Thought Experiment - Language of Thoughts

I was once on an unplanned expedition in a forest-cum-park with my sister and we chose the off-road trails to walk upon. Contrary to my expectations, it was much more wildlife populated than I thought it would be. Among other animals, we came across a path where some 10-15 Langurs were sitting. We were terrified (Ok fine, I was terrified, my sis wanted to take a pic and I wanted a stick) but there was amazing stillness and calmness amongst them. They looked at us and hardly had any reaction. One of them had its long tail resting on the path and it gracefully curled it back for us to pass. Their stillness amazed me. They had something very core to nature, which I certainly didn’t. To me, they seemed more like a group of monks sitting and meditating, which as I later pondered, might not be actually so different.

I think animals have the extraordinary ability to sit for hours at peace doing nothing, just occasionally responding to the external stimuli of the environment, that too in proportionate intensity. What makes this ability extraordinary is perhaps its absence/scarcity in humans. We have the special ‘gift’ of creating our own internal stimuli, effectively creating a pseudo-internal environment in additional to the actual external physical environment. We are always thinking. It like a voice in our mind. Eckhart Tolle has crisply defined the same in his book ‘The Power of Now’:

“..virtually everyone hears a voice, or several voices, in their head all the time: the involuntary thought processes that you don’t realize you have the power to stop. Continuous monologs or dialogues. The voice comments, speculates, judges, compares, complains, likes, dislikes and so on.”

And paradoxically, it’s the effortless/involuntary thinking that is the problem contrary to the thinking that required effort (doing math or coding). Daniel Kahneman is a researcher & psychologist whose work is considered as a major pillar in understanding the psychology of human mind. In his work ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’, he also has segregated the thinking process of humans into broad but distinct two categories. One part ‘fast thinking’, which is effortless, involuntary and extremely quick (flight/fight/freeze response). Another part is ‘slow thinking’, which requires a lot of effort and deliberation and is exhaustive (solving math).

The question for the thought experiment is – Is knowledge of language a root-cause for involuntary thinking or ‘voice in head’?

I am pretty sure that all of us think in sentences/words in some particular languages, perhaps mostly in our mother tongue and a few more languages. I wonder at what age babies/children start having the internal chatter or voice. If we knew no language, how would our thinking get impacted? Would we still have the voice in the head or the chatter? Perhaps some research on babies and nomadic tribes who have not developed language as a mode of communication might help to answer some of these questions.

One argument against it can be in terms of emotions. Even if there is no language, emotions will exist, they are kind of universal and innate. Happiness, sadness, jealousy, regret, fear etc., all would still exist. But mind’s thoughts/commentary is quite discreet from emotions. For example, take this very moment. There is a lot going on in mind, much more than just any emotion of feeling of happiness or sadness, rather in all probability it might be more close to a neutral emotion. Emotions come in peaks and subside, the rest of the time we have the commentary. So how would a nomad’s or infant’s mind activity differ from us, considering they can’t have the internal commentary?

We can try to compare an infant’s mind with an adult’s mind using MRI/c-MRI/some-other scans to show which areas of the brain are active/more active. But there might be a lot of factors which might make this comparison incorrect. It’s a newborn child after all, with the physical parts of body and mind still growing, so the comparison seems incorrect. The scanning is normally done in response to some external stimulus. Some images are shown, questions are asked etc. But we are interested in brain activity which is caused by the internally generated stimulus. First, it might require a non-intrusive apparatus of measuring as the mere presence in a specialized room/equipment will act as an external stimulus. Second, assuming we do are successfully able to measure the brain activities in non-intrusive ways, the end result will be in form of active and non-active areas of the brain shown on a computer screen. In all probability, the study might conclude that the brain of the infant is less active compared to an adult. How does this help in answering our original question?

