Post 1980s Generation in India and China

Both India and China, the two most populous countries, are entering a phase of their respective history when a significant proportion of their population are born without any legacy idealogy. It's going to be traumatic

I belong to the post-80’s generation. How is it possible for me not to be dispirited? It’s enough of a f**king accomplishment that I’m somehow still alive! (TeaLeafNation)

Thinking for themselves

Seth Godin, as usual, hits the nail.

Marketing, like all forms of art, requires us to learn to see. To see what's working and to transplant it, change it and amplify it.
We don't teach this, but we should. We don't push people to practice the act of learning by analogy, because it's way easier to just give them a manual and help them avoid thinking for themselves.

Zombies in Nature and lessons for human beings

This piece in the New York Times reports on research done on parasites. Various parasitic organisms infect their hosts and make their hosts act against their default nature. Spiders, for example, get infected by a virus wasp which programs the spider to build a different kind of web suitable for the wasp larva to breed. Worms sitting inside gammarids make it jump to the surface of a pond, where it inhabits, instead of hiding in the mud. So, instead of protecting itself from predator birds, gammarids become easy prey thus serving the worm's purpose - to move from the gammarid into the bird.

This report focuses on the biological processes which these parasites use to control the brains of their hosts - hence the use of the term zombie to describe them.  For humans, there is the potential case of toxoplasma which they can get from cats. The report says this disease can cause schizophrenia.

While parasites controlling the brains of their hosts is not new knowledge, researchers say the process of how the brain gets manipulated is now understood.

I see a parallel with human activity. In communities which face certain challenges, often there are people who enter these communities and through various processes of endearments and inducements, get these communities to act in ways which may not be optimal or beneficial to them. For example, a politician who wants to maintain a vote base amongst the poor and oppressed classes may brainwash them to act in ways which provides them with some immediate relief but in the long term further cements their poor and oppressed status, thus ensuring more votes in the future.

In the case of religion, it is not uncommon to see priests and clerics direct people to do wrongful acts by controlling their powers to think through a barrage of "divine" messages.

In nature, with the biological processes understood, it may be possible to reverse or control the zombification of species. But in human thought, there is still a long way to go.

Spinoza on Freedom of Expression, Life, Universe and Everything

Freedom of expression has an utilitarian effect.

Spinoza also argues for freedom of expression on utilitarian grounds — that it is necessary for the discovery of truth, economic progress and the growth of creativity. Without an open marketplace of ideas, science, philosophy and other disciplines are stifled in their development, to the technological, fiscal and even aesthetic detriment of society. As Spinoza puts it, “this freedom [of expressing one’s ideas] is of the first importance in fostering the sciences and the arts, for it is only those whose judgment is free and unbiased who can attain success in these fields.”

Libertas philosophandi.

For Spinoza, by contrast, there is to be no criminalization of ideas in the well-ordered state. Libertas philosophandi, the freedom of philosophizing, must be upheld for the sake of a healthy, secure and peaceful commonwealth and material and intellectual progress.

But not absolute freedom of speech.

Now Spinoza does not support absolute freedom of speech. He explicitly states that the expression of “seditious” ideas is not to be tolerated by the sovereign. There is to be no protection for speech that advocates the overthrow of the government, disobedience to its laws or harm to fellow citizens. The people are free to argue for the repeal of laws that they find unreasonable and oppressive, but they must do so peacefully and through rational argument; and if their argument fails to persuade the sovereign to change the law, then that must be the end of the matter. What they may not do is “stir up popular hatred against [the sovereign or his representatives].”

So, as all absolutists say, what is "seditious ideas"?

Spinoza, presumably to allay such concerns, does offer a definition of “seditious political beliefs” as those that “immediately have the effect of annulling the covenant whereby everyone has surrendered his right to act just as he thinks fit” (my emphasis). The salient feature of such opinions is “the action that is implicit therein”— that is, they are more or less verbal incitements to act against the government and thus they are directly contrary to the tacit social contract of citizenship.

To be more precise:

As individuals emerged from a state of nature to become citizens through the social contract, “it was only the right to act as he thought fit that each man surrendered, and not his right to reason and judge.”

