Creative Cycles

When you’re doing creative work, your work broadly falls into two phases – the “invention phase” and the “implementation phase”. Both imply what they mean.

There are times when you are tinkering around and experimenting to find something fundamentally new that is cool. And then, once you have made the breakthrough in finding something cool, you need to make it useful. And this can take considerable amount of work, and its own creativity.

So if you are one person doing a “creative job”, your work will alternate in these cycles – where you create and you implement. The cycles are unlikely to be periodic. Some creative solutions are so creative that implementation is a breeze. In most cases, the inspiration is only 1% of the problem – the devil in the details for which you need to perspire.

When you are part of a creative team, this cycle thing can play out in different ways. Some teams form a caste system, where one set of people work purely on the invention phase, while the other works on the implementation phase. This is especially useful when solving highly complex problems, in which case the skills required for the invention and implementation phases are different.

The big cost of having separate teams like his is the cost of communication (AGES back, when GPUs were just becoming a thing, I was part of a committee that was exploring the use of GPUs in our work. One of the findings there was that GPUs can do the work incredibly fast, but the data transfer from GPUs to CPUs was slow, and could be a bottleneck. I assume that problem is solved now). People sometimes grossly underestimate the effort involved in communicating your solution to someone else. Even if you manage to communicate, there can be significant handholding that might be required to get the other team to take forward your invention.

And so this investment in communication cost is worth it if and only if the work is complex enough. Think of large industrial projects – such as the manufacture of the iPhone, for example – they are complex enough that you need several specialist teams to perform the entire creative process. And in the larger scheme of the complexity, the cost of communication across teams is small.

On the other hand, this usage of multiple teams to perform a creative process can be massive overkill for simpler work – there the cost of communication can far overpower the gains in efficiency through specialisation.

Anyway, I’m getting distracted here.

Coming back, the alternative is to have the same people or sub-teams perform the invention and implementation stages of the creative process. Here, I’ve seen things play out in multiple ways.

Some teams are uncorrelated – this means that different members or sub-teams are in different phases of the work. As a consequence, this kind of a team constantly provides creative output. When some of the people are deep in implementation, others are inventing. And the other way round. This means that the team is constantly both coming up with new ideas and delivering stuff.

Other teams can be more correlated – either everyone is working on the same thing, or the whole team moves in sync (invention at some points in time, implementation at others). Here the issue is that there can go long periods of time without the team really producing anything – in the common invention phase, no shit is getting done. In the common implementation phase, there are no new ideas.

This can lead to stagnation in the team, and frustration outside. And so not ideal.

The other related concept is in terms of management. Some managers of creative teams are better off at managing the invention phase. Others are better off at managing the implementation phase. Given that the creative process involves both, for the team to be effective, we need managers who can manage both as well.

And this is easier said than done in a single person, and so you need a management team. And what you find is that you have a “complementary number two” (no pun intended). If you as the team leader is better off at invention, you get a number two who is better at implementation. And the two (or more) of you together manage the process.

I’ve spoken about this before – this can sometimes lead to suboptimal succession. Let’s say the inventive head leaves. The organisation promotes the implementation number two. Now, it is contingent upon this new number one to get a (inventive) number two asap. If that doesn’t happen, invention can cease. The team will carry on for a while implementing the already invented stuff, and then grind to a halt.

Similarly if an implementation head leaves, the inventive number two gets promoted. And unless a new implementation number two is hired, you’ll see lots of proofs of concept and little actual implementation. Again suboptimal.

Channel Coding Theorem in Real Life

One of my favourite concepts in Computer Science is Shannon’s Channel Coding Theorem. This theorem is basically about the efficiency of communication over a noisy channel. And as I was thinking a few minutes back, this has interesting implications in real life as well, well away from the theory of communication.

I don’t have that much understanding of the rigorous explanation of the theorem. However, I absolutely love the central idea of it – that the noisier a channel is, the more the redundancy you need in your communication, and thus the slower is your communication. A corollary of this is that every channel has a “natural maximum speed”, and as long as you try to communicate within that speed, you can communicate reliably.

I won’t go into the technical details here – that involves assuming that the channel loses (or garbles) X% of bits, and then constructing a redundant code that shows that even with this loss, you can communicate effectively.

