Category: books

Discoverability and chaos

Last weekend (4-5 Feb) I visited Blossom Book House on Church Street (the “second branch” (above Cafe Matteo), to be precise). I bought a total of six books that day, of which four I was explicitly looking for (including two of Tufte’s books). So only two books were “discovered” in the hour or so I spent there.

This weekend (11-12 Feb) I walked a little further down Church Street (both times I had parked on Brigade Road), and with wife and daughter in tow, to Bookworm. The main reason for going to Bookworm this weekend is that daughter, based on a limited data points she has about both shops, declared that “Bookworm has a much better collection of Geronimo Stilton books, so I want to go there”.

This time there were no books I had intended to buy, but I still came back with half a dozen books for myself – all “discovered”. Daughter got a half dozen of Geronimos. I might have spent more time there and got more books for myself, except that the daughter had finished her binge in 10 minutes and was now desperate to go home and read; and the wife got bored after some 10-20 minutes of browsing and finding one book. “This place is too chaotic”, she said.

To be fair, I’ve been to Blossom many many more times than I’ve been to Bookworm (visits to the latter are still in single digits for me). Having been there so many times, the Blossom layout is incredibly familiar to me. I know  that I start with the section right in front of the billing counter that has the bestsellers. Then straight down to the publisher-wise shelves. And so on and so forth.

My pattern of browsing at Blossom has got so ritualised that I know that there are specific sections of the store where I can discover new books (being a big user of a Kindle, I don’t really fancy very old books now). And so if I discover something there, great, else my browsing very quickly comes to a halt.

At Bookworm, though, I haven’t yet figured out the patterns in terms of how they place their books. Yes, I agree with my wife that it is “more random”, but in terms of discoverability, this increased randomness is a feature for me, not a bug! Not knowing what books to expect where, I’m frequently pleasantly surprised. And that leads to more purchases.

That said, the chaos means that if I go to the bookstore with a list of things to buy, the likelihood of finding them will be very very low (that said, both shops have incredibly helpful shopkeepers who will find you any book that you want and which is in stock at the store).

Now I’m thinking about this in the context of e-commerce. If randomness is what drives discoverability, maybe one bug of e-commerce is that it is too organised. You search for something specific, and you get that. You search for something vague, and the cost of going through all the results to find something you like is very high.

As for my books, my first task is to finish most of the books I got these weekends. And I’ll continue to play it random, and patronise both these shops.

Concepts from The Obesity Code

Based on the recommendation of a friend who had once described his waistline as “changing more often than Britney Spears’s (?) bra size”, I read Jasun Fung’s The Obesity Code over the last couple of days. The book is stellar.

Here are my highlights from the book.

Anyway, fitness and nutrition is something I’ve been struggling with for a very long time in life now. I used to believe that I have my health numbers (primarily triglycerides) under control because of regular lifting of heavy weights, but a recent blood test called that assumption to question. Having got what I now think is bad advice about what to eat and what not to eat, getting better advice on food is something I’ve been fairly receptive to. And the book does a great job of it.

The basic idea is – your body weight is controlled by hormones. How much you eat and how much you exercise doesn’t really matter. Calorie counting just doesn’t work. Your body has a “natural weight”, and if you are above that the body will try to adjust it lower, and vice versa. And this “natural weight” is guided by the hormones, especially insulin. The higher the level of insulin in your blood, the more your “natural weight” will be.

So the idea is to keep the level of insulin in your blood low. The author builds up a stellar case with some rigorous presentation of research. There is NO RELATIONSHIP between the fat that you eat and risk of heart attacks. A high carb low fat diet will make you fat.

And what I liked about the book is the structuring – the first 220 pages is all about presenting the research on various topics, and not really “giving away” what you should or should not eat. And then in the last 20 pages, he puts it all together, with a broad plan on what is good to eat and what is not.

In any case, I’m not going to reproduce the book here. You can go read it (it’s very very well written), or just read my highlights. The reason I started writing this post is to document my learnings from the book. I think I’d already internalised a lot of it, but some of it is new. This is how I plan to change my diet going forward:

