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Random Quotes - 2

This is a bunch of interesting quotes I’ve collected over the past few months. Maybe they are connected to each other, and maybe they are not:

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent
- John Maynard Keynes

Source: Wikipedia. See also this relevant article, about the US government bailout of financial institutions in September 2008.

Quotes of Kenneth Boundling, economist, which sound strangely more relevant after the global financial meltdown:

Mathematics brought rigor to Economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis

Nothing fails like success because we don’t learn from it. We learn only from failure.

Source: Wikipedia
Switching a little:

There you have it. Admiration for raw, undirected cleverness winning over a questioning of fundamental importance. I wish there’d been someone in the room like Fight Club’s Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt), who responds to a smart remark by Edward Norton’s narrator character with, “Clever. How’s that working out for you, being clever?”

Source: RibbonFarm.com

But let’s not worry so much about the crisis. Paul Graham points out that now is the best time to start a startup. However, many people think of doing a startups, but not are not willing to quit their current job yet:

People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.
- Marcel Proust

Source: BrainyQuotes

But where do ideas for startups come from? Proust again:

The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

Enough about money. Let’s focus on love and happiness. Here’s Proust again:

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

We only really think when distressed, we shouldn’t worry about striving for happiness so much as “pursuing ways to be properly and productively unhappy.”
- Publisher’s Review weekly paraphrasing Proust

Source: How Proust can Change your life

Men are from mars, women are crybabies

Howstuffworks has an interesting article on the biological and psychological differences between men and women. Some interesting excerpts:

Women’s tear ducts are also shaped a little differently from men’s, which could be either a cause or an effect of increased crying [Source: New York Times]. In addition, people who are depressed may cry four times as much as people who are not, and two-thirds of people diagnosed with depression are women [Psychology Today].

but things are more complicated, and in general there’s a good reason why women and hormones have such a bad relationship:

Studies show that, in addition to worrying more often, women may be physiologically prone to experiencing more stress. For example, the amygdala of the brain processes emotions like fear and anxiety. In men, the amygdala communicates with organs that take in and process visual information, like the visual cortex. In women, though, it communicates with parts of the brain that regulate hormones and digestion. This may mean that stress responses are more likely to cause physical symptoms in women than in men [Source: Live Science].

and to top it all off:

In addition, women’s bodies produce more stress hormones than men’s bodies do. Once a stressful event is over, women’s bodies also take longer to stop producing the hormones. This may be a cause or an effect of women’s tendency to replay stressful events in their minds and think about upsetting situations [Source: Psychology Today].

But the most interesting part is this:

In one German study, researchers showed participants images of several scenarios. The participants used a computer to describe which of the scenarios would be more upsetting. The results suggest that, across cultures, women find emotional infidelity more upsetting than sexual infidelity. Men’s responses varied across cultures, but in general they were jealous of sexual infidelity [Source: Human Nature].

Sounds like it should be OK to have sex with other women as long as you continue bringing flowers to your wife.

The Tyranny of the Normal

Image via Wikipedia

This is an interesting article that talks about the disadvantages of having a privileged life. It is talking about education in Ivy League schools in the US, but applies equally well to the IITs and IIMs in India. It’s quite a long article, and parts of it I skimmed over, but it makes some good points.

It starts out with small ideas:

The first disadvantage of an elite education[...], is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous. Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals.

Later in the article, it touches on another aspect that is more serious, in my opinion:

How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? Wouldn’t I be squandering the opportunities my parents worked so hard to provide? What will my friends think? How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or important people in New York? And the question that lies behind all these: Isn’t it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes, and you miss your true calling.

To me, this appears to be saying something similar to what J.K. Rowling referred to in her famous Yale speech. There are a whole bunch of things that successful people will never try, because that would push them outside the comfort zone that is provided by their success.

Because students from elite schools expect success, and expect it now. They have, by definition, never experienced anything else, and their sense of self has been built around their ability to succeed. The idea of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them, defeats them. They’ve been driven their whole lives by a fear of failure—often, in the first instance, by their parents’ fear of failure. The first time I blew a test, I walked out of the room feeling like I no longer knew who I was. The second time, it was easier; I had started to learn that failure isn’t the end of the world.

This issue does get conflated with financial security, and Venkat pointed out in a comment to that post. But maybe the path to greatness (even in a narrow financial sense) lies in being able to give up some of the financial security temporarily, climb down from the hilltop that you are on currently, walk down into the valley, so that you can scale the next mountain. (Students of optimization will recognize the phenomenon of getting stuck in local optima, and the need to traverse sub-optimal areas of the search space before you can find a better solution. See for example the Simulated Annealing algorithm.)

The great institutions of our country churn out successful executives. Even those of my IIT classmates who had trouble passing their courses are now successful mid- or top-level executives. There are no weirdos. Which might be a problem, claims the article:

Thirty-two flavors, all of them vanilla. The most elite schools have become places of a narrow and suffocating normalcy. [...] I know from long experience as an adviser that not every Yale student is appropriate and well-adjusted, which is exactly why it worries me that so many of them act that way. The tyranny of the normal must be very heavy in their lives.

I don’t quite agree with this paragraph. I think it is a little too harsh. However, in general, the phrase “the tyranny of the normal” somehow resonates with me. I can feel the tyranny of the normal all around me, and on me too. Forget careers and business success. Even in simpler (or is it more complex?) things like relationships, friendship, love, there is the tyranny of the normal.

