Horoscopes and Caesarean Births

The fundamental question is about what needs to be considered as a zero point in a person’s life – conception or delivery. I don’t want to start a debate on abortion here, but just wonder what Indian astrology considers to be the zero point of a person’s life. The answer to this question can determine the effectiveness of Indian astrology, even assuming that it is ok that it hasn’t been recalibrated for a few millenia.

Now my argument here is about the numerous instances in Indian mythology where the child’s future is written down by an astrologer even when it is in its mother’s womb. If an astrologer can tell a child’s future when it is in its mother’s womb, isn’t it an indicator that it is the position of stars at conception that matters more than the position of stars at the time of delivery?

The thing is that no one really knows when a child was conceived. Hence, the time of the child’s delivery is usually used as some sort of a proxy to determine when it was conceived. So basically astrology in its current form has a formula to calculate time of conception based on time of delivery, and so effectively what we have as astrology now is a product of two vectors – one that transposes time of birth to time of conception, and another that translates time of conception to position of stars at conception which then gives rise to the horoscope.

I suppose you can understand that there is obviously one source of error in this – regarding the determination of time of conception at the time of birth – basically no two kids born at the same moment would have been conceived at the same moment, right? So this introduces a fundamental error into Indian astrology.

And as if it were not enough, technology has (as usual) stepped in to hinder religion. The concept of Caesarean section has ended up playing complete havoc with the time-tested formulae of determining time of conception based on time of birth. The concept of Caesarean section has ensured that children need not remain in their mothers’ wombs for a “fixed quota” of time, and there is a very good chance they get released early.

So my argument is that Indian astrology as it stands now is inappropriate for people who were born through Caesarean section, since the error in determination of time of conception is extremely high. Also considering how discontinous things are – there are cases where a half an hour’s change in birth time can completely change a person’s horoscope – the impact of this error is too large to be ignored.

The most common use of astrology in recent times is that horoscope-match is considered by some as a necessary condition for matchmaking. Thinking about it, it is bad (and inaccurate) enough if one of the two parties has been born by Caesarean section. I wonder if it has any impact at all if both parties have been born by Caesarean section!

PS: Back when I was in the arranged scissors market, and my mother was around, this is the argument she would give to people who would demand to see my horoscope in the course of matchmaking. That it didn’t make sense given I was born through Caesarean section.

Shoe Shopping

Ok this is a typical management guru/corporate whore kind of post.

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Last weekend I needed to buy a new pair of shoes. My last pair of black formal shoes had broken a couple of days earlier and I urgently needed a new pair if I were to wear something decent to office on Monday. It was late on Saturday night when I went shoe shopping.

So I walk into this store in Jayanagar and ask one of the sales reps there for a pair of black formal shoes. He asks me my size and immediately runs inside to fetch a pair. While I’m trying out that pair, he runs in and fetches two more. He makes me walk wearing a different shoe on each foot. He brings shoes of all kinds, of varying prices, of varying sizes, of different styles. Before I know it, there are a dozen pairs in front of me, and I’m having a hard time deciding which to pick.

The choice left me utterly confused and I walked out without buying anything. It was impossible for my head to come up with a tractable algorithm to decide which of those shoes to buy. I continued on my walk, stopping only when I reached another shoe shop, with the same name and half a kilometre away.

The salesman here seemed more experienced. Before he went in, he asked me a few questions about what i wanted. He asked about my willingness to pay, colour preferences, style preferences, and even asked me to point out the shoe on display which looked closest to my last pair. He made me take off my floaters and studies carefully the shape of my foot. Even after he goes in, he pops out a couple of times asking me more questions. And finally emerges with one pair.

That pair fit wonderfully! It seemed to satisfy all the constraints that I’d mentioned, and was extremely reasonably priced. And I didn’t need to think twice before buying it.

This is what good marketing is all about. It is about understanding the customer’s needs properly before trying to sell him something. To understand what he wants and give him just that rather than simply flooding him with choices which will only end up confusing him. Giving him more choices makes him do more work than he wants to, and he will simply escape.

If you are in a sales/marketing role in your company, you would do well to spend that extra hour in trying to exactly understand what your customer wants, rather than simply trying to feed him your packaged solutions. I’m sure the extra effort will be more than worth it.

