Goof it up

A couple of days ago, I congratulated a friend of mine for getting promoted. I would not be telling this to you if he was indeed promoted. He was not- I had by mistake, congratulated him for somebody else and in turn ended up rubbing salt on his fresh wounds. Yes, I had goofed up.

Dear reader, this was just the latest addition to my ever growing list of goof ups. I forget to add sugar while preparing tee or worse in some cases add something else. All the 364 days of the year I would remember it, but when the day arrives, I forget to wish happy birthday to my best friend. However hard I prepare my presentation, I tend to miss a very important piece while delivering it. Looking at these problems, I just asked my self - Is there a problem with me? Why do I make so many goof ups? Am I the only one goofing around? There were questions. But there were no answers. I decided to find answers to these questions myself. I looked around, observed situations and asked various people. What I found was pretty fascinating. And that is what I’m going to share with you today.

Since the time I started taking notice, I found almost everybody goofing up some time or the other. I found some of the biggest names in politics, sports, entertainment goofing up big time. I’ll give you an example. A friend of mine was who works for a small firm told me that the VP of his company once forwarded a very critical data to all the employees, and in order to cover up his goof up, he put the fire alarms on while recalling the sent message. For those of you who are not impressed by my observation, here is some scientific research work done by – Dr. Maria Woloshynowych who is lecturer in clinical safety in Imperial College London. She particularly worked to figure out the reasons or patterns of failure in medical sciences. “We all make errors irrespective of how much training and experience we possess or how motivated we are to do it right”

I was relieved. I was so glad to know that I was not the only one goofing around. Almost everybody goofs up.

But wait a second. We humans are supposed to be the most intelligent creatures ever walked on the planes of this earth. And in humans, even the brightest ones have been found making the silliest of the mistakes. How can that be true? What could be the reason? These questions led to me this book: Why we make mistakes: “How we look without seeing, forget things in seconds, and are all pretty sure we are way above average”
In this book the author attributes our goof ups to the way our brain is wired. He suggests that “What we believe is what we see” – it’s not the other way round. We think that what we see is actually there, but in some cases for variety of reasons that isn’t the case. Our brain fills in a lot of details in what we see and that can lead to a lot of errors or so called goof ups. We look but don’t always see.

This reasoning sounds sufficient enough. But the engineer within me refused to accept it. It needed something that can be generalized, something that can be modeled. So I came up with my own interpretation and modeling of goof ups. It’s a bit technical and requires you to have basic knowledge of .NET framework.
Consider your brain as .NET CLR and yourself, the user of the brain as an application. Remember whenever I say CLR, it means brain and whenever I say application it means your body. At runtime (while you are alive) you (application) host the brain (the CLR). The CLR has a number of threads running in parallel to handle multiple basic tasks like listening, looking and feeling. The CLR provides you ways to create threads i.e. you can yourself start doing multiple things together like driving and talking on phone. What it does not provide or maybe we are yet to explore is a way to synchronize application created threads. So in the lack of any synchronization mechanism, application threads more often than not end up corrupting each other’s data. And this corruption in my humble opinion leads to goof ups.
Going by this theory, we can avoid goofing up by having only one thread at a time that it by doing only one thing at a time.

As we all know now that goof ups do happen regardless of how smart or expert we are. We also know that in this world normalcy is driven by what majority of people do. And since majority of people goof up, goof ups are considered normal. So if you have not been goofing up recently, it’s time to return to normalcy. It’s time to goof up :)!

Cheers!
Amit

Modeling the inherent judgements

Hello Reader, Hope you are doing well.

Let me start with asking you this question: "How many times in a day, do you make choices?" Consider choices of all kinds and then answer. Tens, a few hundreds?
What if I tell you the answer as per my theory is way beyond that.. let me say it is countless. If you don't find myself agreeable, read on.

Hey, did you realize you just made a choice? You chose to read on while you had several other alternatives. Chances are high that even if you did agree, you chose to go ahead and still read it. Get the idea? Whether we realize it or not, our subconscious mind is constantly judging things around us and making choices based on that judgement. I'm choosing to blog the inconsequential blahs going around my mind while you are choosing to read it.

We might find hard it hard to believe but we human beings are inherently judgemental. Even the most benign looking feelings/emotions have a judgement story. Let's take the example of friendship to elaborate what I'm saying. We meet thousands of people in our life time. Why is it that we become friends only with a handful. And even within those, we bond at varying degree.
That is because your mind has a very complex algorithm to judge a person. And when you meet a new person, your mind uses this algorithm with various parameters and finds out some data which it stores somewhere. Any time you meet this person again, any information you hear about them, any activity that you get to know done by them re-executes the algorithm with the current situational data and the existing (older) information stored about the person.
The re-execution modifies the information stored for that person. The information is constituted by a set of attributes that our mind is interested in. This information is what helps us determine the type of person and in turn judge the person. Notice that this algorithm is very mature since it has been present since millions of years (since the incarnation of human being). The algorithm seems very flexible and self-learning. Based on the experiences in life, it gets changed. All such updates made to this algorithm are accumulated and passed over to the next generation.

