Oh Jesus! to Ohh! Jesus?

It's been a while since I wrote something here. What have I been upto? Basically some books, some gaming and some "consulting-investing" in the stock market besides the "Internship".

The internship was not much and I would rather not talk about it. I would rather talk about a recent book I read.

The Book - 

I usually choose the books I read carefully. Management education significantly increases your opportunity costs of spending time in not preparing PPT's but reading books. This time though - I decided to take a leap of faith and decided to judge a book by its cover. The book was - The Last Templar by Raymond Khoury.

Warning - Spoilers ahead.

For those who have not heard the term "Templars" , let me elaborate. If you know about them and would like to know about the book experience, you can skip the next  paragraph.

When I thought of Templars I imagined assassins who were hired by the holy church to protect them and their secrets. But this was partly true. They were trained fighters who were supposed to protect the people who travelled to Jerusalem for pilgrimage. The more interesting thing about them is how they were wiped out after they grew extremely wealthy and powerful - partly because they become too rich and powerful and more interestingly because they knew some big secret about the church - something that could change the way people looked at Christainity, the Church and even Jesus.

Christainity has had a bloody and mixed past. Spreading your relegion and letting people decide whether or not they should embrace it is one thing. The church took it to an extreme - any person who either refused to follow them or did something that was unrelegious was punished severely. Punished how? Well no points for guessing - Crucified. Sometimes upside down. Ouch!

So what would happen if somehow, one day, Jesus himself came down and said -

"Chaps! Whatever has been written in the Bible - you guys are taking it too seriously. I was a simple guy, a carpenter. I am no Son of God and neither did I come back from the dead. Like all men, I too liked a Lady and one day got her pregnant. The Pope is no holier than you guys and this whole christainity is too hyped. I never intended it to end up this way!"

An FBI agent and a beautiful (like they always are) archeaologist hunt for that ultimate truth that could change the world and shatter the way we look are relegion. So far so good!

What I liked & disliked about the book - 

1. Practical - Even though the author is dealing with something that is thousands of year old, he has done a great job at putting things in the current context. Mass killings, Discrediting Science and forcing people into accepting a faith is something that has always been associated with relegion. Even today, we see people who just do not want the world to advance because it is somehow unholy. I mean, who would have thought that Jesus would have issues with Test Tube Babies. He would have a much bigger issue with countries killing in the name of relegion and people attacking each other because they have different beleifs. 

2. Critical - The author has used the storyline, although weak, to really analyze the things that are wrong with the world today. How we know so less about what we believe in. He has made logical arguments, coupled them with verifiable facts to make you think about whether what you believe in is really the truth or merely a (mis)interpretation of some mortal. Now, that would really piss off many!

The book has a weak story line. Basically, the author tried to do a backward induction. He knew the end - an awesome end I must say - and then worked backwards. This meant, a story with a lot of twists and turns - a bit too much to digest at times. The result - A bollywoond story with "firnag characters" who travel around the world in search of the truth - while a love story runs parallely. A story with too many coincidences loses its charm after a point. This book suffers from that. 

Ultimate verdict. If you are super-free and really interested in knowing about relegion - do go ahead and read the book. Some parts are good where an over-informed crazy history professor reveals some unsettling truths. 

Philosophy on Love

Why this topic?

It's interesting because we never really think what love is - it's just that intangible "thing" that surrounds us in many forms - love for our parents, love for our lover or love for an object.iT  It is relevant because at some point in our lives we are all touched by it in some form or the other. 

So what IS love?

If we look at the dictionary meaning of love (Yes a Wiki page exists!), we see that it is a form of emotion which leads to a strong attraction or sense of personal attachment in form of kindness, compassion etc. The problem is that although this "definition" tries to objectify love too much - and we know that Love is the last thing that can be objectified. 

Worse still, I personally would be interested in understanding why we love in the first place. Is it some means to an end (I know this might belittle the concept of love for some of us), but one needs to think that their might be some selfishness, albeit of benign nature. in loving someone. It is easier to see this mild selfishness when one talks about Love for good food.. or Love for Beer.. So do we use the term too rashly? Is loving someone the same as loving someone? Do we objectify the "person" we love too? I hope not. 

Philosophers have an answer?

Just like I think about this weird topic at times, many philosophers scratched their beards (almost all of them come with one) while thinking about this four letter word. 