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People, I need honest feedback about how I sound when i try to write like a management guru. Hope I’ m global enough!

Discontinuous Yield Curves

I think that the equity markets have topped out and have cashed out all my equity and equity mutual fund holdings, and am thus sitting on a pile of cash, which I’m looking to invest in debt. Happened to check out the websites of a few banks where I hold accounts and what caught my eye was the discontinuity in the yield curves.

Here is HDFC Bank:

1 year 1 day – 1 year 15 days Below Rs.15 Lacs 6.00% 6.50% May 18, 2009
1 year 16 days Below Rs.15 Lacs 6.50% 7.00% August 03, 2009
1 year 17 days – 2 years Below Rs.15 Lacs 6.00% 6.50% May 18, 2009
2 years 1 day – 2 years 15 days Below Rs.15 Lacs 6.00% 6.50% May 18, 2009
2 years 16 days Below Rs.15 Lacs 7.00% 7.50% August 03, 2009
2 years 17 days – 3 years Below Rs.15 Lacs 6.00% 6.50% May 18, 2009
3 years 1 day – 5 years Below Rs.15 Lacs 6.00% 6.50% May 18, 2009

Notice the discontinuity? About how for a couple of randomly chosen dates the interest rates suddenly shoot up?

Similarly with ICICI Bank:

391 days to 589 days 6.25 6.25
590 days 6.25 6.25
591 days to less than 2 years 6.25 6.25
2 years to 789 days 7.00 7.00
790 days 7.00 7.00
791days to 989 days 7.00 7.00
990 days 7.25 7.25
991 days to less than 3 years 7.00 7.00

Again same story. On certain “magical” days, interest rates shoot up. The degree of increase in rates here is much less dramatic, though. Nevertheless this is extremely interesting, and I wonder why. I remember last year going to Karnataka Bank and asking for a 1 year deposit, and they asked me to make one for 400 days saying that I’ll get 0.5% per annum better for that.

This morning I went to State Bank of India and found that they don’t offer these special rates. I had a friend check at another nationalized bank and found that they too don’t offer special rates. Wonder why the private banks are offering it, though. Why it makes that big a difference to them that the deposit is for 990 days as against 991 or 889. Or is it some way to prevent early closure?

In other news, SBI is offering teaser rates for home and auto loans. Their ads have been there all over the airwaves for the last few weeks. They offer 8% for first year, 8.5% for second and third years and then what they call as “normal rates” after that. If SBI is getting into teaser rates, god only save Indian finance.

Moron Astrology

So this morning I was discussing my yesterday’s post on astrology and vector length with good friend and esteemed colleague Baada. Some interesting fundaes came out of it. Since Baada has given up blogging (and he’s newly married now so can’t expect him to blog) I’m presenting the stuff here.

So basically we believe that astrology started off as some kind of multinomial regression. Some of ancestors observed some people, and tried to predict their behaviour based on the position of their stars at the time of their birth. Maybe it started off as some arbit project. Maybe if blogs existed then, we could say that it started off as a funda session leading up to a blog post.

So a bunch of people a few millenia ago started off on this random project to predict behaviour based on position of stars at the time of people’s birth. They used a set of their friends as the calibration data, and used them to fix the parameters. Then they found a bunch of acquaintances who then became the test data. I’m sure that these guys managed to predict behaviour pretty well based on the stars – else the concept wouldn’t have caught on.

Actually it could have gone two ways – either it fit an extraordinary proportion of people in which case it would be successful; or it didn’t fit a large enough proportion of people in which case it would have died out. Our hunch is that there must have been several models of astrology, and that natural selection and success rates picked out one as the winner – none of the other models would have survived since they failed to predict as well on the initial data set.

So Indian astrology as we know it started off as a multinomial regression model and was the winner in a tournament of several such models, and has continued to flourish to this day. Some problem we find with the concept:

  • correlation-causation: what the initial multinomial regression found is that certain patterns in the position of stars at the time of one’s birth is heavily correlated with one’s behaviour. The mistake that the modelers and their patrons made was the common one of associating correlation with causation. They assumed that the position of stars at one’s birth CAUSED one’s behaviour. They probably didn’t do much of a rigorous analysis to test this out
  • re-calibration: another problem with the model is that it hasn’t been continuously recalibrated. We continue to use the same parameters as we did several millenia ago. Despite copious quantities of new data points being available, no one has bothered to re-calibrate the model. Times have changed and people have changed but the model hasn’t kept up with either. Now, I think the original information of the model has been lost so no one can recalibrate even if he/she chooses to

Coming back to my earlier post, one can also say that Western astrology is weaker than Indian astrology since the former uses a one-factor regression as against the multinomial regression used by the latter; hence the former is much weaker at predicting.

