Old is fool's gold

I just read an article in today's (6/21/2008) Mercury News, Drive section by Richard Russel. The title of the article is "Now and Then". He compares how today's cars are superior to the automotive industry output 30 years ago. He compares a 1975 corvette and the same model sold in 2008. The comparison is eyeopening.

[need a table here]

You can see that whether you look at any aspect of the car, 2008 beats its grandfather hands down. It is faster, more powerful, more fuel efficient, and less polluting. Any engineering feat requires that we make a compromise. If we want to build a faster car, the milage might suffer. This is true for today's car. But the crucial point is that when you compare it to the cars a generation ago, we see that we have miraculously managed to improve each facet. And it is even cheaper - lot more people are affording cars like the 1975 corvette, than they used to 30 years ago. Heck, even a run of the mill 2008 honda accord is sportier than the 1975 corvette. (need to confirm, and quote sales figures for 2008 honda accord vs 1975 corvette)

Now you will say wait a minute, I am not comparing apples to apples. I am comparing a top of the line sports car of 75 to a family box of 2008. The numbers are obviously greater for the family sedan, than a sports car. But that's the whole point - in 1975, you paid a pretty penny to get 270 horsepower engine that gave you certain acceleration, speed and agility. Now that power comes standard on some of the higher end accords. The bar has been raised. The price has dropped down. More people are getting what only a select few got in terms of performance.

Of course you can't buy the mystic and glamor that the old corvette brought you in 1975. To get the same glamor, you might have to buy 2008 corvette - and that one has a comparable price. But glamor is such a funny thing. Glamor or bragging rights by definition have a small supply, and hence will command higher and higher price. I will be entirely happy if glamor keeps getting expensive. I consider it as a welfare tax on rich people that the rich people charge each other.

It is easy to misconstrue the above example. You might think that I am saying progress is only for rich people. After all, only rich people can afford corvettes. Even the honda accords are not that cheap - they cost about 5 times the world's per capita income. Even examples of computers becoming cheaper does not go down well with a poor farm worker in China.

True, that cars are expensive enough so that only the rich at this moment can afford them. But when we focus on objects, we loose track of the bigger picture. We need to think comfortable transport, with great flexibility - rather than a car. That is improving all the time over the last 100 years. Just before the advent of railways - 95% of the world population did not travel beyond 10 miles. Not that they did not need to, or did not want to, but because it was so darn hard! Travelling was fraught with danger.

The transporation machinary has been growing and becoming more comfortable too. And yes, the number of cars is increasing. With the advent of Tata Nano, (and the competition it has spurred) the huge population between 40th and 60th percentile earners can suddenly afford cars. We are at the beginning of S curve for the cars to become widespread. And if you have concerns about pollution, look at the corvetter comparisons. Modern cars simply don't pollute. Period.

There are some who complain about the carbon footprints and greenhouse effect. To them I can only say this is such a low item on the engineering problems humanity faces, it is below the cut line right now. When most other problems are solved, humanity will solve this problem too. (Unless everyone realizes that we don't have any control over it - but that's another article!)

Yes, I envision that the world of 9 billion minds will have something like 2 to 3 billion cars. Those all put together will cause less pollution than the 200 million or so that we have right now. In fact, they will probably run on electricity that is generated using wind, sun and nuclear power - hence they will have a smaller carbon footprint too. How will this happen, and why do I believe in it? Read in an article to be written soon.

The Do's of life (incomplete)

It is interesting to see how the attitudes of humanity are shaped by religions and parental attitudes. All religions tell you how to live. "Love thy neighbor" is certainly a positive message given by most religions. It gets converted to "don't ever get pally with non-neighbors, who incidentally are defined as people of different religion". Message for trust and friendship gets converted into fear and distrust. This probably comes from a general low self esteem, and fear of failure.

