Confusing Symptoms with Causes

It's probably something to do with how our brains work. A lot of us confuse "symptom" with "cause". For example, social scientists have long argued that over-population is a symptom of a country's problems,  not it's cause. Yet, we frequently blame over-population for a country's ills.

Nowhere is this confusion more apparent than the current political discourse in the USA. Everyone seems to blame the President for the country's problems. But Donald Trump is a symptom of the country's deeper issues, he is certainly not responsible for everything that is going wrong with America.

Our brains like to simplify - to cling to simplistic explanations. "If only DJT were not the President, ..." the democrats like to say.

But what about the system that put him in power?

George Carlin made a brilliant observation:

"Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don’t fall out of the sky. They don’t pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It’s what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you’re going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain’t going to do any good; you’re just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it’s not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here…"

Instead of focusing all our energy on one man, why don't we think of systemic issues.


1) The Two-Party System

The two-party system has a severe "lumpiness" problem - it lumps beliefs that are utterly illogical. For example, if you are "pro-life" i.e. you believe in saving lives, then you are forced to support guns, which take lives! 

Suppose someone (only for the sake of logical consistency) believes that lives should never be taken (either by mothers or by guns), then there is no political party that voices their beliefs. [Not to mention the whole "pro-life" argument itself makes little sense but that is besides the point.]

John Adams put it bluntly:

"There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution."

A lot of voters who did not like the current President ended up voting for him because they couldn't bring themselves to lump other opposing beliefs into the rival candidate. 

2)  The Electoral College

This dead horse has been flogged many times over, so I won't repeat the arguments here.


Systemic problems are the real reason why Donald Trump got elected. 


Maybe it is time to direct the anger elsewhere.

Facebook posts

Henry David Thoreau:

"

We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate... We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

"

Is business school research relevant?

In the world of SSENIUB,  there were islands known as U.N.I.V. ("Univ"s) , short for (largely) Unknown Neighborhood Institutions with Verdant structures.

These leafy islands primarily housed adolescent lives - mostly starry-eyed, 18 - 22 year old saplings that dreamed of becoming trees and 'taking on' the real world. But to grow into grand famous trees, saplings needed watering.

And that, was the most important reason they came to the Univs.

Naturally, given how important watering was at univ's, the wooded campuses started to advertize for the position of Plant-Waterer - to hire humans who could water saplings really well. In fact, adolescents paid a lot of money to find the right Univ's where they could receive water from the right Plant Waterers.

With a touch of pomposity, univ's gave an official title to the job of the Plant Waterer - T.E.A.C.H, short for Tree Enhancers Adept at Circulating H2O.

So, T.E.A.C.H was a very important function at any U.N.I.V.

One day, for some inexplicable reason (plausibly linked to how rich and famous saplings eventually became), these T.E.A.C.H jobs started paying off handsomely.  Suddenly, a lot of people wanted to become Plant Waterers. For the money. Why not? You could make a killing just by watering plants.

Thousands of people claimed, and rightly so, that they could perform T.E.A.C.H jobs at U.N.I.Vs. After all, unless you were egregiously bad, watering plants was not that hard. More importantly, a sincere hard-working person could improve his T.E.A.C.H abilities with a few years of practice. Also, minute differences in T.E.A.C.H abilities did not really matter - everyone agreed that much of sapling growth had to come from within.

That was a period known in U.N.I.V history as the Great Big Dilemma: How do you differentiate one "job candidate" from another, when the actual job (of watering plants) is not rocket science?


Someone came up with a brilliant suggestion. Since watering plants is (obviously) connected to water, why don't we select applicants based on how good they were at swimming in the water!
Never mind that swimming, while related to water, had nothing to do with watering plants. But the univ's were full of clever people. They could always come up with a convoluted justification why good swimmers could also be good at watering plants.

This eureka moment prompted univ's to come up with another officious title for swimming - R.E.S.E.A.R.C., short for Reputational Swimming for Reputational Capital.

Clearly, R.E.S.E.A.R.C. was entirely a reputation game.

The univ's themselves started training programs for the reputation game, solely focused on producing the best divers (Ph.D - Perennially High ranked Diver). Again, never mind that the best swimmers or divers were not necessarily the best at watering plants.

