Category: fundaes

The team around you

Back in 2016, footballer Oscar, then of Chelsea, was bought by Shanghai SIPT for a (then whopping) GBP 60M, with a salary of about GBP 20M a year.

Around the time the deal got announced, we were having our 10th year reunion at IIMB. During that a professor told us that one reason Shanghai had to pay Oscar so heavily was the quality (or lack thereof) of teammates he would have to deal with in Shanghai. He was then playing for Chelsea, who had won the Premier League in 2015, and would win it again that season (2016-17). And he was leaving that quality of teammates to join unknown teammates in China, and that meant he would have to be compensated heavily.

During and after last nights’ Manchester Derby, a friend and I were talking about Andre Onana, now the Manchester United goalie. Onana has been an extremely promising goalkeeper, excelling for Ajax and Inter (apart from one doping ban). He is a brilliant sweeper keeper (one reason he got chucked out of the Cameroon national team during last year’s World Cup), adept at playing with his feet and with great positioning sense.

And who does he have in front of him at ManYoo? The former Leicester defensive pair of Harry Maguire and Jonny Evans! They absolutely lack pace which means they can’t play a high line. That means Onana’s sweeping skills are grossly underutilised, and he ends up getting judged based on his shot-stopping skills, where he is nowhere in the same league as his predecessor David De Gea.

When we get into organisations, things we evaluate are the kind of work we do and what we are getting compensated for it. The thing we tend to overlook is who we need to work with, and whether they will elevate us or drag us down. Sometimes, the organisation (like Shanghai SIPT) recognises that you have to put up with suboptimal colleagues, and thus pay you a premium for your services.

Often, though, the organisation will be more like ManYoo, which doesn’t really recognise that the team around you may not be optimal for your playing style. And not everyone is willing to accept a premium in exchange for suboptimal colleagues. So, if you end up like Onana, you are not only frustrated because of the quality (or lack thereof) of your colleagues and peers, but you also end up getting judged on axes that are not your strengths (and what you have NOT been hired for).

Over the last decade, hiring at Manchester United has been curious, to say the least. There have been half-hearted attempts at changing the playing style, and almost everyone brought in to play the new style (I assume Erik Ten Haag wanted to play a more high-press style when he bought Onana) has been frustrated and unable to perform to potential.

Related to this, going back to something I’d written earlier this year, every company has an optimal rate of attrition, which is non-zero. If you end up paying too much of a premium to loyalty, you risk stagnation. If your Onana has to put up with Maguire and Evans, he won’t perform to potential. And then you go back to setting up the way it is optimal for Maguire and Evans.

A schoolboy fight in the Middle East

The ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in some ways, reminds me of my own childhood. And if I think about it, it relates to everyone’s childhoods, and to schoolboy fights in general.

A bit about myself – from early childhood I was mostly “topper types”. Yes, my school gave out “ranks” from the age of 6, and I had started topping then. This made me the teachers’ pet, and object of friends’ ire.

It didn’t help that I was the first person in class to wear spectacles, and was the slowest runner (and thus not very athletic), and had a stammer, and all this put together meant that I was an obvious target for other boys in the class to “tease” (I don’t know / remember why the girls didn’t participate in this. Maybe they had their own target).

Nowadays, I don’t have much patience for being troubled, and it was the same 35 years ago. After a little “teasing” (or bullying, if you might call it that), I would hit back. Literally. While I ran slow and was generally un-athletic, I was easily the tallest boy in the class. And so when I hit people, it hurt. On a physical 1-1 level, the fights were largely one-sided (I mostly remember whacking people, not getting whacked).

Soon this pattern emerged – someone would provoke me and in reply I would whack them. And then someone would complain to some teacher who would see that I had made a much bigger transgression than what the others had done, and then scold (or occasionally hit – my school allowed that) me, much to the joy of the others.

This kept happening, and there was seemingly no end to it. And then one day (or maybe over a period of time), ten years had gone behind us. We had grown up. We hit puberty. Our priorities in life changed. This wasn’t fun at all. We moved on. Nowadays I’m fairly good friends with many of the guys who used to tease me back then.