I am a pretty happy and contented person. In fact, I think I see myself as one of the most contented, amongst all the people that I know. And if there is one thing that bothers me, I think it would be the fact that I long to escape the tyranny of the normal. But I guess this longing is still probably half-hearted. Because, seriously, there is nothing preventing me from doing that, other than the fact that I am comfortable sitting on my hilltop, unable to generate enough motivation to plunge into the valley on the other side.

And, I would like to end with another, in my opinion, insightful quote from that article:

A friend who teaches at the University of Connecticut once complained to me that his students don’t think for themselves. Well, I said, Yale students think for themselves, but only because they know we want them to.

I wonder if I am in the second category.

Gaurav Mishra is giving away everything he owns

Wow.

It took me over an year to “give up” my job. Around August 2006, I started thinking that I should quit my job and take some time off. It took until August 2007 to crystallize the vague thoughts that I had in my mind. And it took until December 2007 to actually quit.

As you can see from the timelines, it is not easy to break free of the structure of the default life that we impose upon ourselves, based on what we see around us. Note that, in my case, it wasn’t finance that was holding me back. It was just needing to convince myself to get out of my comfort zone.

Now, six months later, I am convinced that it was a great decision. In fact, I think everyone should do something like this at some time during their career. Especially if your career is having a mid-life crisis. If you’ve been at a regular job for 5 to 10 years, and you can afford (financially) to take about 6 months (or more) off, I highly recommend that you do this. All the non-financial reasons that you are trotting out for not doing so are just rationalizations. Convince me otherwise, I’m ready to debate you

But frankly, what I did was not all that revolutionary. Lots of people quit their jobs to try something different. Gaurav Mishra is taking the next, really revolutionary step:

I have already decided to give away the job (for ten months at least), and my lovely house goes with it. Now, I am giving away everything else I have, to one lucky person. Yes, you read it right, I’m giving away everything I have, to one lucky person.

He clearly lays out some compelling reasons for why this make sense. Read the details, and comments of readers over at his blog.

For the record, no, I do not feel envious of Gaurav, I have no intentions of giving away my belongings. But I do admire the courage.

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J.K. Rowling on the power of failure

Image by Getty Images via DaylifeHarry Potter creator J.K. Rowling talked about what failure taught her at a recent commencement address she gave in Harvard:

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged.

So, how many of you are working on an area that you succeeded in easily, but is not necessarily your primary passion? Co-incidentally, I had a similar discussion with a bunch of friends yesterday - i.e. those who did well in college and found well paying and mildly challenging jobs have the least motivation to do something truly interesting with their lives. It is the ones who did not do well who are now doing well.

Ever since I quit my job (six months ago) and started “goofing off” (i.e. working on a bunch of things that I feel passionately about), I’ve met more and more people who wish they could be doing the same, but are still unable to take the leap of faith required. I’ve also met more and more people who did take the leap of faith and are doing quite well. I’m fairly convinced that a lot of people in the first category should just bite the bullet and make an attempt at grabbing their dreams. Financial insecurity is often cited as a reason for not doing so, but I am not convinced. I think it is more of a comfort zone thing.

Think about it.

Do you enjoy your work?

Meetu sent me this:

• Human = eat + sleep + work + enjoy
• Donkey = eat + sleep
• Therefore, Human = Donkey + work + enjoy
• And, Human - enjoy = Donkey + work

So, are you enjoying your work?

Catch-22 in real life

The book Philosophical Psychopathology reports on the case of a man who got into a real-life Catch-22 situation. He was brought to psychiatrists because he was suffering from mental delusions. He was afraid that he was going to be “locked up”. And the psychiatrists said that this was a delusion without any basis in reality. In fact, his delusion was so strong, that to avoid being locked up, he tried to kill himself. Based on this, the psychiatrists decided that he should be …… you guessed it …… locked up.

If they lock him up, then his belief was true, and he wasn’t really deluded, was he? So they shouldn’t be able to lock up him. But then his belief would turn out to be false. And they can lock him up after all. Somewhere, Alfred Tarski is getting uncomfortable in his grave.

See full article (via boingboing.

Overcoming Bias: Applause Lights

Read this paragraph and think about it:

I am here to propose to you today that we need to balance the risks and opportunities of advanced Artificial Intelligence. We should avoid the risks and, insofar as it is possible, realize the opportunities. We should not needlessly confront entirely unnecessary dangers. To achieve these goals, we must plan wisely and rationally. We should not act in fear and panic, or give in to technophobia; but neither should we act in blind enthusiasm. We should respect the interests of all parties with a stake in the Singularity. We must try to ensure that the benefits of advanced technologies accrue to as many individuals as possible, rather than being restricted to a few. We must try to avoid, as much as possible, violent conflicts using these technologies; and we must prevent massive destructive capability from falling into the hands of individuals. We should think through these issues before, not after, it is too late to do anything about them…

Before reading further, decide what you think of this paragraph. Then see full article in which it is embedded. I think you’ll like it.

The Twitter Zone and Virtual Geography

Venkat has just written about a new way to map all our social interactions. The innermost ring is the twitter zone, which he describes as:

The twitter zone is the zone of people about whom you get a constant stream of nonessential trivia, ranging from children’s illnesses to tastes in coffee. In previous ages, the high cost of communication meant that this mapped to your village, tribe, (or suburban neighborhood plus cubicle neighbors). Today it includes anyone who engages you in a bidirectional flow of trivia about both your lives, in a constant steady stream, so you develop a full, rich background picture of their lives. It includes some of your physical neighbors (since in this age of Bowling Alone we don’t talk to all our neighbors) and your twitter and instant messaging buddies.

See full article, which should be read in conjunction with the Monkeysphere that I had blogged about earlier.