Thinks 869

WSJ: “Fusion has long been seen as a clean-energy alternative to sources that burn fossil fuels and release greenhouse gases. Other technologies and applications being developed in the race for fusion power include powerful magnets, better lasers or radiation therapy for cancer research. Developers mostly in the U.S., Canada and Europe have been riding a wave of momentum since August 2021, when scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory came close to achieving more energy in a fusion reaction than was put in with lasers, a goal known as net gain. Many grew to believe that a breakthrough was imminent. It came in December when the national lab achieved net gain for the first time.”

NYTimes: “In a study published [recently] in the journal Emotion, researchers found that people who habitually judge negative feelings — such as sadness, fear and anger — as bad or inappropriate have more anxiety and depression symptoms and feel less satisfied with their lives than people who generally perceive their negative emotions in a positive or neutral light. The findings add to a growing body of research that indicates people fare better when they accept their unpleasant emotions as appropriate and healthy, rather than try to fight or suppress them. “Many of us have this implicit belief that emotions themselves are bad, they’re going to do something bad to us,” said Iris Mauss, a social psychologist who studies emotions at the University of California, Berkeley, and a co-author of the new study. But most of the time, she said, “emotions don’t do harmful things.” “It’s actually the judgment that causes, ultimately, the suffering.””

Shankkar Aiyar: “The persistent puzzle is the sub-par participation rates of working-age persons. Nearly four out of ten working-age males and three of four females are staying out. The big question is can India combine the scale of its market and working age cohort to propel consumption, investment and growth. It is true the evolution of the gig economy and investment in infrastructure has triggered downstream effects. It is equally true that 42 per cent of India’s labour force depends on agriculture which accounts for a sixth of the national income. This fault line between urban and rural India distinguishes India’s potential and its reality. It could be argued that if China could leverage its demographics why can’t India? History may well rhyme but the conditions vary. China invested in health and education. It boasts of a literacy rate of 95 plus per cent. China crossed the literacy rate of 78 per cent in 1990 – India is still at 77 per cent. The new economy calls for better schooling and skills — the average Indian spends barely 6.3 years in schooling whereas the average Chinese worker has spent about 8.4 years and an American 13 years in schooling.”

Debashis Basu writes about India: “To become prosperous (forget about becoming an economic superpower) and achieve lower income inequality, strong economic growth is essential but not adequate. That growth needs to be sustained for a long time, supported by low inflation and low interest rates. This is possible only when the economy can adapt to shocks, which in turn is possible only through responsive rules, systems, and strong institutions. Otherwise, growth will stall and a majority of the people will not benefit from the sporadic high growth periods. …Only an economy that can quickly respond to higher demand by keeping inflation and interest rates moderate, while ensuring continued growth, will slowly succeed in spreading prosperity and reducing income inequality all around. This calls for highly adaptive and responsive institutions and regulatory systems. For example, in a boom, there will be a higher demand for hotel rooms. Can hoteliers add to the supply quickly enough? Not with scores of state and central permits that take years to be cleared. It is the same for every industry. Unfortunately, no government has done much to make our regulations fair and transparent, and our institutions accountable. Their actions have been quite the opposite — arbitrary, unfair, and unaccountable. Corruption is endemic. As long as all this remains, income inequality will keep widening and taxing the rich will fetch nothing; only votes.”

My Life System #66: Books and Bookstores – 1

When people come to meet me in my office, many are overwhelmed by the wall-to-wall collection of books.

As I wrote in my earlier post on “Reading”: “I buy a lot of books. I think of myself as a book collector. I cannot and do not read every book I buy. I like to have them around knowing that some day the wisdom in that book will be useful and transformational. Books have served me well through the years: which other product gives you a person’s lifetime of knowledge for a few hundred rupees? It is we who have to make an investment many times greater – with our time – to absorb and learn. And in today’s world of instant-everything and tweet-sized content, a book is a true joy to behold. Ploughing through the daily social media feeds may seem exciting but most are empty – like junk food. They can provide that instant gratification but they do not provide the depth needed to enhance our learning. That is something only good books do.”