What’s your Raashee? Astrology and Vector Length

The problem with western astrology is that there are way too few categories of people according to it. Western astroogy uses a vector of length one – the part of year in which you were born in, and then concocts a story based on that. According to that, people can be classified into twelve categories (as can be seen in the great recent movie whose title is a substring of the title of this blog post) and you can tell their story based on that. Thing is that way too many people you know, and are not like you, are in the same category as you, and this makes things so much less believable.

On the other hand, the beauty of Indian astrology is the vector length that is involved with it. There are nine planets (including the Sun and the Moon, not including the Earth, and with Rahu and Ketu instead of Uranus and Neptune) and at the time of your birth, each of them can be in one of 10 houses (not sure of the number but I think this is it). There are correlation issues so the number of possible combinations isn’t as big as you think it might be, but still there are enough possible combinations that can describe each person you know uniquely!

This ability to identify almost each person uniquely is what makes Indian astrology so fascinating. Stuff is so complicated that you will never understand it. And because you will never understand it, you are more likely to believe it; unlike in western astrology where it is easy for you to see where you fit in, where things are so easy that it is easy for you to see through it.

The other thing about Indian astrology is that given the really large number of variables, it is easy for the astrologer to correct his own mistakes. He will say “Jupiter is in position 7 so X will happen” and then if X doesn’t happen he says “yeah i predicted it based on Jupiter being in 7, but then in the meantime the Sun moved into 8, and so death happened off”. It makes things so easy to cover up that it contributes to the mystique, and to the success of the art.

So a possible moral of the story is that if you want to create fraud frameworks, make sure that they involve long vectors. Make sure that you design them in such a way that the mango person won’t understand; Make sure that you build in enough variables that will allow you to cover up in case when you screw up. Make sure the vectors in your framework are long enough to make the users feel special and unique, yet giving them a feel that you’ve seen someone/something similar before.

I think this is what all the successful consulting firms have done. Perfected this art of coming up with this kind of a vector. And to think that they might have been inspired by Indian astrology..

Relationships and the Prisoner’s Dilemma Part Deux

Those of you who either follow me on twitter or are my friends on GTalk will know that my earlier post on relationships and the prisoner’s dilemma got linked to from Cheap Talk, the only good Game Theory blog that I’m aware of. After I wrote that post, I had written to Jeffrey Ely and Sandeep Baliga of Cheap Talk, and Jeff decided to respond to my post.

It was an extremely proud moment for me and I spent about half a day just basking in the glory of having been linked from a blog that I follow and like. What made me prouder was the last line in Jeff’s post where he mentioned that my blog post had been part of his dinner conversation. I’m humbled.

So coming to the point of this post. Jeff, in his post, writes:

Some dimensions are easier to contract on.  It’s easy to commit to go out only on Tuesday nights.  However, text messages are impossible to count and the distortions due to overcompensation on these slippery-slope dimensions may turn out even worse than the original state of affairs.

I argue that it is precisely this kind of agreements that leads to too much engagement. The key, I argue, is to keep things loosely coupled and uncertain; and this, I say, doesn’t apply to only romantic relationships. I argue in favour of principles, as opposed to rules. Wherever the human mind is concerned, it is always better to leave room for uncertainty. Short term volatility decreases the chances of long-term shocks.

So if you contract to date only on Tuesday nights, and on a certain Thursday both of you get a sudden craving for each other. In a rule-based system, you’d have to wait till Tuesday to meet, and that would mean that you’d typically spend the next five days in high engagement, since you wouldn’t want to let go given the craving. There is also the chance that when you finally meet, there has been so much build-up that it leaves you unsettled.

