Every Page Wants to be Read....

It took me a minute to register what that sound was, it was menacingly loud & very shrill like a 5 inch man yelling at you from the floor while you stand. I instinctively stared down, but couldn't find a small human figure to associate that voice with. At first I thought I was hallucinating, was I? I couldn't possibly ignore that voice & couldn't figure out where it was coming from. So I did the next best thing, I tried to listen to it. It was a constant, almost rhythmic yelp, it screeched onto my ear drums like a finger nail scratching on your high school black board. It said, & kept on saying, "hey, how are you, why don't you put your eyes on me, don't you find me as good as page 102, don't like to know what I have to say?; hey, how are you, why ....." & the same thing all over again.

I thought I was positively going mad, but I wasn't, I knew it because everything else still seemed possible apart from the voice. Then I really decided to pay some attention from where the voice was coming from. I bent down to look under my table, I heard the voice getting a little weak. Then I stood up again & on my way up I passed by the book lying open on my desk & page 103 was fluttering. The moment I stared at page 103, the voice stopped. Then again, I moved my eyes to something else & just as the voice began, I stared at the page once again. Dead silence. I picked up the book & started to read the paragraph which I had left just 15 minutes ago before dozing off on the table. The voice has subsided since then.

But seriously, does the above story provoke something in me, really made me say something which could have been said in just a few insignificant lines? I think it did, thats what an unfinished book must make a bibliophile feel. There are some feelings which we can't find words for. Such feelings, or such thoughts occur to almost everyone I presume. But what really happens when someone else gives your thoughts, the words, the meaning, the purpose, the spin. Such sultans of words live amongst us, they keep on feeding our vocabulary of thoughts with the exact words which we always wanted to say but just couldn't.

Like the story, which was inspired by what Taleb said in the Black Swan, in the chapter, "Umberto Eco's Anti Library", "You will accumulate more knowledge & more books as you grow older & the growing number of unread books will look at you menacingly". This was such a profound thought, almost like an epiphany, exactly my thoughts printed on a paper, in one of the most influential books I have read so far.

Such books live in my room, almost like migratory birds. Once finished they change places with new books. Sometimes they are on my computer screen, sometimes they are on my shelf & sometimes (but most often) they sit right in front of me just a few inches above my computer screen. Whenever I look at the computer, my peripheral vision is always occupied with at least one book staring at me. I don't know what the book is thinking, but it just looks intently, waiting for someone in its vicinity to pick it up & start flipping through its pages, with a deliberate precision.

Imagine what every page while being printed & bound into a book must be thinking. It only has a singular wish that someone will posses the book which its a part of & then reach that page & read it & make a difference in that reader's state of mind. I don't think any page thinks otherwise, school text books might. The page has one desire, it wants to be read, it wants the reader to reach a level of abstraction in thought & in action which he didn't have before reading that page. Maybe that page contains the climax of a soon-to-end mystery thriller or maybe its the page that makes the whole difference in understanding a concept. It can also be that page, which has no great information, but might lead you to the moment-of-truth. The brotherhood of pages which we read all the time, has that singular obsession to fulfill its hearts desire, make every one who reads them, be bestowed with at least one zillionth of a new thought, a spark or even a contemplation.

A book which doesn't think on these lines, a page which doesn't have this obsession can be easily called a text book. But I think even some text books have made me feel; They have occasionally made me sit up an take notice that there are many other books on my shelf which I am not reading. Well thats a thought, I thank all my text books for that.

In the pilot episode of House, there is an insanely hilarious dialog by House who in his classic demeanor to avoid work, says, "as the philosopher Jagger said, ' You can't always get what you want '". I think there must be those disappointed pages living their unread lives on someone's bookshelf or even in some forgotten warehouse. Well, allow me to repeat what philosopher Jagger said...

They didn't get a chance to reach that brain which would have cherished their company, they didn't get a chance to change the world; to make that small dent to someone's thought. They didn't get the chance to prevail in someone's memory of them, who would remember exactly where they are & would read them time & again to relive the magic of reading them.

But to House's wise line, Dr Cuddy (his boss), replies at the end of the show, "I looked up the philosopher you mentioned, & he also says, ' if you try sometimes, you get what you need' ". This just might make that unread page feel some satisfaction that someone thought that it was worthy enough to have something printed upon it.