As a teenager, I used to get books from a nearby library. The school, college, and universities I attended had very good libraries. They became my favourite haunts – I was never much into sports and other activities. Spending a few hours reading was the best “timepass” for me. As I look back, books and BBC’s World Service on radio were my windows to the world.

I have been buying books for as long as I can remember. During my student days in the US, I joined a couple of book clubs that offered books at a discount. New York’s Strand Book Store became a regular haunt – and I searched for bargains. When I returned to India from the US, books filled up many boxes in the possessions I shipped back. And I have kept buying – Strand Book Stall in Mumbai and then Kitab Khana. Bookstores are where I love to spend time when I visit different cities; the serendipitous discovery of titles is a joyful experience.

With Abhishek, I make it a point to visit Kitab Khana once every two or three weeks. I have been taking him to bookstores ever since he was a kid. When we travel, we will spend many hours in a local bookstore. Each store is like entering a new world – the curation is different, the layout varies, and hence the experience is unique.

While my preference is for physical books, I also buy books to read on the Kindle app on my iPad – not every new book is available in physical form in India soon after release. Every inflection point in my life has a book behind it. When I am struggling through a difficult decision, it is a book which ends up providing me guidance on the way ahead. I like being surrounded by books, and every so often, I will pick up a book and browse through it – for the brief period that I am immersed in it, I am lost to the world and come out refreshed and brimming with ideas. I keep my notebook with me so I can capture the connections that reading helps me make.

Thinks 868

WSJ: “Dr. LaPointe calls our current era “learning-based AI.” What characterizes this time is that computers—rather than humans—are now building the models that machines use to accomplish a task. Even “generative” AI is a bit of a misnomer—ChatGPT is using many of the same prediction algorithms and related technologies AI scientists have been developing for years, but it uses them to predict which word to add next to a block of text, instead of, say, whether an image is of a cat. These new generative AI systems, which pull together almost every trick cooked up by AI researchers since the turn of the millennium, are doing things no AI has ever done before. And that’s why they’re being integrated into search and productivity tools from Microsoft, Google, and countless startups in every field imaginable, from healthcare and logistics to tax prep and videogames.”

Louis Hyman: “Computers have failed to produce a huge surge in productivity, but the problem isn’t the computers. It’s that we haven’t let workers tap into the computers’ true power — automation. We still use them like typewriters or calculators.The arrival of ChatGPT — most of all, its remarkable ability to write computer code to automate well-defined tasks — can change all that. Instead of eliminating many white-collar jobs altogether, as people are understandably worried it will do, it has the ability to do something much more powerful: to eliminate what’s boring about those jobs, freeing us up to be more stimulated, more creative and more human in our work. In the process it can drastically increase productivity.”

Magnus Carlsen: “I think there are — there are plenty of players in history who have been immensely talented, but they’re — they’re just too pessimistic. They see too many dangers that are not there and so on so they cannot perform at a very high level.”

Christopher Penn: “Suppose you were able to start two instances of ChatGPT. Suppose one instance could hear what the other instance was saying and respond appropriately to it. You’d sign into one instance and tell it to start writing a blog post. You’d sign into the other instance and tell it to correct the blog post for grammatical correctness and factual correctness. Both instances would start almost competing with each other, working with and against each other’s output to create an overall better outcome. That’s the essence of autonomous AI within the context of large language models. They’re multiple instances of a model working together, sometimes adversarially, sometimes collaboratively, in ways that a single instance of a model can’t do. If you consider a team of content creators within an organization, you might have writers, editors, producers, proofreaders, publishers, etc. Autonomous AI would start up an instance for each of the roles and have them perform their roles.”