The way to go about this is to not make rules and just make do with some simple principles regarding the engagement, and more importantly to keep things flexible. If you have a “I won’t call you when you’re at work” rule, and there is something you really need to say, this leads to wasted mind space since you’ll be holding this thought in the head till the other person is out of office, and thus give less for other things you need to do in that time.

You might ask me what principles one can use. I don’t know, and there are no rules governing principles. It is entirely to do with the parties involved and what they can agree upon. A simple principle might be “if I don’t reply to your text message it doesn’t mean I don’t love you”. You get the drift, I suppose. And the volatility, too. (ok I’m sorry about that one)

The mechanism design problem for scaling down that Jeff talks about is indeed interesting. His solution makes sense but it assumes the presence of a Trusted Third Party. Even if one were to find one such, and that person understands Binary Search techniques, it might take too much effort to find the level of interaction. I wonder if the solution to scaling down also is the Bilateral Nudge (will talk about this in another post).

Bangalore Book Festival

So today I made my way to Gayatri Vihar in the Palace Grounds to visit the Bangalore Book Festival, on its last day. It was interesting, though a bit crowded (what would you expect on the last day of an exhibition? and that too, when it’s a Sunday?). I didn’t buy much (just picked up two books) given the massive unread pile that lies at home. However, there was much scope for pertinent observations. Like I always do when I have a large number of unrelated pertinent observations, I’ll write this in bullet point form.

  • There were some 200 stalls. Actually, there might have been more. I didn’t keep count, despite the stalls having been numbered. Yeah, you can say that I wasn’t very observant.
  • All the major bookshops in Bangalore barring the multicity ones had set up shop there. I don’t really know what they were doing there. Or were they just trying to capture the market that only buys in fairs? Or did they set up stall there just to advertise themselves?
  • It seems like a lot of shops were trying to use the fair to get rid of inventory they wanted to discard. All they had to do was to stack all of this on one table and put a common price tag (say Rs. 50) on every book in that collection, and it was enough to draw insane crowds
  • One interesting stall at the fair had been set up by pothi.com an online self-publishing company. I’ll probably check them out sometime next year when I might want to publish a blook. Seems like an interesting business model they’ve got. Print on demand!
  • I also met the flipkart.com guys at the fair. Once again, they were there for advertising themselves. Need to check them out sometime. Given the kind of books I buy, I think online is the best place to get long tail stuff.
  • There was an incredibly large number of islamic publishing houses at the fair! And have you guys seen the “want qur an? call 98xxxxxxxx for free copy” hoardings all over the city? Wonder why the Bajrang Dal doesn’t target those
  • There was large vernacular presence at the fair. I remember reading in the papers that there was a quota for Kannada publishers, but there was reasonable presence for other languages also, like Gult, Tam, Mellu, Hindi
  • A large number of stalls were ideology driven. Publishing houses attached to cults had set up stalls, probably to further the cause of their own cult. So there was an ISKCON stall, a Ramakrishna Mutt stall, a Ramana Maharshi stall, etc.
  • Attendance at most of these niche stalls was quite thin, as people mostly crowded the stalls being run by bookstores in order to hunt for bargains. Attendance was also mostly thin at publisher-run stalls, making me wonder why most of these people had bothered to come to the fair at all.
  • I saw one awesomely funny banner at the place. It was by “Dr Partha Bagchi, the world leader in stammering for last 20 years” or some such thing. Was too lazy to pull out my phone and click pic. But it was a masterpiece of a banner
  • Another interesting ideological publisher there was “Leftword books”. Their two sales reps were in kurtas and carrying jholas (ok I made the latter part up). And they were sellling all sorts of left-wing books. Wonder who funds them! And they were also selling posters of Che for 10 bucks each
  • I wonder what impact this fair will have on bookstores in Bangalore in the next few days. Or probably it was mostly the non-regular book buyers who did business at the fair and so the regulars will be back at their favourite shops tomorrow.

I bought two books. Vedam Jaishankar’s Casting A Spell: A history of Karnataka cricket (I got it at Rs. 200, as opposed to a list price of Rs 500) and Ravi Vasudevan’s “Making Meaning in Indian Cinema”.