Song for the moment: Rolling Stones - You can't always get what you want

Technorati Tags: Taleb, Books, Joy of Reading, Dr. House

Parallel Encounters - Redux

A recap of parallel encounters, it is a form of parallel learning which involves use of multiple media to educate yourself. These media may include TV, movies, books, internet, radio, nature, life, people, inanimate objects, experiences, et al. What it doesn't mean is, to just observe these things & forget about them. It is the conscious observation of the afore mentioned media to learn as much as we can about life, areas of interest & think of possible applications of the concepts learned into our respective professions. This isn't meant to sound so formal, this is what we humans normally do, but some people have surpassed the natural limits of doing this, to gain that coveted niche which everybody seeks. Learning was/is/never will be a dull activity if we substitute our lack of love for a particular medium with some other media. Its always possible to learn, which way we do it, is totally a matter of taste.

There are many pioneers of this concept, who have chosen specific media to teach themselves & subsequently apply their gained knowledge to their respective professions & achieve 'super-normal' results. Some of them made it so big that they became doomed to fail (reasons infinite). But I don't think they failed because they learned, I think they failed because of some inherent recklessness on their part, or being succumbed to cognitive biases or .... we can give any reason under the sun, in hindsight everything seems possible.

Why is it so important or even necessary to some extent to do this? As I mentioned Sir Ken Robinson's views in my previous post, we have reached intellectual inflation, what needed an 'X' degree now requires a 'X' PG degree & so on. So in the wake of all this, when we are doing what everybody else is doing, how unique are we? This applies necessarily to the investment profession. If you don't have a variant perception, you will always under perform as compared to the market average. But if you have a different way of analyzing the same information which is available to everybody else, quite possibly you will come up with a diverse outcome or a diverse theory. Its not about theorizing or diverse outcomes I am worried about, its the process of approaching the problem.

Everyone approaches problems in a slightly different way. A person trained in math will approach a math problem with a different perspective than a person trained in arts. Why does a disparity exist in their approaches? Is it because they were trained differently? Quite possibly, YES. the subjects they learn, the concepts they encounter, eventually result into setting their thoughts in a particular pattern. Where a scientist will look at a problem with the question "why", an artist will look at the same problem with the question "how". This generalization may not prove much, but these systemic differences in people's approaches can be readily observed. Ask those people who are afraid of numbers or math equations, ask them why they are afraid? They usually don't have a convincing answer, at least no one has ever convinced me about their fear of numbers (needless to say, post a comment if you have a convincing answer :) ). i think, it is because, they don't know why they are afraid. With enough practice these same numberphobics will solve even differential calculus with the same concentration as a math grad. This is because their brains have accepted the pattern due to excessive practice, or even developed heuristic techniques to solve those problems.

The point is, "process is king". The way you approach the problem is vastly detrimental to the outcome of the problem (solution). The legendary fund manager of Legg Mason Capital Management, Bill Miller, uses multiple sources of knowledge to design his investment process. For instance, his investment strategy team includes, a Roman historian, Bill Miller himself is a philosophy major, then you will find regular finance grads & the most important association, Santa Fe Institute of New Mexico. Imagine the brainstorming they have. I can't. Santa Fe Institute is a premier research institute catering to various subjects which eventually merge at the study of Complex Adaptive Systems. So the combined knowledge from all these sources & the basics of valuation & value investing or some other investment theory, Bill Miller comes up with killer investments with almost contrarian & diverse processes. At the end of the day, all one wants from an investment is a good return. So whats wrong in thinking in a different way to maximize it?

Another example I would like to cite, is of Victor Niederhoffer, the twice bust speculator, who otherwise had a tremendous streak, writes in his biography (The Education of a Speculator) about his education from various sources. A curious glance through the chapters of the book would clearly show the various sources he cites (although very impressively). From his training at his childhood neighborhood, to his squash training, from history (books), from professional experiences, from other people in his profession (peers & great speculators before him), from sports & board games, from gambling & betting, from sex, from academia, from music, from markets, & so on. The list is endless & he delivers extremely detailed analyses of which source has resulted in imbibing which quality in him. I am not really interested in his professional streak or the way he speculated, but I am mainly interested in the way he made use of all these sources to do what he did (sometimes even better then others, till he failed twice).

Even looking at my intellectual hero, Nassim Taleb, reading his books is like reading 100 books at once in consolidation with a theme or a backdrop. There are so many books that I have picked up from the library shelves just because Taleb cites some argument or example from that book. Almost always, those books turn out to be insanely amazing. Taleb also recommends, movies, research papers, history, philosophy, his books are a cornucopia of subjects, concepts & eventually decision processes. Taleb's books are the only one's I have found with a very thick bibliography, citing amazing reference material.

The lesson which I take from these people & many more, is that, learning is a dynamic process. It doesn't stop once you leave a classroom. It improves your understanding about things which you wouldn't normally think about, it helps develop an approach which you wouldn't have normally chosen to adopt, it helps spawn those ideas in your head which (maybe) nobody around you is thinking of. Bouncing ideas of these various media has another advantage. Suddenly trivial arguments become less tasking & heavily enjoyable :).

