case against mathematics

" Miyathe anayaa ithi maya " - Maya is that which can be measured.

The mentioned verse is from some sanskrit source . Yet to verify the source though. My questions at this point are

1. Is the statement valid according to the philosophical axioms of praxeology
2. If true, does it explain the preference for qualitative mthodology over empirical or analytical methodology by miseans of the world.
3. Is the implication significant as far as mathematics as an appropriate tool in social science ( apriori science ) is considered

Eye opener

When two parties in disagreement over their interests, share same basic premise, the one more consistent to that fundamental premise WINS.”
AYN RAND, FROM CAPITALISM AN UNKNOWN IDEAL

is it a valid statement???? if valid, its implications are huge.. need to verify

The Lessons from AAmir

The lessons from AAmir

AAmir was here in IIMB as part of his shooting for 3 idiots and he had a Q&A session with students

The most important lesson which I had no clue of but which I always wanted to learn as I knew instinctively knew that it was important. Before going into the substance of what aamir had to offer as true argumentation , let me phrase my question which has bothered me for quite some time. Why is profit making so important for everyone. The unstated part of this same question is why is profit making so important for even rich people. More specifically, why is it important for evry rich person to be concerned about making money with every project they embark on. More generally, it was about why money making such a crucial indicator of worth of a person.

Now what I got from AAmir. He started off saying that the role of producer in film making is more than what meets the eye. He is not just a financier of the movie though a producer can have a financier. The critical unobserved role of the producer is to ensure that the movie is made (completed) in a budget that ensures that the movie makes profit. This statement requires some ex-ante assumptions to make a coherent meaning. Assumptions no. 1 is that a movie has a potential revenue given the stars, the story, appeal, director, treatment, sons etc. Assumption No.2 is that the cost of making movie is independent of this potential revenue. Given these assumptions, the criticality and the complex nature of his job is very clear, that of controlling the expenditure schedule and ensuring that the film makes profit irrespective of all other factors..

Now that is a stunner. Irrespective of everything else, a manager has to make profit..or rather it is possible to make profit irrespective of all contingencies.

Now why is this role important in the first place, especially for other stakeholders in the project (film) at all? Here comes the answer for the larger questions regarding role of profit in business or importance of money making. The argument that aamir gave is that, if a film does not make profit ( despite collecting a lot of money), that project would be marked red against all the stakeholders name. This would act as a deterrent for other prospective partners in collaborating with you.

The second important lesson is regarding how he select films. Now the corresponding question in my mind is how can we make decision involving choice given limited information ( bounded rationality) and all uncertainties. He said he relied basically on three factors. One is the script as such. A script according to him, to be successful as a money spinner regardless of the quality of the story or intent, must set a goal in the beginning and the goal must be accomplished and only at the end of the movie. A contrary example he elaborated was that of ‘ Lakshya’. There the protagonist is a lazy teenager as shown in the start of the movie. He says the goal is set with that premise. The protagonist is lazy and the goal is to make him industrious and conscientious individual. The fault there came in terms of meeting the goal during the interval of the movie. The guy passes out from NDA in flying colors and the second half is about kargil war and all. He says the moment the protagonist completed the NDA trial, the movie has practically met with the goal of the movie. The rest was just waste of time. The second factor that he mentioned was the credibility of the creative as well as the production team. The director, producer etc must be credible in the sense that they should be able to complete the movie in right earnest and then be able to release the movie to a wider audience. The third factor was the most crucial one. He termed it thus, the director should have a story to tell. That sounded interesting for the complexity of the construct. What he meant was that the story must be something which has excited the director so much that he badly wanted to tell that story to others. Something like what sashi tharoor described as the motivation for writing books. He had said that for him writing books is like milb given out of a full mummary opf a cow. If you don’t write, it will create immense pain in you. Similarly, the director must feel the utmost need to communicate some story to others. Once the director has this felt need, the rest of the details like the technique of story telling etc will follow through. He also said that he used to gauge this in a director by asking the director to narrate the story and then trusting his own feelings when it gets narrated. Now, that is complex and subjective .


This sets me to another context. What is more important, improving skills in technologies given the quality of mind or improving the quality of mind at the cost of not learning the fad technologies. Learning technologies is more of a defender strategy while the other is more of a prospector strategy.

