Author: SK

Default Acronym Expansions

Based on the kind of stuff we are interested in, each of us has our own “default expansions” for acronyms.

Now, there are only 26 letters in the English alphabet (and some are much more common than others), and a good acronym is 2-4 letters long, so there are so many acronyms going around. So it is inevitable that there is acronym overloading, with the same acronym meaning different things in different contexts.

In this context, whenever we see an acronym, we have a default expansion of it based on our interests and domains and exposures. And this can lead to some hilarious interpretations at times.

I read this newsletter called “Margins“. I don’t agree with everything they write, but they write about interesting stuff so I read them. Yesterday’s edition had this gem:

Clearly, the 2008 Financial Crisis and the blowup of CDOs and MBSs left a bad taste in people’s mouths over the chopping up and passing off of debt (note: I now get uncomfortable every time I write “MBS” and “chopped up” in a sentence).

This joke works only because of acronym overloading. MBS also refers to Saudi crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman, and he “allegedly” got dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who worked for the Washington Post, literally chopped up (for those of you for whom Mohammed Bin Salman is the default MBS, it can also refer to Mortgage Backed Securities).

Long ago, I worked for a company that had launched a product acronymised as “LFM”. I could never understand what this product does because my “default expansion” of LFM is Left Arm Fast Medium.

Acronym confusion can also happen when you’re deeply familiar with one domain with its own set of jargons and acronyms, and then are suddenly exposed to another domain that has its own set of jargons and acronyms. It takes a long time to “unlearn” your old acronyms and then learn the new ones.

Then again, given the limited number of acronyms available, sooner or later we better learn to learn and unlearn new meanings of acronyms.

Maybe one day Kohlberg Kravis Roberts will buy Kolkata Knight Riders
I still don’t understand how the IPL allowed Delhi Capitals since there used to exist a team called Deccan Chargers in the same league
Does your All India Rank get announced on All India Radio?

Giant Squid is Good Stuff.

 

Looking for porn in Ikkeri

A long time back I’d gone to Sringeri, and tried to use insights from Tyler Cowen’s Discover Your Inner Economist, which I had then just read. Cowen had written that the way to get interested in things you’re not normally interested about is in engaging in side bets.

So if you’re watching a game where you don’t know which team to root for (which makes it less interesting), you place a bet. When you go to an art gallery, think about which painting you would want to steal (if given a choice).

And a corollary is that when you visit a medieval Indian temple, you get yourself interested in the sculptures by looking for porn in them. At Sringeri I hadn’t had that much luck. Either I was bad at spotting figures (no pun intended) back in 2008, or the temple there is simply too “sanskari”, but I had completely failed to find porn there.

Last week, we did a family road trip through West-Central Karnataka. We went close to Sringeri but didn’t actually go there. Instead, we visited seven (I think) other medieval temples in that region, most of them off the beaten tourist track.

All seven temples (IIRC) are under control of the Archeological Survey of India, though all of them also see daily prayers (basically, the idols haven’t been destroyed). In many of them, we were the only people at the temple at the time of visit. We didn’t spend too long in each temple (30-45 minutes at max), and they weren’t particularly close to each other, so it was a real “road trip” that way (most time being spent in the car).

In any case, we were in luck at the Aghoreshwara Temple in Ikkeri.

It was the wife (who, you might remember, is a relationship guru) who first noticed this. “Is this guy shagging?”, she asked, looking at a sculpture on the side of the temple. “Oh wow! This woman is touching herself”, she went on.

We only looked closely at one side of the temple (we had gone in the afternoon and the floor on the other side of the temple was too hot so we didn’t spend much time there), but there was plenty of “good stuff”.

One series of people touching the penis of the guy in front. One person tugging at the penises of two people at the same time. Women sprawled out in an inviting manner. People getting anal. Interesting “positions”. The sculptor surely had superb imagination.

The wife diligently documented a lot of things we saw and put them on Instagram. You can check the stuff out here.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B8rFYmOjoej/

Most of our temple visits on the trip came after this one, and so we kept our eyes out for “interesting stuff” there. Unfortunately we didn’t come by much stuff. Some of the temples we visited later on (like the one in Banavasi) were much older. Other temples didn’t have that much sculpture around the outside walls (which is where this kind of stuff usually goes).

