Lost Einsteins

Imagine living in a world where people debated insightful papers such as this one from Raj Chetty - Lost Einsteins: How exposure to innovation influences who becomes an inventor. 

Relatively little is known about the factors that induce people to become inventors. Using data on the lives of over one million inventors in the US, this column sheds light on what policies can be most effective in increasing innovation. In particular, it shows that increasing exposure to innovation among women, minorities, and children from low-income families may have greater potential to spark innovation and growth than traditional approaches such as reducing tax rates.

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If women, minorities, and children from low-income families were to invent at the same rate as white men from high-income (top 20%) families, the rate of innovation in America would quadruple. Our findings therefore call for greater focus on policies that harness the under-utilised talent in these groups by providing them greater exposure to innovation. Such policies could range from mentoring programmes to internships to interventions through social networks. Our analysis does not tell us which programs are most effective, but it does provide some guidance on how they should be targeted. Targeting exposure programmes to children from under-represented groups who excel in mathematics and science at early ages is likely to maximise their impacts. Furthermore, tailoring programmes to participants' backgrounds may be valuable: for example, women are more influenced by female rather than male inventors. 

These are extremely simple and insightful analysis to help humanity. Alas! this will be extremely simple and insightful only if humans focused on what matters. 

One side keeps on talking about religion and other-side having reached the pinnacle of virtue signaling, is now immersed itself in wokeism where even a some book titles are not to said aloud. 

These morons have no sense of history and yeah, they neither understand the preciousness of freedom of speech. 

Dunning-Kruger effect has spread more rapidly than covid and there is no vaccine for it except self reflection. 

Montaigne's Wisdom

The soul in which philosophy dwells should by its health make even the body healthy. It should make its tranquillity and gladness shine out from within; should form in its own mold the outward demeanor and consequently arm it with a graceful pride, an active and joyous bearing, and a contented and good-natured countenance. The surest sign of wisdom is constant cheerfulness.

- Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

The Book of Minds - How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings

Conceiving of a universe of possible minds can discourage human hubris, and advises erring on the side of generosity in considering the rights and dignity of other beings. But it also enables a literally broad-minded view of what other minds could exist. Mindedness needn’t be a club with rigorously exclusive entry rules. We might not (and may never) agree about whether plants, fungi or bacteria have any kind of sentience, but they show enough attributes of cognition to warrant a place somewhere in this space. This perspective also promotes a calmer appraisal of artificial intelligence than the popular fevered fantasies about impending apocalypse at the hands of malevolent, soulless machines. There is no reason to suppose that today’s AI has any more sentience or experience than the rocks from which its silicon is extracted. But it, too, shows intelligence of a kind, including the ability to learn and predict.

To suppose that something like artificial consciousness will emerge simply by making computer circuits bigger and faster is, as one AI expert put it to me, like imagining that if we make an aeroplane fly fast enough, eventually it will lay an egg. Computers and AI are taking off in the “intelligence” direction of mind-space while gaining nothing on the “experience” axis: their trajectory is heading not towards us but somewhere else entirely. If we want AI to be more human-like, many experts believe we will need explicitly to build human qualities into it – which in turn requires that we better understand what those are and how they arise.

Likewise, most of our fantasies about advanced alien intelligence suppose it to be like us but with better tech. That’s not just a sci-fi trope; the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence typically assumes that ET carves nature at the same joints as we do, recognising the same abstract laws of maths and physics. But the more we know about minds, the more we recognise that they conceptualise the world according to the possibilities they possess for sensing and intervening in it; nothing is inevitable. We need to be more imaginative about what minds can be, and less fixated on ours as the default. As the biologist JBS Haldane once said: “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” Our only hope of understanding the universe, he said, “is to look at it from as many different points of view as possible.” We may need those other minds.

- Excerpts from The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to Aliens by Philip Ball

These Lyrics Still Brings Tears...

I think this will be an everlasting emotional redux - Relationships Are Everlasting Stories. 

This relationship of ours was a short story but yet, it is a small part of the least understood and everlasting human-animal bond. 

These simple bonds will not only outlive self-centered humans but someday might save and protect this beautiful planet. 

Thank you Max for giving me a glimpse of life before I fall. 

1983 & Jersey - Sports As A Means To An End !