The question is what is the alternative? The biggest "do" for life in my opinion is "Love thyself". This is somehow missing from most of the religions. Religions regulate public life, interaction with others from the society. As far the interaction with self is concerned, it is very negative. In fact messages like "you are born a sinner" "your fate is determined by what (bad things) you did in the last life" are pretty common. The low self esteem helps the religion to make everyone fall in line, submit to the higher authority, walk the straight and narrow.

But everyone really liking themself is the key to developing any healthy society. It is the next step to the freedom of mind, once the body is freed from the strife of ill health, and drudgery of work.

This process has started, though it's still in its infancy. Just like thousand years ago only a handful percentage of people enjoyed long life and less than 50 hours a week of work, today only a few percentage of people enjoy the excellent mental health. There is some weak correlation between the financial strength and mental well being. (need data here).

The "don'ts" of life

This is an information age. Day in and day out we are barraged with information of all kinds. Most of the information unfortunately, is what I called "don't" kind of information. It tells you what not to do. It warns you of danger, or tells you not to do something, or says how something is recently shown to be bad for you. This kind of information takes the enjoyment out of life because it glorifies the pain and the risk associated with every pleasure. Don't eat ice cream or cookies because those have sugar and fats, and they are bad for you. Don't go in the sun because it will cause skin cancer, staying up too late is bad for you, don't spend a single dime from the 401k because it is bad for you... There are countless examples of direct advise that we get from every nook of the cyberspace.

The "don't" advise has a distinct parental tone to it. It is of course the voice of experience. It comes from the authority figures. It has the all knowing feel to it. It says, I know better how to live the life than you do. More often than not it focuses on the limited area. It has fear of failure built into it like Aesop's fables. The voice also makes some assumptions. These assumptions are not entirely wrong but like one size fits all clothing, they don't fit anyone exactly. On good days the advise is on the right side for most people, but on bad days, it is so off the track that it is not even funny. The voice of caution actually leads to danger. The caution is against a small yet very visible risk, whereas the danger you undertake by following the cautionary advise is more hidden. For some reason the visible small always wins over the invisible large. How many times have we seen a hero saving a little girl's life by risking a population of multitude?

One example of it is scare about bicycling as a dangerous activity. Now I know, that most parents encourage their kids to ride bike, and also the recent emphasis on wearing helmets. Helmets, like seat belts, save lives - there is no question about that. Yet, after a certain age very few people ride bicycles. Whether as a hobby or as a proper commuting vehicle, bicycle is used too rarely. Part of the reason is that we in the US rely so much on the automobile, and have built our lives around it - which in turn mean working far enough away from the home, not building an adequate public transport system. But one underlying cause of the preference for the car is the perception that riding is not very safe.

Those who cry out that the bicycling is not very safe, show the following statistics. [need statistics here]. But they never show the statistics of what not biking leads to. That statistics is much more difficult to get, and not visible. One has to deduce that given reasonable amount of biking, less people will drive. Which means there will be fewer accidents during driving. Also, the roads will be safer for bicycle riders too - meaning fewer riding fatalities. This is not in dispute, anyone with reasonable common sense will see this. But even beyond the road fatalities, there are lives lost to diabetes, heart attacks, strokes and other diseases. The main cause behind these is the sedentary lifestyle that we lead. If all of a sudden everyone started riding a bicycle, we will have fewer deaths. I have no doubt about that.

The reason that brought up this example is not to ask everyone to bike. The example shows how the nagging, shrill voices that caution you can actually lead to a worse life. They ask you to err on the safer side - but their definition of safe is here and now. They follow naive arguments like Action A leads to result B which is bad for you. Hence don't do the action A. What they miss is that lack of action A will lead to another result C which might be even worse.

The second problem is that result B may not always be bad or at least bad enough to warrant giving up action A. For example, a dont that we hear most often is that "Don't eat fatty and carb rich food, it will shorten your life". This is an absolute truth in a statistical sense. Too much of eating comfort foods will shorten your life span. But the question is how much of life are you gaining and how much fun are you giving up? There is a cost associated with giving up good food. Someone may argue that other healthier food tastes just as good, but I don't buy it. Eating creamy, sugary, fatty stuff feels really good. It satisfies not only the taste buds, but the entire body and mind.