Hypocrisy Series - 1

Hypocrisy (or the state of being a hypocrite) is the act of preaching a certain belief, religion or way of life, but not, in fact, holding these same virtues oneself. For example, if a person were to tell one to stop smoking cigarettes yet they smoke themself, this is hypocrisy. - Wikipedia

'Do unto Others as you would have done unto Yourself' as Matter (and thus Humans) are the size of the Universe thus the Other is a Part of the Self. - spaceandmotion.com

"That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation - Hillel in response to the request from a prince to teach him the whole of torah while stands in one leg

The idea is to write a seeries on hypocrisy which I consider as the greatestest of all evils. Sorry I am wrong here. I actually understand that hypocrisy is the only evil in the world, the only form of ignorance that one needs to fight against. Why so? the other natural question that follows is whether other accepted evils like murder, stealing, raping etc are not evils as per my understanding. The answer is simple. some of them can be evil, all need not be.

Let me explain one case here. Take the case of murder. It could be that the person who committed it have done it with the understanding that the deceased deserves capital punishment and he would not mind getting such a punishment for the same crime. In such case, as per my understanding of evil, the person has only done the right thing though he might have to pay the price of such an action by a possible costly litigation. But then all human actions have costs and benefits and human beings can only be rational in deciding what is good and what is bad in any given situation given the potential costs and benefits.

Poverty Porn Now and Then

Now: slumdog millionaire

Question No. 1

Theme : Certainty, Uncertainty, Forecast

Question: Which is more difficult to predict or forecast , the short term movement or the medium or the long term movement.

Initial Guess: The most difficult would be the short term one, followed by the long term one. The only possible forecast possible is the one in the medium term. This provided adequate knowledge in the domain and wise enough in general and lastly bestowed with luch and fortune.

Another instance of high return low risk game

In the case of long gestation infrastructure projects,the private sector wants to pass on legitimate commercial risk to the public while keeping the profits involved in the construction of the project in private hands through the instrument named Government guarantees. Is it not another case of high retun low risk game being played by transfering the risk component to hapless tax paying public.

Lucas critique

I liked this idea by Robert Lucas that historical data cannot be the basis for policy making since the parameter estimates from such data is not policy-invariant and hence not structural. In simple words, past records cannot be overvalued for its direction to future.
I would like this concept to be linked to Taleb's thoughts.

Intuition .. a non entity?

Intuition - " thoughts and preferences that come to mind quickly and without much reflection " - Quoted from the nobel prize lecture of Daniel Kahneman in 2002.

I doubt anyone would be having problem with the above definition for intuition. Even I dont have. It is a fact that I have experienced such rush of preferences and thoughts in the face of any stimuli ( the stimuli could be a purchase decision, asked to make opinion on someone, school selection for kids etc). And I also assume that all human beings have experienced such a rush of thoughts and preferences, albeit with differences in content of such thoughts. It can thus be considered as a universal entity. If it is so, then what is the relevance of the title which suggests intuition tto be a non entity. I will try to explain it here.

The problem as I see is the effeorts at distinguishing between intuition and reasoning as exemplified by Stanovich and West (2000) who labelled the distinction as labeled System 1 and System 2. The operations of System 1 are characterised as fast, automatic, effortless, associative, and difficult to control or modify while the operations of System 2 are slower, serial, effortful, and deliberately controlled. Now this is accepted in the ider academic world in some form or other. I question this distinction. My proposition here is that intuition is reasoning by all means, that is sound, calculated and controlled. Only that intuition presents itself as effortless and less controlled.
The reasoning for my proposition is based on the understanding of hierarchy of assumptions built into each one of us, human beings. Labelled differently as implicit and explicit assumptions, cultural assumptions, prejudices, ideology, aesthetics and finally philosophy. Philosophy, according to me is a property of human beings, present in all either in implicit or explicit terms, discovered by the individual or injected in by environment. It is the final layer for all practical purposes at least as of now an at least according to current academic knowledge. ( No wonder philosophy was considered to be mother of all subjects ). Given this fact, which can be verified ( I am not attempting now how to do it), intuition is just a reflection of his or her philosophy.

what is the implication of this ? What is the relevance for this ? How can I use it for predictive purposes ? How can I substantiate intuition as sound reasoning. Well, I have a rough sketch now. People can be tested to thier response for a stimulus (questions, problems, choice preference etc) in intuitive format and more exacting reasoning format. The different formats can be designed in terms of 1. the time given for responding 2. the reasoning for the choice of response etc. Compare the responses for the same stimulus. My guess is it would be the same. I dare to say, even with additional irrelevant information, the responses would be the same. The reasoning for the choice may differ as I expect more politically correct reasoning given for the latter.
My conclusion in pure theoretical grounds. There is nothing called as intuition in opposition to reasoning. There is only fast response and slower response.