Thinking about it, there is nothing exclusive to me in this story. If you have siblings (I don’t), you might have seen this happen in your house. The smaller one provokes the bigger one, who hits back (mostly literally), causing a transgression much bigger than the provocation. This plays into the smaller one’s hands who then complains to the parent, who censures the bigger one, much to the joy of the smaller one. Again, this kind of stuff continues, until the kids grow up.

At some level (I know of the massive ongoing destruction and cruelty), the fight between Israel and terrorist groups such as Hamas can be thought of in a similar fashion. Israel is the “bigger kid” with an ability to whack the smaller kids to a level where they can’t hit back directly. Israel is also the kind of bigger kid who will just whack in retaliation without paying attention to “what people might think”. Hamas is like the mischievous little kid out to bug the bigger kid.

Over 75 years of fighting, the situation has now got to the point where the typical schoolboy fight gets played out, though at a much larger scale and with far far more damage. Hamas provokes Israel. Israel hits back with much greater force. It is clear that Hamas can’t whack back Israel with the same ferocity that Israel hit them. And so they go crying uncle. The “uncles” temporarily outrage. The situation (hopefully) comes back to some kind of an uneasy truce. And then it repeats.

Unfortunately, unlike schoolboys, countries (and terrorist groups) don’t grow up. I don’t know what the “puberty equivalent” for Israel and Hamas is, that will let them forget their mutual fight and unite for other common purposes. Until they find some such, the fighting will continue.

Brahmastra

Sometimes we overdo “option value”. We do things that have a small possibility of a big upside, and big possibility of no or very minimal downside, in the belief that “nothing can go wrong in trying”.

My father used to term this “pulling a mountain with a string”, with the reasoning being that if you actually manage to pull, then you have moved a mountain. If not, all that you have lost is a string.

There is one kind of situation, however, where I think we might overindex on option value – these are what I call “one shot events” or “brahmastras”.

Going into a little bit of mythology, there is the story of the Brahmastra in the Mahabharata. Famously, Karna possesses it. It is an incredibly powerful weapon with the feature (or bug, rather) that it can be used only once. Karna would have set it aside to use on Arjuna, but the Pandavas decide to send Ghatotkacha to create havoc during the night fight when Karna is forced to use up his brahmastra on Ghatotkacha – meaning he didn’t have access to it in his battle with Arjuna, where he (Karna) ultimately got killed.

Because the Brahmastra could be used only once, Karna wanted to maximise the impact of the weapon. His initial plan was to use it on what he thought might be a decisive battle with Arjuna. The Pandavas’ counterplan was to force him to use it earlier.

Actually, thinking about it – the Brahmastra can be thought of as another kind of option. The problem here being one of optimal exercise. Actually, there is a very stud paper written by economist Avinash Dixit on this topic – regarding Elaine’s sponges.

Read the whole paper. It is surely worth it. To quickly summarise, Elaine has a limited number of “contraceptive sponges”, and wants to maximise her “utility” of using them. When a guy comes along, she needs to decide whether it is worth expending a sponge on him. Dixit derives a nice equation to determine a function for this.

Basically, Brahmastra occurs when you have only one sponge left, and you need to use it at an “optimal time”. There is another problem in economics  called the “secretary problem” (nothing to do with secretary birds) that deals with this.

Recently I’ve been thinking – these kind of Brahmastra / sponge / secretary problems are important to solve when you are thinking of talking to someone.

Let’s say you have what you think is a studmax application of GenAI and want to talk to VCs about it. If you go too early, the VC will only see a half-baked version of your idea, and even if you go to them later once you have fully formed it, the half-baked idea you had showed them will influence them enough to discount your later fully formed idea.

And if you go too late, the idea may not be that studmax any more, and the VC might dismiss it. So it’s a problem of “optimal exercise” (note that this is an issue only with American options, not European).

It is similar with asking someone out (or so I think – I’ve been out of this business for 14 years now). You approach them “too early” (before they know you), they will dismiss you then and then forever. You approach too late and the option would have expired.