Another extremely popular way of measuring is via questionnaires. Give a set of carefully designed questions (kind of like psychometrics) to a person and then evaluate his thinking based on the answers provided. In addition to the uselessness of this approach in our experiment (subject doesn’t know the language), I have never been a big believer in this approach. And there is a growing set of researchers who also think the same. This approach is fundamentally flawed according to me, and as indeed it led to increased type-1 error in US school healthcare programs and wrongly tagging more and younger children with ADTs and Depression, starting the use of Prozac and allied products in disproportionately high ratios. Measuring something which is fundamentally unmeasurable is OK, we need that. But putting too much faith in those measurements and devising interventions based on those numbers has butterfly effects. And since that happens in long terms, it gets ignored by the immediate gains it is able to showcase. To understand that the results from actual physical research can be so wrong, consider the peanut allergy study fiasco in the US. And this is just one of the early intervention which is being recalled/modified. Now consider the implications of research based on no physical data but just some questions answered by the patients. How can we say, the data which gets collected is an observation or an opinion?

Perhaps I diverted from the main question too much. But it was able to demonstrate the potential of the question. ADD, PTSD, Depression – these are problems of the mind. Most of our medical research is focused on suppression the regions of the brains which cause these problems in the patients. Tell me if you see it as a positive approach at all.

Coming back to the forest and Langurs, I don’t think they have the privilege of thinking in a language like we do. But they also perhaps don’t have the compulsive internal chattering like we do. And we can’t unlearn language. Neither should we. Once we have started identifying the ink marks as alphabets and words, we can’t see them as inky spots anymore. We cannot and must not go backward. But the artificial stress and mind-chatter which comes along with it should be acknowledged and understood in its unnatural nature for living beings. I read somewhere that no other living creature on planet earth feels negativity except humans (I don’t have data to back it, can be researched).

All forms of meditation basically attack this mind-chatter, trying to reduce it having the ultimate aim for one being able to be still in mind. Perhaps the animal kingdom is already there. Sun is a definitive source of physical life on earth and will be a definitive source of its destruction as well. So can be a language for mental life.

Selecting Books to Read

This blog will be more relevant to those who like reading.

I read a lot. And the more I read, the less I know. The linear increase in information and/or knowledge is accompanied by an exponential increase in the known unknown universe of ideas. I avoid fiction, but read anything and everything in all other domains. But I give the credit of my reading habit to J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, it actually was magical. Naturally, I am a member of the library, it’s only logical.

There is a phase, early during the development of the reading habit, when we get highly influenced by the central idea of every book we read. We recommend it to all our friends and use its reference wherever possible. It is only after one has read sufficient books that he understands the underling writing methods and influencing techniques used by authors to infect the mind with their idea. And once this level is reached, when one can objectively read something and can validate the strength of its idea in different contexts, then one actually starts learning something. And add to that the understanding and power of probability and statistics, one can become immune to a lot of crappy, fake and incorrect material available in abundance in today’s digital age.

I usually become half-blind when I am collecting books in the library. I ignore to a large extent the name of book, author, color, size and smell of the book while collecting. I usually collect 7-10 books from different domains at a go and keep them on the desk and then sit. The collection ranges from business, management, philosophy, psychology, history, religion, economics and auto/biographies. Being blind at the collection stage helps avoiding type-2 errors, so you don’t miss a potential gold mine.

Then comes filtering. And this has come with experience. Any book which satisfies the Lindy Effect is always on my radar. The older the book (decades, even centuries), the stronger is the evidence that it has faced the tests of time and survived, and must not be ignored. The same is not true with many (most) recent publications, where the initial euphoria and success is very short lived (< 1 year).

There were some criteria I used to do filtering before, but now I don’t, because of high type-2 errors. We have a list of authors we admire, and with time this list increases. If any of these authors have said anything positive about the book in hand, then it usually is a good-to-go book for me. But as said, I don’t use this criteria anymore, it’s just an added bonus if available. Similarly, reviews are very narrow tools to filter. Rejecting a book on the basis of reading someone’s view about it is perhaps even worse that judging it by its cover.  Also now I don’t give too much heap to the recently published material, references of which are easy to find in newspapers (along with paid reviews). It’s amazing to observe how time can convert so much text invalid within short duration. Aging of material is one of the best tests for its validity.