Anyway, let’s leave behind the theory communication and go on to real life.

I’ve found that I communicate badly when I’m not sure what language to talk in. If I’m talking in English with someone who I know knows good English, I communicate rather well (like my writing šŸ˜› ) . However, if I’m not sure about the quality of language of the other person, I hesitate. I try to force myself to find simpler / more obvious words, and that disturbs my flow of thought, and I stammer.

Similarly, when I’m not sure whether to talk in Kannada or English (the two languages I’m very comfortable in), I stammer heavily. Again, because I’m not sure if the words I would naturally use will be understood by the other person (the counterparty’s comprehension being the “noise in the channel” here), I slow down, get jittery, and speak badly.

Then of course, there is the very literal interpretation of the channel coding theorem – when your internet connection (or call quality in general) is bad, you end up having to speak slower. When I was hunting for a job in 2020, I remember doing badly in a few interviews because of the quality (or lack thereof) of the internet connection (this was before I had discovered that Google Meet performs badly on Safari).

Similarly, sometime last month, I had thought I had prepared well for what I thought was going to be a key conversation at work. The internet was bad, we couldn’t hear each other and Ā kept repeating (redundancy is how you overcome the noise in the channel), and that diminished throughput massively. Given the added difficulty in communication, I didn’t bring up the key points I had prepared for. It was a damp squib.

Related to this is when you aren’t sure if the person you are speaking to can hear clearly. This disability again clouds the communication channel, meaning you need to build in redundancy, and thus a reduction in throughput.

When you are uncertain of yourself, or underconfident, you end up tending to do badly. That is because when you are uncertain, you aren’t sure if the other person will fully understand what you are going to say. Consequently, you end up talking slower, building redundancy in your speech, etc. You are more doubtful of what you are going to say, and don’t take risks, since your lack of confidence has clouded the “communication channel”, thus depressing your throughput.

Again a lot of this might apply to me alone – I function best when I’m talking / writing at a certain minimum throughput, and operating at anywhere below that makes me jittery and underconfident and a bad communicator. It is no surprise that my writing really took off once I got a computer of my own.

That was in the beginning of July 2004, and within a month, I had started (the predecessor of) this blog. I’ve been blogging for 19 years now.

That aside aside, the channel coding Ā theorem works in non-verbal contexts as well. Back in 2016, before my daughter was born, I remember reading somewhere that tentative mothers lead to cranky babies. The theory was that if the mum was anxious or afraid while handling her baby, the baby wouldn’t perceive the signals of touch sufficiently, and being devoid of communication, become cranky.

We had seen a few examples of this among relatives and friends (and this possibly applies to me as well – my mother had told me that I was the first newborn she ever handled, and so she was a bit tentative in handling me). This again can be explained using the Channel Coding Theorem.

When the mother’s touch is tentative, it is as if the touchy channel between mother and child has some “noise”. The tentativeness of the touch means the baby is not really sure of what the mother is “saying”. With touch, unlike language or bits, redundancy is harder. And so the child goes up insufficiently connected to its mother.

Conversely, later on in life, these tentative mothers tend to bring in redundancy in their communications with their (now jittery) children, and end up holding them too hard, and not letting them go (and some of these children go to therapists, who inevitably blame it on the mothers šŸ˜› ). Ultimately, all of this stems from the noise in the initial communication channel (thanks to the tentativeness of the source).

Ok I’ve rambled on here, so will stop now. However, now that I’ve seeded this thought in you, you too will start seeing the channel coding theorem everywhere (oh – if you think this post is badly written, then that is again like reading this over a noisy channel. And you will get irritated with the lack of throughput and pack).

Strategic Wallis Simpsoning

While University Challenge lasted all of two seasons in India, it gave rise to some memorable memes. For example, our episode against Hindu College (2003-4) gave birth to the term “chimpanzee question”, which has since been shortened to “chimp”. Enjoy the etymology here:

Two rounds later, we got thulped by KREC (featuring Mukka, Ganja, Peeleraja and Rajat). I’m unable to find the video of that, but I clearly remember this question from later on in the quiz, at a time when we were well behind.