My Life System #65: Connections – 2

For the past few years, I have started to think about the origins of some of my ideas. There is never a single ‘Eureka’ moment – in most cases there is a chain of connected conversations or events. The Velvet Rope Marketing came about when I picked up a book by Peter Fader form my bookshelf; the book itself had been bought because I chose to spend a few extra hours in New York’s Strand Book Store because my Air India flight to Mumbai had been delayed a few hours and I had to checkout from the hotel. I wrote about this in “Life’s Daily Clue” (as part of my Proficorn series), and concluded: “It is therefore important for the entrepreneur to go through many different experiences – talking to different people, reading widely, taking time off to be alone, traveling to new places. Each creates a new clue – if one knows where to look. Each prints a new dot – to be joined with others. It is from these clues that new patterns start forming.” As I think about it now, it is much more than a clue – any event can be the start of a connecting thread, which leads us to a new portal of ideas and experiences.

When we are unable to explain or connect the dots, we see it as luck. As I wrote, “At some level, decisions we make cause us to be in situations where we can get lucky. Had my initial efforts at creating a successful business not failed, I would not have started IndiaWorld. When I got an offer to sell Netcore in 2011, was it luck? And when I look back, was it good luck that the buyer backed out at the last minute? What would my life have been had I sold Netcore a decade ago? Life is all about a stream of events and decisions. What we think of luck are just decisions either we made or someone else did. At times, it is better to ascribe it to an unseen force than take up ownership especially when things are not going right!”

My broader point is that we should pay a little more attention to the connections in our lives. One event leads to another, which in turn opens another door. We have to put ourselves in places where these connections can happen. The equivalent in relationships is the idea of “weak ties”: “In social networks, you have different links — or ties — to other people. Strong ties are characterized as deep affinity; for example family, friends or colleagues. Weak ties, in contrast, might be acquaintances, or a stranger with a common cultural background. The point is that the strength of these ties can substantially affect interactions, outcomes and well-being.”

We should put ourselves in situations where our connections can expand – meetings, conferences, travels, readings, reflections. When something interesting happens, think for a few moments on how that came about, what was the chain of moments leading up to that moment. It is these connections that make life so rich and varied, so full of surprises.

As James Burke wrote, “Following the trail of events that leads from some point in the past to the emergence of a modern invention that affects our lives is like being involved in a detective story, in which the reader will know at any particular stage in the story’s development only as much as did the people of the time. As each story unfolds it will become clear that history is not, as we are so often led to believe, a matter of great men and lonely geniuses pointing the way to the future from their ivory towers. At some point every member of society is involved in the process by which innovation and change comes about, and this book may help to show that given average intelligence and the information available to the innovators of the past, any reader could have matched their achievements.”

Our life is a story of connections. I have seen this in my life. There are many in my life that have materialised a sequence of events that has changed the course for me. Whether it was the sale of IndiaWorld or my entry into the world of politics, it is the “connections” that have made all the difference.

Thinks 867

David Brooks writes about the power of American capitalism: “I was especially struck by how much America invests in its own people. America spends roughly 37 percent more per student on schooling than the average for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a collection of mostly rich peer nations. ChatGPT and mRNA vaccines are not the only signs of American technical prowess. The United States accounts for 22 percent of the patents in force abroad, up from 19 percent in 2004. That’s more than any other nation. The level of education is one reason American labor productivity increased by 67 percent between 1990 and 2022, compared with a 55 percent increase in Europe and 51 percent in Japan. American companies continue to generate amazing value. If in 1990 you had invested $100 in the S&P 500, an index of American companies, you would have about $2,300 today, according to The Economist. If you had invested that $100 in an index of non-American rich-world stocks, you would have about $510 today….The American model of capitalism is under assault from the left, which rails against the supposed horrors of neoliberalism and globalization, and from Tucker Carlson-style populists, who often treat American capitalism as a great betrayal. But it has proved superior to all real world alternatives. In fact, I’m kind of amazed. We’ve lived through a wretched political era. The social fabric is fraying in a thousand ways. But American capitalism rolls on.”