Nevertheless, this “discovery” early on in our trip made all our subsequent temple visits that much more interesting.

Schools and Officers’ Wives

I’m reading this fascinating interview in the Financial Times (possibly paywalled) with my former super^n-boss Lloyd Blankfein. It’s full of interesting nuggets, as well as fodder for people who want to criticise him.

I must admit right up front – I’m a big fan of Lloyd’s. This has nothing to do with the fact that I briefly worked for Goldman when he was CEO (I had even asked him a “planted question” when he had given a talk to the office sometime during my tenure there). In general, I think he says things as they are, and his twitter account is rather entertaining as well.

Anyway, the first statement in the interview that caught my attention was this statement about why the quality of schooling has gone down over the years. “He explains that the schools were only good because the women who staffed them were blocked from jobs in business and industry.” This is complementary to a view that I’ve strongly endorsed for a while.

Let me explain this using examples from India. Long long ago, maybe until the 1940s and 1950s, most school teachers in India were men. Way too few women had the kind of education that would qualify them to teach in schools. Moreover, back then, teaching paid sufficiently to run a (at least lower middle class) family on a single income.

In the 1950s and 1960s, women in India started going to college, and started entering the workforce. Mind that it was still a massively patriarchal society here back then, and women were expected to do their “household duties” in addition to bringing home a secondary income. And this meant that many of them were in the market for jobs that offered good work-life balance.

Teaching in schools offered that sweet spot – it required credentials, and the woman’s degrees would help in that. The hours weren’t too long. There would be ample vacations through the year. Schools were found everywhere, so the job was location-independent to a large extent. This last bit was important since the women’s husbands would frequently be employed in government jobs that were transferable, and the women’s “secondary careers” meant that they would be forced to move along.

And so we saw the rise of a class of teachers that I’ve come to call (not very politically correctly) as “officers’ wives”. These were well educated women, married to well educated men who held good jobs. They were passionate about their jobs, and went about it with a sense of purpose that went well beyond making money. This meant that the standard of teaching overall was raised.

And most importantly, this increased standard of teaching came without a corresponding increase in cost. The marginal utility to the family of this secondary source of income wasn’t particularly high, so this class of teachers didn’t demand very highly in terms of wages. In any case, they were doing their job out of passion rather than for the money, and would be willing to accept below-market wages to go about their jobs.

Then, two things happened. Firstly, the presence of employees who weren’t in it solely for the money pushed down average wages, and teachers for whom teaching was the sole source of family income started getting crowded out of the market. Secondly, with liberalisation in the 1990s, the nature of the job market itself suddenly changed.

One reason why the “officers’ wives” took to teaching was that it was hard to find other employment that was commensurate to their education that gave them the flexibility they desired (if you’re a secondary income earner you need that flexibility). With the market opening up, there was suddenly a number of options available to these people that matched their skill and flexibility needs. For example, my 11th standard physics teacher quit the school midway through the year to take up a job as a software tester at Wipro (this was in 1998-99).

So, rather suddenly, the opportunity cost of teaching shot up since the teachers suddenly many more options. It wasn’t possible for schools to jack up fees at the same time to be able to continue to afford the same teachers. And so, supply of quality teachers dropped. And consequently, the average quality of teachers (holding the schools constant) dropped as well.

Putting it in another way, schools nowadays need to compete with a much larger and much more diverse set of employers for their teachers. Many of them, for the sort of fees they charge, are simply unable to do so. The “passionate bunch” has found other avenues to exhibit their passion.

And the problem continues. And from what Lloyd says, it isn’t only India that is seeing this drop in quality of teaching – the US sees that as well. It was a sort of repressed larger market that had artificially pushed up the quality of school teachers, and the drop in repression has meant that the quality of teaching has dropped.

I will leave you with the concept of Baumol’s Cost Disease.