Shamanth (pictured above in the featured image of the YouTube video) buzzed and gave a long answer about the woman whom Edward VIII married. It didn’t matter – Quizmaster Basu wanted the name. The question passed to the opposition, and Mukka immediately buzzed and said “Wallis Simpson”.

Unlike Chimp, this didn’t catch on, but briefly at IIT, we used “wallis simpson” as a generic term in a quiz where you give most of the answer, but not the full answer, which means the team next in line can then “cash” on your descriptions and take the points.

I guess the term was too long (“chimp” became a thing because “chimpanzee question” got shortened to “chimp”). Also, unless you are interested in British monarchs, Wallis Simpson is “floyd” (a fairly vague funda). That said, it’s appeared enough times in quizzes to be called a “peter” (from “repeater”).

Anyway, here is a picture taken of the IIMB team after we had won Nihilanth in 2005. Shot by Pota, we later decided that in this photo we look like a band. And that the band would be called “Peter Floyd and the Chimpanzees”.

Bottom left in this picture is Mukka, who answered “Wallis Simpson” in UC in 2003.

Speaking of Wallis Simpson, the nomenclature just didn’t catch on, but the concept has always existed in quizzing. I got reminded of it last week, and thought it can be rather “strategic”.

Since the pandemic, the world has been flush with online quizzing league. I had steadfastly refused to take part in them, forever maintaining that for me “quizzing was a social activity”. Recently, though, I happened to go for a few quizzes with Kodhi (top right in this pic, with his fist to his chin), and he convinced me that I should give it a shot. FOMO having been lit, I signed up for a league called “B612” (that the league is seemingly named after my birthday further encouraged me to sign up).

The league is two weeks in. I won my first round fairly easily (and it left me so stimulated that I couldn’t sleep half that night), and then had a really bad day in the second round last week.

Maybe it was because the quiz happened at 6pm, just after I had returned from work. Maybe because the Swiss League pitted me against stronger opposition, given I had won the first one. Maybe I hadn’t relaxed enough before the quiz started. I was in really poor form, missing some absolute sitters.

Halfway through the quiz, it was clear I wouldn’t win. However, second place was still gettable (I was then third). That’s when I got a direct question where I “knew the funda but not the answer”. If I got it wrong, the question would pass to the person then in fourth place, and then to the person then in second (the quiz follows a format called “Mimir“, which is like the US sports draft system – people who’ve attempted less on the pass get precedence).

While I was in bad form, I realised that I could “strategically Wallis Simpson”. It was my turn to answer, so I could give out all I knew about the answer, even though I didn’t know the answer itself. That would maximise the chances of the person then in fourth place to answer, which would mean the question wouldn’t pass to the person then in second (thus denying him an opportunity to pull further ahead of me).

If the question were to, after me, pass to the person then in second place, I would have simply passed – there was no way I would have done him favours. However, in this particular question, the person in fourth stood a chance of preventing the person in second from answering – and so I had to give him (#4) all the help he needed.

And so I said something like “I know it’s the Toronto basketball team that won NBA recently but I’ve forgotten its name. So I’ll say Toronto Maple Leafs“. As it happened, neither the person in fourth nor the person in second could build upon my clue. The leader, who ultimately won the quiz easily, answered Raptors – though I don’t know if my clue helped him.

As it also happened, by the time the quiz ended, the person in second pulled away from me, and the person in fourth caught up with me – we ended up joint third. That wasn’t a possibility I had been playing for when I decided to “strategically Wallis Simpson” him! There is no reward without risk.

Resorts

The first time I stayed in a resort was during my honeymoon in 2010, when we stayed at the Vivanta in Bentota (Sri Lanka). The travel agent (yes, we still paid them good margins on those days) had convinced us to stay two nights there. Friends had told it is “romantic”. Our room got upgraded to a suite.

And then we got bored. Our boredom occurred on several fronts. Firstly, there was nothing much to do there. Both of us being good south indian middle class kids, our idea of a “holiday” had then been the package tour with a tightly packed schedule. Suddenly, two days at a single hotel was incredibly boring.

Then, we got bored of the food. Back then I was vegetarian, which meant we could realistically only go to one of the three or four restaurants in the resort. By the time we finished a day there, we were completely bored of the food.