Supporting a monster to kill a demon

Supporting a monster to kill a demon

is this one major argument sold well with the common masses and hence exploited to justify (and legitimize) any action by the powers-that -be. Go through some of the recent examples

1. Bailing out corporations to avoid systemic failing

2. Soft approach to terrorism to avoid offending particular communities

Two Ideas

Two Ideas

1. Why not stop collecting taxes when we can print.

One basic axiom that majority share is the need for some form of government for organised living. Given that, the next corollary statement would be that it pays to run any form of government to support the bereaucracy and the military and to built empire. Now where does the revenue for running governments come from. The straight forward answer is that it is taxes collected from the population that forms the revenue for government. It was that simple in those good old days when printing technology was still an unknown and the world ran on gold as the currency. With the advent of fiat currency, there exists the possibility of an additional source of revenue. This is the very simple act of printing money. Now that we have these two forms, the natural question that follows is which one is better of superior. We can understand superiority as cost and ease (efficiency and effectiveness) with which one can collect or receive the revenue. why is this question relevant. Once we can fix one between the two to be clearly dominant over the other, we can go in for the decision of moving completely to that provided we can assume absense of trade off in their relationship.

Taxation as a process require an elaborate bureaucracy to administer the whole system of assessing, collecting the taxes. I would also require support of legislations to provide incentives and disincentives for paying up and underreporting of income by the population. It would require the people paying taxes to go through the elaborate and most often complex process of filing, paying tax and getting the tax returns. Leave alone the ingenuity wasted in time and efffort in finding loopholes in the tax laws to reduce ones tax to be paid. (I am remined of the keynesian digging holes and covering it for generating employment here. What is wealth forms the basis of this rememberance). Printing money is much easier compared to that.

My question at this stage is why not we move completely into printing money for government spending and stopping the taxation process completely.

I know a lot many questions would be asked at this point. some at the top of my mind for which I have adequate explanation as well are as follows.

1. Wouldn't there be a huge inflation issue in printing money in such large numbers. - go full free banking or at least full reserve system in banks

2. Wont' governments spend more and hence print more compared to the current figures. This given the fact that now we dont have a revenue standard to fix spending and hence fix the deficit. - Inflation beyond a point repels votes and at least in democracies it may not be a big issue

3. What about the other information that comes with taxation system - Have a better census system.

2. The risk-return paradox at the top

The commonsense notion as well as the sophisticated notion in the financial as well as the larger social world regarding the risk-return relationship is that one can expect biggger returns only when one undertakes big risks. This notion may not be a law and could just be a principle in the sense that all high return bets may not involve high risks. As a principle, given fair and open process (kind of like perfect market assumption), high return would entail high risks. My guess is it was this principle which ensured that only the deserving gets through to the top in any hierarchy. The reasoning is this. High risk bets would require 1) very cautious approach 2) would require collecting or aggregating information, often real time 3) would require advanced technical as well as economic ( for want of a better term) knowledge 4) need patience as a quality since returns will take time and effort as opposed to instant gratification as a quality 4) Would require elaborate risk management efforts including a supportive family, supportive society at large . To have all these and more, one needs to be not only knowledgeable, but also sensitive to others etc or in short one needs to be high in IQ, EQ and SQ (spiritual quotient) and hence truly deserving.

My concern or rather observation is that this principle is not working as of now. Rather the one which is working is something like this. The game at the top is an entirely different game played by a few. The entry barrier to play this game is kept very high by the existing players. But one an entry is made possible, the game as such is very easy to the point of being dumb. It is a low risk high return game at the top, once we consider money and hence cash flow as the returns. (In fact the consideration of money as the criteria for assessing worth of people is given ground by the intellectuals in the system). An example would be the political and business system as accepted today. and the mechanisms through which this is achieved are Fiat money and Corporate form of privatisation.

Now what is the implication of such a lopsided principle? The ones at the top in any hierarchy would be ones with low intelligence, high in ignorance, high in brawn and very high in short sightedness. What would be result of such people at the top for any hierarchy, be it be family, business or society at large is just second guess.

Keynesian unreason

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist - Keynes

Keynes was a master crook. That is my understanding. For he not only knew what he was proposing as sound economic theory is just unreason with huge propoganda value for governments, he also knew that mankind will accept it unquestioningly as an axiom and allow themselves to be subjugated. Look at his own statement quoted above from his ' classic' The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. But then what is the state of mind to create such theories. My guess is that it is the result of a combination of laziness, greed, pessimism, nihilism and a thrist for certainty.