The above model of algorithm and storage of data about persons to judge them - can be easily extended to non-living objects as well. Remember that models are supposed to assist in understanding a complex system. They might not represent the true state of affairs. Same is the case here. My model might not be accurate but it does clarifies the workings of the underlying system which happens to be understanding how we judge and make choices.

As I said, We are constantly making judgements and choices based on the outcome of that judgement. I choose to stop here and give you a break from the inconsequential blah :).

Cheers
Amit

You are living in debt, Dear Reader

You might be very well off having a comfortable life with no financial liability, Dear Reader. You might even be one of the richest in this country. But you are carrying a handsome amount as debt on your shoulders. And you are NOT alone. Every living indian is bound to be at least as indebted as you are in this regard.

I'm not an economist, Dear Reader. Nor am I a statistician. I do not understand the fancy words relating to economy and bugdet. Being from a middle class family, I understand one basic undocumented rule though and as per the rule - "you should never spend more than what you earn". And I got to know that this rule happens to be violated every year since the birth of independent India. Every year the expenditure by the government turns out to be more than all the earnings put together. And each passing year the gap between the earnings and spendings becomes wider. So the question is - who is supposed to pay this ever increasing amount of debts and associated interests? The government. Right? But then how can the government make this extra money? Since whatever they are making, it can't even match the total spedings, how can one imagine goverment earnings to outnumber the total spendings?

You look scared, Dear Reader. Don't you? You are right in guessing whose head this burden lands on to. It is you who will have to pay out this burden. And if you happen to complete your life without having to pay out, don't be glad - your descendants will have to shell out their earlings to meet the demand.

OK. Let's do some interseting stuff before you loose interest. Let's do some quick mathematical calculations to put things in perspective.

Total external debt on indian goverment as of September 2009 = USD 242.8 billion
Total population of India as of 1st January 2010 = 1.15 billion

Let's for the sake of simplicty, ignore interests on the debt for now. And let's also ignore the increase in the external debt from sept 2009 to december 2009.

If uniformly distributed across the population, then the total external debt on an indian = USD 242.8 / 1.15 = USD 211. Considering current rate of exchange (46 Rs/USD), this amounts to 9706 Rs. And remember that the gap beween the earnings and spendings is becomming bigger with each passing year. And this increase in difference is so big that it beats the increament in indian population to shoulder the total debt each year. And thus in effect, the debt/indian is ever increasing. So to summarise the calculations, let me conlude by saying

Debt on you = N * (9706 + X)
Where N is the number of dependents you have
X is an ever increasing number with respect to time. X ~ 0 for 1st Jan 2010.

What did you say? Did I hear you saying "the amount is manageable"?
May be it is for you. May be it is small enough for you to even bother about. But it certainly is not at all manageable for the 80% of working indian population, the population which struggles hard to make both ends meet. This fraction of the population, even if they want to, can not make any contribution in shouldering the burden. So it again came down to people who are earning enough to be able to contribute - it again came down to you.

I see you doing some mental calculations (probably to figure the lump sum amount you might have to pay out). Does the amount still seem manageable, Dear Reader?

First thing first

To be honest, i never felt any urge to blog. This would perhaps explain why am I starting to blog so late despite being in touch of internet for several years. But i've been watching people doing and talking about it. Though I could never exactly understand what makes people tick when it comes to blogging. Recently one of my friends suggested me to take blogging as an active interest. The same old question - "Why blog" came up and struck me. This time I decided to do some alalysis myself to understand Why people blog. I'll point out some of what i came up with -

• In psychology, there is a well established theory known as "Maslow's heirarchy of needs for humans". I just love its simplicty and its universal appeal. And somehow we all already know this. The theory establishes relationship between social status of an individual and the kind of needs the individual would have at a particular status. As a living creature, we have some very fundamental needs - needs like food, sleep. If any of these fundamental needs are not fulfilled, we may cease to survive. Once these fundamental needs are appropriately fulfilled, we start worrying about our safety/stability. Safety from the possibility of going back to the older or even worse state where even the fundamental needs were not taken care of. These are called safety needs. Once we have an OK kind of personal/professional life, we start feeling the need to fulfuill our emotional desires like being part of the society, having bunch of good friends etc. These are social needs. Once we have all these three kind of needs fulfilled, we start feeling the need to be admired, to be appreciated etc. I think blogging comes here. People blog because they want their voices to be heard, their view points to be appreciated, admired and validated. And the fact that most bloggers are educated people who have the priviledge to enjoy their lives with their fundamental, safety and social needs met - vindicates this.
• Some feel that it gives them power to disseminate information pretty quickly and to a very broad reader base. While some blog just because others around them are doing it and they don't want to be left behind. Some use it as a stress buster. Several others are just doing it for experimentation - What does it mean and how does it feel to blog. This particular blog comes under this category. Another reason to blog is that blogging has become fashion today. And not having a blog doesn't sound that cool. Right? :)

Incidently and quite intertingly, one line in point 1 - "because people want their voices to be heard, view points to be understood, appreciated, admired and validated" is compelling me to write more about how we humans want our view points be admired and in process get ourselves validated from others. May be that is the topic for my next post.

Till then, good bye !
Amit