Then there was nothing much to do. The swimming pool was crowded, having been monopolised by a large and noisy tour group. The beach was okay, nothing compared to that at Trincomalee on Sri Lanka’s east coast (which we visited in 2014; oh, and by the way, my wife has started a new newsletter with her Ā travel experiences. The first episode is called “paid sex in Sri Lanka”).

Over the years, we have kept going back to resorts, and seldom enjoyed them.

I mean, spending one night at a resort, like we did during our recent travel to Tamil Nadu, is good. You are in the vicinity for something else, and it gives you a nice place to relax and recharge, and before you get bored of the place, you are out of there.

Any longer than that at a resort, unless there is something compelling to do, is a disaster. You get bored. The food starts becoming monotonous. You start doing things just to fill your day – and that thing is usually NOT reading the book you took on vacation. You might drink excessively. And so on.

Then there is the size of the resort. If it is too small, it can easily get monopolised by one large (ish) group, making it unpleasant for everyone else there (this has happened countless times now). If it is too large, it can get a bit impersonal (though one time we stayed at a really large resort, in Maldives, we loved it).

The other issue with resorts is that you are forced to follow their schedules. As a family, for example, we have our dinners around 6pm, which is normal for some parts of the world but rather early for India. Most resorts force us to wait till 8pm (or even 9pm) for our dinner, thus upsetting our schedules and sleep.

Another annoying thing I find about resorts is their desire to “add value”. From a resort’s point of view, they want guests to stay for longer, and that means offering them more things to do (unless there is something “natural to do”, such as a good beach, near the resort). And so the resorts pack themselves with all kinds of “activities”.

On Saturday, for example, at a resort near Kumbakonam, they had arranged for a classical dance performance. The number of times they reminded us about that was not funny. And some of the other “things to do” sounded like things you would write in a Social Studies exam to make your answer longer – “feed the fish in this pond”, “light a lamp, make a wish and float it in that pond”, and so on.

All this said, I was happy to be in that resort for that night (apart from the late dinner, which affected my sleep). Some people are of the opinion that on some kinds of holidays, the quality of the hotel doesn’t matter since “you only need a place to sleep”. As far as I’m concerned, though, I don’t mind paying the premium for a nice place so that the sleep is (sort of) guaranteed, and we are able to properly relax.

I thought I was done with this post, and then realised I’ve written about resorts once before.

The Krishna principle

However much you try to protect yourself the enemy will find a way to get to you

Iā€™ve written here a fair bit about the gods. Itā€™s largely been about Ganesha and hanuman, though and there is very little about Krishna that Iā€™ve written here. However an incident at todayā€™s dinner suggested there is an important life lesson to be learnt from Krishna as well.

I was wearing my white T-shirt. Rather, I was wearing one of my two plain white Zara T-shirts. Iā€™ve abused them both a fair bit ever since I got them. Itā€™s inevitable that when i wear them I end up soiling them by spilling some food stuff. So far itā€™s not been too expensive – each time the shirts come out of the washing machine fully clean. I donā€™t know how long this will last.

We were having dinner at our hotel in chettinad – the generally excellent CGH earth Visalam. It was a sit down banana leaf dinner, but there were napkins provided with knives and forks (no clue what purpose the latter served!).

Iā€™ve had a complicated relationship with napkins. In nursery school I remember they would make us tuck napkins into our shirts while eating. I hated that (also a reflection of the quality of napkins we got in 1986-88). and so I started considering napkins as a downmarket thing.

And then over the course of life I found that putting the napkin on your lap was more elegant – shirts werenā€™t protected now but it was far less awkward. Growing up I figured the napkin could be used to signal to the waiter when you were away from the table – on the chair means youā€™re going to be back, and on the table meaning you were done. Etc.

Anyways so today at dinner I remembered that Iā€™d dirtied this shirt for the last 2-3 times I had wonā€™t it. And so I decided to protect it by wearing the napkin in the way it was taught to us in kindergarten – tucked into the front of the collar.