But the lure of swimming, was that, unlike watering plants, it was a skillful activity. Swimming was a differentiator that univ's could use !!

So, even if thousands apply for the job of watering plants , selecting (and more importantly, quantifying) applications based on swimming ability was nice and easy.

This somewhat halted the mad rush of applicants. But the ones eventually hired had exactly a coin-flip's chance of simultaneously being good at T.E.A.C.H, because of its utter lack of correlation with R.E.S.E.A.R.C.

Some smart individuals recognized this problem and started different hiring processes - for the "low skilled" T.E.A.C.H track (where you "deserved" to be paid less) and the "high skilled" R.E.S.E.A.R.C track (where you just had to be paid more).

But that led to another problem! Swimming was inherently not a very useful activity for the trees of the real world. Trees in the real world cared about water and how they could access it. But what wisdom did they receive from the divers and swimmers instead? Sophisticated and mathematically precise ways to do multiple somersaults.

Somehow, it never occured to the swimmers that, maybe, trees didn't care too much about learning how to do a somersault. That was the origin of the now famous phrase in tree language - "yes, but that's only of academic interest".


Some jaded trees that cared about saplings and society cried  "irrelevance!" .

Their voices remain strangulated.

Dual citizenship : Your money OR your life

India has a very strange law.

It does not allow dual citizenship. Funny thing is: there is absolutely no logical, social, economic reason for not allowing dual citizenship. Most countries in the developed world have it already.

SO weird.

Picture a man with a big family - living happily with his wife , kids and (elderly) parents. Suddenly, there is a random "law" that proclaims :
a) either live with your wife and kids, or
b) live with you parents.

You cannot do both. Nope, just not allowed.


Seriously, WTF !! Why ??


Sorry, no explanations for arbitrarily tearing apart happy families.


That is exactly what India's dual citizenship law does. It forces you to choose between wife and mother.

Tough choice indeed.

PhD and Entrepreneurship

I have been thinking lately on what it takes to do a PhD (or pursue an academic career), especially given that I am already in one!

Someone at an online forum remarked that doing a PhD is akin to entrepreneurship. The more I think about it, the more I am convinced :this analogy is right on the money!


Academics : Ideas  ::  Entrepreneurship : Products. 


To oversimply things a little, as an entrepreneur, your main job is to create and sell products. As an academic, your main job is to create and sell ideas. (Yes, selling ideas is as important as 'creating' them)


The analogy doesn't stop here.
The other crucial dimension where the two are similar is ownership.

Suppose you are an entrepreneur in the restaurant business. Few weeks into your new restaurant, you get a late night call that a fire broke out in the dining area. Your immediate response? Drop whatever you are doing, rush to fire-fight and try and save your enterprise.

Contrast this to a traditional job in a multinational company. If you got a call at 11 pm that your office building was on fire, you probably might get annoyed but you will go back to sleep! You might even rest assured there will be a no-work day tomorrow (depending on how much you love your job). In any case, it is not your responsibility. Your job is well defined enough to not involve extinguishing fires.

The example might sound over-dramatic, but notice the crucial difference: as an entrepreneur your responsibility in your business is complete and total. The buck really stops with you. You make all the decisions. You are completely responsible for everything that happens. You can never say, for instance : "I only work from 9 to 6. That was not my job".

This is exactly how an academic career is.

"Everything" is your job. You are wholly responsible for what direction your enterprise (= research agenda) will take. Nobody will tell you what area to research on, you will have to find it yourself. Just as no one can tell you what business you should start. Again, you are not answerable to anyone if something goes awry with your research agenda, because nobody really cares! If your restaurant caught fire, there is no convenient "manager" to lynch you. (Yes, giving yourself a beating is harder!)


Think of academics as being given an empty room and directed to "research". (however vague that might sound). That would exactly be as vague as putting an entrepreneur in an empty office space and asking him to "enterprise".

In both cases, you not only need enormous discipline to stay on 'track' (stay profitable) but also need something that helps you "self-start"(pick up from failed ventures and try again).

Gun Control

Somebody famous said, " If you don't have facts, we'll just use my opinions"

So here are SOME facts. They are pretty compelling. There is more, but I am having a lazy day.

As a social scientist, I know that such debates are rarely purely "scientific". The facts are on our side (indeed, I am picking a side!) but how do you convince people who get all emotional and political about it ? More importantly, how do you break the lobbying cesspool ? These are bigger problems.

