What is bad?

This is first question I ask myself. I sincerely try to define why I call something bad. If we sit down to define the word bad it really becomes a difficult task.
1.Bad is something, which is not good for me.
2.Bad is an unexpected result.
3.Bad is an expected result, but I do not like the result.

Is it really so simple, may be there are other definitions also. I don’t think it is that simple. There are a lot of phrases, proverbs which come to my mind which help me define bad or – rather makes me understand that I cannot define what is bad.

Let us take some proverbs which are supposed to be good and guide us in life
Opposites attract – Birds of the same feather flock together.
Too many cooks spoil the broth. – Many hands make light work.

I see the proverbs that are opposite of each other. So which one of the proverbs is bad and which one is good. If I look at it closely both are good and bad depending on the perspective from which I am looking at them.

Not only with proverbs there has been instances in history, which intrigues me. There have been many instances which prove that what was good at one point of time proves to be bad at another point of time and vice-versa.

There have been many cases ranging from politics to science and technology where bad had become good and good has become bad.

Let us take politics to begin with.

Good becomes Bad
The Americans support the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan to fight the Russian oppressors. They felt they were helping democracy fight communism. They thought they were doing good. This happened in 1979-89. The Russians finally withdrew.13 years later the same Mujaheddin hit at the heart of Americas killing thousands.

Funny the good act of helping Mujahideen has turned into a bad act for the Americans in a period of 13 years.

Same is case for India under Indira Gandhi, nurtured LTTE for whatever reasons, but the same LTTE comes back to kill Rajiv Gandhi. India at one point thought they were helping Tamils in Srilanka survive.

Bad becomes Good
A simple case would be British occupation of India seems like a bad deal. But I think in the long run it is good. If India continued we would be having so many different countries in the place we call India now. Maybe Tamilnadu would have declared an armed war with Karnataka now.

But the British occupation is sole reason we are together. Only somebody really foolish can judge that being as a country together and using each strengths and weakness as complimentary to each other’s state as bad. Yes we have problems but being separate we will have bigger problems. It would be like the small countries in Africa like Namibia, Angola, Ghana which keep on fighting while people are starving to death.

Let us look at science/technology.

Good becomes Bad
The American inventor Oliver Evans designed the first refrigeration machine in 1805. He thought it was good, people will able to preserve food, hunger will be reduced etc.

In reality 1985, scientists discover the ozone, responsible for global warming, rising water, annihilation of coastal in the years to come, lesser rains. The cooling agents in the refrigerators have become unsuspecting weapons of mass destruction.

I am not advocating against technology or growth but it would have impossible at that point to judge that refrigeration can be so harmful. A blessing for mankind turned into a curse.

Bad becomes Good
Any scientist in history was termed either an anti-Christ or mad by the society till time proved otherwise. The examples are enormous. There have been cases in which the scientist had been put to death because he proposed the theory of the solar system and earth not being flat.

What seemed bad to society and people at that point have been accepted as good things that has happened in human history.

The concept of everything in this world is Maya or illusion according to Hindu philosophy.

BAD IS ABSOLUTELY RELATIVE

The statement by a westerner that ” The entire world is a stage and we are all actors doing our roles.”

Practically speaking, killing another human being is bad but not when he is an enemy soldier from across the border.

Driving slow is good but bad for a driver on the race track or driver of an ambulance taking a patient with heart attack to hospital.

So this where I end up. I find it difficult to define bad. So I question myself that “Can I judge something bad?”

Well it is a tough question. We can only judge something good or bad depending on the knowledge we have at that particular point of time.

Because as we all know the past is gone, no point in thinking or worrying about it, but it is a good teacher. History as I explained has taught us “What is good now will not always be good and what is bad will not always be bad”.

When I think through this I realize that I cannot really with full confidence judge something that has happened as bad.

When I cannot classify an event that happened as bad.The question “Why bad things happen to me?” changes to “Why things happen to me?”. Because I cannot call what had happened that day as bad anymore.

Once I stop calling that thing as bad. I don’t feel bad or sad about it. Please note I am not happy about it either. But I come to peace with myself and the world. I tell myself “Okay this happened this way it might have better if it had happened the way I expected it. But as history or time tells, you never know it is good or bad. So I will take this event a little easy and look forward to a better tomorrow.”

I feel relaxed after going through this thought process. I go and lie on my bed and close my eyes. More or less I am fast asleep in 5 minutes. During earlier times, I could not sleep at all.

There is an important criteria what action qualifies for discussion below. I define it as – “Any action done for no direct benefit to the doer but for the person to whom this is being done for”.

Some examples to make this very clear
  • I take a relative of mine to the doctor when s/he is sick
  • I take care of my neighbour’s dog while they are out of town.
  • I guide a colleague when s/he is stuck in work late night by sitting with him/her to fix an issue.
  • I take my brother-in-law for some examination
  • Taking my parents to a temple
  • Giving money to my domestic help for his/her kid’s education
  • Helping ease out traffic at neighbourhood junction
  • Giving money to an orphanage 
Please note that none of the actions listed above have a direct benefit to the doer (i.e. me).