For readers more familiar with Greek myth than with hindu myth. Krishna has an ā€œAchilles-likeā€ story. It goes that his mother dipped him into a pool of liquids with immortal powers. However since his mother held him by his heels they didnā€™t touch the water and so remained mortal. Finally he died by a hunters stray arrow that hit his heal.

And this is the principle Iā€™m talking about – Krishnaā€™s mother wanted to make him immortal (especially given the looming Kamsa thread). But the part with which she held the baby remained mortal. And that caused his downfall.

So the Krishna principle says – however much you try to protect yourself (or a loved one) there will always be a vulnerability, that the enemy will exploit.

And so today I was happily enjoying my dinner, with my napkin tucked into my front collar, seemingly safe in the knowledge that my shirt was safe.

Then they served crab. As I tried to break one of its claws, it squirted some weird liquid. Which splashed right into the sleeve of my shirt!ā€™! and so it went.

Hopefully this shirt will survive this wash as well. Tomorrow Iā€™m going to be wearing its partner – the ā€œmid weightā€ Zara T-shirt. Iā€™m hoping Iā€™ll be able to protect that one from culinary damage!

At the cost of one shirt stain, Iā€™m happy Iā€™ve managed to get an interesting concept.

Status and money

Over the last week or so, I’ve been discussing this post by Robin Hanson with just about anyone. The first paragraph is the one that caught my attention.

Having a romantic partner is useful in many ways. You wonā€™t be as lonely, you can ask them for advice, you can do activities together, and you can share transport and even a household with them. But if you look carefully, you will notice that many people donā€™t choose such partners mainly for their promise in such roles. They instead seek high status partners, who make them look good by association. Partners who are hot, funny, rich, powerful, etc.

Nevertheless, I urge you to read the whole thing. Hanson goes on to talk about status in several other fields, such as politics or in organisations.

Broadly paraphrasing (you should still read the whole thing), he says that people want to be associated with people with high status, or people who add status to them. So politicians who can project higher status will get elected. Organisations will appoint people who can further increase the status of the organisation.

I was thinking about this today from the point of view of last night’s post, where I had compared my life in my (current) full time job to that of a consultant, which I had been for nine years prior.

Sometimes it is common for us to comment, or gossip, that someone Ā got hired purely on the strength of their reputation, and that their abilities are not extraordinary. Sometimes, reputations can be self-fulfilling – if you can somehow get the reputation of being good at something, more people will start with the Bayesian prior that you’re good at that, and as long as you don’t suck at that thing, the prior will continue to hold. And so more people will think you’re good at it, and so on.

So when I think of my own career, basically I realise the way to go is to get into a position that my sheer presence adds status to the organisation I’m associated with. That way, they will be more forgiving of the work that I do (or don’t do). At the same time, from my own perspective, the organisation also needs to (at least marginally) add to my status – at some level I may not want to join a club that wants me as a member.

I remember back in the day when I was consulting – one of my clients, during the negotiations prior to the engagement, had wanted me to put on LinkedIn that I was working for them. Now when I think of it from the point of view of Hanson’s post, this was the client leveraging my then reputation in data to further their own status.

This is what I need to bring to my employers as well (I have no clue if I do already with my current ones – though I’m not so popular within my (data science) domain in india). The target, if I were to think of it, is to get into that self-fulfilling space when it comes to status – that people want me just because I’m me and bring along a certain (positive) status.

Now that I’ve identified the target, I need to figure out how to get there. I know in his famous podcast, Naval said that we should optimise for wealth (a positive sum game) rather than for status (a zero sum game). But Hanson’s post, and my analysis of it, suggests that status can also lead to wealth. I need to figure out the tradeoff now!

Coasean notes

I’m well over two and a half years into my current job, easily making this my longest unbroken spell of employment ever. This is a random set of pertinent observations, more a set of notes to myself rather than for any reader, regarding how the job has been playing out.

  • The Nature of The Firm is real. For nine years, as a consultant, I enjoyed market pricing (adjusting for illiquidity and and other distortions) for all the work that I did, but also suffered from the transaction costs that Coase writes about in his famous paper.