I am not against moderation. Of course if you are eating 300 gm of carbs every day and you cut down to 250 you will not miss it too much, the cost will be small. This cutdown may lead to some amount of better health, which is your gain. The gain will outweigh the cost very easily. But every 50 gm of carbs you cut down, the cost will be progressively much higher. And the rewards will keep on getting smaller. There will be a point for each person where the costs are simply not worth the reward, and you settle at that point. This is entirely sensible. The voice of advise does a good thing by making aware of the rewards. However, it goes to the extreme of saying that increasing the length of your life is so important that you should keep on making this sacrifice and eat pretty much nothing but boiled veggies, boiled chicken, and fruit. I know I am exagerating a bit, but the example here is again to show that the donter miss this subtle balance that everyone decides for themselves. One reason for this shriller nature of don't voice is that Doctors are forced to give "safest is the best" advise. They face too much risk of lawsuits if they give advise like "you know, a couple cigerettes a day didn't harm no one. If you enjoy them, sure, go ahead". They simply go into black and white mode and say "No smoking. Period."

The point I am trying to make is that of the attitude. If we listen to the media, we end up getting the feeling that "boy, I am doing so many things wrong". This is attitude of pessimism, half empty cup. It is bound to build a low esteem society. Instead we should be saying "I am doing most of the things right, and boy I am succeeding." If we take some known risks boldly, we will in fact live better longer and not to mention more fulfilling life. It is with this positive attitude that we will achieve the confident world of future.

Good ole' nostalgia

There are some distinct phases that almost everyone goes through. Childhood is marked by curiosity and learning. Youth is marked by energy, earnestness and confidence. Middle age is when you start losing the brand new life smell and relax into the same old same old. As you start getting even older, nostalgia starts to set in.

Why do we get nostalgic? My guess is that by then you have too much to reminisce, you have lost your youth for good, and facing the pain of old age and void of nothingness ahead. Memories are sweet. And more often than not you end up remembering them to be sweeter. You are also jealous of the young people, just for having what they have - youth. That's when you start saying the good old days were really good, and these undeserving yuppies have got it too easy. In short their grapes are sour, mine were sweeter.

Recognizing nostalgic statements is easy. Any sentence that contains the word "Nowadays" is almost certainly nostalgic. Especially when it talks about how things are bad nowadays. Almost no one under 20 uses the word “nowadays”. They are too excited by the new things that are happening today, and about to happen tomorrow. They hardly have time to talk about the yesterdays. Also any derogatory or even worried statement about the "new generation" or "kids these days" has a stamp of nostalgia on it. Any one talking about "family values" is talking through a nostalgic microphone. If you want to keep your youth, you should pay attention to your mind as well as your body. If you find yourself using these phrases a lot often than you used to try to think of the good old days, when you didn't do it as often.


Nostalgia is not a new phenomenon. It's been there for a few centuries definitely - because we have recorded statements. But I have a feeling it transcends civilization and cultures. I am sure an Egyptian who grew up to a ripe age of 50 reminisced about how the newer pyramids are just plain blocks of stones and theirs were works of art. It is difficult to say about nostalgia in prehistoric period, because most people probably died before turning soft and nostalgic. Those were the days, man!

Nostalgia rears its ugly head at many intellectual junctures. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that those considered intellectuals are already in the nostalgic phase. Anthropologists are especially prone to it (of course, not all). They call bones of people who died of unnatural cause as a proof of the society following "ritualistic killing" somehow making it sound better than murder. They also sometimes call graffiti as "sex symbolism". Nomadic tribes that killed their young because the food was scarce are called "in tune with the natural rhythm of plenty and scarcity". The eulogistic wording for what were really savage ways of our ancestors shouts of nostalgia. We are afraid of denigrating non-western, and ancient civilizations, even though the so called "civilizations" and communities had institutionalized oppression, slavery and murder. Historians too fall into this trap sometimes - calling certain periods as "golden age".