In the world of finance, we focus too much on the PRICE of options and (based on my now limited knowledge) too little on optimal expiry of the said options. In the real world, the latter is also important.

Mid Wife Crisis

A month or two ago, my wife wrote this studmax blogpost about “Mid Life Crises“. I read it when I was in draft. I read it again soon after it was published. And I read it again, and again, and again. And I’ve been showing it to a lot of people I meet.

Having seen this post, it has been impossible to unsee. I used to wonder why Hospi puts so many dance videos on Instagram, and then realised it must be mid-life crisis. I saw Josh go from being a VLSI Engineer to pushing limits, and have classified that as mid-life crisis as well. Recently, Ruddra posted topless gym photos. I actually commented that it “must be mid life crisis”.

A few days ago, my wife and I were talking about an acquaintance who is possibly having an affair, and that again we put down to “mid life crisis”. When asked why he had had a second child eight years after his first, a relative had said “early forties you hit mid life crisis. We had the option of a sports car or another kid. Decided to go for the latter”.

You see – once you’ve seen this concept, and if you belong to the broad 35-50 age group, it is absolutely impossible to un-see. You get excited about possibly meeting an old flame after ages, and mid-life crisis explains that. You want to get hammered when you meet your old friends, and mid-life crisis explains that as well.

Now, being 40 and having identified that I’m at “mid life”, the challenge is to deal with the crisis in the least destructive manner possible. That the crisis exists, and needs to be dealt with, is a fact. The choice is in terms of how to deal with it.

If you are married (or in a long term relationship), you don’t want to have an affair and put that in jeopardy (also the question needs to be asked if one’s demand for an affair can be met with supply). Alcohol and dope can be destructive to your physical and mental health. Social media gives you dopamine (and I think that was my main tool of dealing with mid-life crisis till recently), but can be both addictive and anxiety-causing. Gaming (I’ve considered buying a console for nearly 2 years now, but I’m yet to act on it) gives you the dopamine but again comes with addiction risk.

And that is where the “healthy obsessions come in”. You notice that many people around my age take to running, or cycling, or lifting, or a combination of these. All of these are physically strenuous activities, and thus can give you your endorphins. As an added bonus, they increase either your cardiovascular health or your muscle strength, thus preparing you better for old age.

So you find these to be fairly common midlife-dealing hobbies. If you can find one of these that you don’t get bored by, it’s a clear win-win (I lift weights). The “problem” is that because it is physically strenuous you can only do so much of it (I go to the gym for an hour each 2-3 times a week. If you do less strenuous stuff like running, you can perhaps do an hour 7 times a week). And so you need more. The question is what you can choose that is non-destructive (relatively speaking).

A month or two back, I got introduced to online quizzing. I’m currently playing three leagues (one of them will end soon, but I’ve signed up for yet another starting at the end of this month). I find that this is a fairly high-dopamine hobby (to the extent that now I’ve started doing this late in the night since it interferes with my sleep), and keeps me stimulated enough. The only issue is it can be potentially addictive (when I played my first “friendly” online quiz 2-3 weekends ago, I felt the same way as I did when I smoked my first cigarette – “this is addictive shit, I need to be careful”).

Interestingly, two friends I spoke to in the week of August 15th (and I’m pretty sure those two have never met or spoken to each other) told me “start working on another book to deal with your mid life crisis”. I admit they too have a point, but I don’t know what to write about.

But yes – midlife crisis is a real thing. It is only about how you choose to deal with it without causing self-harm.

IQ and mental health

It’s possible that I’ve written about this before, but I’m too lazy to check. I just saw this tweet by Baal about what he calls the “Aaron Swartz syndrome” (of brilliant people lost to mental illness because they put too much pressure on themselves).

(and yay, tweets are publicly visible again)

Baal’s tweet here is about a mutual classmate who we lost over a decade ago.  And this tweet triggered off a thought that I’ve had regarding pattern recognition, and which I might have written about earlier.