    This meant that unless the work was reasonably well defined, or of a certain minimum size, I wouldn’t take it up – the transaction costs involved in doing the deal would far outweigh any benefits that my counterparty and I would achieve from the deal. This meant I added less value than I could have to my clients

  • “Going deep” has its benefits. If I look at some of the work that I’ve done in the last few months here, and compared that to my work in my first year here, there is an absolutely marked difference. The difference is the two years of compounded extreme domain knowledge (about the company and its business).

    From that perspective, consulting can sometimes suffer from a limitation of domain knowledge

  • Countering the above point is that I’ve “been internalised” after two plus years here. The things that excited me at the time I joined don’t excite me any more. There are times when I get what I think are interesting insights, and then just don’t bother about showing them to anyone, based on the historical reaction to such insights.

    A fresh consultant, on the other hand, would share more, and would thus get more done

  • The biggest advantage of being “in house” is the data – I have access to pretty much ALL data in the company, and if I don’t have access to something, there is a good chance that the data doesn’t exist. This means I’m able to craft better hypotheses and do better analysis, compared to the time when I relied on clients to share specific datasets with me (pretty much nobody opened up full live access to their database to me)
  • In a way I also miss the novelty of being a consultant – because you work with a company for a short period of time, you are bringing in new ideas and insights in that period of time, and people pay you attention for it. As an in-house employee, you become a part of the furniture. And a lot of the time, it is a good thing if nobody notices you
  • Lack of friction in terms of taking up work means average quality of work can suffer. If you are very particular about the kind of work you want to do, it’s good if you can be a consultant – the friction means it’s easier to say no there.
  • As a consultant, by definition, I was a “hybrid worker”, working by myself for long periods of time and then visiting the client for meetings and discussions. That had worked out brilliantly well for me.

    However, I realise “that hybrid” is different from “this hybrid” (the job), since here people have access to my calendar and are able to schedule meetings even at times when I’m not in office. Rather, since my company has a multiple-headquarter setup, I even prefer to take meetings with colleagues not in Bangalore on days when I’m at home.

  • The biggest difference between monogamy (one employer) and polyamory (two or more “clients”) is that in the latter, no one owns your time. Because they know that they are “one of several” (even if at some point in time they are “one of one” it doesn’t matter, since that’s a special case), they can’t take your time for granted. And that gives you immensely more control over your time.

    This was possibly the hardest part for me getting back to a full time job – the lack of control over my time since I had now sold ALL of it to one company.

  • The flip side of this is that, at least for someone like me, not having to keep selling myself constantly is a brilliant feeling. Though, there is some amount of “within the company selling” that has to happen from time to time.
  • Apart from control over my time, the thing I miss the most about my consulting life are the “semi work meetings” – these are meetings with prospective clients, people who can lead you to prospective clients, old clients, etc. Where there is a tinge of work to the meeting, but you also catch up on several other things.

    Now that I’m in a job, and one that is entirely internal facing, there is no concept of “pseudo work meetings”. It is either proper work meetings (or “water cooler conversations”) with colleagues, or proper socialisation with others. That means I’m meeting far fewer people on average, nowadays

  • I admit that having become a sort of a “company man“, I’ve started taking myself more seriously than I would like to. Of late I’ve started making a conscious effort to dial this back a little bit, and I think it’s already making me happier.
  • Oh, and game theory rocks. Not a day goes by without me thinking about “saama daana bhEda danDa

I can go on and on and on, but I think this is enough for now. If I have more, I’ll write another post.

Bad Data Analysis

This is a post tangentially related to work, so I must point out that all views here are my own, and not views of my employer or anyone else I’m associated with

The good thing about data analysis is that it’s inherently easy to do. The bad thing about data analysis is also that it’s inherently easy to do – with increasing data democratisation in companies, it is easier than ever than pulling some data related to your hypothesis, building a few pivot tables and charts on Excel and then presenting your results.

Why is this a bad thing, you may ask – the reason is that it is rather easy to do bad data analysis. I’m never tired of telling people who ask me “what does the data say?”, “what do you want it to say? I can make it say that”. This is not a rhetorical statement. As the old saying goes, you can “take data down into the basement and torture it until it confesses to your hypothesis”.

