SAST Wingees

Comments (33)

Phrase Origins – A1 and Bangalore Torpedo

Prolog:

My research into the caste system is taking longer than planned. It may take another week or two before my history series resumes. Meanwhile, i thought i will write on some lighter topics.

Phrase Origins

I have always been interested in phrase origins because most often there is a very interesting story behind these phrases. In the past we have covered – To fight like Kilkenny Cats , Drinking the Kool Aid and the Red Carpet treatment. Ganesh had pointed to this site word detective a while ago.

Bangalore Torpedo

Recently I came across this phrase “Bangalore Torpedo” from a client. If you think about it, it is an unlikely combination of words because Bangalore is a land locked place and Torpedo is a naval weapon.

Well, it turns out that a british military officer by the name Captain McClintock invented the Bangalore Torpedo while he was stationed in Bangalore. And the weapon is used till date to destroy land mines from a distance without having to go near the land mine.

A1

This one has been ringing in my ears for a while now. A1 is used heavily in Chennai. If you served someone a cup of coffee and asked them later how the cuppa was, they would immediately say “The coffee was A1”. In general, whenever you want to say something is nice, you say it is A1 in Chennai. Not sure if this phrase is used elsewhere in India? Maybe the readers can comment.

Again, when you think about this, A by itself stands for A class and 1 stands for No.1. The question is, why use both A and 1 together? Is it just a tautology or is there something more to it?

Well, my research didn’t lead me anywhere. Then i asked Priya Raju to help and she came up with this A1 from the Wikipedia and this one. A1 seems to be a designation given to a ship of high quality construction and high quality material. Given that Chennai is a port and both the British and Indian Navy had/have operations here, this seems like the most likely origin for this phrase. Interesting, isn’t it?

Epilog: 

Are there other phrases that pique your curiosity? Would love to hear.

Comments (3)

Do you want to Ning?

I am thinking of creating a network in Ning (kind of our own little Facebook) and invite folks who typically visit and post on this blog and hence I believe at least have some common interest.

I would also be extending the invite to “Sast Wingees” – a bunch of us who spent a lot of our time together (I did not say study) in BITS Pilani.

If you are interested in such a network please send your reply to ganeshv@gmail.com. Of course, if you have a better tool/idea or think this to be a waste of time, please add your comments in this blog.

If I see reasonable interest, I will set it up and send an invite to interested parties.

Ganesh

Comments (25)

Building a Belief System Part 2 – What holds us back?

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?

Comments (23)

Building a belief system – Why do we believe what we believe?

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.

Comments (22)

Life’s lessons from Vishwanathan Anand – world’s no.1

Updated Apr 27,2008: Owing to Vijay Arumugam’s comment, i have amended the greatest designation i gave to Anand. Thanks for pointing out Vijay.

Last night we had the privilege of listening to Vishwanathan Anand – arguably amongst the greatest sportspersons from India if not the greatest. He singlehandedly put Chess on the national sporting agenda. Unfortunately, in a cricket crazy nation his accomplishments are often overlooked.

He spoke about his life’s lessons. The words may not be accurate but i have tried to capture the essence. Please read this as if he is speaking:

“I learnt chess at the age of 6 from my mom. And within a few months after that i went to a tournament and promptly lost the 3 games i played. I had a lot of enthusiasm which is an easy thing to do for a 6 year old. Then i went again and again and even won an award for perseverance. I started winning slowly, became the subjunior champ, junior champ, got the IM title and then the Grandmaster title with the requisite 3 norms.

I was in 10th grade in 1987 when i became GM. I was extremely happy. Felt on top. I was staying in the top hotels, playing in top tournaments etc. But suddenly, life was feeling empty because it seemed like there was nothing left to do.

Then i decided to try for the world championship and that gave me something to look forward to. I was also beginning to get used to the trash-talk and other psychological tactics my competitors were using. People used to say i had “great talent” which is an euphemism for saying i am not a champ yet. That told me that people were afraid of me and that i have truly arrived.

I achieved the world champion title in 2000, somewhere on the way beat both Karpov and Kasparov. Again i felt the same emptiness. I was getting into some sort of a routine and then i had a disastrous tournament in 2002 that forced me to rethink everything. I changed a lot of things, tried new openings, dumped my permanent coach etc. Kept at it and finally couple of years later i again won big in a tournament in Mexico.

What i learnt is this – i should not have waited for a disaster to change myself, adapt myself. We have to keep changing all the time proactively.

Last year i again made the goal to try for the world champ. This time an open tournament. I prepared hard but i was a bit detached. I was going to give it my best and try to win and not become too attached. I managed to win.

In sum, my lessons are – be enthusiastic/passionate, do things you love doing, be perseverant, don’t get into a rut, keep challenging yourself and keep adapting.

Hope that helps a bit. ”

Then he took a few questions:
1. Who is the toughest player you encountered?
Kasparov. These days this Carlson boy is a big challenge.

2. Why were the Russians so dominant?
Soviet Union was the only country that played professional chess. It was them versus all the other amateurs from the different countries. They had the system and the seniors trained the juniors. Untill Bobby Fischer came no one could challenge the Soviets.

3. What about India and Indians? What holds us back?
Indians are very creative. But when it comes to getting something done as a group we don’t do it consistently. Our public leadership is seriously lacking. With so many people in poverty we have to do something seriously. We have a long way to go.

With that his session ended. It was amazing how well he simplified and
presented the learnings.