  • Sometimes in recent times I’ve noticed this “heady feeling” upon eating certain foods. I used to think it’s due to eating too much sweet. Now, after reading, I think it’s the feeling of an insulin spike in my head. I’m not going to have any fruit juices. Fruits need to be eaten whole
  • I’ve largely eschewed added sugars for a while now (sometimes on and off). This will continue.
  • Artificial sweeteners also cause a spike in insulin. I didn’t know this. So no more coke zero. No more Muscle Blaze Whey Energy powder as well (I now need to find a whey powder that doesn’t contain any sweet or any sweetener). No energy bars. No “no added sugar” biscuits.
  • This is maybe the most important concept in the book – NO SNACKING. Eat exactly two or three times a day (I used to eat two a day, but nowadays I go to the gym in the mornings, so breakfast is necessary). Eat as much as you want at each meal, but don’t eat in between meals. The body needs lots of periods of time when insulin levels go low – so it doesn’t adjust to a higher natural level of insulin, which means a higher natural weight.
  • Dairy products have a high “insulin index” (produce lots of insulin once eaten), but also have high satiety – they keep you full for a very long time after eating. After my last cholesterol test, after a fight with the wife, I largely gave up on cheeses. I’m reversing that now. I love cheese, and it’s good for me. Calorie counting just doesn’t work (the book does a great job of explaining this).
  • Not doing keto. It’s unsustainable. And I love my fruits too much. Oh, and I need to eat my fruits along with my meals. Not as “snacks”
  • Processed carbohydrates are not good. So no more bread for me. I need to figure out if fried eggs + milk will be enough for breakfast. Or find a decent substitute.
  • I also need to figure out how good or bad basmati rice is. Definitely makes me feel better than sona masuri (which we used to eat before). Need to figure out if this feeling is justified.
  • Peanuts are good. Peanut butter is good. Other nuts are good as well. But need to eat them for breakfast. Not as a snack.

The hardest part for me, with this new regimen I plan to start, is “no snack”. I’d gotten so used to snacking that I think I eat far less than necessary during my main meals. And that results in a vicious cycle. I’ve attempted to start breaking out of that by supplementing my chapati-paneer curry with some curd rice tonight.

So far I’ve been feeling great. Let’s see how this goes.

Re-gifting for rebel girls

On the occasion of her birthday a couple of months back, the daughter received a copy of “Goodnight stories for rebel girls“. As you might have guessed, this was not the first time she had received this book – we had bought it for her earlier this year.

Interestingly, barely a week or two before, some friends who were visiting had gifted her “goodnight stories for rebel girls – 2“, saying that they were pretty confident that she will have this first book already.

In any case, once you have a second copy of a book, the honourable thing to do is to gift it to someone. So the copy of goodnight stories (1) that was received for the daughter’s birthday immediately went into our “regifting cupboard”. It continues to sit there.

The question is who to regift it to. It is a fair hypothesis that most girls will already have the book. So regifting it to another girl will only send it on an endless orbit of regifting. The logical corollary is that we need to regift it to a boy.

Here is where it gets a bit complicated. We’re pretty sure that any boy being brought up by a “feminist mother” (or “feminist parents”) will already have a copy of the book. And if we were to gift the book to a boy whose parents aren’t feminist, we’ll only end up pissing off the boy’s parents.

Who said giving a gift is easy?

Known stories and trading time

One of the most fascinating concepts I’ve ever come across is that of “trading time”. I first came across it in Benoit Mandelbrot’s The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets, which is possibly the only non-textbook and non-children’s book that I’ve read at least four times.

The concept of “trading time” is simple – if you look at activity on a market, it is not distributed evenly over time. There are times when nothing happens, and then there are times when “everything happens”. For example, 2020 has been an incredibly eventful year when it comes to world events. Not every year is eventful like this.

A year or so after I first read this book, I took a job where I had to look at intra-day trading in American equities markets. And I saw “trading time” happening in person – the volume of trade in the market was massive in the first and last hour, and the middle part of the day, unless there was some event happening, was rather quiet.

Trading time applies in a lot of other contexts as well. In some movies, a lot of action happens in certain times of the movie where nothing happens in other times. When I work, I end up doing a lot of work in some small windows, and nothing most of the time. Children have “growth spurts”, both physical and mental.

I was thinking about this topic when I was reading SL Bhyrappa’s Parva. Unfortunately I find it time-consuming to read more than a newspaper headline or signboard of Kannada, so I read it in translation.

However, the book is so good that I have resolved to read the original (how much ever time it takes) before the end of this year.

It is a sort of retelling of the Mahabharata, but it doesn’t tell the whole story in a linear manner. The book is structured largely around a set of monologues, largely set around journeys. So there is Bhima going into the forest to seek out his son Ghatotkacha to help him in the great war. Around the same time, Arjuna goes to Dwaraka. Just before the war begins, Bhishma goes out in search of Vyasa. Each of these journeys associated with extra long flashbacks, and philosophical musings.