[Original Article by Steven Nadler in NYT]

What I gather from this is the delicate balance between individual liberties and social good. At a practical level, societies which operate in a state of equilibrium between the individual and collective will obviously prosper. At every stage, when the balance is skewed to one side, social forces act to correct the balance. In a dictatorship or totalitarian system, for example, in due course civil liberties and freedom of expression will evolve to a level that they significantly influence the fall of the system and vice versa.

It also makes the whole debate on freedom of speech pedantic. Whether or not there are laws to protect the individual in expressing or consuming any ideas of his or her choice, like life which starts to grow even in the harshest of environments, ideas will find their way of expression. We would not have had a peak at a typical day in the life of Ivan Denisovich and been so affected by it had it not been the system which triggered that idea and the process in which it became available to the public.

Purvapaksha, debates and the role of ideas

Justice Markandaya Katju pulled in as Chairman of Press Council of India and immediately made some interesting comments about the state of media. He then further clarified providing a philosophical and cultural argument leading to what should be the role of media today in India. There are three interesting points he makes

He first places the state of the nation as a society in transition and highlights the role of ideas in this:

Today India is passing through a transitional period in our history, the transition being from feudal agricultural society to modern industrial society. This is a very painful and agonizing period in history. The old feudal society is being uprooted and torn apart, but the new modern industrial society has not been fully and firmly established. Old values are crumbling, but new modern values have not yet been put in place. Everything is in flux, in turmoil. What was regarded good yesterday, is regarded bad today, and what was regarded bad is regarded good.
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In this transition period the role of ideas, and therefore of the media, becomes extremely important. At a particular historical juncture, ideas become a material force.
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In my opinion the Indian media too should play a progressive role similar to the one played by the European media. This it can do by attacking backward and feudal ideas and practices like casteism, communalism, superstitions, oppression of women, etc. and propagating modern rational and scientific ideas, secularism, and tolerance.

Then he comments on the debates on Indian television and detachment from classical Indian philosophical practice:

While criticizing, however, fairness requires that one should report the words of one’s opponent accurately, without twisting or distorting them. That was the method used by our philosophers. They would first state the views of their opponent, in what was called as the ‘purvapaksha’. This was done with such accuracy and intellectual honesty that if the opponent were present he could not have stated his views better.

He was commenting on how many shrieky newscasters on Indian news channels paraphrase statements into "burning questions that face the nation" making the deeper issues look trivial.
Lastly, he elaborated on the difference between "uneducated" and "a poor intellectual mind".

I did not say that this majority was uneducated or illiterate. This again was a deliberate distortion of what I said. I never used the word ‘uneducated’. I said that the majority is of a poor intellectual level. A person may have passed B.A. or M.A. but yet may be of a poor intellectual level. 

This distortion by media is not a one-off thing. In India, people consider the letters after a person's name as indicator of his eruditeness. But as Justice Katju says clearly, passing exams and getting a degree does not make you wise nor intelligent. There is a larger sensitivity and engagement that is required for a person to achieve any kind of insight in any subject of his or her choice.
Here are some of the people Justice Katju refers to in his clarification. A reading of these eminent thinkers and intellectuals will do a lot of good for one's evolution.
William Shakespeare. Voltaire. Rousseau. Thomas Paine. Junius. Diderot. Helvetius. Holbach. Charles Dickens. Raja Ram Mohan Roy. Nikhil Chakravarty. Munshi Premchand. Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay. Saadat Hassan Manto. Rahim. Madhavacharya. Emile Zola. 

Chaos, Complexity, Thermodynamics and Entropy

On Chaos:

Chaos is the Anti-Calculus revolution. Chaos is the rediscovery that calculus does not have infinite power. In its widest possible meaning, chaos is the collection of those mathematical truths that have nothing to do with calculus. And this is why it is distasteful to twentieth century physicists.

On Thermodynamics

Thermodynamics, another name for statistical mechanics, is about disordered energy - understanding the relationship between disordered energy and ordered energy.

On Disorder

When we say entropy is a measure of disorder, the disorder is in our head, in our knowledge of the situation.

