Robert Trivers on Evolutionary Biology & Math Of Honor Killings!

Omnipresent Ingratitude

Since Max was a puppy, I have heard this reasoning when something bad happens - "Hey, this always happens; everywhere." 

That drove me nuts.  I phrased a term for this - "consoling the conscience."

Then I reminded myself of this Adam Smith quote from his least read book Theory of Moral Sentiments (remember, he wrote only two books):

If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own.

People don't give a flying fuck about anything else other than themselves and their families but yet, what they love depends completely outside of that circle. 

I would calm myself, and go play frisbee with Max. Max made a freaking little better living being. He was wiser than I will ever be. 

I was barely out of my teens when Manmohan Singh and Narsihma Rao changed the destiny of India. 

Of-course I have no idea on the profound implications of their wisdom. All I saw was Coke and Pepsi was available in India and Aamir Khan's Pepsi ad's were phenomenal. 

And then my prefrontal cortex developed a little. Slowly, I understood their wisdom. I started developing not only gratitude but tremendous wisdom not only for their actions but they were able to pull this off in a country like India. 

Then I read Margaret Mead's wise sentence: 

Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has.

Then I read Taleb insight of Minority Rule. 

What happened in India during 1991 was a ridiculous minority of three people (Green revolution happened because of Norman Borlaugh and most Indians don't know his name - god bless my species). 

(Hey a good human from the future: If you are reading this after I am long gone - don't give up animals.

Keep up your good work. Change will come. 

Love from Max and I will always be there for you. 

Remember no one will remember you but that is the ultimate victory for you. Why would you want these fucked up being to remember you? 

You will be one of those longest hours in the "Deep Time" when billions don't even make it micro-milli-second.) 

Samir Varma's wonderful and insightful piece how fucked up and ingratitude Indian memory is: 

The real reasons for the forgetting are deeper. And they’re not unique to India—they’re human. Which makes them harder to fix.

This is the deepest explanation, and it’s not Indian—it’s universal. It’s baked into how human memory works.

You cannot feel gratitude for something that didn’t happen.

The 1991 reforms prevented:

- Soviet-style economic collapse (remember what happened to Russia in the 1990s?)

- Possible mass famine (India was weeks from being unable to import food).

- Political fragmentation of a nuclear-armed state (India could have Balkanized).

- A generation of deeper poverty (another decade of 3.5% growth would have been catastrophic).

- The humiliation of permanent dependency on foreign aid.

- The brain drain accelerating until no one capable was left.

But because these didn’t happen, they’re not real to anyone. You can’t photograph the famine that didn’t occur. You can’t interview the refugees from the civil war that wasn’t fought. You can’t quantify the poverty that wasn’t endured.

The plane that didn’t crash. You don’t celebrate the engineer who prevented the disaster. You can’t point to a specific moment and say “there—that’s what they saved us from.” The counterfactual doesn’t have photographs. It doesn’t have victims whose stories can be told. It doesn’t have monuments or memorial days. It’s just... absence. An empty space where catastrophe would have been.

This isn’t an Indian problem. Americans don’t celebrate whoever prevented the 2008 financial crisis from becoming Great Depression II—assuming anyone did, assuming it wasn’t just luck. They barely remember Paul Volcker taming inflation in the 1980s—an achievement that made possible two decades of American prosperity. They’ve already forgotten the pandemic response that prevented millions more deaths. This is how human memory works. We remember disasters. We forget the people who prevented them.

[---]

Here’s an irony: the reforms succeeded so completely that they became consensus.

Every government since 1991 has continued them:

- BJP under Vajpayee: accelerated privatization

- Congress under Singh: continued liberalization

- BJP under Modi: GST, Make in India, further opening

When policy becomes consensus, it stops being anyone’s achievement. It’s just... what we do now. The way things are.

Nobody campaigns on “I will continue the reforms of 1991.” They campaign on what comes next. The foundation becomes invisible because everyone builds on it.

Success erased the memory of who created it.