Fundamentally, what makes us intelligent is our ability to see patterns. Before the advent of modern “advanced linear algebra”, the difference between giving instructions to a human and to a computer was that the latter had to be incredibly specific. The human, on the other hand, could get approximate instructions, and then quickly see patterns in what they were observing, and get the job done.

Even a lot of “advanced linear algebra” works the same way. You give it a bunch of data, and it uses some mathematical transformations to “learn patterns” about the data, and then looks for these patterns in hitherto unseen data to make predictions. So what makes “artificial intelligence” intelligent is that it can use maths to divine patterns.

I remember taking this Mensa test when in college. It was all about pattern recognition. Four images given, and you need to figure the best fifth image to complete the sequence. That sorts. And Mensa claims to be a “club for the insanely intelligent”, and they use pattern recognition as a means to identify the more intelligent humans.

I can go on but I think I’ve provided sufficient evidence arguments on how intelligence is basically about pattern recognition. The more intelligent you are the better you are at identifying patterns.

Now what does it have to do with mental health?

The answer lies in false positives.

The problem with being good at pattern recognition is that sometimes you can tend to overdo it. You start seeing patterns that don’t really exist. I must mention here that I got over my extremely long-term and fairly deep depression back in 2012 when I was asked to deliver a few lectures on logical reasoning – explaining to my lecturees that correlation does not imply causation convinced me of the same, and I started feelingbetter.

So – because you are good at pattern recognition, you end up seeing too many patterns. I remember this from business school – I saw a bunch of people eating lunch together and thought I’ll go eat with them. And then I noticed a pattern among the set of people (something silly to the effect of “they are all from Section A, and taking this marketing elective”) that didn’t apply to me. And suddenly I decided I didn’t belong there and didn’t go to sit with them.

On that day I remember this happening multiple times, and I finally ate my lunch alone. Now thinking back, this was silly of me – and I had voluntarily brought upon myself unpleasant thoughts (“I don’t belong in this group”) and loneliness.

This is just one example – such things regularly happened through the decade of the 2000s. I would see demons (patterns, basically) where none existed. I would overthink decisions like crazy. I would bring loneliness upon myself. I would make random correlations, that would only serve to depress (“oh, my lucky shirt hasn’t dried, so I won’t be able to do well in today’s exam” types).

Generalising – what you see is that the better you are at seeing patterns, the more the spurious patterns you see (in advanced linear algebra, we call this “overfitting”). And these spurious patterns end up affecting you, and clouding your judgment. And making you less capable of leading life.

I keep thinking, and saying, that my engineering class has been especially badly affected by mental illness. In the class of 30 odd, we’ve lost two people to suicide already (including the person Baal mentioned in his tweet), and know of several others who had mental illness severe enough to either drop out, or take semesters off.

And given that the class was largely made up people from the extreme right tail of the distribution in a highly competitive entrance exam, I’m coming to believe that correlation exists – all of us being superior pattern recognisers, have been prone to recognising spurious patterns, and many have fallen prey to mental illness, to different extents.

PS: I found one blogpost I’ve written about this topic

 

Modern Ganeshas

Om Ganeshaaya Namaha

There is this theory I have heard – just that I have forgotten the source – that Ganesha was not originally part of the Hindu pantheon, but was a local god who was coopted into the fold later on. In fact, the same is said of his “brothers” Karthikeya and Ayyappa, and it is interesting that all these cooptions happened as sons of Shiva.

Back to Ganesha, the story goes that he is “vighneshwara” not because he removes obstacles (“vighnas”) but because he is the “obstacle god” (direct translation of vighneshwara). The full funda is – the locals who had Ganesha as their god allowed him to become part of the Hindu pantheon (and thus themselves becoming Hindus) under the express condition that he be worshipped in advance of any of the other gods in the Hindu pantheon.

Now, as even most non-practising Hindus will know, pretty much every Hindu ritual starts with a worship of Ganesha. It doesn’t matter which other god you are trying to worship, you always start with a prayer to Ganesha (unless, of course, if you are a radical Vaishnavite – in which case, Ganesha, as a son of Shiva, is taboo).

