Gill Eapen's Blog, page 87

Unruly

To move a society to its optimal state (to be defined), there is likely a minimum and maximum number of rules (to be defined) that can be imposed on it. A rule can be defined as a simple construct such as "If X then Not Y", and the societal optimum may be the aggregate production or some such metric. In a society where there are no rules, aggregate production is unlikely to be maximized as the members of the society (presumably maximizing tactical individual utility) will exhibit behavior...

Pyramids of our time

A famous scientist characterized the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, "the pyramid of our time." It is an apt description. Five thousand years ago, the Egyptians erected magnificent structures of such grandeur that they drained the GDP of entire countries for centuries. So elaborate were the plans of a few to build the pathway to afterlife, they deployed most of the manpower of the entire country to do so. They did this on unlikely assumptions, unable to understand the futility of it...

Innovation manufacturing

Consultants with decades of experience in re-engineering everything without consideration for end outcomes have been moving into areas such as innovation. This is bad news for the economy as it appears that the disease is spreading – the disease of process optimization, manufacturing efficiency and productivity based on time spent.  It does not look like any learning resulted from the botched attempts of accountants and engineers to optimize processes, cut costs, implement just in time...

The pendulum swings

Many companies appear to be pulling back from research and development and the advancement of early ideas as they struggle to manage short term economics. Business and technical managers battle as some want to optimize resources and others to maximize the probability of success. Business schools have been teaching financial techniques that largely ignore the characteristics of investment ideas such as uncertainty and flexibility.  As such, investment decisions are made on gut feel...

Science and non-science

Books, articles and tv-shows have been admonishing science for rejecting religion. Some invoke arguments such as - "since science cannot explain many things, it is equivalent to religion, that cannot explain an equal number of things." More illuminated writers argue that scientists used to be religious believers as if that fact alone proves that scientists should cling to religion even now. Curiously, such an illogical argument is made along with the basic objection that science is not...

Inefficient real markets

In financial markets, efficiency means that known information gets reflected in asset prices reasonably quickly. Although there are many disbelievers of market efficiency,  some because they think they know more and others because it is a nice way to write papers that cannot be refuted, empirical data is strong for the weak form of market efficiency. Efficiency can only exist in broad financial markets with commodity assets that have standardized contracts that can be easily transacted –...

Knowledge

Knowledge, a term that is difficult to define, has been claimed by many – individuals, religions, cultures and countries. Since knowledge is something that spans many domains and attributes, it is difficult to have a crisp measurement of it – to determine who has it and who does not. Experience has been used as a proxy for knowledge and this implies that knowledge is an empirical construct that grows with information and experiments. Certain religions have defined knowledge as something that ...

IQ puzzle

Disease has recently been implicated as the cause of IQ differences across countries. There are many problems with this observation. First, IQ is not a robust or absolute measurement. It suffers from the bias of those who design and measure it. If you go to a more fundamental definition of IQ – the ability to survive under adverse conditions by adaptation – it will totally change the picture. After all, the primary objective of biological systems, including humans, is survival. Philosophy...

Friendships, longevity and social networks

It has been shown that both people and baboons show a positive correlation of lifespan to friendships. Although friendships is a difficult parameter to pin down, it appears that stronger and deeper ties are more important than breadth and volume of relationships. From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense as deep friendly ties help humanoids weather stress better and stress is negatively correlated with lifespan. However, if this is the case, the effect of social networking...

Relationship goals

A recent article in the Journal of Personality & Social Psychology describes how goals may be activated unconsciously and instinctively in humans, in the presence of relationship representations, such as parents and teachers. Although setting and seeking goals are considered to be a higher order and strategic activity, under certain conditions, it appears that it does not require a conscious construction but can be merely activated by the psychological presence of known relationships.

This ...