In other words, what Bhyrappa does is to seek out tiny stories within the great epic, and then drill down massively into those stories. Some of these journey-monologues run into nearly a hundred pages (in translation). The rest of the story is largely glossed over or given only a passing mention to.

Bhyrappa basically gives “trading time treatment” to the Mahabharata. It helps that the overall story is rather well known, so readers can be expected to easily fill in any gaps. While the epic itself is great, there are parts where “a lot happens”, and parts where “nothing happens”. What is interesting about Parva is that Bhyrappa picks out unintuitive parts to explore in massive depth, and he simply glosses over the parts which most other retellings give a lot of footage to.

And this is what makes the story rather fascinating.

I can now think of retellings of books, or remakes of movies, where the story remains the same, but “trading time is inverted”. Activities that were originally given a lot of footage get glossed over, but those that were originally ignored get explored in depth.

 

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?

Big Data and Fast Frugal Trees

In his excellent podcast episode with EconTalk’s Russ Roberts, psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer introduces the concept of “fast and frugal trees“. When someone needs to make decisions quickly, Gigerenzer says, they don’t take into account a large number of factors, but instead rely on a small set of thumb rules.

The podcast itself is based on Gigerenzer’s 2009 book Gut Feelings. Based on how awesome the podcast was, I read the book, but found that it didn’t offer too much more than what the podcast itself had to offer.

Coming back to fast and frugal trees..

In recent times, ever since “big data” became a “thing” in the early 2010s, it is popular for companies to tout the complexity of their decision algorithms, and machine learning systems. An easy way for companies to display this complexity is to talk about the number of variables they take into account while making a decision.

For example, you can have “fin-tech” lenders who claim to use “thousands of data points” on their prospective customers’ histories to determine whether to give out a loan. A similar number of data points is used to evaluate resumes and determine if a candidate should be called for an interview.

With cheap data storage and compute power, it has become rather fashionable to “use all the data available” and build complex machine learning models (which aren’t that complex to build) for decisions that were earlier made by humans. The problem with this is that this can sometimes result in over-fitting (system learning something that it shouldn’t be learning) which can lead to disastrous predictive power.

In his podcast, Gigerenzer talks about fast and frugal trees, and says that humans in general don’t use too many data points to make their decisions. Instead, for each decision, they build a quick “fast and frugal tree” and make their decision based on their gut feelings about a small number of data points. What data points to use is determined primarily based on their experience (not cow-like experience), and can vary by person and situation.

The advantage of fast and frugal trees is that the model is simple, and so has little scope for overfitting. Moreover, as the name describes, the decision process is rather “fast”, and you don’t have to collect all possible data points before you make a decision. The problem with productionising the fast and frugal tree, however, is that each user’s decision making process is different, and about how we can learn that decision making process to make the most optimal decisions at a personalised level.

How you can learn someone’s decision-making process (when you’ve assumed it’s a fast and frugal tree) is not trivial, but if you can figure it out, then you can build significantly superior recommender systems.

If you’re Netflix, for example, you might figure that someone makes their movie choices based only on age of movie and its IMDB score. So their screen is customised to show just these two parameters. Someone else might be making their decisions based on who the lead actors are, and they need to be shown that information along with the recommendations.

Another book I read recently was Todd Rose’s The End of Average. The book makes the powerful point that nobody really is average, especially when you’re looking a large number of dimensions, so designing for average means you’re designing for nobody.

I imagine that is one reason why a lot of recommender systems (Netflix or Amazon or Tinder) fail is that they model for the average, building one massive machine learning system, rather than learning each person’s fast and frugal tree.

The latter isn’t easy, but if it can be done, it can result in a significantly superior user experience!

Alchemy

Over the last 4-5 days I kinda immersed myself in finishing Rory Sutherland’s excellent book Alchemy.

It all started with a podcast, with Sutherland being the guest on Russ Roberts’ EconTalk last week. I’d barely listened to half the podcast when I knew that I wanted more of Sutherland, and so immediately bought the book on Kindle. The same evening, I finished my previous book and started reading this.

Sometimes I get a bit concerned that I’m agreeing with an author too much. What made this book “interesting” is that Sutherland is an ad-man and a marketer, and keeps talking down on data and economics, and plays up intuition and “feeling”. In other words, at least as far as professional career and leanings go, he is possibly as far from me as it gets. Yet, I found myself silently nodding in agreement as I went through the book.

If I have to summarise the book in one line I would say, “most decisions are made intuitively or based on feeling. Data and logic are mainly used to rationalise decisions rather than making them”.