Indian mythology celebrates:

- Suffering: Ram’s fourteen-year exile, the Pandavas’ humiliation

- Sacrifice: Bhishma’s lifelong celibacy vow, Karna’s tragic loyalty

- Martyrdom: Gandhi’s assassination, Bhagat Singh’s hanging

- Dramatic confrontation: Arjuna’s crisis on the battlefield

What does this template not include? Competent technocrats who quietly solved problems and went home.

Singh didn’t suffer publicly. Rao didn’t sacrifice visibly. Ahluwalia just... did his job well. They made it look easy. They didn’t create drama. They prevented drama—which is the opposite of what heroes do in Indian narratives.

They don’t fit the heroic template. In India, that’s not a hero. That’s a bureaucrat.

There’s a deeper cultural explanation, and it connects everything.

The successful prevention of catastrophe is the most thankless achievement in human history.

Rao, Singh, and Ahluwalia prevented a disaster. They did it so well that the disaster became unimaginable. And the unimaginable cannot be remembered.

That’s why India forgot them.

And if you are thinking this is history - think again. 

Its only because of steadfast minority refuses to live under totalitarianism that we don't live under totalitarianism. (via)

Fed Chairman Powel statement from yesterday. 

Thank you sir for your courage. Minority Rules!

via MR - Alex Tabarrok

Whether an independent Fed is desirable is beside the point. The core issue is lawfare: the strategic use of legal processes to intimidate, constrain, and punish institutional actors for political ends. Lawfare is the hallmark of a failing state because it erodes not just political independence, but the capacity for independent judgment.

What sort of people will work at the whim of another? The inevitable result is toadies and ideological loyalists heading complex institutions, rather than people chosen for their knowledge and experience.

 

Another word I hate most is "Legacy". I know so many morons who talk about their legacy. These   morons are people I know personally.

What freaking legacy? Just do the right thing.  And if you do the right thing, there is high probability very few people will remember you and thank you. That is just a second order effect. 

Our life is to do the right thing and stand up for truth. That should be a basic and decent categorical imperative. 

Jonathan Safran Foer on Eating Animals

Ever since Jonathan Safran Foer's book Eating Animals came out, while Max was alive, I have been posting Foer's talk every year during Thanksgiving. 

So much irony in this day... billions get slaughtered after their short and miserable life full of pain and suffering.

Did I mention I love Robert Trivers and his "self-deception" hypothesis? 

This day is one of those days where human self-deception reaches a pinnacle. 

I am sorry for my fellow family who lost their lives today. 

Vikram On Chola History

Local Animal Shelter CEO Remembers Impact Of Diane Keaton

Thank you, Ma'am for everything. 

You will be missed but your beautiful impact will spread for ever. 

The Obscenity of India's Wealthy

Listen. 

Don't weep nor get angry. 

Think and change yourself and the ones around you. 

Rajinikanth - One Of The Greatest Orators of Our Time

Over the last few years, I have been listening to his every talk (he gives 2 or 3 in a year); every one of these talks are filled with immense wisdom, humility, truth, humor and so much more. 

All this without any pride about his stardom and power and with full skin in the game. 

A simple human teaching other humans what he has learned from his life in a very very hard way. 

I have learned a ton from Rajni sir on how to be a good human being. Thank you, sir. 

• Your Intelligence will tell you which thing to speak
• Your ability will tell you how to speak 
• Audience will tell you how much to speak 
• Your experience will tell what to speak and what not to speak :-) 

Drone Captures Dolphins Guiding Lost Humpback Whale to Deeper Water

Small Pox - Defeating a Virus That Killed Half a Billion People

Immense gratitude. Well, immense is not enough. 

Well, I am a moron. Why do I expect people to have any gratitude for anything?

Thanks for eradicating small pox and making my life healthier (and my face better). 

Thank you.

Man, what a life it's been. With Max for 13 years, running water, electricity, health and so many things I take for granted.