Jason Gay: “As I get older, I realize I need to utterly unplug. My ideas will not come from my phone, a Facebook post or the latest tire fire on Twitter. For me, they come from digital distance, from oxygen and exercise and especially from time spent outdoors. There once was a time I could get ideas from staring at websites, but not anymore. I get them from looking at trees. I know I’m not alone. The science is vast on the value of boredom and the stimulus of fresh air—it’s what opens the brain to sparks of creativity and inspiration. It’s why child psychologists want parents to strip away the iPads and help their children get comfortable offline. Hearing “I’m bored!” should not be a parenting emergency.”

FT writes the never-ending brilliance of board games: “[The] greatest triumph [of Klaus Teuber, who died recently, ] was The Settlers of Catan — now simply Catan — which replaced Monopoly in the affections of anyone who knows anything about board games. “Settlers of Catan changed everything,” says James Wallis, a game designer and author of a new history of board games, Everybody Wins. Players gather resources and trade with one another to build cities on an island. Catan is as simple to learn as Monopoly, but vastly more enjoyable — quicker, more interesting when it’s not your turn, building to a climax rather than a grinding elimination of the weak. There’s no secret ingredient to Catan; it’s just a superbly executed collection of good ideas. “You’re involved with the game at all times but not so much that it demands your complete focus,” adds Wallis, “and although there’s a lot of dice rolling it almost never feels that you’re at the mercy of unfair randomness.””

Morgan Housel: “Once you understand the basic principles of your profession, you might gain more expertise by reading around your field than within your field. Connecting dots between fields helps you uncover the most powerful forces that guide how the world works, which can be so much more important than a little new detail that’s specific to your profession. And I’m telling you: The more you look, the more you start to see these connections everywhere. They are endless. John Muir once said, “When we try to pick out anything by itself we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.””

My Life System #64: Connections – 1

Many years ago, my friend Atanu discussed the book “Connections” by James Burke. It is about the flow of history and events – how seemingly small developments had a big impact, how one thing led to another in ways completely unexpected. As Burke writes:

In some way or other, each one of us affects the course of history. Because of the extraordinarily serendipitous way change happens, something you do during the course of today may eventually change the world.

As you will see in this book, ordinary people have often made the difference. A self-educated Scottish mechanic once made a minor adjustment to a steam pump and triggered the whole Industrial Revolution. A nineteenth-century weatherman developed a cloud-making device that just happened to reveal to Ernest Rutherford, a physicist he knew, that the atom could be split. Thanks to a guy working on hydraulic pressure in Italian Renaissance water gardens we have the combustion engine. So you don’t have to be Einstein to make your mark on events. We all contribute.

This is because there’s no grand design to the way history goes. The process does not fall neatly into categories such as those we are taught in school. For example, most of the elements contributing to the historical development of transportation had nothing to do with vehicles. So there are no rules for how to become an influential participant on the web of change. There is no right way. Equally, there is no way to guarantee that your great project meant to alter the course of history will ever succeed.

… This book looks at the forces at work in making the connections that brought into existence some of the most powerful tools and systems that drive the world today: the computer, spacecraft, the production line, television, atomic weapons, plastics, telecommunications, and aircraft. Each of these innovations emerged as the result of a closely linked sequence of events taking place on the great web of history that links us all to each other, to the past, and (in the way that each of us triggers change) to the future.

While Burke writes about the connections that lead technological innovations, the same principle also applies in our life. A chance meeting, a passage in a book, a presentation at a conference – anything can have an impact on the course of our lives. There is a connectedness that at times we don’t see or recognise, but when we look back, we can trace the origins of our ideas and therefore our actions. This is much more than luck – it’s the sequence of events that take place and guide us along; we remember the last one or two, but rarely do we trace the chain back to the origin.