Book Recommendations for Children

On Saturday, the daughter and I went book-shopping to Blossom, and came back with a bunch of books that the wife described as “mostly useless”. I put it down to my lack of judgment on what is a good children’s book.

That is a serious issue – how do you really know what is a good children’s book? And what is a book that is appropriate for the child’s age? I tried the usual things like googling for “best books for three year olds”, but the intersection of those lists and what was there at Blossom wasn’t great.

For starters – we’ve got the basics . Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Julia Donaldson’s The Gruffalo. Judith Kerr’s The Tiger Who Came To Tea. A bunch of brilliant books the wife picked up at a bookstore in Oxford which were recommended by a kindly lady she bumped into at the store who has kids older than ours.

However, in the interest of getting the daughter to handle books more (she can’t read yet, just about learning the letters (or “sounds” as she calls them) ), we want to get more books. And it was with this noble intention that we ended up at Blossom (which is where I go to for my physical books) on Saturday.

I tried a couple of heuristics. One was to buy more books from authors you have read and liked. Julia Donaldson, for example, is rather prolific, as is Eric Carle. One book by each was part of the “useless bunch” that we got on Saturday.

The other heuristic I followed was to seat the child on a chair, and then pick out books one by one from the shelf and see which one she got more interested in. And then ask her if she wanted the book, and let her decide what she wants (we ended up with more “useless books” this way).

For my own physical book shopping nowadays, I rely on Goodreads. I got this idea from Whaatra Woreshtmax, whom I’d accompanied to Bookworm (down the road from Blossom) a few months back. He walked around the store with his Goodreads app open, scanning the barcodes in the app and checking for ratings. Anything with an average rating over 4.15 went into his basket (he reads prolifically so he can be more liberal with his choices).

I don’t scan barcodes, and I check on Goodreads only if I have an initial sense of whether the book is going to be of my liking. And since I understand my preferences may not match “the crowd”‘s, I have a lower cutoff – incidentally set at 3.96 which happens to be the current average rating of my book on Goodreads.

Now I don’t know if people rate children’s books on Goodreads the same way as they do adults’, and if I should rely on them. The number of factors that affect whether a book is good or not for children is much longer (I think) than for adults’ books.

So what heuristics do you follow to buy books for your children? Let the children decide? Go for known authors? Goodreads? Anything else?

Children’s birthday parties and alcohol

A long time ago, well before I had even planned to have children, I had decided that children’s birthday parties were decidedly boring affairs, especially for adults. Activities are all kid-centric. Food is kid centric (not often that you get chocolate cake at children’s birthday parties). Adults (at least those without kids) won’t be able to relate to most of the songs. It’s especially hard if you as an adult is incapable of getting silly.

One of my friends had once told me that his trick to dealing with kids’ birthday parties (he has lots of kids himself) is to carry along a hip flask, and get buzzed to the appropriate amount (remember you primary task, especially if you have kids of your own, is to chaperone). Since then, I’ve come to believe that alcohol is the best way for an adult to deal with a children’s birthday party.

However, so far I haven’t come across too many children’s birthday parties (maybe not even one) where alcohol is served. In a lot of cases the reason is regulatory – people like to do their children’s birthday parties outside of home, in a sort of party venue. And onerous liquor regulations in Bangalore mean that it is next to impossible to serve liquor there (unless the venue already has a liquor license).

And I must sheepishly raise my hand as a guilty party here, but I’ve found that so far house parties celebrating children’s birthdays also don’t serve liquor. And thinking about it, one big reason comes to mind.

As mentioned earlier, the role of most adults at children’s birthday parties is chaperoning. Which means that they need to be in a state that they can effectively take care of kids. And so some hosts might (maybe legitimately) feel paternalistic about not letting these guest chaperones take full care of the true guests (the other kids at the party).

Added to that is that in Bangalore at least, a part of the job of chaperoning involves driving the child to the party and back, and there alcohol can be a really legitimate barrier. And so that further reduces the demand for alcohol at the party, perhaps below a point where the host feels compelled to serve it.