Why Living Close to your Children in Old Age Could Be the Biggest Mistake of Your Life

True peace does not come from others. Its comes from within oneself

Christspiracy: Correcting 2,000 Years of Censorship on Animal Ethics

You can watch the full documentary online at Christspiracy

From Nazareth to the Vatican and from New Delhi to Kathmandu, the pair questioned world-renowned theologians, Christian farmers, Indigenous shamans, archeologists, and religious leaders and asked them to explain why cruelty to animals is accepted around the world, even though compassion is supposedly the uniting core principle of all world religions.

The historical texts and facts that they found—some hiding in plain sight and some deeply buried—are explosive. The new documentary Christspiracy reveals truths that many lifelong Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists have never heard. For those of us who have felt isolated and confused by seemingly conflicting values, the film offers hope: clear and compelling evidence that great religious leaders absolutely rejected harming and killing animals. This revelation has massive implications for how we conduct our moral lives.

Getting the information wasn’t easy. The filmmakers’ vehicles were chased, their homes were ransacked, and doors were slammed in their faces. Netflix wanted to censor the film. Waters and Andersen refused, and Christspiracy became the first movie ever to have its rights bought back from the world’s largest streaming platform.

Waters was forced out of his congregation after church leaders told him to stop asking questions. And his experience rings familiar to many of us. We’ve been ridiculed for our concern for animals, reprimanded for questioning what we were taught, and mocked for our discomfort at religious gatherings in which animals’ flesh is served. But we stand firm in our belief that violence toward animals is wrong.

- More Here

Ed Yong talks about his seven rules for being a public figure in a time of crisis

I have been reading Ed Yong since he started writing a blog on Discover; a long long time ago when I guess he was just out of college. 

I love his humility; a rare trait in this world.

What The Dying Teach The Living - Frank Ostaseski

The good news is we don't have to wait till until our end of life to realize the wisdom death has to offer. 

Elephants Call Each Other by Name

Abstract

Personal names are a universal feature of human language, yet few analogues exist in other species. While dolphins and parrots address conspecifics by imitating the calls of the addressee, human names are not imitations of the sounds typically made by the named individual. Labelling objects or individuals without relying on imitation of the sounds made by the referent radically expands the expressive power of language. Thus, if non-imitative name analogues were found in other species, this could have important implications for our understanding of language evolution. Here we present evidence that wild African elephants address one another with individually specific calls, probably without relying on imitation of the receiver. We used machine learning to demonstrate that the receiver of a call could be predicted from the call’s acoustic structure, regardless of how similar the call was to the receiver’s vocalizations. Moreover, elephants differentially responded to playbacks of calls originally addressed to them relative to calls addressed to a different individual. Our findings offer evidence for individual addressing of conspecifics in elephants. They further suggest that, unlike other non-human animals, elephants probably do not rely on imitation of the receiver’s calls to address one another.

- Full paper here

“Intelligent Openness” & Trust - Onora O’Neill

More trust is not an intelligent aim in this life. Intelligently placed and intelligently refused trust is the proper aim. Well once one says that, one says, yeah, okay, that means that what matters in the first place is not trust but trustworthiness. It's judging how trustworthy people are in particular respects.

[---]

The shop where I buy my socks says I may take them back, and they don't ask any questions. They take them back and give me the money or give me the pair of socks of the color I wanted. That's super. I trust them because they have made themselves vulnerable to me. I think there's a big lesson in that. If you make yourself vulnerable to the other party, then that is very good evidence that you are trustworthy and you have confidence in what you are saying. So in the end, I think what we are aiming for is not very difficult to discern. It is relationships in which people are trustworthy and can judge when and how the other person is trustworthy.

So the moral of all this is, we need to think much less about trust, let alone about attitudes of trust detected or mis-detected by opinion polls, much more about being trustworthy, and how you give people adequate, useful and simple evidence that you're trustworthy.

Jon Stewart Remembers His Best Boy, Dipper

 Boy! My wish for you is to find that one dog. 

 

I got more than I dreamt for in this life from Max. People don't understand that unique oneness which transcends everything I know as a human being. 

