

Going on a fast until death was a strategy probably invented by Mahatma Gandhi. He used it effectively against the British to obtain concessions and meet his demands related to granting India its freedom. Although it has been used elsewhere--for example, Bobby Sands, a member of the Irish Republican Army, fasted to death in 1981--it is in India that it remains a popular way of achieving results.

The more contemporary examples are fasts conducted by Anna Hazare and Baba Ramdev to raise the issue of corruption in India and make the government do something about it

It is a pretty effective strategy. As long as the adversaries have some moral value, they would not like to see someone starve to death because of their refusal to take some actions. Besides moral compunction, there is a political reason for the other side to act --such an event would provide a strong outrage from the population at large. Finally, they need to respond quickly---the other side has only a few days before the person dies.

However, it can also be considered to be a dangerous weapon.

While no one can argue that gaining independence or removing corruption are worthwhile causes, one can see it being used to gain action on causes of dubious nature. What if someone decides to go to fast until death unless laws are passed restricting what women can wear in public? Is that a justifiable cause? Who decides if it is justifiable?

Democracies, such as India, depend on laws enacted and actions taken that would be acceptable to the majority of population, as interpreted by their elected representatives. Doesn’t the use of fasting to make things happen bypass these democratic processes?

Also, even if the cause is “just” as decided by a majority of people, and there is clearly a need to take action, how can the adversary do something that is well thought out in such a short time span? How can a 20-30 day time limit, before the fasting person irreparably harms himself/herself, provide the time necessary to chart out a well reasoned and debated course of action? I suspect that what you would get is something half baked or without serious intentions for follow up once the said fast is broken and victory declared.

Finally, there is the issue of personality of people involved. Mahatma Gandhi was clearly a person whose intentions were beyond reproach, and Anna Hazare seems to be a similar person intent upon helping people. Baba Ramdev, I am not too sure. Does he really want to help people or is this a stunt to increase his market value?

Fasting is an effective but a dangerous weapon indeed.

Simplify!

I am sure I am not alone in my desire to simplify life. Most people, whose lives are equally cluttered with things accumulated over time and activities that are without much purpose would yearn for achieving the same goal. What I am not sure is why we have this yearning to simplify and how to resolve it.

Perhaps the root cause is nostalgia. We always look back at the past and think of it as “good old days.” For most of us, we had fewer things in life in the past and hence simplification gets equated with good times.

May be it is in our DNA. I read somewhere that going back to nature is like going home. It is where we came from and within ourselves there is a strong desire to get back. Living in a cottage surrounded by nature is probably the closest we can come to going “back home” according to this theory.

Talking about living in a cottage in a forest away from people of course brings us to Henry David Thoreau. His reason for doing what he did is very well articulated in his book Walden, written when he lived near Walden Pond in Concord, some five miles from our house in Acton. He says,” I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and when I came to die discover that I had not lived.” So perhaps, we desire to simplify because we believe that in doing so we will be able to learn what life has to teach.

That sounds like a really strong reason. However putting it to practice is another matter. For most of us, giving up everything and living in the woods in not practical or may not even be advisable. Only hermits like the mad man Unabomber would opt for such a life these days. Besides if all of us decide to do what Thoreau did, we would end up destroying all the woods and quickly starving to death.

However, that does not mean that we can not reduce the clutter. We can downsize from our large dwellings, generally without suffering much pain and reduce our possessions quite drastically. We can reduce many unnecessary activities and interactions without becoming a hermit or misanthrope.

Even that is easier said than done, but I believe it is necessary to at least make an attempt. I believe in Mr. Thoreau’s philosophy. I too do not want to discover that I had not lived when I came to die.

OK, so which ones of the twenty five magazines I subscribe to right now can I stop getting?

End of Exploration?

April 12th this year was the fiftieth anniversary of one of the great events in human history. On that day, fifty years ago, Yuri Gagarin blasted off in his Vostok spacecraft and became the first human being to venture into space. For people around the world it was a very exciting event which led to even more adventures and “firsts” in space. The first woman in space, the first multiple person team in orbit, the first space walk…..