So, for example, when I hire analysts, I don’t check as much for the ability to pull and analyse data (those can be taught) as I do for theirĀ logical thinking skills. When they do a piece of data analysis, are they able to say that it makes sense or not? Can they identify that some correlations data shows are spurious? Are they taking ratios along the correct axis (eg. “2% of Indians are below the poverty line”, versus “20% of the world’s poor is in India”)? Are they controlling for instrumental variables?

This is the real skill in analytics – are you able to draw logical and sensible conclusions from what the data says? It is no coincidence that half my team at my current job has been formally trained in economics.

One of the externalities of being a head of analytics is that you come across a lot of bad data analysis – you are yourself responsible for some of it, your team is responsible for some more and given the ease of analysing data, there is a lot from everyone else as well.

And it becomes part of your job to comment on this analysis, to draw sense from it, and to say if it makes sense or not. In most cases, the analysis itself will be immaculate – well written queries and logic / code. The problem, almost all the time, is in the logic used.

I was reading this post by Nabeel Qureshi on puzzles. There, he quotes a book on chess puzzles, and talks about the differences between how experts approach a problem compared to novices.

The lesson I found the most striking is this: thereā€™s a direct correlation between how skilled you are as a chess player, and how much time you spend falsifying your ideas. The authors find that grandmasters spend longer falsifying their idea for a move than they do coming up with the move in the first place, whereas amateur players tend to identify a solution and then play it shortly after without trying their hardest to falsify it first. (Often amateurs, find reasons for playing the move — ā€˜hope chessā€™.)

Call this the ā€˜falsification ratioā€™: the ratio of time you spend trying to falsify your idea to the time you took coming up with it in the first place. For grandmasters, this is 4:1 ā€” theyā€™ll spend 1 minute finding the right move, and another 4 minutes trying to falsify it, whereas for amateurs this is something like 0.5:1 ā€” 1 minute finding the move, 30 seconds making a cursory effort to falsify it.

It is the same in data analysis. If I think about the amount of time I spend in analysing data, a very very large percentage of it (can’t put a number since I don’t track my time) goes in “falsifying it”. “Does this correlation make sense?”; “Have I taken care of all the confounding variables?”; “Does the result hold if I take a different sample or cut of data?”. “Has the data I’m using been collected properly?”; “Are there any biases in the data that might be affecting the result?”; And so on.

It is not an easy job. One small adjustment here or there, and the entire recommendations might flip. Despite being rigorous with the whole process, you can leave in some inaccuracy. And sometimes what your data shows may not conform to the counterparty (who has much better domain knowledge)’s biases – and so you have a much harder job selling it.

And once again – when someone says “we have used data, so we have been rigorous about the process”, it is more likely that they are more wrong.

Dislike of the like button

When you read histories or profiles of Facebook (the “original” product), there are two inflexion points that are likely to get mentioned. One is the news feed, where updates from all your friends are shown in “random” order on your wall (along with a bunch of ads). The other is the “like” button.

The like button was transformative in that it allowed people to express their acknowledgement of a post without really having to write a word. It was the lazy person’s best friend. One bit to show that they have “put attendance” or “shown support” or just acknowledged that they had been there.

More importantly, from Facebook’s perspective, this gave them tremendous data (at low cost to the users) in terms of what people wanted to see more or less of on their newsfeeds. Their algorithms quickly started working on this, and people’s feeds got tuned. Engagement went up. Ad sales went up. Everything was good.

And then the like button started appearing everywhere. I remember Twitter changing one button – from something else to “like”. LinkedIn introduced it, too. Soon, there were several versions of the like button representing different kinds of emotions. I don’t even understand what most of these buttons mean.

It was only a matter of time that this button would make its way to WhatsApp. It’s been there for a few years now but I haven’t really taken to using it. And now I’m thinking it’s actually a problem.

The problem with the like button (or any other such emojis) on WhatsApp is that it is a conversation stopper. Literally. It is basically a message that cannot be replied to, or acknowledged (you can’t like a like). So once one of the parties puts the emoji, there is nothing more to be done, but to move on.

Long ago, conversations would go like this:

“Hey man, happy birthday”.
“Thanks a lot. how are you doing? how’s the job / wife / kid? ”
Conversation continues….