Nostalgic thinking combined with media is especially potent combination when there is a real problem to talk about. These experts come out of the woodwork to conclude that things are taking turn for the worse. The media loves them, they keep the reader/viewer glued - nobody turns the page or touches that dial.

Mother and child

A common theme for the modern world is about our relationship with the Nature. This relationship is usually expressed ruefully using many statements. “We have come very far from Nature”. “The modern man has lost the connection to the mother earth that the caveman had”. “We no longer have reverence for the Nature.”

The statements like this are not completely false. But how true are they? Rather more importantly, how useful are they? Mind you, they are not meant to be simple statements of fact. They certainly carry heavy moral judgment. We humans have been bad boys (girls are supposedly nicer in this respect). We have sinned, neglected our mother for our selfish interests. We have depleted her resources, cut down the beautiful trees, stopped worshipping the elements as we once did, we have become slaves of Satan.

The moral implecations are supposed to follow if the statements are true. But are they? Well, my feeling they seem like they have graduated from cliché-hood to truth, sometimes without passing the examination. Some are partially true, and some are absolutely false and even those that are true, do not lead to the serious moral implications. The picture is less of a flagrant sinner who raped mother earth, and more of a poor starved society that did not know better and was forced into using whatever they could to defend their existence. As humanity becomes more stable and powerful, it is undoing some of the harms, and ultimately will become as little intrusive as possible.

The trick is to remove the statements from emotionally and politically charged environment to dissecting table of sensibility and put them under the microscope of objective thinking. Make it less of a moral issue and take it to the realm of a problem that humanity needs to solve.

Are we going away from the Nature? Of course we are. Nature can be a very dangerous place. There are predators everywhere. Wild animals, snakes, various pests, harmful bacteria, viruses. These all take toll on human life - even the caveman tried to avoid them. Modern nature conservationists are not much different – they try to live in homes that are free of all the above. That's why you have never heard of "save cockroaches campaign" or "E-coli preservation act". The elements are not too nice either. It rains, snows, there are tornadoes. So we wear clothes, and make ourselves comfortable inside walls built of wood, stone, bricks and cement. To fit more people we build skyscrapers made with steel.

This much distance is good, I hope everyone will agree. So what other distance are we talking about? It is more of emotional distance that everyone worries about. We no longer revere nature as we used too. There were people who worshipped various natural deities, the Sun, the wind, the Rain. Sometimes they went a bit too far by sacrificing humans to these gods, but mostly they revered the nature. Or so the theory goes. It is this sense of reverence that is lacking in the modern humans, and who knows where it will lead to...

The question to ask is where did the reverence come from? And why don't we have it anymore? Maybe it was the fear that forced humans to make deities out of natural forces. They had no knowledge, no control, and were helpless against the forces that hurt them severely. If you are in this position, you to would try, as a last resort to placate the elements through rituals. It is really interesting to see that it is exactly like a relationship of a baby with his parents. No wonder we call it Mother Nature. Now we know better, and have a lot more power in terms of prediction and protection. We are no longer afraid, just prepared. It is a relationship of an adult with his parents. However, the childhood memories still linger on through years gone by. But like any grown adult, humanity has feeling of guilt about living away from the mother. What we don't realize is that Nature can be a very harsh and abusive mother. We stay away to protect ourselves, yet get together when we can, and pay our tribute. That's not a relationship to be ashamed of.

Yet we are learning to take good care of mother nature. We are cutting down on polution wherever we can, designing more eco-friendly cars, finding more and more energy from wind, sun and nuclear sources. We are potecting at least the cute creatures. But if you are sick and starving, and worried about your next meal, you can't be expected to give your mother the highest priority. You do what you can, and hope for a better future. One day we will find the best balance. Right now the problem of finding balance is not high priority for us. There are still millions of children dying, and billions living in desparate conditions. To improve their lives, we must keep the pace of progress up, so that they can grow strong enough, and their mind free enough to give mum a call once in a while.