Like Douglas Adams said: "I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day."

Split wide open

"It is widely known that we have two sides to the brain,...."

That is how I wanted to begin, but instead I think I shouldn't .....

"I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of everyday life."

There are ways to describe intelligence, creativity & all that jazz. People have come up with amazingly subjective explanations like, he is so intelligent he practically taught himself calculus at age 13; or he is so creative that no one had to teach him to paint & he became an impressionist. There are variants to these sentences thrown around by parents & peers alike to describe a relative measure of intelligence or creativity. But underneath it all, is nothing but an organized pattern of neurons. How they network is the cream of some other argument.

A professor Allan Snyder of the University of Sydney, has made a very compelling research in the dominance of left hemisphere over the right & right over the left. All he does is, use Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (in human words, temporarily numbing a region of the brain with the help of strong magnetic fields disrupting the usual circuitry in that region). This is an ingenious technique to study the effect of dominance of the regions of the brain. For instance, his primal argument is that everybody is a born genius, we just grow into ordinary people (or not).

As it is known, the right hemisphere usually handles the creative (read, abstract) half of the thought whereas the left hemisphere deals with the logical (read, mechanical or deductive) half of the thought. But is also observed, that as we grow up, we are molded into a thought pattern which ideally decides whether we become left brained or right brained i.e. more inclined towards towards logical reasoning or more inclined towards abstract reasoning, or quite possibly both.

What Snyder does with his experiments is, he asks a subject to draw any sketch, as accurate as they can, of some object which the subject has commonly seen or know of. For instance, a Horse. The subject using his normal, regular faculties of drawing, draws a picture on a piece of paper. After a 45 minute (totally harmless) magnetic numbing of the left brain, the subject is asked to re-draw the same object on another piece of paper. What professor Snyder found was remarkable & truly amazing. He observed that the sketch made before was just a play of lines to construct a similar looking object on the paper, whereas the sketch made after the numbing of the left brain was a far more detailed and close to accurate representation of the thing being drawn (by the same person). He also conducts other memory tests & tests which are used to determine creative potential. These custom made tests also concluded that the creative score tips considerably when the left brain is numbed. After an hour or two, when the left brain comes back to normal, the results again are agonizingly close to the results before the numbing process.

This speaks volumes about the dominance of a thought process. The left brain clearly dominates over the right brain. There are many theories proposing why this happens, some attribute it to the chemical imbalances during the process of birth within the womb, or some even attribute it to the gradual dominance of a hemisphere over the other. The brain works on an amazingly simple technique, "use it, or lose it". If you fail to take advantage of your brain's abilities, you are bound to lose the functionality from your brain & that dysfunctional region instead of just being idle, is utilized by some other brain function. So if you do not make use of your language part of your brain ever, ever since you are born, then that region of your brain would be hijacked by some other dominant function. Eventually you will lose your ability to use speech or language as a medium to communicate & it would become incalculably difficult for you to learn it once you have grown up. Imagine, no language, no thoughts, the brain just sits there and your body just floats around like a unguided zeppelin.

This takes me to another, really crucial argument, why do we lose creativity when we grow up? Do we actually lose it? or do we forget we have one? (just like Snyder proves).

An amazing & amusing video of Sir Ken Robinson at TED, asks a vital question; 'Do Schools Kill Creativity?' The moment I read that title, I almost unconsciously whispered, yes they do. I have been through that unlearning phase which has taught me never to get caught in that same maddening pattern again. It is more liberating now than ever before. But why? why do schools have to kill creativity? He puts forward a simple point, about the classification of fields of study & how they got to be classified that way. He says that every education system in the world is based on the same hierarchy of subjects, Math & languages at the top, the humanities in the middle & the arts at the bottom. The idea is, the most useful subjects for work at the top & descending from there to the subjects where you wouldn't make it worth a living. An unmistakably horrifying thought today when we know how much proliferation creativity has today. This has spawned due to the industrial revolution, which basically decided which subjects will help a kid grow into an adult who will be able to contribute to the working of a factory, a machine & so on. Abilities such as math, logic & mechanical / technical rigor are often encapsulated in the top echelon subjects, where as the professionally less important subjects are relatively below them.

Robinson makes another claim of academic inflation. With the growth in population, of students and the institutes coaching them, more people go through the same type of education which results into a diversity breakdown. This leads to people (who can) adopting to higher education. So a job which required a degree 50 years ago, will now require a post graduate degree & a job which would need a PG degree will now require a PhD or maybe even more. So what happens when we exhaust even that resource of vertical growth. Do we grow laterally & acquire more badges on our sleeves?