And if you think about it, it’s mostly true. For example, you don’t use physics to calculate how much to press down on your car accelerator while driving – you do it essentially by trial and error and using your intuition to gauge the feedback. Similarly, a ball player doesn’t need to know any kinematics or projectile motion to know how to throw or hit or catch a ball.

The other thing that Sutherland repeatedly alludes to is that we tend to try and optimise things that are easy to measure or optimise. Financials are a good example of that. This decade, with the “big data revolution” being followed by the rise of “data science”, the amount of data available to make decisions has been endless, meaning that more and more decisions are being made using data.

The trouble, of course, is availability bias, or what I call as the “keys-under-lamppost bias”. We tend to optimise and make decisions on things that are easily measurable (this set of course is now much larger than it was a decade ago), and now that we know we are making use of more objective stuff, we have irrational confidence in our decisions.

Sutherland talks about barbell strategies, ergodicity, why big data leads to bullshit, why it is important to look for solutions beyond the scope of the immediate domain and the Dunning-Kruger effect. He makes statements such as “I would rather run a business with no mathematicians than with second-rate mathematicians“, which exactly mirrors my opinion of the “data science industry”.

There is absolutely no doubt why I liked the book.

Thinking again, while I said that professionally Sutherland seems as far from me as possible, it’s possibly not so true. While I do use a fair bit of data and economic analysis as part of my consulting work, I find that I make most of my decisions finally on intuition. Data is there to guide me, but the decision-making is always an intuitive process.

In late 2017, when I briefly worked in an ill-fated job in “data science”, I’d made a document about the benefits of combining data analysis with human insight. And if I think about my work, my least favourite work is where I’ve done work with data to help clients make “logical decision” (as Sutherland puts it).

The work I’ve enjoyed the most has been where I’ve used the data and presented it in ways in which my clients and I have noticed patterns, rationalised them and then taken a (intuitive) leap of faith into what the right course of action may be.

And this also means that over time I’ve been moving away from work that involves building models (the output is too “precise” to interest me), and take on more “strategic” stuff where there is a fair amount of intuition riding on top of the data.

Back to the book, I’m so impressed with it that in case I was still living in London, I would have pestered Sutherland to meet me, and then tried to convince him to let me work for him. Even if at the top level it seems like his work and mine are diametrically opposite..

I leave you with my highlights and notes from the book, and this tweet.

Here’s my book, in case you are interested.

 

Serials and movies

Yesterday I finished reading Gita Krishnankutty’s English translation of MT Vasudevan Nair’s Randamoozham. It’s the story of the Mahabharata told from Bhima’s perspective.

This wasn’t the first time that I was reading a translation of this magnificent book. A few years ago, journalist Prem Panicker had created a series on his blog where he would put up translations of bits of this book daily. I remember quite liking that, and a lot of people raving about it.

Prem’s version of the book was far longer than the version that I finished yesterday (Gita Krishnankutty’s version is 380 pages long, which comes to around 70000 words or less. Prem’s is 120,000 words long). It was also far more passionate. Rather than directly translating the novel, Prem took liberties in adding his own inputs.

It’s been over a decade since I read Prem’s version, but from what I remember, the parts of the story where Bhima mourns Ghatotkacha’s death, for example, are far more well sketched out in that version. It is similar with the parts which show Bhima’s frustration with Yudhishthira’s leadership.

Thinking about it, though, one reason why Prem was able to go into such detail was that he presented his book in a serialised format. Every day he would put out the translation of a few pages’ worth of a book, and the translation would come out to be the length of a long form article (the kind of articles that Prem became a specialist in writing during his time at Rediff).

When you’re reading it in book form, in which you read the whole thing together, reading in such detail may not work so well since that might make the book unnecessarily thick, and people might put NED midway. Give the inputs in small doses, however, and people will be happy to consume the greater detail. In that sense, Prem’s and Gita Krishnankutty’s translations are both excellent, and both very well suited for the formats they came out in.

It is a similar story with movies and serials. Movies have a 2-2.5 hour length because that’s how much typically people can consume at a time without putting NED. Serials, on the other hand, because they are consumed bit by bit at a time, can go much longer in aggregate (sometimes unnecessarily long).

Netflix releasing all episodes of a series at the same time, however, is changing this dynamic. Sacred Games apart, I’ve been unable to get through any Netflix fiction series because of their sheer length. Because binge-watching has become a thing (thanks to Netflix putting out an entire season at once), the entire season comes to resemble a movie. So a season with 8 one-hour episodes effectively becomes a 8-hour movie. And unless it’s extremely well made, or has sufficient stuff going on through the 8 hours, it becomes incredibly hard to sit through!