I am blessed because of you Max. 

I miss you and miss me in you my love. 

But I have you in me which keeps me going.

How To Live a Resilient Life - Nassim Taleb

I love to listen to this once in a while to evaluate myself at a given point and time. Plus it gives me insight about myself which I was unaware of. 

Today, I understood why I moved away from so many "friends" :

Tell people what you do not what they should do. 

When I talk about things I do and act on; I think it irritates and intimidates those people. They prefer talking abstract bullshit or signaling topics. 

I prefer not do those mating dances. 

Next one: 

If something is nonsense... say it!

This one is more elegant. People who can digest that fact I am calling their "bullshit, are more open minded and have an ability to change their mind. Plus they are mature enough to understand that I can be trusted and I will be a shoulder they can rely on.

This has been my technique to weed out crappy humans out of my life.  It not only saved me time but helped me avoid unwanted psychological drama. 

Here's Taleb's 11 rules: 

1. Do not disappoint your 18-year-old self. 
2. Sacrifice for others
3. Seek self respect
4. Do not read newspapers (or consume news) 
5. If something is nonsense... say it!
6. Be most respectful to manual workers
7. Avoid things that bore you
8. Don't do to others what you don't want them to do to you
9. Start a business
10. Tell people what you do not what they should do
11. I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist. If that saying doesn’t convince you of the fatuousness of left vs. right labels, nothing will.

Things to avoid completely: 

• Muscles without strength
• Friendship without trust
• Opinion without risk
• Change without aesthetics 
• Age without values
• Food without nourishment 
• Power without fairness
• Facts without rigor 
• Degree without erudition 
• Militarism without fortitude
• Progress without civilization 
• Complication without depth
• Fluency without content
• Religion without tolerance

What I've Been Reading

When a true opening of the heart develops collectively, miracles are possible. 

This is perhaps the most difficult point of all to accept in today's cynical world, and I will not try to argue abstractly for what Adam illustrates so poignantly. 

By miracles I don't mean that somehow everything turns out for the best with no effort or uncertainty. 

Hardly, if anything, the effort required greatly exceeds what is typical, and people learn to embrace a level of uncertainty from which most of us normally retreat. 

But this embrace arises from a collective strength that we have all but ceased to imagine, let alone develop: the strength of a creative human community grounded in a genuine sense of a creative human community grounded in a genuine sense of connectedness and possibility, rather than one based on fear and dogma. 

- Forward by Peter Senge

Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities by Adam Kahane.

Max's holiday card for 2024 was quoted from this brilliant 20 year old book. 

We in America think that the political and ideological problems here are unsolvable because of polarization and people don't even look in each other's eyes, leave alone talking to each other. 

Adam beautifully explain in this book,  how even people who wanted to kill each other, worked together for a better future. 

This book teaches us that: 

A transformation in our ability to talk, think and act together. 

These are actual events from countries much worse than most countries in the world. We are talking about South Africa after Mandela's release, drug lords ridden Colombia in early 2000's, Argentina post their economic fallout to Guatemala.  

We are not talking abstract "hope" here but actual transformative events. If these people in these countries can do it, anybody in any country can do it. And we can do it at home too. 

In order to embark on that better future, read the quote from Max's holiday card. 

There are three kinds of complex problems: 

• Dynamically complex—Causes and their effects are separated by space and time, making the links between them difficult for any one person or group to identify.

•  Generatively complex—They are unpredictable and unfold in unfamiliar ways. A problem that is generatively complex cannot be solved with a prepackaged solution from the past. A solution has to be worked out as the situation unfolds, through a creative, emergent, generative process. 

• Socially complex—The people involved are extremely diverse and have very different perspectives.

Our common way of talking and listening therefore guarantees that our complex problems will either remain stuck or will get unstuck by force. (There are no problem so complex that is does not have a simple solution ... that is wrong.) We need to learn another, less common, more open way. 