When I was at a low point in life after multiple business failures, I picked up a book, “Competing for the Future” by CK Prahalad and Gary Hamel. As I read it, the business plan for what became IndiaWorld fell in place – leading to a monumental transformation of my future. A few years later, a random conversation with Bhavana in a car journey from Nakoda ji to Jodhpur led to the creation of multiple Indian-named websites. A blog post read by a person I did not know connected me to Atanu who mentioned the Burke book which made me think about the connections in our lives and which is the subject of this post!

Thinks 866

Evan Armstrong: “You probably shouldn’t work at a startup. It’s overrated—both financially and emotionally…There is a romantic vision of startup employment that doesn’t hold up under close scrutiny. Business model risk is extreme and the financial opportunity cost is significant. Typically we assume that a startup is a better overall employment experience, this probably isn’t true for most people. There are some circumstances where working at a startup makes sense! But it is important to go in with open eyes.”

Max Gunther: It is essential to take risks. Examine the life of any lucky man or woman, and you are all but certain to find that he or she was willing, at some point, to take a risk. Without that willingness, hardly anything interesting is likely to happen to you. [via Shane Parrish]

Economist obit on Michael Lipton: “Much of his life’s work was dedicated to devising laws and processes to promote “land reform”. The goal of such measures was to reduce poverty by increasing the proportion of farmland controlled by the poor. Most of Mr Lipton’s fieldwork, and the biggest successes for his approach, were in Asia. His main insight was as powerful as it was simple. In poor countries the neediest people are nearly always in the countryside, and often underserved by public policy due to an “urban bias”. Attending to their needs through well-conceived land reforms brings greater reductions in poverty and inequality than any other approach, including the “green revolution”, which boosted fertilisers and new crop strains to raise yields. In most places, merely having a clear claim to a bit of land is the best guarantee not only against destitution but of possible advancement. Over the past century, Mr Lipton wrote, “land reform has played a massive, central role in the time-paths of rural and national poverty, progress, freedom, conflict and suffering.””

Karen Dillon and Rob Cross: “There’s a common but little-understood reason for that exhaustion. We call it “microstress”—brief, frequent moments of everyday tension that accumulate and impede us even though we don’t register them. Unlike stress triggered by a notable anxiety-producing event (a sharp conflict with a friend or colleague, a health scare), microstress is hard to spot because it is baked into our daily lives. And often it arrives through the people closest to us, making it more difficult to either admit or avoid…What does microstress look like? At work, it can stem from a disagreement in a meeting that you sense but remains unspoken, a colleague who routinely drives incremental work back to you, or frequently shifting expectations from your boss. At home, it could come from hearing about a family member habitually forgetting to take their medicine or a text from your child about a problem that turns out to be momentary.”

My Life System #63: Vacations

For the past many years, I have looked forward to June – because that is when Bhavana, Abhishek and I go on our vacations. Before Abhishek was born, our vacations were whenever we wanted. But once he started school, we had to adhere to his calendar. For me, vacations were the time I got to spend much more time with Abhishek – without the overhang of work.

Our favourite vacation destination is New York. Every third year or so, it has been the place where we will spend 10-12 days. We don’t go around much – at best, day trips to places like Boston, Washington or Philadelphia. NY is a city I know well from my days at Columbia. I don’t drive; so that’s a constraint on where we can go. Jain food is not a problem in New York. And all three of us have something to do. For me, it’s just the joy of walking around the avenues and taking in the sights of the city. In the past few vacations, Abhishek and I took the subway to faraway destinations – especially those lines which travel overground.

Among other cities, Singapore is another favourite and repeat destination. We always stay at the Shangri-La Apartments – they have a nice kitchenette, another requirement given our food constraints. Its proximity to Orchard Road is also good; Kinokuniya, one of the largest bookstores I have seen, is just a few minutes walk. Among other vacation spots: Hong Kong, Bangkok, London, Dubai, Beijing, Shanghai, Sydney. Common to all of them: they are all big cities! We are not much for the rural, countryside feel. A vacation we did a few years was Tokyo. While I had been to Tokyo a couple times on work before, this time around we spent time seeing the city. We also took the bullet train on a day trip to the other end of Japan to Kanazawa, a beautiful ride from the east to the west (and back).