The polite explanation of this is “Ganesha is such a great god, and a remover of obstacles, you better worship him first so that the rest of your worship goes without obstacles”.

The more realist (and impolite, and controversial) explanation (again I’ve forgotten the source) is that if you started a worship without worshipping Ganesha at first, the locals who had “contributed” him to the pantheon would get pissed off and ransack your worship. And so the Ganesha worship at the beginning of every worship (and invocation ceremony) originally started as a form of blackmail, and then became part of culture. Eventually, it became lip service to Ganesha.

Earlier this year, I was watching the Australian Open. The finals ended, and it was time for the prizes. And at the beginning of the prize distribution, the announcer (Todd Woodbridge) said (paraphrasing) “we begin with a worship to the native peoples of Australia on whose lands we now stand”. It was similar to some episode of Masterchef Australia 2-3 years  back, which again started with the same “invocation”.

OK I actually found the video of Woodbridge from this year:

 

In this particular case, what has happened is that Australia has (finally) learnt about racism, and is now going overboard to identify all forms of overt or covert racism, past and present. The modern Ganesha-worshippers are the people whose job it is to point out every instance of overt or covert racism. If you don’t worship this Ganesha (talking about the “native peoples whose lands we stand upon”), the Ganesha-worshippers will come for you and maybe disturb the rest of your worship.

Ultimately, like the original Ganesha worship, this has turned into lip service.

“Modern Ganeshas” are not restricted to Australia. I just read this hilarious tweet (new Twitter rules means I have to copy paste here):

Have been on college tours in the Northeast. Every admissions officer and student volunteer starts with (1) a declaration of their pronouns, and (2) an acknowledgement of the stolen native lands their college is placed upon.

This is similar modern Ganesha worship, but practiced in the US. Lip service paid so that the “modern Ganesha worshippers” don’t come and disturb your worship.

When Colin Kaepernick knelt down during the playing of the (US) national anthem, he made a powerful statement. But then, when people started randomly taking the knee at the beginning of events (especially immediately after George Floyd’s murder), it turned into “modern Ganesha worship” (lip service so that the worthies don’t get offended).

And no political “wing” or party has a monopoly on modern Ganesha worship. In some places, ceremonies routinely start with praise being conferred on some “dear leader”. Literal Ganesha worship can also help in modern times, since that still has its guardians. You can include recitals of (whichever nation’s) national anthems, or readings from the constitution into this list.

The less memetically fit of these worships will fade away (or burn out, in case of a change in government). The more memetically fit of these worships will remain, but over a period of time turn into Ganesha worship – a token done out of habit and practice rather than due to fear of any contemporary reprisal.

Bayes Theorem and Respect

Regular readers of this blog will know very well that I keep talking about how everything in life is Bayesian. I may not have said it in those many words, but I keep alluding to it.

For example, when I’m hiring, I find the process to be Bayesian – the CV and the cover letter set a prior (it’s really a distribution, not a point estimate). Then each round of interview (or assignment) gives additional data that UPDATES the prior distribution. The distribution moves around with each round (when there is sufficient mass below a certain cutoff there are no more rounds), until there is enough confidence that the candidate will do well.

In hiring, Bayes theorem can also work against the candidate. Like I remember interviewing this guy with an insanely spectacular CV, so most of the prior mass was to the “right” of the distribution. And then when he got a very basic question so badly wrong, the updation in the distribution was swift and I immediately cut him.

On another note, I’ve argued here about how stereotypes are useful – purely as a Bayesian prior when you have no more information about a person. So you use the limited data you have about them (age, gender, sex, sexuality, colour of skin, colour of hair, education and all that), and the best judgment you can make at that point is by USING this information rather than ignoring it. In other words, you need to stereotype.

However, the moment you get more information, you ought to very quickly update your prior (in other words, the ‘stereotype prior’ needs to be a very wide distribution, irrespective of where it is centred). Else it will be a bad judgment on your part.