There are four different ways of talking and listening based on the work of Otto Scharmer of MIT: 

• Downloading: we merely repeat the story that’s already in our heads, like download- ing a file from the Internet without making any change to it. When we download, we are deaf to other stories, we only hear that which confirms our story. This is the kind of non-listening exhibited by fundamentalists, dictators,  experts, and people are arrogant or angry.

• Debating: When we debate, we listen to each other and to ideas (including our own ideas) from the outside, objectively, like a judge in a debate or a court room. 

• Reflective Dialogue: We engage in such dialogue when we listen to ourselves reflectively and when we listen to others empathetically - listening from inside subjectively. 

• Generative Dialogue: We listen not only from within ourselves or from within others, but from the whole of the system. 

There is a remarkable story in the video below. One can sense generative dialogue when: 

The team sensed that something important and special happened during that story telling. One story seemed to flow into another, as if the tellers were all telling parts of the same larger story. 

Time seemed to slow down: I wasn't sure how long the five minutes of silence actually lasted. 

The normal separation between people seemed lessen: the team shifted from listening to each other's individual perspectives to being, for a while, a whole collective "I". 

What I've Been Reading

Complex human societies need elites – rulers, administrators, thought leaders – to function well. We don’t want to get rid of them; the trick is to constrain them to act for the benefit of all.

[---] 

Americans today grossly underestimate the fragility of the complex society in which we live. But an important lesson from history is that people living in pervious pre-crisis eras similarly didn't imagine that their societies could suddenly crumble around them.  

End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration by Peter Turchin

I have been following Turchin for many years now and his work "predicted" the path that led to the 2020 election madness. And he coined the term Cliodynamics.

The book is based on models built using CrisisDB (work in-progress - global history database) that includes one hundred cases from European, Chinese, Russian and American history (no Indian or other countries yet) 

The core findings behind "End Times" faced by past societies: 

1. Popular Immiseration - The proportion of GDP consumed by the government has not changed much in the last four decades and it has grown for elites. The main loser has been the common American. 

2. Elite Overproduction - What determines whether we have a problem of elite overproduction is the balance of the supply of youth with advanced degrees and the demand for them - the number of jobs that require their skills. By the 2000s, unfortunately, as is well known, the number of degree holders were greatly outnumbering the position for them. 

Surprisingly, Turchin's research doesn't count ideology as the primary factor. 

Well.. humans are convenient creatures and ideology evolves over time. Lot of people today avoid mRNA vaccines but it's a matter of time as they get older they will embrace mRNA treatment with relish for cancer treatment.  On the other hand, "green" and "eco-savvy" people gluttonize a poor cow or worse baby cow using "veal" as a euphemism. 

I admire Turchin's rigor of applying data to find patterns in history. 

Yes, Turchin's models are not even close to perfect but if the same rigor continues for a few more years or decades (and we happen to survive) then Cliodynamics has a potential to become more robust. 

• Pundits and politicians often invoke "lessons of history". The problem is that the historical record is rich and each pundit an easily find cases in it to support whichever side of a policy debate they favor. Clearly, inference from such "cherry-picked" examples is not the way to go. 

• A relatively small set of mechanisms can generate exceedingly complex dynamics. This is the essence of complexity science; complex dynamics do not have to have complex causes. 

• What are the features of conspiracy theories that distinguish them from scientific theories? One, the conspiratorial theory is often vague about the motives of the behind-the-scenes leaders or assigns them implausible motivations. Two, it assumes that they are extremely clever and knowledgeable. Three, it places power in the hands of one strong leader or a tiny cabal. And, finally, it assumes that illegal plans can be kept secret for indefinitely long periods of time. A scientific theory, like the class-domination one, is very different. 

• First, let's avoid blaming the rich. The economic elites are not evil - or, at least, the proportion of evil people among them is not terribly different from that of the rest of the population. They are motivated by self-interest, but Mother Teresas, if absent among the ruling class, are quite rate in general population as well. 

Dog Amma In Delhi

 I salute you Amma! Thank you for everything you do.