So one of the first ones to "define" love was this bearded old guy, better known to us by the name Plato. He simply said - 

"Love is our search for our alter ago, that part of us that will make us whole again. Love is a remedy for an ancient wound inflicted on us by the gods, who divided us in two as a punishment for our arrogance. Since those primordial times, each of us is only half of himself or herself, searching relentlessly for completion"

Colorful definition. If we ignore the "Gods punished us part" the definition makes a lot of sense. Come to think of it - we often say that we found our better half when we (think) have found love. 

Socrates, yet another bearded guy modified this definition a bit and said that love is not just yearning for completion but yearning for goodness and completion. When we love something, we are really seeking to possess the goodness which is in it. Not temporarily of course, but permanently hopefully. The one interesting aspect of the definition is the search for good - but then are we not always in search of something good - throughout our lives? However, is it not also true that we often fail to find the other half that is the object of their love, the one which motivates their striving - something which they want to possess perpetually. 

But the irony is that even if one half knows and finds it - the other half may not be competent in realizing the same. That should not be confused with "One sided love" because I think that the fineness of the argument lies in the intensity of love form both sides. Imbalances lead to misunderstanding - never allowing either sides to achieve that completeness.

Love or desire? 

Few people recognize it, for in the confusion of  their lives human beings know that they have desires, but they do not know what will satisfy them. When hungry,  we eat, thinking that food is the object of our desire. But  once we have eaten, we desire other things, and so on, till death (hopefully) puts an end to it. This incapacity leads nowhere and people seldom find love on this path. 

Path to successful love - the bottom-line!

Here I have tried to highlight the key points that lead to true love. It feels weird to put down "bullet points on love" but I'll still do it. 

I'll end it here.. I am a little confused myself. This Love seems like an untamed devil - almost impossible to define and "feel".

More random stuff !

What is Chaos?

These are systems which are non-deterministic. However, the interesting bit is that they are often governed by deterministic equations. The sad part is that it is difficult to reverse-engineer this process. So if you look at a random card generator in a casino, you might think that it is completely random. However, the machine uses certain rules (for the inquisitive minds – look up Rule 30 in 2-D cellular Automata) to generate this card. The trick lies in the difficulty of deciphering this process as they are the closest realizations of true randomness. Chaotic systems are also very sensitive to initial outcomes, a small change in the input can lead to massive changes in the way the future values turn out to be.

Why does Chaos matter for the oracles of today?

Now I hope that most of us agree that many things in life are chaotic and this is what makes them interesting. Say you are at some state and want to predict the future – assuming the system is chaotic – the initial error can accumulate and lead to massive difference in the prediction and the future reality. Added to this there might be some Black Swan (See previous post!) awaiting you. I know it is a bit fuzzy and abstract at this point – So let us take an example – Sorry but the math cannot be delayed anymore!

Say we have a function – x (n+1) = 4*x(n)*(1- x(n))

For Slightly different starting values – let’s see how the future values turn out. I made a small graph for some (read just 3) values. The errors in the initial input are less than 1.5% and yet the future prediction can be way off. If we start at 0.75 (highly unlikely) it turns out to be a very stable outcome. Now think of anything that diverges from this as your prediction error and look at your ability to predict. This clearly highlights why prediction systems often fail! Moreover, we seldom know the precise form of the equations and often calibrate it based on past data. Imagine what a 5-10 % error (acceptable by many standards) can do to your predictions! So we need to know whether the things that we predict – markets, weather and book sales are such chaotic systems.

The financial market analysts who “claim to” know the way the market will behave rely on the equations (not developed by them) to do this. Given the present state – the future should be deterministic they say. However, what they fail to realize is that such equations are extremely sensitive to inputs and often ignore (Alas!) the “highly (im) probable but highly consequential” Black swans.

You can't see the future precisely because you don't really know what's causing it. This is the huge problem with us. We almost always justify things and associate a cause to things that were unexpected before they happened. As Taleb says – “We attribute our success to our skills and our failures to all external factors beyond control”.

How do we deal with Chaos? We despise it. In-fact order is substituted with elegance. Remember the time when you saw an elephant shaped cloud? This might be the pinnacle of our ignorance – how we want to simplify things, put them in order for our convenience. The only sad thing is – reality is a zillion miles away! As a result we often see luck being mistaken as skill in many places (think if those intelligent investors).