Finally, there is the sexist reason – at a party I had chaperoned the daughter to yesterday, I was the only dad (among the section of the crowd I knew, at least). All the other kids had been accompanied by their mothers. Maybe the fact that most adults at most children’s birthday parties are women makes the hosts go full on paternalist and refuse to serve liquor?

WhatsApp Profiles and Wandering Spirits

As the more perceptive of you might know, the wife runs this matrimonial advisory business. As a way of developing her business, she also accepts profiles from people looking to get married, and matches them with her clients in case she thinks there is a match.

So her aunts, aunts of aunts, aunts’ friends, aunts’ nieces’s friends, and aunt’s friends’ friends’ friends keep sending her profiles of people looking to get married. The usual means of communication for all this is WhatsApp.

The trigger for this post was this one profile she received via WhatsApp. Quickly, her marriage broking instincts decreed that this girl is going to be a good match for one of her clients. And she instantly decided to set them up. The girl’s profile was quickly forwarded (via WhatsApp) to the client boy, who quickly approved of her. All that remained to set them up was the small matter of contacting the girl and seeking her approval.

And that’s proving to be easier said than done. For while it has been established that the girl’s profile is legitimate, she has been incredibly hard to track down. The first point of contact was the aunt who had forwarded her profile. She redirected to another uncle. That uncle got contacted, and after asking a zillion questions of who the prospective boy is, and how much he earns, and what sub-sub-caste he belongs to, he directed my wife to yet another uncle. “It’s his daughter only”, the first uncle said.

So the wife contacted this yet another uncle, who interrogated more throughly, and said that the girl is not his daughter but his niece. As things stand now, he is supposed to “get back” with the girl’s contact details.

As the wife was regaling me with her sob stories of this failed match last night, I couldn’t help but observe that these matrimonial profiles that “float around” on WhatsApp are similar to “pretas”, wandering spirits of the dead (according to Hindu tradition), who wander around and haunt people around them.

The received wisdom when it comes to people who are dead is that you need to give them a decent cremation and then do the required set of rituals so that the preta gets turned into a piNDa and only visits once a year in the form of a crow. In the absence of performance of such rituals, the preta remains a preta and will return to haunt you.

The problem with floating around profiles on WhatsApp, rather than decently using a matrimonial app (such as Tinder), is that there is no “expiry” or “decent cremation”. Even once the person in question has gotten taken, there is nothing preventing the network from pulling down the profile and marking it as taken. It takes significant effort to purge the profile from the network.

Sometimes it amazes me that people can be so nonchalant about privacy and float their profiles (a sort of combination of Facebook and Twitter profiles) on WhatsApp, where you don’t know where they’ll end up. And then there is this “expiry problem”.

WhatsApp is soon going to turn us all into pretas. PiNDa only!

Tautological Claims

Sometimes the media can’t easily reason on what led to something that they consider to be negative. In such cases they resort to tautologies. One version of this was seen in the late 2000s, during the Global Financial Crisis. The crisis “was caused by greed”, claimed many a story. “It is because of the greed of a handful of bankers that we have to suffer”, they said.

Fast forward ten to twelve years later, and the global financial crisis is behind us (though many economies aren’t yet doing as well as they were before that crisis). The big problem that a lot of people are facing is addiction – to their smartphones, to apps, to social media, and so on. Once again, media at large seems to have been unable to reason effectively on why this addiction is happening. And so once again, they are resulting in “tautologies”.

“Apps are engineered so that you engage more with them”, they say. If you ask the product manager in charge of the app, you will find out that his metric is to increase user engagement, and make sure people spend more time on the app. “Apps use psychological tools to make you spend more time on them”, the outlets write, as if that is a bad thing.

However, if you are an overstretched product manager hard-pressed to increase engagement, there is no surprise that you would use every possible method – logical and psychological, to do so. And if that means relying on psychological research that talks about how to increase addiction, so be it!

It is tautological that social media companies “want to increase engagement” or “want to increase the amount of time people spend on the platforms”, and that they will try to achieve these goals. So when media agencies talk about these goals as something to be scared about, it’s like they’re bullshitting – there’s absolutely no information that is being added in such headlines.

