Category: blogging

Election Metrics goes international

For those of you who are not particularly aware of it, for the last year and a half I’ve been writing this column called Election Metrics for Mint. It’s basically a quantitative take on elections, and in my estimate I should’ve written over 50 pieces for them so far.

The last two pieces, however, have been different in the sense that I have now moved beyond covering Indian elections to look at elections abroad. In my last but one post, published last month,  i took a look at potential cheating in Afghan elections. (Now I remember linking to that piece from here).

Now, in the latest piece that was published today I look at the forthcoming Scottish referendum, and a recent poll by YouGov in which 47% of respondents said they wanted to vote in favour of independence. I use some binomial jugglery that shows that this translates to a 2.5% chance of a Yes vote, which while insignificant, is an order of magnitude higher than the 0.0004% chance of “Yes” that can be implied from an earlier poll.

I then use the “possible, plausible and probable” framework made famous by Bill Gurley and Aswath Damodaran in their “exchange” in July to show why this poll is significant (it shows that a “Yes” vote is “plausible”, while earlier it was possible but definitely not plausible).

The Afghan elections were rigged

That’s what I conclude in a piece I’ve written for Mint which got published today.

I analyze the last digit of the vote tally of different contestants in different provinces, and find an unusually large number of numbers that end in zero – the odds of this happening at random are at most 2.25%, I conclude.

You might be aware that I’ve been doing this series on elections for Mint for over a year now. Since the Indian elections are over, and steam is yet to pick up for state elections in Maharashtra, Haryana and Jharkhand I’m dabbling a bit in analysis of international elections. If there’s something potentially interesting that you want me to analyze, do drop a note here.

Slowing down

Back in 2003, when I was in my third year at IIT,  I thought that “life was going too fast”. That too many things were happening all the time and I had no time for anything. I decided to respond to that by purposely slowing down my life. I gave away my bicycle (which was the primary means of transport at IIT) and started walking. This meant I had to leave ten minutes earlier for class each morning, but given I would wake up early this wasn’t an issue. What this ensured was that I had time to think, to introspect, and to do things at my own pace rather than let other things drive my life.

In January this year I went off Twitter. Twitter was being too much of a time sink, and was taking too much mindspace so i decided to get off. the abstention lasted a month. I sought to make a ‘limited comeback’ in February so that I could plug my pieces in Mint, among other things. However, that soon turned into a full-scale comeback and in the last month or two I’ve been looking at twitter while trying to put myself to sleep, and again as soon as I wake up.

So I’ve decided once again to slow things down. I’m off twitter and facebook. I hope this one will last longer than my last attempt. The reason this time is a combination of the time sink that these networks were proving to be and the overall negativity that was being transmitted through these networks – facebook has stopped being a place where people share photos and quirky messages – it’s all outrage and flame wars there. Twitter has always been that way. I realized these were affecting me negatively to a significant extent, and so I’m off.

So far there have been no withdrawal symptoms, but I’m formulating a policy for that. If there’s something I want to say, there are two ways I’m going to say it in – I’ll either expand and elaborate and write a blog post ( you are likely to see more action on this blog and on my other two blogs in the next few months), or I’ll decide which specific person I want to tell what I wanted to tell, and tell that person! Broadcast is simply a waste of time.

My policy as of yesterday afternoon:

  • No twitter
  • No facebook
  • More email
  • More google hangouts
  • More whatsapp
  • More phone calls
  • More reading books
  • More writing blogs

And hopefully I can even resume on that book of which I’ve only written the preface.

I returned last night from a walk, and instinctively reached for my phone to check twitter and facebook. And then realized those two apps have been uninstalled. I wanted to switch on my PC and just “generally be online”. But then realized that most of my “generally being online” was to be online on twitter and facebook. With those two out, there was no use of “being online”.

And then I saw my kindle, and spent the next four hours continuing a book I’d left midway a month back. I woke up this morning and switched on the computer, and have been “generally online” but reading emails and writing blogs. I like this already, and hope this can sustain.

Last week someone told me that I’m a “natural blogger”. The meaning of this term wasn’t clear to me until he said “I assume you can write a blog post in like 45 minutes?” 45 minutes is the upper end of the time i take to write a blog post. I normally do one in 20. Maybe it’s a sign and I should get back to doing more of this.