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

- Margaret Mead

I was 9 years old when India won the world cup in 1983.  Everyone in my house were sleeping; I was watching the match with someone who was visiting us. I think he was my mom's relative. That is one of my oldest memories. I don't remember how jubilant I felt that night but there are glimpses of me walking to the refrigerator and drinking ice cold water (which meant I was happy and needed a drink).

That victory changed confidence of Indian people. It was the seed which lead to the growth of Tendulkar in 1990 who single handedly responsible for boasting confidence of India. Timing was impeccable as the economy opened up around the same time. I am pretty sure, this generation doesn't have any idea what it meant and hence, they have no gratitude for what they have now. 

I also met Kapil Dev near my house before I moved to US. These two cricketers are great human beings who have a big hand in changing a fate of nation which was stuck in the past even after 4 decades of independence. 

The English game of cricket was the biggest catalyst for India to come out of the shadow of English imperialism. 

I don't watch cricket anymore nor any other sports. I think, it was very useful tool for me during my younger days. Sports inspired me and I moved on to other things as I grew older. It's pity that most people use it as a passive entertainment and wasting hours everyday sitting in front of the TV. It's worse in US. 

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumble puppy. 

As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions."

In 1984, Huxley added, "people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us".

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Jersey is a heart warming story. It's inspired from the life of the late cricketer Raman Lamba. I don't remember much about his career but the kid in me was thrilled to see him come out to bat and he was the fittest person in the team. 

When I read the review of the movie, I thought it was the story of Robin Singh. But this is a story of thousands of talented Indian cricketers and other sportsmen who lost their dreams because of omnipresent bureaucracy. This hasn't changed even today. 

Movies like Jersey are a remainder to younger generation to see the reality as it is, stop using cricket to fuel nationalism, be persistent to fight the system and change it. One can dream. 

The song Maiyya Mannu is soothing.

After a long long time, I got to watch not one but two soulful Hindi movies.

In Praise Of Parasites

By some estimates, nearly half of the species in the animal kingdom are parasites. Most of them remain largely out of sight because they are small, even microscopic. Their ancestors didn’t always start with a parasitic lifestyle: Researchers have so far found 223 incidents where parasitic insects, worms, mollusks or protozoans evolved from non-parasitic predecessors. Some ate dead things. Others killed their prey and consumed it. Then their life strategy evolved because they proved more successful if they kept their prey alive, kept their victims close — so they could feed on them longer. It’s a strategy distinct from those of parasitoids, which outright kill their hosts, Lafferty explains, a glint of mischief in his eye. “Think about the movie Alien.  Remember when the alien sock puppet bursts its head out of John Hurt’s chest? That’s a classic parasitoid.”

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He is also a serious marine ecologist who holds passionately that parasites are worthy of study for how they influence ecological systems and how ecosystems influence them. For years, it was a fairly lonely position to take:  “Ecologists have built hundreds of food webs and they haven’t put parasites in them. And what we’ve lost from that is the ability to even think about parasites and their role in ecology,” Lafferty says. Ecology conferences used to struggle with where to place Lafferty’s talks in their schedules, but nowadays the meetings have dedicated sessions on wildlife infectious diseases. And ecologists, especially younger ones, are starting to recognize that they are missing part of the story if the food webs they model don’t include parasites that can influence predator-prey relationships and competition for resources. As illustrated by the trematode in the killifish, Lafferty says, “parasites are determining who lives and who dies in a way that benefits them.”

Moreover, parasites are a useful way to explore broader ecological questions: How does energy flow through those food webs? What forces maintain ecological stability and keep one species from overrunning all others? What are the implications of robust and healthy biodiversity on human health? Ecologists debate all sorts of competing theories, Lafferty says. What’s clear to him and other like-minded parasitologists: “We cannot answer these questions if we are going to ignore the parasite part of the equation.”

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It hit him that here was an opportunity to break new ground. “Although lots of people had studied parasites for their own sake, or as problems to be solved, it seemed like an open playing field to start asking how parasites fit into natural ecosystems,” he says. He spent the next two years cracking horn snails with a hammer to collect trematodes in estuaries from San Francisco to Baja. His work solidified how the parasites were affecting the snails’ abundance and evolution — finding, for example, that snails in areas with high infection rates have evolved to mature and reproduce early, before they get castrated.

- More here including Toxoplasma gondii. 

We know Toxoplasma causes "feline attraction" but it might also slow reaction times or diminish ones ability to focus, these may be why infected people have a nearly threefold higher chance of being involved in a car accident.