Two positives make a negative

What is two plus two? If you use the mathematical terms, the answer is four. But we are not mathematicians, we like our language to be vague. We tend to use the word “plus” more like putting things together. It really depends on what those two are. And it depends on what you mean by putting them together. If you put the number 2 right next to another number 2, you might get 22. If you put 2 hydrogen atoms next to two oxygen atoms, you might get a tiny explosion and end up with a water molecule and a free oxygen radical. If you put two men together with two women, it might be a double date.

One way we commonly put two things together is when we say two different causes affect an outcome. The combination here is really important. For example, everyone knows that your health depends on how much you eat and how much you exercise. But the effects are not additive. If you exercise, and don't change your food intake, you will grow thinner. If you exercise a lot and don't each much, then you will lose muscles. If you don't exercise and increase food intake, you will get fat. However, if you exercise and increase food intake (reasonably), you will probably gain muscles. So the question is does exercise cause you to gain muscles or lose them? The answer is, it depends on how much you eat. Life is filled with such examples where something is good or not is determined by something else that is happening or not.

To add to the confusion, the yardsticks that we use are simplistic, and do not take these complexities in account. A typical measure for obesity is BMI – higher your weight for a given height, higher your BMI. The taller you are for the same weight, smaller your BMI. It is weight divided by height squared. Higher BMI usually means obesity. I said usually because the measure is simplistic. Here is an example. My friend was starting to put on weight. At 5'9" he was flabby and weighed 165 pound. That made his BMI = 26. His doctor warned against the weight gain and he seriously started exercising, and controlled his diet. After a while, he started liking what he saw in the mirror and decided to improve it. So he did a lot of weight training, with proteins. He built a fabulous body - almost no fat and bulging muscles. But the problem was that the amount of muscles he gained outweighed the fat he lost. He now weighs 170 pounds. His BMI is now larger - 26.5. If you did not look at him and simply looked at the two BMI numbers, you would say his health has deteriorated. But in reality he is fitter than ever.

This is what can happen when you have simplistic measure - you can have two positives (fat loss + muscle gain) appear as a negative (increased BMI). The word “appear” is very important. The appearance is only in the numbers. If you looked at his real appearance, it is a classic before and after case. But you are not his friend, you don't know him, the only information you get about him is from the BMI numbers. You can see him through a very narrow vision, like seeing through some special glasses. To make matters worse the glasses are curved - so they distort the picture. Two positives appear to make a negative.

Now imagine instead of my friends, a society. Almost any developing country might do. Let's say we know for a fact that the number of rapes that took place actually went down from say 1000 a year to 800 a year (let's assume the population was constant). Now as the rapes reduced, there was something else happening in the society - the taboos were breaking down, women were stronger and more independent, and their belief in the justice system improved - all very good things. As a result, more and more women came forward and were willing to report the heinous crime. Let's say the percentage increased drastically from 40% to 60%. Add the two good things together – decreased number of rapes, and higher reporting – and you will see the number of reported rapes going up from 400 to 480! That’s a 20% rise! Despite the fact that actual rapes dropped by 20% and reporting improved by 50%! What is happening here? And maybe if the police were more diligent, you will see convicted rapists going up from 200 to 300! That's a 50% increase in rapists! Oh my! What is the society coming to? Where are we going wrong?

Societies that are in transition often appear to have these "problems". But most of the times, these appearance are only on paper. Imagine hearing the following news: the proportion of marriages that end in divorce has gone up from 5% to 15%. Now is this bad in itself? A society that goes from rigid model of working husband and a housewife towards equality is going on the right path. A woman who is suffering abuse of a husband does not need to put up with him, because she can support herself, now can decide to end the suffering and opt for the lesser evil. Also the stigma that was once associated with divorce is reduced, or no longer there. We can look at the numbers and say, that maybe 10% marriages that did not end in divorce earlier, the parties involved suffered through because the alternatives were even worse. It is like suffering gangrene, because amputation was not an option.