PS: This also means that the only way I can talk to you, the reader, is through the comments section of this blog. I promise to be more responsive here and engage in a conversation.

New Comment Policy

For about three or four years now the quality and quantity of comments on this blog has dropped. Earlier, there used to be some rather insightful discussions here in the comment section. Nowadays, people don’t seem to leave too many comments here. And I’m also a guilty party – for one I don’t promptly reply to comments on my blogposts, and I don’t usually leave comments on others’ blogs – preferring to add my two naya paise over twitter instead.

Also, of late I’ve been getting a lot of anonymous and sometimes abusive comments. So far I had tolerated them but henceforth will be marking all such comments as spam. Essentially I’ll be following a simple rule – if you leave a comment without leaving your name the comment will not be seen here for way too long. That will also be the case in case I feel that the comments are not adding to the discussion.

The best thing you can do while leaving a comment is to login – openid has been enabled and you can use the login of your own blog to leave the comment here. Next best thing is to leave your valid email id. If your comment follows neither of the above two conditions it will not be approved.

Thanks.

Long mails

As you might have noticed from my blog posts over the years, I like writing long essays. By long, I mean blog post long. Somewhere of the length of 800-1000 words. I can’t write longer than that, because of which my attempts to write a book have come to nought.

Now, thanks to regular blogging for over nine years, I think I’ve become better at writing rather than speaking when I have to explain a complicated concept. Writing allows me to structure my thoughts better, whereas while speaking I sometimes tend to think ahead of what I’m talking, and end up making a mess of it (I had a major stammer when I was in school, by the way).

Given that I like explaining concepts in writing rather than in speech, I write long mails even when it comes to work. Writing long emails is like writing blog posts – you have the time and space to structure your thought well and present it to your readers. This especially helps if the thoughts you are to communicate are complex.

The problem, however, is that most people are not used to reading long emails in a work contexts. People prefer to do meetings instead. Or they just call you up. For whatever reason, the art of long emails has never really taken off in the corporate sphere, Maybe people just want to talk too much.

This, of course, has never deterred me from using my favourite means of communication. It didn’t stop me when I was an employee and the people I wrote to were colleagues. It still doesn’t stop me now, when I’m a consultant, writing to people who are paying me for a piece of work. If they are paying me, I should communicate things to them in a form they are most comfortable with, you might argue. If they are paying me, I should communicate things as well as I can, I argue back, and my best means of communication is writing long emails.

The problem with long emails, however, is that, like long-form articles you send to a Pocket or an Instapaper, you tend to bookmark these long mails for later, intending to read and digest them when you have the time. So, when you send a long email, you are unlikely to get a quick response (note that you can sometimes use it to your advantage). This means that when you write long mails, you might have to follow it up with an SMS or a phone call to the effect of “read and digest and let me know if you have any questions”.

In my last organization, I worked with a number of technical people, some of whom had PhDs. It was interesting to contrast the way they communicated with my long emails. They too would put complex thoughts in writing, except that they would use Latex and make a PDF out of it. It would be littered with equations and greek symbols, in a way that is extremely intuitive for an academic to read.

And here I was, eschewing all that Greek, preferring to write in plain text in the body of emails. No wonder some of my colleagues started terming my emails “blogposts”.

Literature Survey Articles

Of late I’ve come across a number of articles which I describe as “literature survey articles”. The distinguishing feature of these articles is that the author draws upon the wisdom of respected predecessors (“stand on the shoulders of giants”, to put it figuratively). The article is filled with quotes from people who are either famous or respected in the topic that the article pertains to. The contribution of the author of the piece is limited to putting together the quotes from various sources and binding them together with a coherent narrative.

I don’t like such articles. While it is important from time to time that certain old ideas that currently make sense be revitalized, I find articles such as these difficult to read and hard to truly appreciate. Speaking about the former part, when you quote verbatim from several sources in the same article, the article ends up having a number of voices. The reader is not allowed to settle into “listening one voice”, and this can make the article rather incoherent (this is especially true of articles with lots of short quotes).