So once we are past the acknowledgement, preface and table of contents, the actual content starts. One common thread among many classics is that each sentence has a lot of meaning and invokes thinking. More and more knowledge/information in lesser words. The trend is somewhat changing. There have been many books I have read where even after reading the entire page, there was no worthy piece of knowledge which I could condense in a single sentence. They are so superficial and generic, it’s a pain to turn pages of such books to find more and more of blabbering.

In order to hide their incompetence and crappy work, we find many authors keep throwing various references of other research works sprinkled throughout the book to give a more “data-backed” and “scientific” feel to their own work, which is actually more like “data-showoff” and “scientifism”. I think that easily 30% of the text in their book are just references. They confuse Science with Social Science. There are no Laws in social science, only theories. And theories are never certain, they are only a provisional best explanation supported by some evidence under a given set of assumptions and constraints. So the amount of error which gets introduced when a theory in social science is used in a plug-and-play fashion is exponential. By drawing tables and graphs of data they try to avoid any questioning of their work by the general reader. A one-level-down analysis of the same data by someone who works with data can land them in the soup.

Many “self-help” books and other motivational books try to center their entire stand on one single point/idea/change. They suggest that if you implement that one single thing in your life, everything will fall in place and all problems will get solved. And they give many examples of the same. It’s very tempting to buy this kind of shit, partly due to human nature which believes such one-universal-answer exists and partly due to the simplicity of the idea. We don’t like complexity. It’s human nature to break complex things down and make them simpler and shorter to understand and retain. But that doesn’t mean that the original complexity out there vanishes. No, only we distill the information/situation so that we can process and remember it, and in the process a lot of data is lost. Oversimplification of things and narrative fallacy (the obsession to fit in some logic to events when in fact there is none) causes a lot of errors in our understanding of the reality.

If I see too much of political correctness in the word choice of the author, then I feel that he doesn’t have the guts to speak his mind out, that too in his own book. He might be more concerned about how his work will be perceived by the reader and will try to adjust it accordingly. All this may point to his primary intention of monetary gains from the work than any other thing.

The avalanche of digital articles is causing more confusion than clarity. They seem to be oversimplifications of complex matters. Their promises for quick fix of problems are generally worded like ‘5 ways to manage your time’ ‘What you should be doing for getting XYZ’. These are small and ineffective band aids created by doctors who have studied at IIN for patients having deep wounds.

So these are some of the criteria I use to filter. However, more so recently, I have developed more and more resistance to the bullshit that some books offer. And this helps in one great way. All crappy work does have references to some good and original research works to make their own work seem data-backed. So a crappy book has the potential to refer to 10 original and useful books! Happy Reading.

'Blind Feedback' - Employee Engagement Activity

Activity Name	Blind Feedback
Mode	Onfloor announcement, 1-day wait period, online+offline modes
Time Required	15 minutes on floor, 1-day waiting period for gathering data
Cost	< INR 100/-
Group size limit	No Limit
Coordinator requirement	Not required
Level of Engagement aimed	Medium-high
Stationary requirements	A physical drop box. An online form creation (google form) or on company intranet, data access only with HR
Audio/Video requirements	Not required
Activity Description	A drop box will be kept on floor and a google form link will be shared with all. Employees can give blind feedback to anyone by either putting the note in drop box or by filling the google form. Anonymity will be the key, no one will need to write their own name in the feedback. 1-day time period will be given to collect the inputs. General announcements shall be made to ensure the audience about the anonymity of the process and its use only for development purpose. The final results shall be collected only by HR and collated for each person who received some feedback. HR needs to apply discretion to paraphrase the feedback in plain straight language to avoid any identification leak.
Activity Outcomes	Employees will get an unbiased platform to share their concerns and feedback about team members without involving their direct reporting managers. If the activity is successfully followed with its deliverables, then it can result in significant increase in  positive perception of an equal opportunity work environment and supporting existing level of diversity. It will underline some important on-floor dynamics which HR might be unaware of and can help in addressing the vital ones.
Activity Deliverables	Collated raw data and processed data shall be kept confidential and only with HR. Paraphrasing of raw data is vital. The authenticity of received feedback will be questionable, however the frequency of the same/similar feedback for a particular employee will be strengthen its authenticity. A list of feedback points per employee will be created and shared only with that employee in  a one-on-one session with HR followed by a general discussion and developmental feedback. If feasible, a copy of the same can go in employee file as well.

