Tag: half a day

Missing the Obvious

It was a year and a half back that I bought this desktop that I’m writing this post on. Given that the desktop was to be placed in my study, and the modem is in the drawing room, the most intuitive thing for me to connect up this desktop was to buy a USB wi-fi adapter, which cost me in excess of a thousand rupees. While it worked well in general, it gave problems once in a while, requiring reinstallation of the software and setting some random settings.

Last week, when I got some data from a client, I realized that my computer was wholly unsuited for big data operations, and I needed to upgrade, big time. I’ve now got myself a badass Intel I7 processor, with 8GB RAM and a 64 bit OS which will hopefully enable me to run my business successfully. The downside of this is that my old USB Adapter doesn’t work on a 64bit processor (it can be made to work, but the process is long and tedious). After getting my wife to dirty her hands on this (she is the in-house hands-on engineer), I realized that it wasn’t possible to get the USB Adapter to work, and thought of complicated options such as using this computer purely for analysis and using my laptop and a Pen Drive for the networking. Half a day of working thus told me it was way too inefficient. Then I thought of shifting the entire modem to the room, drawing a line from the telephone jack in the drawing room all around the house,  a process that is not painless.

Finally, for two hundred and sixty rupees (less than a fourth of what I had paid for the USB Adapter) I got myself a 20 meter long LAN cable, and have simply connected my computer with that. Beautiful, intuitive, simple. The question, though, is about why I had never thought of this beautiful, simple, intuitive solution for so long! It turns out that I had never really taken this option into consideration at all, for had I done it there would have been no grounds to reject it at any point in time.

I have recently embarked on a career in consulting, and I believe that a significant proportion of my insights are going to be beautiful, intuitive, simple solutions which for whatever reason the client hadn’t particularly thought of. Why do such low hanging fruit exist at all?

What is it about our thinking that we get so tied up in complications and completely miss out the obvious? Is it a fallout of our spending large amounts of time trying to solve complicated (and in the larger context inconsequential) problems? Or is it that these simple obvious solutions have to “hit us” sometime (in the form of an insight) and when we sometimes approach the problem in too structured a manner we tend to miss out on these insights? What do you think?

While I’m happy that I’m connected again, and in such simple a manner, I’m cross with myself that a simple soluti0n as this didn’t strike for such an extended period of time.

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).