predictions

This weekend, I was reading interview with editor of The Guardian in Hindu, came across this:-

If you believe there is a revolution going everywhere else in information and you take a decision early on to cut yourself off from that, then it’s difficult to see how you can experiment in future. My suspicion is that in the next 10 years, the most extraordinary things will happen in terms of information, how we find it, how we search for it, how we present it. And I want to be as open as possible to all that.

There has been this drumbeat of change in news and in general publishing – with web first and now mobile and other devices such as iPad and Kindle gaining more prominence. But what struck me there was the intention to keep the organization open to that change, getting positioned to take advantage of it than work to minimize the impact of the change.

Other thing was about predictions. Same article in Hindu mentions about mobiles and saw this Gartner research which is related to it – by 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide. On Monday, I heard someone quoting a Gartner research that 30% of legacy systems were going to be modernized to ERP packages in next few years (didn’t get a reference to this). This has implications to folks with mainframe background in terms of acquiring new skills. So I was thinking what else is going to change that has impact? What is going to change in IT outsourcing in next 10 years?

tests vs fun?

I was reading this on Chinese way of tests in schools vs US.

Article was talking about a kid “who was clearly not “ready” to read” and “(US) law doesn’t start testing students’ reading abilities until after third grade” so that kids don’t start anxious about tests. Again not a consideration for us. My daughter, 3 and 1/2, is starting to read words in Malayalam and English. And it will be the case with most of our children – we don’t really consider the readiness factor all that much. Our parents don’t have too much against scolding the kid, forcing them to sit and study and make them ready rather than let them develop at their own pace.

For “Western parents, who were more concerned with whether their kids were having fun — and wanted less (tests).” – at the same time, we usually don’t have that consideration of kids having fun while choosing school or education. It might be a good thing in early ages, but that attitude towards education – that pretty much it is about passing tests – carries forward when they need to branch out after school. I think that is where the advantage stops – in creativity, pursuing their dreams, following different paths than a socially accepted standard for success and having fun doing the job.

This week Obama was warning US children about competition from India and China. At the same time, if we don’t teach our children to be creative, we might not effectively compete also.

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

I have read Tipping Point and Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, so wanted to finish off his books – completed Blink and reading What the Dog Saw and Other Stories now. The subjects that he takes up may not be very sophisticated and I doubt if many authors can write an entire book or even a chapter on them – but he somehow manages to write a book and make it entertaining. Usually making something “pop” (fiction, movies, and science) is looked at as making it somewhat less in quality – but I feel in many cases that the information might remain available only to experts otherwise. I had read “Made to Stick” sometime back – about making your ideas sticky by simplifying the concept, telling stories that are used to remember the concept etc. It will be hard to enjoy a serious psychology article, but I think that is where Malcolm Gladwell is succeeding – telling stories to make things sticky.


Basic concept of this book is also very simple – our unconscious mind is deciding many things making it easy for us to live this life. Then he dissects this into many parts – trying to convince us using many stories of experiments, studies, real life events that we do make unconscious decisions all the time which are significant. Like deciding in few seconds whether we like or dislike someone, whether something or someone poses any danger, whether someone is honest or a cheat, whether we like a web site, a product, or a store. He calls it many names – “thin slicing”, recognizing the “fist” or signature or character of something/someone.
Further slicing of unconscious is again basic science – that our brain is good at pattern recognition. And we create an extensive library using our experiences and environment, validating the assumptions, correcting patterns. We keep perfecting these patterns to reduce the overhead in daily life. What happens when we judge something is applying the available patterns against the situation to come up with the best fit. Doing this exercise in conscious memory will be taxing and we will not be able to complete the calculation in reasonable time. Key thing there is – experts are people who generated a lot of these patterns in their brain by careful study and practice – hence they can recognize patterns quickly. Basically he says we can improve our first impressions with exposing ourselves to different environments or experiences. Like a white police officer who judges a black person as hostile or not can make better judgments by associating in a multi-racial environment than in an isolated environment.

Another interesting thing was that trying to explain something we have a feeling for – he says it is hard for us to explain feelings about unfamiliar things. He calls it “verbal overshadowing” – that the visual memory (pictures) getting replaced with words. It is like trying to explain what a person looks like vs your picture of that person in memory. Related to this, one of the most interesting podcasts series that I heard recently was radiolab. Again it is similar to the concept earlier – with sound and narration, make science interesting and accessible. One of the things I heard there is that the most truthful memory is that of a person with amnesia – reason being, every time we retrieve a memory we add something to it or modify it. So memory of a worst vacation seems not so bad (or much worse) after years – after recounting it many times over the years. How do you trust an explanation of a good or bad feeling – how close will it be to your actual feeling and does your feeling become more aggravated or reduced when you talk about it? He proposes that we come up with a reason for why we like or dislike something and then adjust our true preference with that reason.

One of the things that I felt somewhat dangerous is – he makes an assertion that “thin slicing often delivers a better answer than more deliberate and exhaustive ways of thinking.” He goes at length to prove this by taking examples where gut feel decision making (of course by professionals who have seen similar situations before) trumps decisions made from extensive analysis involving too many variables. The balancing is to know when to use what kind of decision-making – which is not something he has explored much in the book.

Overall the book will not bore you and gives some food for thought.