In any case, coming to the point of this post, I find that the respect I have for people is also heavily Bayesian (I might have alluded to this while talking about interviewing). Typically, in case of most people, I start with a very high degree of respect. It is actually a fairly narrowly distributed Bayesian prior.

And then as I get more and more information about them, I update this prior. The high starting position means that if they do something spectacular, it moves up only by a little. If they do something spectacularly bad, though, the distribution moves way left.

So I’ve noticed that when there is a fall, the fall is swift. This is again because of the way the maths works – you might have a very small probability of someone being “bad” (left tail). And then when they do something spectacularly bad (well into that tail), there is no option but to update the distribution such that a lot of the mass is now in this tail.

Once that has happened, unless they do several spectacular things, it can become irredeemable. Each time they do something slightly bad, it confirms your prior that they are “bad” (on whatever dimension), and the distribution narrows there. And they become more and more irredeemable.

It’s like “you cannot unsee” the event that took their probability distribution and moved it way left. Soon, the end is near.

 

Channelling

I’m writing this five minutes after making my wife’s “coffee decoction” using the Bialetti Moka pot. I don’t like chicory coffee early in the morning, and I’m trying to not have coffee soon after I wake up, so I haven’t made mine yet.

While I was filling the coffee into the Moka Pot, I was thinking of the concept of channelling. Basically, if you try to pack the moka pot too tight with coffee powder, then the steam (that goes through the beans, thus extracting the caffeine) takes the easy way out – it tries to create a coffee-less channel to pass through, rather than do the hard work of extracting coffee as it passes through the layer of coffee.

I’m talking about steam here – water vapour, to be precise. It is as lifeless as it could get. It is the gaseous form of a colourless odourless shapeless liquid. Yet, it shows the seeming “intelligence” of taking the easy way out. Fundamentally this is just physics.

This is not an isolated case. Last week, at work, I was wondering why some algorithm was returning a “negative cost” (I’m using local search for that, and after a few iterations, I found that the algorithm is rapidly taking the cost – which is supposed to be strictly positive – into deep negative territory). Upon careful investigation (thankfully it didn’t take too long), it transpired that there was a penalty cost which increased non-linearly with some parameter. And the algo had “figured” that if this parameter went really high, the penalty cost would go negative (basically I hadn’t done a good job of defining the penalty well). And so would take this channel.

Again, this algorithm has none of the supposedly scary “AI” or “ML” in it. It is a good old rule-based system, where I’ve defined all the parameters and only the hard work of finding the optimal solution is left to the algo. And yet, it “channelled”.

Basically, you don’t need to have got a good reason for taking the easy way out now. It is not even human, or “animal” to do that – it is simply a physical fact. When there exists an easier path, you simply take that – whether you are an “AI” or an algorithm or just steam!

I’ll leave you with this algo that decided to recognise sheep by looking for meadows (this is rather old stuff).

Order of guests’ arrival

When I’m visiting someone’s house and they have an accessible bookshelf, one of the things I do is to go check out the books they have. There is no particular motivation, but it’s just become a habit. Sometimes it serves as conversation starters (or digressors). Sometimes it helps me understand them better. Most of the time it’s just entertaining.

So at a friend’s party last night, I found this book on Graph Theory. I just asked my hosts whose book it was, got the answer and put it back.

As many of you know, whenever we host a party, we use graph theory to prepare the guest list. My learning from last night’s party, though, is that you should not only use graph theory to decide WHO to invite, but also to adjust the times you tell people so that the party has the best outcome possible for most people.

With the full benefit of hindsight, the social network at last night’s party looked approximately like this. Rather, this is my interpretation of the social network based on my knowledge of people’s affiliation networks.

This is approximate, and I’ve collapsed each family to one dot. Basically it was one very large clique, and two or three other families (I told you this was approximate) who were largely only known to the hosts. We were one of the families that were not part of the large clique.

This was not the first such party I was attending, btw. I remember this other party from 2018 or so which was almost identical in terms of the social network – one very large clique, and then a handful of families only known to the hosts. In fact, as it happens, the large clique from the 2018 party and from yesterday’s party were from the same affiliation network, but that is only a coincidence.