Thought Experiment - Antifragile Skills

I initially wanted to name the topic as ‘Antifragile Jobs’, but then realized that skills are omnipresent, jobs are not. A coder will have coding skills irrespective of whether the job exists at a given place & time. Antifragile is a book written by NN Taleb, I am just trying to extend the application of his ideas in some specific hypothetical extreme scenarios. The meaning of the term Antifragile is not the opposite of Fragile, that will be Robust. Antifragile is more than robust. It is something which becomes stronger when exposed to stressors. As Taleb stated the example, every plane crash makes the entire airline industry stronger. How? The analysis of the crash and its reasons gets incorporated in flight safety processes and checks for the entire industry.

Now the thought experiment. Consider that a large scale disaster strikes, natural or man-made. Heavy damage is sustained, both in terms of life and material. Electricity is down and very limited backup is available. The electricity generation and distribution infrastructure have suffered great damage and it might take months/years to rebuild the same. Needless to say, the internet is also down. In such situation, what kind of jobs and skills will sustain relevance and which may not?

The event might act as a big equalizer in the society, blurring the lines between various classes (economic, educational, social and others). Socialism might become the most preferred system, even by those who were previously capitalists and conservatives. With the unavailability of IT and related infrastructure, a lot of dependent professions and fields might become immediately irrelevant. More fundamental and basic professions will continue to exist and thrive. Comparing the scenario with stone-age might not be very apt, considering the relative high difference in population and level of knowledge in the two eras.

Farming, nursing, cooking and physical labor will be the professions which will be in high demand. The entertainment industry will survive but will be more localized and live. Libraries will be back. Politics and religion will occupy the central pillar, even may integrate to a greater extent, giving/generating hope to all for a better future. Professions which follow Lindy Effect will survive.

A coder will have coding skills irrespective of whether the job exists at a given place & time. But he can have many more skills as well. We invest good amount of time and money in getting skills and knowledge to help us in future. In addition, perhaps we can also start learning some basic skills which might be in demand if the outlier Black Swan event occurs.

Thought Experiment - Consulting the Expert

Let’s say you are facing some chronic problem in your personal or professional life and you really want to solve it, or at least a part of it. You write on a paper (or MS word) your problem in details with all parameters involved, which you feel might be responsible for it and your current way of handling the situation and any other resolutions which you might have unsuccessfully tried. It might be a long letter, but that’s fine.

Once the draft is complete, you save it on your PC in a folder which you normally don’t access on a daily basis. Also at the same time, you create a calendar reminder (outlook/Google app, whichever tool you use) for one week from today along with saving the folder location in the reminder. This is a reminder for you to read the letter.

One week from today when you open the letter and read it, there might be a very good chance that you will get a relatively more objective and realistic picture of the problem, something close to a third perspective and may induce some small logical and corrective steps towards solving that problem. It is important that the time elapsed since you wrote and read the letter should be at least a week, so the reminder comes as a genuine surprise and memory of writing the letter is not as clear to bias any preconceived notions about the problem. You might as well see it as a letter from someone else asking for your advice. No harm trying!

The idea of this topic popped up when I was thinking about a friend of mine who, under normal circumstances, is a very intelligent and a practical man. Ask him questions, he will give a great answer. Even if he doesn’t know the answer, he will guide to a place where I can find it. Objective and clarity are his hallmarks. The problem arises when it’s his own problem. Logic and rationality flow out to drain when he discusses his own problems and issues and it amazes me how he doesn’t see it. The strange part is, he thinks almost the same way about me!