Search strings – last one month

It’s been a long time since I’ve done this and I’m feeling bored now so thought I should write this. It’s the same old usual thing – unusual things that people have searched for and landed up at my blog. I used to compile these stats on a daily basis earlier but nowadays due to NED have abandoned it. So here is an attempt to revise it. This time it’s not for a particular month. It’s just over hte last 30 days. Here goes:

  • travelling on general compartment on shimoga express
  • “ramnath narayanswamy” sex
  • doctor is that the coin falls the right way
  • is token system better than queue in reception of hospital
  • where is kodhi math in karnataka??
  • women in skimpy cut offs

Ok I know the list is smaller than the usual, but I think people aren’t being that crazy nowadays, or for some reason the crazy people are being repelled by my blog! Hopefully next month I’ll have better stuff.

Relationships and Prisoner’s Dilemma

So I ws thinking about this car analogy for relationships. I was thinking about how when you start your car, you will need to drive in first gear, with full engine power, slowly releasing the clutch, using a lot of fuel. However, after you have gathered certain speed, it is wasteful and unstable to go on in first gear. It is time for you to take your foot off the gas pedal, hold down the clutch and change gears, and shift the car to lower engine power.

I think it is similar with romantic relationships. Once you’ve reached a certain level and gotten past the initial phase, it is wasteful to continue in the same full throttle. Once both of you understand that the other is firmly in the basket, there is no need to waste much time just assuring and reassuring each other of the other’s presence. It is simply a wastage of fuel. Also, if there is too much torque at too much speed, there is a good chance that the car will spin out of control, so that needs to be avoided.

A relationship is like a car with two control systems. It is important that both of you coordinate the gear change, else there is a danger that the axle might snap. Let us move out of the analogy for the rest of the post.

So there are two of you and both of you have the choice of whether to change gear or not. Now, the ideal thing to do would be to change gears together, since that will ensure the relationship is at the same level but you’ll both be spending lesser energy on it. The worst case is if exactly one of you changes gears. If one of you suddenly slows down while the other is still at full throttle, it is likely that the other will suddenly feel insecure that the one has stopped responding, and this is likely to lead to some sort of breakdown in the relationship, even if temporary. And in order to get things back on track, you’ll need to go full throttle, thus leading to wastage of energy.

So basically, exactly one party deciding to scale down can prove to be disastrous for both of them, because of which the dominant strategy is to stay where you are – at full power. Let me draw the 2 by 2.

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|                        |    Scale down           |  Remain at full blast     |

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| Scale down|    0                               |  -100                                  |

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|Remain at   |  – 100                         |  -50 |

| full blast     |                                      |                                              |

——————————————————————–

You will notice that the players start off at a Nash equilibrium! Of both of them remaining at full blast. And thus neither has the incentive to scale down, unless he/she is sure that the other will also scale down simultaneously! And if the couple is not communicative enough, they will continue in this suboptimal state for too long, and end up burning way too much energy and willpower, which could’ve been otherwise put to good use.

Hence it is important that the couple communicates about matters such as these, and coordinates the shift in gears, and saves valuable energy!

P Polie Exclusion Principle

The basic concept is that for any given person, no two romantic partners fulfil the same kind of needs.

Let us take all the possible ways in which a romantic partner (since we are talking about multiple partners for the same person, usuallly happening at different points of time in the person’s life, I don’t want to use the term “long-term gene propagating partner”) can help you out. The kind of needs that she can fulfil. Make a list of them, and represent them as a vector.

And to this, add a vector of binaries. Let us call it the “need vector”. You might have guessed that an element of this vector is 1 if the partner fulfils this particular need and 0 otherwise. So for each of your romantic partners (spanning across space and time), construct such a vector. Yeah of course some of these needs are more important than others so you might think you might want to give weights, but that is not the purpose of this exercise.

The Pauli Exclusion Principle in quantum mechanics states that no two electrons can have the same four quantum numbers. Similarly the P Polie Exclusion Principle in romantic relationships states that no two of your romantic partners have the same need vector. That the needs vector of any two of your romantic partners have a hamming distance of at least 1.

This principle has certain important consequences. Given that any two of your romantic partners are separated by a Hamming distance of at least 1 and using the Neha Natalya-xkcd argument, the number of romantic partners you can possibly have in your lifetime is bounded from above by 2^n, where n is the length of your need vector. So contrary to intuition, this shows that promiscuous people actually have a larger set of needs from romantic partners than committed people.