Or

“Hey, check out this link”
Either no response, or “Thanks, I’ll check it out”, or (best case) “Very very interesting. This is my take on this. And see this other article”

Now all this is history. You say Happy Birthday, and people react right there with some emoji. You send them a link. They react with a thumbs up sign on the same message. There is nothing else to do. There is no conversation.

I’ve started regarding the like emoji on WhatsApp as rude (the only exception is the laughing emoji, to react to jokes, and that is ONLY to be used in groups). If someone reacts with an emoji (especially the thumbs up, or folded hands), I take that as “ok fine, I don’t want to talk to you” sign.

Maybe I’m becoming old.

 

Notes from a wedding reception

One of the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic was to reduce the size of weddings. For a brief period of two or three years, the so-called “big fat indian wedding” got significantly slimmer.

It had started with the lockdowns and some insane government-imposed regulations on the size of weddings. I remember attending even some close relatives’ weddings over Zoom during 2020 and 2021.

And then there was the bandwagon. Because during that time people had been used to not being invited for weddings of people they knew (a few years back my wife’s French flatmate had been shocked to know that we had invited my wife’s aunt’s friends to our wedding. And this was before we told him that we’d also invited the priest of the temple across the road, and the guy who ran a chaat stall down the road), some people continued to have small weddings.

As a consequence, it had been a good four years since we had attended a “random” wedding – the wedding of someone we didn’t know too well. And as we were getting ready to go to my wife’s school friend’s brother’s wedding reception, she remarked that “somehow these receptions of people you don’t know too well are more fun than those of close friends or relatives”. Having gone to the wedding and come back, I attest that statement.

A few pertinent observations, in no particular order:

  • The “density of a queue” is a function of the level of trust in society. In a high-trust society, where you expect everyone to follow the queue, people can have personal space in the queue. In a low trust society, when you are concerned about someone overtaking you in the queue, you stand close to the person in front of you. By recursion, this leads to a rather dense queue.
  • Unfortunately, by the time of my own wedding in 2010, I hadn’t figured out why lines at wedding receptions were so long (apart from the fact that we had invited the priest across the road and the guy who supplied coffee powder to my father-in-law). And then later found that the culprit was the “panning shot” – a video taken by the videographer where he pans across the set of people posing with the couple for the photo.

    It is 2023, the panning shot still causes hold-ups. Now, I expect generative AI to solve this problem for good. All you need are a bunch of still photographers at a few strategic angles, and then the AI can fill in the panning shot, thus saving the time of everyone at the reception.

  • For a while I had stood alone in the queue, as my wife and daughter had gone somewhere with my wife’s close friend (whose brother was getting married today). I had a bouquet in hand, and the density of the queue meant that I had to be conscious of it getting squished. And the uncle in front of me in the line kept walking backwards randomly. Soon I decided to let the thorns on the roses in the bouquet do the work
  • Of late we’ve had so many bad experiences with food at functions (and remember that we’ve largely gone to close relatives’ and friends’ events, so we haven’t been able to crib loudly as well) that we recently took a policy decision to have our meals at home and then go to the events. As Murphy’s Law would dictate, the food today looked rather good (and my wife, who had the chaat there as an after-dinner snack, confirmed it was)
  • At my own reception in 2010, I remember my (then new) wife and I feeling happy when large groups came to greet us – that meant the queue would dissolve that much quicker. From today’s experience I’m not sure that’s the case. The advantage is one panning shot for the entire group. The disadvantage is the amount of time it takes to get the group organised into a coherent formation for the photo
  • Reception queues, if anything, have become slower thanks to people’s impatience to wait for the official pictures. Inevitably in every largish group, there is someone who hands their phone to the official photographers asking for a photo using that. In some seemingly low-trust groups, multiple people hand over their phones to the official photographer asking for the picture to be taken with THAT
  • Wedding receptions are good places for peoplewatching, especially when you are in the queue.

    And not knowing too many people at the wedding means there are more new people to watch

  • One downside of not knowing too many people at the wedding means you are doubtful if the groom or bride recognise you (especially if you are the invitee of one of their close relatives). You will be hoping the parent or sibling who invited you is around to do the intro. I’ve had a few awkward moments

OK that is one wedding reception I’ve attended in almost four years, and I’ve written a lot. I’ll stop.