The culmination of these early days of space travel was the Apollo program. I clearly remember the day when Apollo 8 and its crew of three Americans (Borman, Lowell, and Anders) left earth’s orbit and headed toward the moon. For a teenager growing up in Rajkot, India, I could not think of anything that could be more exciting.

Of course, there was something more exciting on the horizon---the actual landing on the moon. I was studying in IIT during that time and was hoping to catch the live radio broadcast of Armstrong stepping on the moon. However, he decided to step outside earlier than planned (he was too excited to sit inside) and so by the time we returned from our classes, the event had happened…and the mankind had taken a giant leap.

And, it all began on April 12th 1961 with Gagarin’s flight.

However, one would not have guessed the importance of the anniversary given the complete lack of excitement about it. There was almost no mention of it in the news papers and no one I met talked about it. My broadcast email about this or posting of a video of Gagarin’s flight on Face Book was generally met by a big yawn.

I am puzzled by such lack of enthusiasm, not just by the people that I interact with, but by our society in general. I guess we are all so tied up with the current affairs that we do not have time for such frivolous activities as space exploration. After all, there is no financial rate of return on adventures like this---they only fulfill our innate curiosity to explore.

What puzzles me is that we have always financed such explorations in the past, even when the economic conditions were worse than what we have now. So, what is different now? Are there other ways by which our desire to explore being satisfied?

Maybe I am all wrong and someday there will be a manned space flight to Mars or we will establish a colony on the moon. Those will be the adventures that would captivate human beings once again and set the imaginations of then teenagers to fire.

However, given the current lack of enthusiasm for anything like this, I doubt that I would live to see that day. We have probably already arrived at the end of the days of exploration.

Authority, Responsibility, and Accountability

I work for a management consulting firm. One of the tasks we often perform is to evaluate the way a specific process is working in a company. We are asked to recommend changes if it is not working well---and often the issue it is the way it being managed.

As one would expect, any complex process involves multiple people; each with his/her own authority, responsibility, and accountability---authority to make certain decisions and take actions, responsibility to make sure his/her part of the process works well, and accountability for the end results. For a process to work well, these three elements have to be in alignment with each other. So, if you hold a person responsible for a process, and accountable for the results, he/she has to have the authority to make decisions affecting the outcome. These elements not being in alignment is often a reason for the breakdown of the system.

Such a misalignment is the reason for why many systems we encounter in our daily life do not work, both at a micro and macro levels. Take healthcare for example.

If the government has the responsibility for providing free or subsidized healthcare for older people or people of limited means, it has to have the authority to make decisions and impose regulations that would affect the cost of providing such service. That is the way to achieve alignment. And yet, when government tries to suggest, let alone dictate, how to live healthy lives, the staunch advocates on the right start screaming.

When Michelle Obama talks about providing healthy school lunches, the dim witted firebrands start arguing that we are becoming a nanny state and a child has all the rights to eat Twinkies. Of course, when the child becomes obese and develops health problems, it is the government’s responsibility to take care of him. Responsibility but no authority.

Along the same lines, if you want to have the authority to make all the decisions, then it should be you who should be held accountable if something goes wrong. If you want to live a criminal life and get shot, you should not expect the government to pay for fixing you up and send you out so you get shot once again. Authority but no accountability.

Authority, responsibility, and accountability. They need to be in alignment at all times.

Leaderless Democracy

A brilliant article in the Economist a while back analyzed the financial crisis of California and identified reasons for it. One reason that has stuck in my head is that Californians have perfected the art of using Propositions in the way they make rules. For those not familiar with Propositions, these are questions included in an election ballot asking public at large what to do about certain issue---say, providing a new type of service, changing a law, or taxing something. These votes are binding, and can not be changed unless there is a judicial decision or passage of another Proposition overturning it.

Every time, some propositions pass, some are defeated. Not surprisingly, the Propositions dealing with increasing taxes get defeated and those for providing new services pass. Equally, not surprisingly, the Propositions are thus a major cause for budget deficits.