It is similar to how a decade and a bit ago the same media decided to blame a fundamental human tendency – greed – for the financial crisis.

Management Gurus

A few years back, one of the professors from my wife’s business school had come to London, and had given a talk to the alumni of the school. He was a professor of Operations Management (IIRC), and had given a talk about the Toyota Production System or some such.

At the time, my wife was working for Amazon and was completely unimpressed by the lecture. “This guy is 20 years behind”, she claimed, as she gave me a review of the lecture the same evening. The processes the professor had described were apparently extremely primitive compared to what Amazon was following at that time (I believe that).

So this got me thinking about management academia as a profession, and what value they add apart from teaching and preparing MBAs. I’ve sort of worked as one, though my position as Adjunct Professor at IIMB meant that I only taught and didn’t do any research. I did talk to some of the professors there during that time and tried to figure out what they were working on in terms of research.

Putting all this together with material I’ve gathered from Clayton Christensen’s obituaries, I think I’ve recognised a pattern that connects management research – it’s all about looking back at business over the last few years, deciphering patterns about them and then theorising about them.

In a sense it reminds me of second and third order levers. Scientific academic research is usually (though not always) cutting edge, with new science being created in the academic laboratories and then engineered in industries which then go on to commercialise this research.

Management research, on the other hand, is flipped. The true cutting edge in management happens at businesses, where the experimentation is relatively easier than experimenting with scientific stuff. Once some experimentation has happened at the business level and successes and failures have been observed, the academics get into action.

They look at the experiments that the industries did, meticulously collect data that documents the success or failure of these experiments (along with the external factors that might have affected the success or lack of it), and then theorise about the costs and benefits of these experiments, and the situations where they work (or not).

Sometimes the academics supplement their data gathering of the experiments and situations with experiments of their own, and some interviews, and then apply their deep academic and theoretical knowledge on top of it to create theories about them. And once the academic theoretical peer review process has taken place, the idea can get better traction in parts of the industry that have not already figured it out.

The competitive advantage that management academics have is that they sit an arm’s length away from the industries that they study, and they are able to gather data from large numbers of companies in order to build their theories. They may not be the originators of the ideas but their value addition in terms of synthesising ideas generated elsewhere is significant.

The Base Rate in Hitting on People

Last week I met a single friend at a bar. He remarked that had I been late, or not turned up at all, he would have seriously considered chatting up a couple of women at the table next to ours.

This friend has spent considerable time in several cities. The conversation moved to how conducive these cities are for chatting up people, and what occasions are appropriate for chatting up. In Delhi, for example, he mentioned that you never try and chat up a strange woman – you are likely to be greeted with a swap.

In Bombay, he said, it depends on where you chat up. What caught my attention was when he mentioned that in hipster cafes, the ones that offer quinoa bowls and vegan smoothies, it is rather normal to chat up strangers, whether you are doing so with a romantic intent or not. One factor he mentioned was the price of real estate in Bombay which means most of these places have large “communal tables” that encourage conversation.

The other thing we spoke about how the sort of food and drink such places serve create a sort of “brotherhood” (ok not appropriate analogy when talking about chatting up women), and that automatically “qualifies” you as not being a creep, and your chatting up being taken up seriously.

This got me thinking about the concept of “base rates” or “priors”. I spent the prime years of my youth in IIT Madras, which is by most accounts a great college, but where for some inexplicable reason, not too many women apply to get in. That results in a rather lopsided ratio that you would more associate with a dating app in India rather than a co-educational college.

In marketing you have the concept of a “qualified lead”. When you randomly call a customer to pitch your product there is the high chance that she will hang up on you. So you need to “prime” the customer to expect your call and respond positively. Building your brand helps. Also, doing something that gauges the customer’s interest before the call, and calling only once the interest is established, helps.

What you are playing on here in marketing is is the “base rate” or the “prior” that the customer has in her head. By building your brand, you automatically place yourself in a better place in the customer’s mind, so she is more likely to respond positively. If, before the call, the customer expects to have a better experience with you, that increases the likelihood of a positive outcome from the call.