Another example: you read that the number of people going to a psychiatrist to be treated for depression has increased from mere 1% to 6% in the last ten years. Does this mean we are more stressed as a society? Well, it might mean that more people are aware that the problem exists, that a solution exists, and more people can afford to use the solution, and it also may mean that the stigma associated with going to a psychiatrist has gone down significantly. All these are good factors, leading to a conclusion that is exactly opposite of the reality. The stress may not have increased, in fact the effect of the same stress has decreased because more of the worst affected people are seeking help.

There are countless other examples. More people wearing glasses does not mean the eyesight of humanity has worsened, it means exactly the opposite, more people are seeing things better now. But the theme is common, more people start accepting something as a problem, rather than hiding it, and more people solving the problem – these two good factors together makes the statistics to appear as the problem has increased.

Absolute and Relative

Think of a large number. Did you? Good. Now is it really large? Large enough?

While reading the questions, you must have felt something amiss. A Large number of what? Large enough for what? There is no number that is large by itself - you can easily multiply it by a thousand, and presto, your original number becomes puny compared to it. There is no limit beyond which every number is a large number. You can talk about larger number or smaller number. These words are relative. The numbers themselves are absolute. The funny part is that a good relative comparison can be done for only absolute quantities. This is a very subtle point. It is like if you want to compare height, you want to look down and see if they are standing on the same ground. The word “large” lives in the gray area between absolute and relative. You have to ask large number of what? Ten million dollars can certainly be large amount of money, but the same number of raindrops might not even be registered. The word large challenges us by not only to make sure that the count is substantial, but it is significant. Sometimes this distinction is a little slippery.

Let’s look at the crime statistics in a hypothetical area. We read that in the last 10 years number of crimes went from 2000 a year to 2100 a year. You would say the situation has clearly deteriorated. The media will sound alarms, and theories of how exposure to television and free access to guns leads to increased violence would gain ground. But as any other numbers, they are relative. 2100 is larger than 2000 - any fifth grader can tell you that. The question is, do the numbers stand on their own, are they absolute? If you are smarter than a fifth grader, you would notice that in the same 10 years, the population of that area went from 2 million to 2.3 million. The crime rate has actually gone down, from 10 in 10000 people to about 9 in 10000. This is about 10% improvement. So the crime rate, is an absolute quantity that can compared from a society to society, from time to time. It is something like density. We usually say iron is heavier than water - what we really mean is iron is denser than water. If you took 10 pounds of iron and 10 pounds of water, they will weigh the same. Density is in some sense more absolute properties of the two materials - it is not relative to the amount.

The problem is that we usually talk about anything in numbers, and since numbers in themselves have the sense of absoluteness, it is easy to give that absoluteness to what they measure. But the most important thing to remember is this numbers are absolute only when they don’t have units. Once they acquire units, they lose that high priestly position, and become pedantic. One must look at the units to determine whether we can compare them without any problem.

When can we compare two numbers? The simple answer is that you need to do apple to apple comparison. All things being equal, 2100 crimes are more than 2000 crimes. However, whenever some of the things change, you need to take the change into account. In our example, the population changed. You can take this change out of the equation by dividing – like finding density. The reason for this is we want useful information by doing comparison. We want to know whether the crime situation in that particular area has improved over the given 10 year period. The assumption is that the number correctly represents the crime situation. This assumption is really a big assumption. In fact it incorporates multiple assumptions like
- The population did not change
- Reporting stayed exactly the same - (for every 5 crimes, 4 were actually reported)
- The crimes were similar in composition (there could be 1000 murders and 1000 petty theft 10 years ago, and now there are 300 murders and 1800 petty thefts)

Usually for a large enough population (there go the relative term again...) compositions remain similar over a short enough time. But if over the 10 years improved technology or improved awareness, and increased belief in justice system, let's say higher proportion of crimes got reported, then in fact the real crimes might be going down, but the reporting might increase. This is an irony of good things leading to bad perception.

I am not trying to say that nothing is comparable. You can do meaningful and useful comparisons. You just need to make sure we take the right relationships into account.