The whole point is, the education system forces use subconsciously to become left brained. It teaches us the logical deduction of things, it teaches us to follow patterns & algorithms & we do without asking why, why, because frankly most of the time even the teacher doesnt know the answer. Whom do we owe this unintellectual debt to, once we grow up? We grow up invariably without our choice into number crunching calculators dreaming that everything is part of an efficient system.

But imagine that mind, which has liberated itself from that left brained linearity. Imagine a mind who thinks in abstracts & believes in random patterns & derives every thought on its backdrop. The possibility of such a mind having a niche in the market where everyone has the same kind of thinking is undeniable. We have seen master investors, great artists, out of the box thinkers, basically rock stars of everyday life, are these the people who have let go their left brain dominance?

What is intelligence then? It is, the ability to look at things in diverse ways, from interdisciplinary approaches. This is only possible when you have let go your standard patterns of understanding things. One of the fascinations of the Systems Approach, for me, is in spite of propagating a logical & left brained idea of systems having step by step iterations, it also allows us to think of interconnections among systems. It doesnt stop us to believe that every system is invariably connected to every other in form or the other & realizing this, it allows us to somehow deduce that intelligence can only be possible when such diverse connections become comprehensible.

Although I have too many personal experiences to relate, I need to think on the following concepts..........

- Connecting this dichotomy to parallel encounters & its implications
- Dependence on Academics & the classroom numbing
- Use of psychology to "left brain" normal people
- Finally, forcing the unlearning process through deliberate & new thought patterns

Natural Optimization

What is the single-most important driving force for any animal living on this planet?

It is not the ability to live in a sustainable equilibrium with all other creatures, it's not the ability to even multiply, but most importantly it is the ability to maintain a sustainable environment for its offspring to live in. This is so deceptively simple to understand, that nature has been doing it from ever since nature exists. Generating this self sustaining equilibrium through various processes and counter-processes which clean each other out. It is an important perspective to share with nature, that we need to keep our home clean for our children to live in. This is not the transfer of responsibility alone, but also generating a conducive environment so that the offspring can carry out the responsibility for its offspring and so on.

Biomimicry is that emerging field which will be responsible to teach "humans" (can be read as, wasteful creatures) how to emulate nature's owns works through our technology to maintain a sustainable environment for our kids to live in.

Why is it so complicated for us humans to design something, to make something, to use something & generate a huge amount of waste in the process of doing so, which can't be used for anything at all but for disposal? Even the system of nature has it own share of outputs/byproducts, but how these outputs are effectively fed back to other parallel systems working along with it as an input for some other process. The whole crux of looking at life as a complex adaptive system, let alone nature, feeding enormous quantity of waste to some system which acts as the enormous amount of input for that system.

For instance, what is the most heavily generated by product we can even conceive of from any system? Imagine a system of animals, what can they generate which can be potentially lethal for their own survival? Well, many things, but the alarming quantities of one substance, namely Carbon dioxide (CO2) is what I am aiming at. Almost all mammals exhale this gas, which is not good for their survival on this planet. Well we know where it is used and how it is recycled. Its a natural process, CO2 not required by mammals is used by the flora & many other systems which sort of sustain the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. This is nature's amazing way to clean itself up, this is an optimization system which makes use of "what is" available to eliminate the waste from other processes by using it as an essential ingredient.

What could have been nature's challenge in terms of developing this self-sustaining equilibrium? We can't have such information, atleast from what we know. But one thing that biomimicry expert Janine Benyus, points out is the use of elements (a limited amount of them) in constructing these systems. What she means to say is, we humans use the entire length and breadth of the periodic table in making things which makes our lives more livable, whereas nature uses just a few elements from the periodic table in order to generate specific processes. So the whole concept of biomimicry is to emulate nature's own way constructing these systems & make changes in our designs to minimize our wastefulness.

In this remarkable video by Benyus at TED 2005, she explains 12 sustainable ideas from nature which can be (and are actually being) incorporated into our way of thinking of systems and designing them. The aim, is to be design more efficient systems, parallel to the way nature conceives it & eliminate non biodegradable waste, which apparently cannot be used as an input for any other system.

So according to her, whats the biggest design challenge for the current and the forthcoming generation; is to design systems which allow them to do what they want to do without destroying the environment which will take care of the forthcoming generations.

The bottomline according to Benyus is;

"With 3.8 billion years of research and development on its side, nature has already solved problems that human designers and engineers still struggle with. Thus there can be ways in which humans mimic nature in the products we build and the systems we implement. And because the champion adapters in the natural world are, by definition, those that can survive without destroying the environment that sustains them, biomimicry can contribute to the long-term health of our planet."

Technorati Tags: Biomimicry, Nature, Systems Thinking, Design