And this applies to chatting up women as well. The lopsided ratio at IIT Madras, where I spent the prime of my youth, meant that you started with a rather low base rate (the analogy with dating apps in India is appropriate). Consequently, chatting up women meant that you had to give an early signal that you were not a creep, or that you were a nice guy (the lopsided ratio also turns most guys there into misogynists, and not particularly nice. This is a rather vicious cycle). Of course, you could build your brand with grades or other things, but it wasn’t easy.

Coming from that prior, it took me a while to adjust to situations with better base rates, and made me hesitant for a long time, and for whatever reason I assumed I was a “low base rate” guy (I’m really glad, in hindsight, that my wife “approached” me (on Orkut) and said the first few words. Of course, once we’d chatted for a while, I moved swiftly to put her in my “basket”).

Essentially, when we lack information, we stereotype someone with the best information we have about them. When the best information we have about them is not much, we start with a rather low prior, and it is upon them to impress us soon enough to upgrade them. And upgrading yourself in someone’s eyes is not an easy business. And so you should rather start from a position where the base rate is high enough.

And this “upgrade” is not necessarily linear – you can also use this to brand yourself in the axes that you want to be upgraded. Hipster cafes provide a good base rate that you like the sort of food served there. Sitting in a hipster cafe with a MacBook might enhance your branding (increasingly, sitting in a cafe with a Windows laptop that is not a Surface might mark you out as an overly corporate type). Political events might help iff you are the overly political type (my wife has clients who specify the desired political leadings of potential spouses). Caste groups on Orkut or Facebook might help if that is the sort of thing you like. The axes are endless.

All that matters is that whatever improved base rate you seek to achieve by doing something, the signal you send out needs to be credible. Else you can get downgraded very quickly once you’ve got the target’s attention.

Afcon in winter

As well as Liverpool is doing this season, there are already clouds on how good next season could be. The reason is the moving of the African Cup of Nations (AFCON) to January-February, which means Liverpool will be without three key players (Mo Salah, Sadio Mane and Naby Keita) for over six weeks of the season.

When asked about it at a press conference last week, manager Jurgen Klopp went off on a massive rant (paywalled) about scheduling, and FIFA and UEFA and everything.

The other thing is it doesn’t help African players. We will not sell Sadio, Mo or Naby now because they have a tournament in January and February — of course not — but if you have to make a decision about bringing in a player it is a massive one because before the season you know for four weeks you don’t have them. That’s a normal process and as a club you have to think about these things. It doesn’t help the players, for sure.

This is a very valid second-order impact of having the African Cup of Nations in the middle of the European season. As the timing of the AFCON gets regularised in winter, European clubs will be loathe to hire Africans into their leagues. And that is bad news for African footballers.

While elite players such as Salah or Mane might never be in the need for a job, the problem with the unavailability mid-season is that clubs will start accounting for that while making decisions on recruitment.

The marginal African player playing in the second or third division in a major European footballing country will find it marginally more difficult to get a next good contract. The marginal African player at the top of his country’s league will find it marginally more difficult to get recruited to a (nowadays coveted) European club.

And as African players play less for European clubs (this will happen in due course), there will be fewer African role models. Because of which fewer African kids will want to take up football. Because of which the overall level of football in African countries will go down.

This is the problem with dependence on external factors, like African football does with European football. That the best African footballers want to play in Europe means that the wishes of Europe will automatically have an impact on football in Africa. This means that Africa cannot schedule its continental tournament at the time of the year that is most convenient to it without impacting its own players.

This is a rather common problem. A quick analogy I can think of is the impossible trinity of macroeconomics – an independent monetary policy, free capital flows and a fixed exchange rate. The moment you peg your currency to another, what happens in the other currency automatically starts affecting you.

So what should African Football do? Clearly, climatic conditions mean that for most of Africa it’s optimal to host the tournament in (the northern hemisphere) winter. Clearly, there is no point of hosting such a tournament if the best African footballers don’t take part. But doing so will marginally jeopardise the marginal African footballer. And that is not good for African football.

There are no easy answers to this puzzle.