Thinking about it, we ended up rather enjoying ourselves at last night’s party. I remember getting comfortable fairly quickly, and that mood carrying on through the evening. Conversations were mostly fun, and I found myself connecting adequately with most other guests. There was no need to get drunk. As we drove back peacefully in the night, my wife and daughter echoed my sentiments about the party – they had enjoyed themselves as well.

This was in marked contrast with the 2018 party with the largely similar social network structure (and dominant affiliation network). There we had found ourselves rather disconnected, unable to make conversation with anyone. Again, all three of us had felt similarly. So what was different yesterday compared to the 2018 party?

I think it had to do with the order of arrival. Yesterday, we were the second family to arrive at the party, and from a strict affiliation group perspective, the family that had preceded us at the party wasn’t part of the large clique affiliation network (though they knew most of the clique from beforehand). In that sense, we started the party on an equal footing – us, the hosts and this other family, with no subgroup dominating.

The conversation had already started flowing among the adults (the kids were in a separate room) when the next set of guests (some of them from the large clique arrived), and the assimilation was seamless. Soon everyone else arrived as well.

The point I’m trying to make here is that because the non-large-clique guests had arrived first, they had had a chance to settle into the party before the clique came in. This meant that they (non-clique) had had a chance to settle down without letting the party get too cliquey. That worked out brilliantly.

In contrast, in the 2018 party, we had ended up going rather late which meant that the clique was already in action, and a lot of the conversation had been clique-specific. This meant that we had struggled to fit in and never really settled, and just went through the motions and returned.

I’m reminded of another party WE had hosted back in 2012, where there was a large clique and a small clique. The small clique had arrived first, and by the theory in this post, should have assimilated well into the party. However, as the large clique came in, the small clique had sort of ended up withdrawing into itself, and I remember having had to make an effort to balance the conversation between all guests, and it not being particularly stress-free for me.

The difference there was that there were TWO cliques with me as cut-vertex.  Yesterday, if you took out the hosts (cut-vertex), you would largely have one large clique and a few isolated nodes. And the isolated nodes coming in first meant they assimilated both with one another and with the party overall, and the party went well!

And now that I’ve figured out this principle, I might break my head further at the next party I host – in terms of what time I tell to different guests!

The Law Of Comparative Advantage and Priorities

Over a decade ago I had written about two kinds of employees – those who offer “competitive advantage” and those who offer “comparative advantage”.

Quoting myself:

So in a “comparative advantage” job, you keep the job only because you make it easier for one or more colleagues to do more. You are clearly inferior to these colleagues in all the “components” of your job, but you don’t get fired only because you increase their productivity. You become the Friday to their Crusoe.

On the other hand, you can keep a job for “competitive advantage“. You are paid because there are one or more skills that the job demands in which you are better than your colleagues

Now, one issue with “comparative advantage” jobs is that sometimes it can lead to people being played out of position. And that can reduce the overall productivity of the team, especially when priorities change.

Let’s say you have 2 employees A and B, and 2 high-priority tasks X and Y. A dominates B – she is better and faster than B in both X and Y. In fact, B cannot do X at all, and is inferior to A when it comes to Y. Given these tasks and employees, the theory of comparative advantage says that A should do X and B should do Y. And that’s how you split it.

In this real world problem though, there can be a few issues – A might be better at X than B, but she just doesn’t want to do X. Secondly, by putting the slower B on Y, there is a floor on how soon Y can be delivered.

And if for some reason Y becomes high priority for the team, with the current work allocation there is no option than to just wait for B to finish Y, or get A to work on Y as well (thus leaving X in the lurch, and the otherwise good A unhappy). A sort of no win situation.

The whole team ends up depending on the otherwise weak B, a sort of version of this:

A corollary is that if you have been given what seems like a major responsibility it need not be because you are good at the task you’ve been given responsibility for. It could also be because you are “less worse” than your colleagues at this particular thing than you are at other things.