Category: General Thinking

Would you like it more spicy or less? If you were serving 100 people and you kept asking the same till you have 50, who would like it spicier and 50 who would like it less spicy, you would have arrived at the mean. The normal distribution curve is considered the truth of life. Following…

I was recently reading a book called Wanderer, Kings, Merchants by Peggy Mohan who is a language researcher. The book summarises the rise of various Indian languages and the metamorphosis that they have undergone over the millennia. The first language to come to India was the one that was used by the Harappan Civilisation. It…

One of the questions I often used to be asked was; Would AI cause joblessness? My answer always was, a hammer can be used to make things or destroy things. The hammer is not at fault, it is the user, usually, a man wielding the hammer who is at fault. AI will not cause joblessness.…

We all are works in progress. We always have been; always will be. None of us is the same as the day before. Just like a tree which is never the same on a subsequent day as the day before. The trouble is that the change is hard to see. Have you ever woken up,…

Often the outcome of a decision ends up determining our assessment of the quality of the decision. What it also does is that it makes sure that we learn all the wrong lessons. In 1986 as the space shuttle program was reaching maturity, people were losing interest in the human spaceflight program. As public interest…

The model of knowns and unknowns. Known knowns are facts that you know. Known unknowns are facts that you are certain you don’t know. Unknown unknowns are facts that you don’t even know exist. Unknown known is fact that you do not know but others do. Also the most fertile ground of conspiracy theories. When…

We all have an image of ourselves that we have constructed in our minds.  I had this image of myself as being that person who loves to play the piano and would imagine myself playing fluently on a keyboard or a piano. Because of this image of myself, I not only spent money on buying…

The common Silicon Valley refrain goes – Solve a problem and then use technology to scale it. Do not build technology and then look for problems to solve. The underlying assumption is that technology would take the burden of scaling the solution rather than throwing more people at the problem. This can help achieve exponential…

The scientific method is a series of steps  – Observation  – Research  – Hypothesis  – Test with Experiment  – Analyse Data  – Report conclusion This is prescribed by every university in the world as the blueprint to create knowledge. I think this is a huge problem. Here is why… Take for instance the theory of…

Almost all of us have gone through those important exams. In India, it is the 10th and the 12th class. Those board exams are supposed to make or break your life. Then there is the college entrance and so on. We remember them because they are unfortunately turned into life milestones. Do you remember any…