My more important beef with such articles is that the fact that someone famous or respected said something doesn’t make it right. Everybody makes mistakes, and it is unlikely to find famous speakers or scholars who did not say anything wrong in their lives. So unless it is accompanied by rational reasoning, saying “this famous person said that, so that must be true” has no point. Also, using quotes as arguments doesn’t accommodate for the fact that the opinions of famous or scholarly people often change, and the fact that the quote may have been something they contradicted later on in their lives (not that there is a problem with it. When the facts change, as John Maynard Keynes once said, one ought to change their opinions). Then there is the issue of cherry picking – if some scholar has said a bunch of contradictory things about a particular issue, you can get away with picking only those statements that are in consonance with your opinion.

There is one type of literature survey article that I don’t mind, though – when you declare upfront (either in the title of the article or towards the beginning) that the article is about channeling a particular person or persons’ view of a particular issue. When this is made explicit, the reader knows that you are only channeling someone else’s argument, and you are not presenting their arguments as “proof” for your own argument. It is like famous people’s twitter bios, which say “RTs are not endorsements”.

Lest I be mistaken, I must also mention here that I have nothing against quoting (you might notice that I’ve paraphrased Keynes earlier in this article). You may quote liberally, as long as you don’t exclusively rely on those quotes for your arguments. Just make sure you don’t significantly disturb the flow of the piece, that is all.

Bloggers writing books

There have been times in the past when I would have read a book and then concluded that “it’s a blog post expanded into a book”. One book that I clearly remember that followed this model was Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point”. An idea that can be easily explained in 3000 words instead taking 30000, so that it can then qualify to be a “book”, the economics of whose publications are much different from that of a “long form article”. I remember thinking this even more about this book called “Why Popcorn Costs So Much At The Movies“. It was all about price discrimination, a concept that could have been explained well in a blog length article (500-1000 words). Even a long-form article would have been too much for it.

The topic of this post, however, is not about books that should have been blogposts. It is about bloggers writing books. For dinner on Saturday I met two friends who also happen to be renowned twitter trolls. Somewhere between the soups and the pizzas the conversation moved to books being written by bloggers (and there are many of those). And the three of us came to the unanimous decision that bloggers are lousy at writing books (I haven’t read any of the books they were talking about, but could attest to it since I’ve been trying to write a couple of books for a couple of years now and getting nowhere).

The fundamental point is that the art of holding someone’s attention over 1000 words (the normal length of a blog post) is very different from holding someone’s attention over 50000 words (the length of a typical book). So if you’ve been a blogger for a few years now, through sheer practice you would be great at using 1000 words to put across your ideas. However, when you want to write something longer, you either get discontinuous (with lots of mini-chapters of 1000 words each) or you end up saying the same thing over and over again.

So yes, as you might have figured out from my Project Thirty/Thirty One filings, I’m writing a book. And no, it’s not about Studs and Fighters (thanks to your valuable feedback I’ve given up on that concept). I’ve been  trying to write lots of small chapters. Somehow, I’m not able to go beyond 1000 words per chapter (2000 is the intention). There is a bigger problem. I begin to take myself too seriously when I think I’m writing a book. I stop writing in the informal conversational style I normally use on my blog. And it becomes excruciating, both to write and to read (I’ve tried reading some of my own “serious” pieces and given up).

Maybe all this tells me something. That having been writing this blog (and its predecessor on LiveJournal) for 9 years now, and having got many an accolade for it, I should simply stick to writing blog posts. Maybe it’s time to accept that when it comes to writing books mEre sE nahIn hOga

Me, all over the interwebs this week

Firstly, on Tuesday, I got interviewed by this magazine called Information Week. Rather, I had gotten interviewed by them a long time back but the interview appeared on Tuesday. I spoke about the challenges of election forecasting in India and the quality of surveys.

Again on Tuesday, and again on Wednesday, I wrote a pair of articles for Mint analyzing constituencies and parties. On Tuesday, I analyzed constituencies whose representatives have always belonged to ruling parties in the last 4 elections. There are 34 such constituencies. Then on Wednesday I wrote about the influence of states in the Lok Sabha, analyzing the proportion of MPs from each major state that was part of the ruling coalition.

If I had forgotten to mention earlier, I have a deal with Mint that lasts till next October where each month I’m supposed to write 3 articles on election data. You can find all my articles so far here.

Then, today, Pragati published my review of the book Why Nations Fail by Acemoglu and Robinson. More than a book on economics or institutions, it is an awesome history book. Get it.