The problem does not end here –

Till this point I have argued that we are terrible at predicting. It gets even worse when we try to justify our forecasts and fail to learn from history. However the problem bigger problem is – we are always too optimistic about stuff. We tend to over-value a lot of things in the present and this is bound to make us suffer in the future. One important idea made famous by Rob Shiller (Yale) is that of “Irrational exuberance”. How we attach a irrational/sentimental value to things we possess – making them seem more valuable in the present. At the risk of making the discussion less general, lets venture into the field of economics (surprise!).

Updates

Yeah! This one would rather be an update on what has happened in the past 6 months (since my last blog) rather than one of my deep insights as usual. :D

So half an year has already has passed and it has been one of the most uneventful periods. Not that I had many resolutions in mind. You lose weight automatically in a place like Chennai and you don't have money to booze and I guess those are the top two things on many New year resolution lists.

Apart from the few trips I made (2500 km - 4 day - Kerala and Ooty - Road-trip) the last semester was packed with indolence (without the pleasure). Days and days were spent doing things that one is not expected to do in college, taking a philosophical look at life, subverting the usual and boring monotony. I also finally managed to finish Fountainhead (Ayn Rand) which had been on my shelf for the past year with a really frustrated book tag residing in its pages. I had ample time (more than ample I'd say) time to catch up on a few TV series. That is becoming my new idea of adventure - Sad!

As usual, my procrastination let me down once again (as if I was expecting something else) and much of my final year project work was done in the last 2 months (it's an year long work schedule - ideally!). A visibly "pained" (apologies for the lingo) professor asked me to take an extension and said that he has no clue how I should manage my thesis, courses and other things. Sadly, neither did I.

On recent happening - the IPL controversy. Yeah! It's hard to ignore a bunch of losers making a mockery of the game I (used to ?) adore so much. Why Mr. Srinivasan was kept the chairman after having such a stake in CSK? Just like many other Indians feel, it's a mystery to me too. But that is Indian politics (if I may call it that, since more than half of the "managers" are politicians and won't know the difference between a doosra and a yorker) at its best.

Looking forward - Inspired by Mr. Robert frost, I have decided that I would rather go against the natural flow of things, There seems to be some fun left in disturbing the natural order of things. Hopefully it would pay off. Would be finally leaving the southern part of the country where I somehow managed for 5 years. Loved every bit of IIT and despised every bit of Chennai (the weather is to blame)!  :O

Thinking – Fast and Slow

An amazing book by Daniel Kahneman on how we think and how we think we think! What makes the book great is the fact that it uses examples and anecdotes that are truly counter-intuitive for the first time. He has summarized almost all of his research that he did over 20 years and got him the Nobel Prize.

Two systems – Kahneman argues that we have two kinds of brains. Let’s call them System 1 and System 2. System 1 is where all the intuitive thinking and knee-jerk reactions come from. The interesting part is that this area of your brain is working all the time – beyond your realization. So the next time you think that you are acting greedily – it might not be in-grained in your nature. It could be your System 1 playing a huge part in you doing so because of your surroundings. He extends this idea and goes into the exciting world of priming – How minor perturbations to the environment can affect your behavior. His research shows that (as an example) people are more likely to believe in written words when they are in bold font, when they are written in simple words and even when they have a musical rhyme to them. (Woes unite foes against Woes unite enemies). Even thoughts that are easy to recollect are deemed more believable. This is the realm of “cognitive ease”. System 2 is where all the logical stuff goes on. So if you are asked to multiply 17 and 24 your System 1 would be stuck (unless you are one of those Human calculators!).

Amazingly, our System 2 relies a lot on System 1 and this is the cause of many cognitive biases/errors. This does not mean System 1 is all that bad. Remember the fact about – Laugh for sometime every-day.  Kahneman shows that this is true because of System 1. So when people are asked to hold pencils between their teeth in such a way that they smile – the show positivity when shown some pictures/videos. Holding it the other way – rubber between teeth – so that it makes you frown results in negative thoughts with same pictures/videos. However, we ought to train System 2 to be more self-sufficient and reliable – to not trust System 1 (intuition) all the time. If all this seems trivial consider this –

“People are more likely to solve problems/puzzles when they are written in small font – making it difficult to read. Why?”