Let's address the simpler ones. Especially the supremely dumb ones.

Supremely Dumb Argument 1 : "Guns don't kill people. People kill people"

This argument is dumb on so many different levels. Yes, people kill people. But guns make it easy for people to kill people.  Get that ? Give me a good reason why we should make it easy for anybody to take innocent lives? Who gives you the right to make it easy for a random nut job to kill children? Who gives you the right to make it easy to deny someone their fundamental right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

Let's turn the logic for all the gun-obsessed folks who make the stupid guns-don't-kill-people argument. Guns don't kill people, it is the bullets inside those guns, silly. So hand over the bullets and you can keep your stupid guns! See how illogical these arguments are?

If you buy the guns-don't-kill-people argument, then you should buy the nuclear-weapons-are-harmless argument. After all, it is not the nuclear warhead that kills people, it is the person who presses the 'launch' button! So by your twisted logic, we should encourage nuclear weapons. See how dumb your argument is?

Supremely Dumb Argument 2: "Cars kill people too. Will you ban cars next?"

This is really the height of ignorance. Cars serve a purpose. They help people get from point A to point B. What purpose do guns serve other than making it easy to kill living beings?
Don't give me crap about how it helps protect your family! You live in a country where law enforcement is extremely good. Trust me you have no idea. Back in my country, a "911" call has almost zero chance of being responded to. With a great law-and-order system such as the one here, there is absolutely no need to own guns.
The answer to guns is not more guns, it is less guns!!


I shudder to think of the day when our entire society turns into a wacko gun-loving violent one.

How high is your V.Q ?

We live in an age where parents are constantly obsessing over how high their children's I.Q scores are. B-O-O-R-I-I-N-G...

Indian parents! Please, give I.Q the boot - what your kid really needs is  V.Q !!

[ If you didn't already know, I am bringing you good news - V.Q is already in your blood...It might get a trifle supressed in your children though, especially if you  raised them outside India but then it probably just needs the slightest possible nudge ]

Of course by V.Q I mean 'Vasool'giri Quotient. There, there - did I hear someone patting my back already, but let me fully explain first :

In true Mayflower style, when the first 357 (yes, I cooked that up) Indians arrived on a ship to USA they brought with them their culture, their spices and guess what else - their exchange rate !!

It is true !! The exchange rate between India and US is the life-force of V.Q. It is what makes us walking human calculators (for those who wondered why Indians are good at arithmetic). Next time you see us shopping in Macy's, try coming close to us...and assuming you don't mind the creepiness factor....come close to our heads, 'cause they will be warmer than those of other shoppers. And if you get close enough, you can surely hear the whirring inside them - the exchange rate conversion - the rapid calculations $32.64 * 53 ~ Rs.1700 should I pay that much for a pair of jeans, I can get the same for 2K with 17% discount during Diwali sale and if I use my 234 credit points on......

Still not convinced ? Read on..

Paisa Vasool
Act 1, Scene 1:
The Wife and I (two representative Indians) at the Art Institute of Chicago

We see the paintings. No - I mean we literally see every single painting in every single room and listen to everything on the (free free free!) audio guide. While other art connoisseurs are slowly waltzing their way from Manet to Monet, we are gasping for breath as we leap from Rembrandt to Van Gogh and lunge toward Picasso (we can't tell the difference - French/Dutch/Spanish - who cares) - So the scene ends with the museum curator being so impressed that she offers us jobs as supervisors that we finally  politely decline.

Anyway, Paisa Vasooool. Yea !! We paid 20 bucks - of course, we want to extract as much value as we can!!

High V.Q .
High-five The Wife.

Paisa Vasool
Act 1, Scene 2:
Indians and Vonage phone connection.

Apprently for the money we pay them, the folks at Vonage give us free calling rights (evil evil smile) to 64 countries. Biggest mistake of their lives. Have you noticed news reports from around the world that random people in completely unrelated countries are getting missed calls for no reason.

Paisa Vasoooool. Yea !! We have paid for all 64 countries, haven't we ? So what if we don't know who is on the other end of the phone line. Just dial man!!


I can give more examples. But you get the drift.

Teach your kids some V.Q, or beware - they might lose their Indian-ness. Boo.