Many of our India vacations tend to be around religious spots with the extended family. Jain temples abound, and are architectural marvels also. These tend to be shorter trips. When Abhishek was younger, we had also done a few Club Mahindra vacations – while the properties were great, the access roads from the nearest airport was always a challenge. I think this situation has probably improved a lot in the past decade.

Before Abhishek was born, Bhavana and I vacationed a lot in Bangkok. A few hours by flight, and we were in a city like Mumbai but with a lot more shopping options! It wasn’t expensive to travel, stay or shop. We liked visiting the various markets and huge malls. This was in the late 1990s and early 2000s – when the shopping options in Mumbai or even India were quite limited.

For me, vacations with family are all about ensuring that they have a good time; it is about planning and anticipating. (My ‘vacations’ are when I travel on work!) From the choice of hotel to the itinerary, my focus is to ensure happy memories with the adequate surprises. Some of my best moments have been with Abhishek, answering his never-ending stream of questions.

With Abhishek grown-up and off to university in the US soon, maybe the next vacations will be more diverse for Bhavana and me – so much of the world yet to see, absorb and learn from.

Thinks 865

Economist: “ChatGPT embodies more knowledge than any human has ever known. It can converse cogently about mineral extraction in Papua New Guinea, or about TSMC, a Taiwanese semiconductor firm that finds itself in the geopolitical crosshairs. GPT-4, the artificial neural network which powers ChatGPT, has aced exams that serve as gateways for people to enter careers in law and medicine in America. It can generate songs, poems and essays. Other “generative AI” models can churn out digital photos, drawings and animations. Running alongside this excitement is deep concern, inside the tech industry and beyond, that generative AI models are being developed too quickly. GPT-4 is a type of generative AI called a large language model (LLM).”

David Perell: “We’ve lost touch with the ultimate purpose of education: to transform our being and improve our character. A century ago, the purpose of education was so widely accepted that it wouldn’t have been worth mentioning. But today, it’s controversial. In the 1970s, three-quarters of freshmen said college was essential to developing a meaningful philosophy of life. Only one-third said it was essential to financial well-being. Today, those fractions have flipped. Runaway student debt and high tuition costs may be to blame. Regardless, American universities have been reduced to farm teams for the corporate big leagues. They assume that you have to accumulate wealth before you can cultivate goodness — as if you can only focus on bettering yourself once you’re financially secure…The treasures of the liberal arts lie not in financial riches, but rather in the wealth that comes with depth and wisdom — the stuff of a life well-lived.”

Brian Chen: “Social media is, in many ways, becoming less social. The kinds of posts where people update friends and family about their lives have become harder to see over the years as the biggest sites have become increasingly “corporatized.” Instead of seeing messages and photos from friends and relatives about their holidays or fancy dinners, users of Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter and Snapchat now often view professionalized content from brands, influencers and others that pay for placement. The change has implications for large social networking companies and how people interact with one another digitally. But it also raises questions about a core idea: the online platform. For years, the notion of a platform — an all-in-one, public-facing site where people spent most of their time — reigned supreme. But as big social networks made connecting people with brands a priority over connecting them with other people, some users have started seeking community-oriented sites and apps devoted to specific hobbies and issues.”

FT: “India’s expanding workforce is envied by greying nations. Forty per cent of its population are under 25, and roughly 1 in 5 of the world’s under 25-year olds live there. Its median age of 28 contrasts favourably with 38 in the US, and 39 in China. But this huge and youthful pool will only be a blessing for their country if they can find jobs. India has a burgeoning middle class and is a global leader in IT, making it well-positioned to win investment from companies seeking to diversify away from China. But the jump to high-end manufacturing, which propelled countries like Taiwan and South Korea to prosperity, has so far been elusive in a nation where almost half the workforce still works on the land, and 46 per cent of adults over 25 didn’t finish primary school.”