 

Dreamers and Dignity

If I’d picked up Snigdha Poonam’s Dreamers before I had read Chris Arnade’s Dignity, I might have liked it better. As it happened, having read Dignity, I found Dreamers to be unnecessarily judgmental and prescriptive, and was unable to read it beyond the first two chapters. It is now there on my goodreads page, as a book that I “finished” and gave one star.

Dignity is a book I highly recommend. Chris Arnade, a former investment banker with a PhD in astrophysics wanders around and hangs around in what he calls as “back row America”, and chronicles people’s lives there. The entire book is simply a set of chronicles, garnished with beautiful photos he has taken of his interviewees.

While Arnade makes no secrets of his own political leaning, he doesn’t let that affect his book. Rather, he keeps his own politics to the minimum and lets his interviews do the talking, literally. There are no policy prescriptions in the book, and the reader is simply presented a set of lives and asked to draw her own conclusions. And that means that even if you don’t agree with the politics of the author (I certainly don’t), the book is an incredibly compelling read.

I picked up Snigdha Poonam’s Dreamers about a month or so after I’d finished Dignity. The premise is sort of similar – except that given that India has recently had far higher growth than the US, the “back row Indians” can be classified as “dreamers” who are seeking a better life. And in this book, Poonam chronicles the stories of some of these dreamers, and what they are doing to get themselves a better life.

Poonam is clear about her politics as well (“my family has always voted for the Congress Party”), but what makes her book different from Arnade’s is that she lets her politics take over her narrative. While telling the story of Moin Khan, who runs a spoken English class in Ranchi, she doesn’t hesitate to make snide remarks about either the teacher or any of his students.

Rather than letting her characters talk, Poonam talks on their behalf and overlays her politics to pretty much everything she is talking about. “This is how you are expected to get ahead in Modi’s India” is a refrain through the book.

And even leaving the politics aside, what made me uncomfortable with Dreamers is that the author seems to talk down to the interviewees. The tone throughout the parts of the book that I read is one of moral superiority and smugness of being part of “front row India”.

Maybe if I had read Dreamers before I read Dignity, I would have appreciated it for what it is, and for the stories that it told. I might have discarded the politics and the tone and just enjoyed the stories (I see the book has got 4 stars on Goodreads from a lot of my friends).

Having read Dignity, however, I perhaps had this image in my head of how these stories can be told well. And that meant that I was simply unable to look beyond the overt politics and smug tone in Dreamers. And that meant I abandoned it midway, and gave it a low rating.

Margaret Atwood doesn’t escape my fate

My book released exactly two years ago (if you haven’t read it yet, you can buy it here). Rather, it was supposed to release two years ago, on 6th of September 2017. As it happened, people who had pre-ordered the book got deliveries a few days early. Amazon had messed up with the release date.

I remember getting in touch with Amazon Customer Care. They didn’t seem to care. I spoke to friends and relatives who worked there, and they suggested a “Jeff B escalation” (an email sent to Jeff Bezos – apparently he reads them). There was no response to that either. And so my book came out in a trickle, being sent to people as they ordered them, rather than with a bang.

I’m possibly feeling a sense of schadenfreude that it’s not just first-time authors like me who got screwed over like this by Amazon in terms of early release of the book. I am in illustrious company – Canadian author Margaret Atwood suffered the same fate this week.

Amazon, the biggest book vendor in the United States, recently started shipping preorders of Margaret Atwood’s book Testaments. The problem, notably, is that Atwood’s book is not supposed to launch until Tuesday, September 10. Amazon is violating the embargo that all sellers of the book have agreed to. And its indie bookselling rivals are pissed.

In my case, Amazon had exclusive sales on the book – thanks to using a small first-time publisher, we didn’t have the network to go wider and get the book into more stores. In that sense, apart from me, there was possibly nobody pissed off at the early release of the book.

Then again, this early release of pre-ordered books was an endemic problem to Amazon, and a high-profile leak such as this one was bound to happen some time or the other. Hopefully this will lead to the retailer to put enough measures in place to prevent this kind of thing from happening again (mainstream publishers have strong relationships with bookshops, so they are likely to put pressure on Amazon).

In any case, I’m glad to have such good company!

PS: If you haven’t listened to Atwood’s conversation with Tyler Cowen, you should do so soon. It’s fantastic (and I say this as someone who hasn’t read any of her works)