Because difficulty in reading strains your brain and System 2 takes over. Once in action you would not be very likely to give the intuitively obvious answer straight-away. By virtue our System 2 is lazy! So lesson drawn – Moderate stress during exams is good! Get those System 2 horses running before the big exam!

“I’m in a very good mood today, and my System 2 is weaker than usual. I should be extra careful.”

On the other hand, your system 1 is happy when you are at ease – “Cognitive ease leads to positive emotion”. He shows that people are more likely to invest in stocks that have pronounceable ticker symbols – and such stocks do well in IPO’s. That has been tested statistically and it is indeed amazing! Other thing that System 1 is very good at doing is finding an explanation for anything that is a major event. Stock market movements and NEWS are often related everyday – NNT pointed this out very beautifully in his book Black Swan – How such events are random, consequential and unpredictable. Yet, almost always we seem to give explanations for this – the so called market gurus have made this a BIG business! All those CNN news can actually make you dumber (as Taleb pointed out). 

Kahneman calls this “associative cognition”, however I think this is more a fallacy that (I hope) can be corrected by training! Although it is true that an even will have a cause, System 1 will accept the most possible and intuitive cause – something that is easy to relate to, easy to explain but by no means the correct one. Worse still, deeming this explanation unbelievable is the Job of System 2. However, most of us just don’t use it. As Robert Shiller (I think) points out, unlearning stuff is important too! Something’s just don’t fit in to regular explanation framework and we should learn with it. The problem is – where do we draw the line? Be an oracle or an ignorant guy?

Making a good first impression – Yes! The age old saying is true. Kahneman studies this in the context of the halo effect. Traits which might be both positive and negative are interpreted depending on the notion we have about the person. So making a good impression would not only help you but it would transform your negative traits into good one. An intelligent – illustrious – stubborn guy is better that a stubborn – intelligent - illustrious guy. Order matters! Sadly we might not control that always!

“The sequence in which we observe characteristics of a person is often determined by chance. Sequence matters, however, because the halo effect increases the weight of first impressions, sometimes to the point that subsequent information is mostly wasted.”

Also, next time you ask someone for advice (which one to choose), do not give them your opinion first!

More on System 1 – Kahneman argues that System 1 is your intuitive brain and many times beyond your control. For example - Evaluating people as attractive or not is a basic assessment. You do that automatically whether or not you want to, and it influences you. He talks about Mental Shotgun – how a train of exogenous thoughts may cloud your judgment. As an example -

Evaluate (as quickly as possible) if the following statements are literally true.

Some roads are snakes.

Some jobs are snakes.

Some jobs are jails.

Were you slow with the 1 and 3 statements? Probably because they might be true metaphorically and that made you stop – even though it was out of context and your mind meandered to a different question.

Taking this a step further the concept of Heuristics and their ability to bias our answers was one of the most interesting parts of the book. As he puts it –

“The normal state of your mind is that you have intuitive feelings and opinions about almost everything that comes your way. You like or dislike people long before you know much about them; you trust or distrust strangers without knowing why; you feel that an enterprise is bound to succeed without analysing it. Whether you state them or not, you often have answers to questions that you do not completely understand, relying on evidence that you can neither explain nor defend.”

The heuristics and bias approach simple means that you (your system 1) always needs to have an answer. Sadly, you always rephrase a difficult question with a substitute one – something that you think is an easier one to answer.

“We concluded that people must somehow simplify that impossible task, and we set out to find how they do it. Our answer was that when called upon to judge probability, people actually judge something else and believe they have judged probability. System 1 often makes this move when faced with difficult target questions, if the answer to a related and easier heuristic question comes readily to mind.”

For guys who have read – Polya (How to solve it) this might seem painful! Polya says - “If you can’t solve a problem, then there is an easier problem you can solve: find it”. But despair not! This is not the System 2 heuristic. Rather this is the System 1 heuristic – which is often in your sub-conscious mind and may be wrong more than often.

This is pretty much the first part of his book. He later digs deeper into this interesting study. Hopefully, it will change the way we think – maybe make the System 2 less lazy and System 1 less ambitious! 

This is a very good book to read. Also read Black Swan - one of the book that inspired Kahneman!