And in the midst of all this, right here, I wrote a “worky” post about the pros and cons of having a dedicated analytics team.

And if you didn’t notice, this website now has “new clothes”. It was a rather long-pending change and the most important feature of the new layout is that it is “responsive”, and thus looks much better on smartphones. I’ve heard a couple of issues with it already, and do let me know if you have any more issues. And for the first time last night I opened this blog on an iPad and I find that it looks fantabulous, thanks to the OnSwipe plugin I use.

The success and failure of Coupling, this blog and the Benjarong Conference

One of the few sitcoms that has remotely managed to hold my attention is Coupling, the series on BBC. I don’t think it runs “live” any more, and even when it did, the quality of the episodes fell off sharply in season three, and even more sharply in season four. Episodes of those two seasons simply cannot compare to the episodes of the earlier seasons. In possibly related news, a number of blog readers and commentators mentioned to me that they saw a sharp fall in quality in posts on this blog sometime in late 2009. None of them have told me that the blog has made any “comeback” of sorts. And given this theory, it is unlikely to.

Back in March 2009, there was a meeting of six great minds at Benjarong Restaurant on Ulsoor Road, which has come to be known as the Benjarong Conference. The main topic of discussion that evening was about chick-hunting, and more so in the controlled environment of South Indian Brahmin arranged marriages. The conference was a grand success in terms of the quality of discussion, and left lasting impressions on the minds of the participants. Kodhi, who is going to be arranged married later this year, mentions that over two years on, it was the proceedings of this conference that helped him make his decision.

The main attraction of Coupling, for me, was the theories that the character Jeff used to propound. Starting in Episode One of Season One, where he comes up with the concept of “Unflushable” as his best friend Steve repeatedly tries to dump his girlfriend Jane, and fails. And in subsequent episodes, when the three male leads (Steve, Patrick and Jeff) meet at the bar, Jeff always has a theory to explain why things happen the way they happen. Masterful theories, at a similar intellectual level that was exhibited at the Benjarong Conference. Jeff has a theory for everything, except that he is unable to implement his own theories and get hooked up. And what happens in Season Three? He gets hooked up (to his boss, as it happens)! And starts falling off the social radar, and even when he is there at the bar, he is incapable of coming up with theories like he used to. And in Season Four, he disappears from the show altogether, thus robbing it of its main attraction.

Four of the six participants at the Benjarong conference were single, with three of those having never been in a relationship. The two that were married were married less than a month, and one of them had met his wife not too long before. The conference drew its strength from this “singularity”. Single people, especially those that have never been in a relationship, have a unique knack of being able to dispassionately talk about relationships. The problem once you get committed, as readers of this blog might have noticed, is that there is now one person that you can’t disrespect when you talk or write. So every time you concoct a theory, you have to pass it through a filter, about whether your WAG will find it distasteful (most singletons’ theories on relationships have a distasteful component, as a rule). Soon, this muddles your thinking on these theories so much that you stop coming up with them altogether.

One of the pillars of strength of this blog between 2006 and 2009 was the dispassionate treatment of relationships. Then, in late 2009, fortunately for myself and unfortunately for my readers, I met Priyanka, with whom I have subsequently established a long term gene-propagating (no we haven’t started propagating, yet) relationship. And on came the “distaste filter”. And off went the quality of my posts on relationships. A large section of the readership of this blog knew me as a gossip-monger, and they would now be sorely disappointed to not find such juicy material on this blog any more. The only good relationship posts subsequent to that, you might notice, would have been on the back of some little domestic fights, which would have led to temporary suspension of the distaste filter.

Sometimes, though not in public forums, I do get my old distasteful sense back. Not so recently, I was counselling my little sister-in-law about relationship issues. After thoroughly examining her case history and then situation (examining case history and diagnosis is her domain. She’s studying to be a doc), I recommended to her that the solution for her then relationship woes was to get herself a Petromax. While it did help that my wife and her parents weren’t around then, the tough part was to convince her that it was a serious well-researched piece of advice. Maybe I should have packaged it less distastefully. And maybe it is time to accept that the distaste filter in my case is on permanently, and I’ll never be able to spout theories like I used to. And my dear blog reader, it is time you accept that, too, and stop holding this blog against its pre-2010 standards.