In general in our daily life there is a good probability that everything we do for others is categorised by us mentally as a Help we have done the other person.

The thought is pretty simple, when we do an action for somebody else it falls under one the following 3 categories.
   • Duty
   • Obligation
   • Charity

Let me explain each one of them in detail

Duty – This is something which I have to do for others regardless of what or how I feel about it. These are defined by ourselves .So simply you go ahead and do it when these action present themselves in front of us. Examples of them are
  • Taking care of my sick parents
  • Educating my kids
  • Voting on election day

Obligation – This is something which I have to do for others but I make it clear to them that it is an obligation and I expect something in return. Examples of them are
    • When my neighbour asks me to take of his/her dog instead of quietly accepting and doing it I make it clear ti him – “Sure I can do that. It is little difficult but I am sure you will take of receiving the courier when I am out of town    and you would not mind me giving you contact number”
  • Help a colleague at work but tell him/her  ”I can help you with but you will need to help me out next week with the assignment – right?”

The basic point is when you are doing an obligation, make sure the other person has to return the favour in explicit terms. In corporate terminology “Set expectations explicitly and clearly”

Charity – This is an activity which we do and should not expect anything in return and is done of sheer free will. Note this is different from Duty in that there is no external requirement to this activity.Examples of them are
  • Helping out a neighbour drop the kid at school
  • Taking out my wife’s uncle for a shopping who is visiting from out of town.
  • Giving money to my driver when his/her father is sick

Now that we have defined the 3 categories, we need to deal with them. We should be careful in life never to mix the categories which lead us to heartburns, disappointments and spoilt relationships.It is a simple 2 step process
   •  Before doing any activity for others categorize mentally into one of the 3 buckets and do it.
   •  This is the most important step – Do not mix the items in the bucket after the activity is done ever in the future.

So you need to be clear in your mind on how you are doing the categorization and never ever shuffle the contents of buckets. Look at buckets as a post box into which an activity can be categorized and dropped but can never be taken out.

The tough part is that there are activities which can qualify as under any of the above, so it is up to each individual to classify it accordingly. For example I can say that “Doing the laundry or the vessels” is an obligation to my wife ( ok I am going to get a lecture about this statement from my wife) but on the other hand I can also classify it as a duty as a husband or a father. A typical example of falling into the pit hole – I pay my driver some money for his kid’s school fees and at the time of giving the money I categorize it as charity but may be some months later I ask the driver to come on a Sunday and he refuses. I feel hurt recollecting that I helped but he is not helping me or I tell him so now, which is even worse.

To summarize – Help others by categorizing your actions and never change it after you have done it.

Updated May 11, 2008: Archana Raghuram joined the conversation with a nice book review of Phantoms in the Brain.

Prolog:

Last week we covered what the ultimate belief system would look like using Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit. Thank you all for the stimulating discussion. As i said in my previous post, i want to keep God and belief in a religion outside the scope of this discussion. Ganesh’s comment captures the essential difference between Faith and Belief extremely well. We all liked the quote from Buddha that Arun gave us. NK Sreedhar captures the approach of a sceptic (i am one as well) beautifully in his comment. Scpeticism is a great quality to cultivate for a better belief system. I will talk about another idea in that regard that may be helpful to all. The main purpose of this post is to look at the neuroscientific view to understand what challenges our brain poses.

Left Brain Vs. Right Brain

Dr. V.S. Ramachandran, one of the world’s foremost neuroscience experts discovers, through a series of experiments on patients suffering from a brain disorder called Anosognosia , that the left brain essentially forces us into keeping our current beliefs intact, whereas the right brain plays the role of the devil’s advocate. If you are passionate about Neuroscience, and want to understand how he reached the conclusions that he reached, you may want to read Chapter 7 in Dr. Ramachandran’s brilliant book – Phantoms in the Brain.

To illustrate this, Dr. Ramachandran gives a beautiful example:

Imagine, for example, a military general about to wage war on the enemy. It is late at night and he is in the war room planning strategies for the next day. Scouts keep coming into the room to give him information about the lay of the land, terrain, light level and so forth. They also tell him that the enemy has five hundred tanks and that he has six hundred tanks, a fact that prompts the general to decide to wage war. He positions all his troops in strategic locations and decides to launch battle exactly at sunrise at 600AM.

Imagine further at 5.55AM, one little scout comes running into the war room and says, “General, I have bad news.” With minutes to go until battle, the general asks, “What is that?” and the scout replies, “I just looked through binoculars and saw that the enemy has seven hundred tanks, not five hundred”.

At this point a typical General would like to ignore/rationalize/deny this new bit of information and proceed with his battle plans. Dr. Ramachandran says this is typically what the left brain does – protects us from lots of divergent information creating chaos in our mind by allowing us to delude ourselves. Now, Dr. Ramachandran, asks – what if a scout comes in and says that the enemy has nuclear weapons. That would call for a complete reevaluation of the battle plan obviously. At this point the right brain kicks in and calls for a paradigm shift to handle this new information. Dr. Ramachandran says (it is only a hypothesis now but it makes a lot of sense), the right brain keeps looking at anomalies that come our way and when a threshold level is breached, it kicks in to call for a complete revision of the belief.