About Internships

I recently met a very young girl in my college library who was browsing the library sections with curious eyes and interest. After browsing through all the sections, she approached me with a query regarding internship. She told that she was perusing an undergrad program in finance at our college and was interested in doing an internship in upcoming 2-months break. I couldn’t help her much except giving generic gyan stuff which came to my mind at that time. However, that made me think a little more about internship and its objectives, both academic/professional and the intangibles.

Internship remains a starry place for those who have never done it, and a barren Rann-of-Kutch for those who have. Very few interns come out with a great experience, especially from well established companies which supposedly have a well-structured format for such programs. Also being in HR and having experienced the other side of interns as well, very few interns actually show interest in any sort of learning. All the fizz dies after a week and their attendance drops. Perhaps the most talked about topic within interns is the free lunch provided by the company and the TT table.  

Expectations and the ground reality are always different in any domain, and internship is no exception. The young and energetic are curious to know what actually lies inside an organization and how they can implement some of their learnings there. But most find the environment unsupportive and their so-called ‘mentors’ hardly giving them any time and assigning them low-grade tasks. And this is understandable, mentors don’t have and get any incentives for mentoring interns, apart from perhaps some false sense of superiority and a small bullet in their annual reviews (which is irrelevant to his/her supervisor). HR is useless for interns, as their headache vanishes by giving them induction training and food coupons. So the majority of interns find themselves roaming around TT tables/gyms and breakout areas after two weeks and then at the end of the internship duration, they come up with some ‘project’ which they can submit at the college. Only a mentor who has done some real investment of time and effort in an intern can think about rejecting the project, rest all are more than happy to sign it without a glance.

The area of topic in an internship is another story. Hardly few get some worthy work during an internship, getting it in their specific domain is very rare. Add to that the confidential nature of information on which companies work, it’s just plain risk without any tangible return. Most of the expectations of getting the expected project in the internship dies within first two days.

Let’s consider a fairly reasonable thought experiment. Say you are doing a specialized course and are looking to do a two-month internship in any organization. You would prefer the topic of the internship and the company to be in the same domain of your academic course, but you are flexible with both the parameters considering you don’t have much time left before your two-month break starts. Any event which can have two outcomes has a 50% probability for both outcomes being random, like flipping a coin. Taking this in mind, let’s consider the following. The probability of you getting the internship in your domain is 50% (it can be more if college assists in placement). Considering the favorable outcome that you indeed get an internship in your domain, the probability of getting actual worthy work in your domain is 50% (now this usually is less than 50%, but let’s be optimistic). Let’s say luck favors you and you indeed get worthy work as well. The probability of you getting a decent-to-good mentor is 50% (ask anyone who has done an internship, s/he will say it’s less than 30%). So, at the end of the internship, the probability of any actual tangible-technical learning in your domain is 50%*50%*50% = 12.5%. That’s a ridiculously low probability. These odds must encourage students to change the parameters of the equation itself rather than having false expectations.

So what can be a reasonable expectation from an internship, the odds of which happening is at least 50%? I don’t know. I personally think that Sales as a domain can teach much valuable skills that any other, which become extremely useful in the later part of the career. Everyone sells. Doing an internship in sales can develop practical behavioral learnings in a person which can never be achieved by any classroom training. Facing rejection, criticism and pressure on sales has exponential learning outcomes. You will carry that badge proudly all your life that you have been involved in actual ground work, have been a part of a profit-center. So perhaps instead of trying to find domain-specific technical work in an internship, we can try to find a sales role in that domain. I am sure everyone will welcome sales intern in any domain. Be it the selling of financial products or insurance (even credit cards) of getting new business for the company.