On Evolution and Entropy

The spontaneous evolution of an isolated system can never lead to a decrease of its entropy (= disorder). The entropy is always increasing as long as the system evolves. If the system eventually reaches equilibrium and stops evolving, its entropy becomes constant.

On Entropy and Knowledge

...our dimensionless entropy, which measures our lack of knowledge is a purely subjective quantity. It has nothing to do with the fundamental laws of particles and their interactions. It has to with the fact that chaos messes up things; that situations that were initially simple and easy to know in detail will become eventually so complicated, thanks to chaos, that we are forced to give trying to know them.

Michel Barranger explains these concepts for the general student. For students of human systems, this syncretism from the natural sciences is essential. Any human collective which is engaged in a common purpose operates has exchanges of energy. And all social systems demonstrate the tendency to move towards an equilibrium, often accompanied by some level of decadence and degradation. Civilisations have appeared in different parts of the world and over history, flourished and then suddenly vanished. There are some communities who become rulers, dominating the entire civilisation. But over time, they fall apart either due to internal struggles or through an external force. The Mughal Empire after Bahadur Shah I shrank as subsequent rulers could not manage the "system" with the result that with a little force, the Mughal Empire was replaced by the British Empire. Like Michel Baranger explains, from one chaotic volume, the system was modified into a new volume which was initially smooth by the 1940s had become (due to various factors) so chaotic and complex that the Britishers found it worthwhile just to leave - creating a new system.

At a practice level, for the individual and for the organisation, there are implications. In business, markets cannot be defined as sets of static silos based on demographic or psychographic parameters. Markets are complex communities of human beings and there is a constant interaction between order and disorder as communities evolve over time. When one sees markets as such, there is a different paradigm of engagement that is required. And for individuals, one cannot be merely satisfied by knowing "analysis" or believing in the "exact" aspect of the "exact sciences."

Related articles:
An interesting paper on evolution and entropy (second law of thermodynamics presented by Kaila and Annila of the University of Helsinki

The Pros and Cons of Meritocracy

Does meritocracy really serve society?

The conventional wisdom is that the best and most intelligent people are taken aside and kept together so that they can be given the best education, resources and tools to further society. They cross pollinate amongst themselves and grow even more intelligent and wiser. They understand and appreciate the systems, are able to design solutions and provide a fair and just administration.

But the argument against meritocracy, based on empirical sociological evidence, is that meritocracy creates homogeneity. This homogeneity often leads to uni-dimensional thinking. Highly intelligent people start thinking in the same way - thus if one person is stuck for answers, everybody gets stuck. The problem becomes unsolvable. Anyone coming out with a radically new idea will automatically be deemed as "nonsensical" or "mad" or simply "dreamer".

Where this argument makes most impact is in selection of students for an educational program - take the best people and put them together or get diversity?

Martin Reuf, a Princeton sociologist, did this interesting research on over 600 entrepreneurs. The main point that he makes is:

Business people with entropic networks were three times more innovative than people with predictable networks. Because they interacted with lots of different folks, they were exposed to a much wider range of ideas and “non-redundant information”. Instead of getting stuck in the rut of conformity – thinking the same tired thoughts as everyone else – they were able to invent startling new concepts.

 Jonah Lehrer in Wired is troubled:

There is something unsettling about Ruef’s data. We think of entrepreneurs, after all, as individuals. If someone has a brilliant idea for a new company, we assume that they are inherently more creative than the rest of us. This is why we idolize people like Bill Gates and Richard Branson and Oprah Winfrey. It’s also why we invest in the meritocracy: We believe that we can identify talent in isolation. But Ruef’s analysis suggests that this focus on the singular misses the real story of entrepreneurship. Unless we take our social circle into account – that collection of weak ties and remote acquaintances who feed us unfamiliar facts - we’re not going to really understand the nature of achievement. Behind every successful entrepreneur is a vast network.

In a way, strangers represent the unknown. Meeting strangers is an opportunity to widen your own view of the world. If you restrict yourself and stay among people of your own "interests", you will just end up being a dogmatic network spouting the same rubbish all the time.