The reason we elect representatives to go and make laws is that they are empowered to make tough choices on our behalf. They are suppose to lead the way by doing what is right not what is popular. Changing this long accepted way of running country into that run by propositions inevitably leads to a disaster.

Stretching this further, I look at the revolution in Egypt. Enabled by the new social media technology, this was the first instance of a leaderless way of changing the government. The population was able to do what would have required a charismatic leader in the past. It was an electronic equivalent to pushing a binding Proposition.

However, now I wonder what comes next. How will this new found power be wielded? Will the same leaderless population decide to reduce the tax rate? Increase social services? Will they ever be able to make tough choices? Do people ever decide to increase tax or reduce expenses without a leader?

Or will a leader emerge out of this, curtailing the power of the population in order to take unpopular decisions and make changes? I hope so, because in my opinion, a leaderless democracy does not work, because the population at large can not make tough choices.

Flying a Kite

India celebrated the festival of Makar Sankranti on January 14th. One of the only festivals in India that is tied to the Western calendar, Sankranti always falls on the 14th of January and for people in Gujarat, the area I come from, it only means one thing---flying a kite. It is a joy to be in a city like Ahmedabad and see hundreds of kites in the sky.

Although most people can learn to fly a kite---sort of, being good at it is not easy. On the surface of it, you need to learn only two actions--- (i) hold and tug the string, and (ii) play it out. However, a key thing to learn is when to do what. If you hold the string for too long, the kite does not fly---if you just let it go, it does not fly either. It is well synchronized switching between the two actions that would make the kite fly.

Good kite flyers develop an intuitive feel for when to hold and when to let go in order to get optimum performance out of a kite. Further, they learn to read the wind and know how to adjust their actions. Theirs are the kites that fly the highest.

Kite flying is a perfect metaphor for many things we need to learn to do in life.

A perfect example (at least to me) is child rearing. Like kite flying, one needs to do two basic things (i) hold on to the strings (discipline the child or set boundaries) and (ii) let go (let the child explore on his/her own). If you hold on too often and for too long, the child remains highly disciplined but does not progress or take wings. If you let go all the time, the child goes haywire---undisciplined and rudderless. I am sure you have seen examples of both types.

The key again lies in knowing when to do what and acting accordingly. Good parents seem to have developed an intuitive feel for when to hold and when to let go.

Then there is the question of wind---in this case externalities like the prevailing cultural climate and social norms. Different wind pattern requires different actions. Good parents, like good kite flyers are able to read the prevailing winds and adjust accordingly.

Their kites end up flying high.

God and Black Swan

‘The Black Swan’ is an interesting book written by Nassim Taleb. If you wade through the pages of somewhat pompous writing, you would find several good insights. One of them goes like this---In our normal life we only see white swans and you may be tempted to assume that all swans are white. However, this may not be the case. A black swan may exist and be seen by some ornithologist someday. So, the word ‘certainty’ can be applied only to indicate the presence of black swan, if one is seen. One can not be certain that no such swans exist if only white swans are seen.

There is an asymmetry here that applies to many situations.

Take, for example, the question of the existence of God. For many of us, we have not seen evidence that would indicate his existence*. So, we conclude that he does not exist. However, if the above logic is used, the absence of evidence implies only that he may not exist, not that he does not exist. The only time we could be certain is when the opposite happens---an irrefutable proof is found.

So, by this argument, we can not be atheist and claim to be rational at the same time. The only rational position is that of an agnostic.

I am troubled by this. In our daily lives we, the doubters, are given more leeway.

Take for example the court of law. You are innocent until proven guilty. So, the absence of an irrefutable proof that you murdered someone is taken to indicate that you are innocent, not that you may be innocent. The onus is on the other side to prove your guilt.

Why can’t the same logic apply while discussing the existence of God?

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* The purpose of this post is not to question the faithful who are able to see the evidence of God in many events and things around us. It starts with the position held by many of us who do not see the evidence and argues for the validity of atheism as a rational position.