Be it any domain, any work and any company, students do get the chance to be a part of the system. And since they are not actual employees, their stake is very limited compared to what they get exposure to. An internship is the perfect place to fail in an actual environment without having anything to lose. Talk to everyone from all departments, get to know how things work. Observe and get involved in organizational politics. I have seen so many freshers who even after a year in the organization can’t adapt to the system. The academic theory has instilled strong “should-be” expectations of the work place, totally forgetting the “as-is” conditions. Many interns believe that the culture of the company is not so good, but their final placements will happen in companies with good cultures. It takes 3-4 years of working experience in a multitude of organizations to finally accept that there is no such thing as a good culture.

Don’t bother about the name of the company, big or small. Two years down the line you won’t even include that 2 months experience in your CV. Don’t do it to build the CV. Internship experience hardly counts for organizations. But the experience will count a lot for your development and the long journey ahead. Don’t bother about PPOs, they are generally a joke (just check the conversion rates). And smaller organizations generally have more and better work to delegate to willing interns than big organizations. Go ahead, get a flavor of your future.

'Create a Story' - Employee Engagement Activity

Activity Name	Create a Story
Mode	On floor / Training room
Time Required	15 - 20 minutes
Cost	No cost
Group size limit	Audible range
Coordinator requirement	Yes - HR + video recorder
Level of Engagement aimed	Fun-Light
Stationery requirements	None
Audio/Video requirements	Video recording of session
Activity Description	A fictional story will be created by the entire group. Employees can be instructuted to be as creative and innovative, can take sentences from famous movies or politicians.  HR will point to an individual & s/he will have to contribute 1-2 sentences randomly & interestingly. Then next person and so on. All employees shall be covered. Video recording is important so that HR can later share the final combined story created.
Activity Outcomes	Fun, giving platform equalizer for everyone to participate, incorporating everything said by everyone in the final story.
Activity Deliverables	An email from HR with the text of the final combined story and video of the event, if possible/allowed. Also event photographs.

Delegation at Workplace & its Density

PreScript: I hate using unnecessary jargons and management terms to make stuff sound sophisticated and credit-worthy. In fact, whenever I read the words like ‘strategy, restructuring, paradigm shift, holistic, empowerment’, I feel like puking. So, don’t mind below text being simplistic and to the point. Visit HBR & McKinsey for puke-worthy articles. Enjoy.

In teams, there are always some who are overburdened and some who are relatively not. And then there are some who are mostly found in breakout areas and smoking zones. Irrespective of the workload, it’s an important task of a TL/Manager to frequently keep shifting the load within team members so that no one burns out. It might be a better and effective way of controlling attrition than many others, like promising promotions and on-site. A monthly check of the work load on various resources can be a small but big way to improve both employee productivity and project deliverables.

However, knowing the current load on a person is not as objective a task as it seems, especially in bigger teams. One of the simplest ways to find this is by using email usage density of employees. In IT/ITES and allied industries, email continues to be the primary mode of communication. Tasks are assigned by emails, delivered by emails. It might not be absolute, considering there are modern social-media-like platforms where the team can collaborate, but their use is not that widespread, especially in Indian industry. Also, coding is done outside the email zone. But invoking the infamous ‘bell curve’, we can assume 80% of the industry use emails.

What we can do is very simple. At the end of the month, ask each employee to prepare a table/chart with names of all/major team members and number of emails received & sent to each. I have attached a sample sheet for demonstration. This data extraction can be manual from outlook (may take about 10 mins) or there may be some automation technique out there which I am unaware of. But 10 mins a month should not be a big deal.

The TL/Manager will get the data for all/major employees and will plot a very simple bar-graph in excel (or pivot) to get a quick view of who all are being chased the most and by whom. A sample demo available in the sheet. Uses can be many, if properly applied. There will be some roles which are PMO/coordinator, so they will be sending high numbers of emails. Project Managers will have a high spike in graph considering they are in CC in many emails. But a TL/Manager can quickly identify the standing of his/her team and dig deep to take proactive actions. A quick Pareto can be applied to check the top 20-30% of outliers in the graph and a chat with them can help diagnose and improve the situation. This analysis can also be coupled with the modern but unproven ‘continuous-feedback’ performance management systems, adding more weight to it.

This is cheap (virtually zero cost), effective and result-oriented analytics.