Gill Eapen's Blog, page 86

Spilling guts

Intuition, is often given as the reason for good decision-making. Since intuition is in some way forecasting the future state, those with intuition should also be good forecasters.  For example, if the decision is binary, it will require an estimate of the probability of one state or the other materializing in the future. If the future outcomes are correlated with similar situations in the past, then the probability of a future state can be simply derived from historical data. If the...

Scare tactics

Economists, with or without Nobel prizes, have been out in full force lobbying for "more stimulus." The problem is clear, they argue – aggregate consumption is not growing and employment situation is not improving. Every economics book or academic paper written thus far, worth reading, argues for more stimulus – fiscal, monetary or both – in such a situation, they assert. This is one of those obvious things, for without it, we will slowly decline into depression, they lament.

Economics and a...

Closed clusters

A recent study has demonstrated that clusters are more efficient in behavior transmission across a network due to people's affinity toward reinforcements from similar and closer sources. It is shown that clusters perform better against random networks of much bigger sizes for behavior transmission, proving significant superiority to clusters. This makes sense as humans are social animals and generally seek validation from such sources. This is disappointing as it means that the natural...

Godly assertion

An eminent physicist recently reneged his own earlier position of the need for "God" to explain the universe. His new position, universe can happen out of nothing and our own current universe is one of many incarnations, is not anything new.  What is interesting though is that it is symptomatic of the lull in Physics – the field of enquiry that has been slowly declining for many decades now. The contemporary field is populated by story tellers and experimenters, some writing popular books...

Oh, no… Now it is the "innovation machine."

Innovation has been wonderfully fashionable. Some have been toiling to define the "process of innovation," and setting it up in companies so that they can churn out inventions like Hamburgers in a busy McDonalds. Others, completely upset at the suggestion of such systematization, argue that innovation is not a process and inventions come from creative people breaking all the rules. Recently, the magazine that is the arbitrator of all news, remotely economics related, has sighted recent work –...

Brainy

Some have been lamenting the news that many large pharmaceutical companies are terminating R&D in Central Nervous System (CNS) diseases. CNS has always been the holy grail of medicine – some seeking to define the brain and others attempting to showcase just the shortcomings of it. Some stood perplexed at the prospect of unpredictable side effects of designer drugs that are highly selective and others took a sledgehammer to the neuron network to numb it, with no tangible effects. In either cas...

It's not the rankings – but the metrics

The US has failed to reach the top 10 of the world's best countries' list published recently by Newsweek. The list is a bit skewed as most of the top 10 countries claim populations less than NY city.  Similarly, India, that shows up at a miserable 78, has villages with many times the populations of the top countries. In the metrics used such as education, health and quality of life, population scale does have a significant impact.  So, it is difficult to attach too much importance to the...

Living Programmatically

A recent study has linked a gene to the proclivity for accumulating and carrying high credit card debt. Genetics, thus, has influence not only on the hardware but also on the software of humans. This is a problematic finding as it substantially reduces an individual's flexibility to design her life. The effect of genes on hardware has been well established through the observation of disease incidence and resistance but the impact on seemingly superficial behavior patterns is, indeed...

Boys and girls

A recent study has demonstrated that in terms of brain development, the maternal genes dominate in fetal development and in early childhood, followed by a period where paternal and maternal genes tussle for control, followed by eventual bias in favor of paternal genes in early adults. This is an important finding. For unknown reasons, the nature biases paternal genes in the end outcome but not before early adulthood. Although there is some evidence of counteracting effects in daughters throug...

Fairness shaped by the society

A recent study in Norway finds the children's  views of fairness change from egalitarian to merit based as they grow older.  Many conclusions may be drawn from this observation. One is that the definition and understanding of fairness are shaped by the society. The more interactions the individual has with the broader society, the more likely that the individual's views will be shaped by the society. If this is the case, one may find differences in views of fairness across countries with...