Taking time for forming beliefs

Let us say, we formed a belief in our mind, without first considering many points of view (the first step in Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit), we risk forming an incorrect belief. But then even more troublingly for us, the left brain will keep making us believe in the incorrect belief by ignoring/denying counter examples. This is called Confirmation Bias - we only look at data that confirms our beliefs because of the left brain’s need to preserve our beliefs.

For example, instead of trying to find data with a starting position – All XYZ = ABC, you should collect all points of view about XYZ and then form a belief. Even after you do that, when you come across completely contradictory information, you need to revisit the belief again to reevaluate. This is a better strategy and one that sceptics practice. The reason your starting point is important because, given the amount of information we have on the Internet, it will be fairly easy to find supporting data for any belief you may have. Therefore it is important to start with collecting data and then form the belief instead of the other way around.

Strong Opinions Weakly Held

Having strong opinions is a leadership trait and is essential to make decisions about moving foreward. But these strong opinions should be weakly held – that is whenever contradictory information is presented, we order a revamp. I came across this from Bob Sutton’s blog – I am a big fan of his writings. This powerful idea of strong opinions weakly held and a strategy to avoid confirmation bias are 2 big cornerstones of a sound belief system. As we have seen, thanks to the brain, this type of belief system is hard to practice.

Epilog:

It must be pretty clear from the above, that our brain forces us to have confirmation bias, what do you all do to avoid it?

Prolog:

Dharampal’s Beautiful Tree is a 457 page book. I have read it once before i did my last post. But for me to summarize the book accurately i need to read it at least 2 more times and i am in the middle of my 2nd pass. Meanwhile, i thought i will cover something that has been bothering me lately – my belief system. This is something i have been thinking about for atleast 20 years now. The kind of comments i have received on the history series have brought this thinking about belief systems to the fore. In other words, why should you believe what i write or more troublingly why should i believe what i believe? As i interact with so many people, i realize this is a problem that most thinking individuals grapple with. Therefore i decided to present you some of my thoughts. Given the complexity of this subject, i can only make an attempt in the hope that the highly intelligent community that congregates on this blog, will contribute and make it better. Please support me.

Barack Obama does not believe in the US National Anthem

Some of you may have seen this circulating in emails about Obama.

As an Obama supporter, this shocked me. I recalled Obama’s Rev.Wright Defense speech and this picture below in the Time magazine where Obama is seen without the hand on his heart as is the protocol.

Thankfully i have developed a habit these days – Whenever I see such emails, i make it a point to check Snopes which has been playing the exemplary role of digging up the truth. Okay, this Obama email above is false. Here is Snopes uncovering the truth for you.

Made to Stick

I chose to present an Urban Legend above because these are great examples of how easy it is to believe in the untruth. If you analyzed why I believe in it, it adhered to all the 6 principles the Heath brothers lay out in their brilliant book – Made to Stick. The email is simple covering one item, it is unexpected from a presidential candidate, it is concrete, it is credible because it ostensibly ties with Obama’s previously disclosed stances i point out above, it is emotional because the national anthem/flag are emotional issues, and it is a powerful short story.

As we have seen, there are sources like Snopes which you can use to puncture urban legends. But then not all belief issues are as simple. Before we get much further, what does the ultimate belief system look like and what does it entail?

Ability to detect Baloney

Given my general experience with myself and people that i have interacted with, there are very few people who i have come across, who have an extremely sound belief system. And rarer still seem to be people that embody the belief system in everything they do. In my view, that ultimate belief system is something Carl Sagan famously outlined in a popular book and it goes by the name -
Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit. It is a small set of principles that are easy to understand but hard to follow. In my experience, i can say that anything other than belief in God can be subjected to this kit and help test your beliefs.

Chain of Evidence

One of the key principles that Sagan outlines in the kit is – “If there is a chain of argument every link in the chain must work”. For instance, in the Obama example, while at the surface the email seems to be true, one can easily see that the source is not disclosed and it turns out to be a political satire someone wrote which is being passed off as authentic. Snopes also goes further and shows videos, photos of Obama respecting the flag, singing the anthem, pledge of allegiance thereby confirming the point that the photo i showed above is not the whole truth. Unfortunately, most people succumb to the seeming surface level truths because it has been presented in a made-to-stick fashion.

Sweeping Generalizations

This is another weak area for people. It seldom occurs to people that Sweeping Generalizations are the easiest to disprove. For instance, if i said <Substitute your hated ethnicity/followers of a religion> are terrorists. I only need to show one person of that ethnicity/religion that is not a terrorist as a counter example and that statement i made earlier becomes false. But it will be surprising how many people fall for these generalizations because the generalizations adhere to the Made-to-Stick code – they prey on your insecurities deep in your mind, maybe some negative experiences of yourself or near/dear, or popularly covered terrorist incidents etc.

What are your experiences with your belief system, what is hard to do for you?

I will cover next week, how our brain conspires against having the ultimate belief system. That is a critically important consideration because without understanding how belief systems work neuroscientifically, our ability to get closer to the ultimate belief system will be very hard.