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

Darwin never warned against crossing black cats, walking under ladders or stepping on cracks in the pavement, but his theory of natural selection explains why people believe in such nonsense.

The tendency to falsely link cause to effect – a superstition – is occasionally beneficial, says Kevin Foster, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University.

For instance, a prehistoric human might associate rustling grass with the approach of a predator and hide. Most of the time, the wind will have caused the sound, but “if a group of lions is coming there’s a huge benefit to not being around,” Foster says.

Foster and colleague Hanna Kokko, of the University of Helsinki, Finland, sought to determine exactly when such potentially false connections pay off.
Simplified behaviour

Rather than author just-so stories for every possible superstition – from lucky rabbit’s feet to Mayan numerology – Foster and Kokko worked with mathematical language and a simple definition for superstition that includes animals and even bacteria.

The pair modelled the situations in which superstition is adaptive. As long as the cost of believing a superstition is less than the cost of missing a real association, superstitious beliefs will be favoured.

Read the full article.

Reflecting on the misinformation, half-truths, and weasel-words that form the bulk of political-campaign speecifying, I conclude that listening to politicians’ campaign speeches yields about as much information as listening to insects buzzing: in both cases you’re made aware that annoying, and possibly dangerous, pests are nearby.

Source: Cafe Hayek

“Faith is Hope given too much credit.”

– Matt Tuozzo

Source: Overcoming Bias

NBC Universal, which is trying to block a public bike path from traversing its property along the waterway…
One bike advocate said Universal executives told him they feared that people would use the path to lob unsolicited screenplays onto the studio’s nearby production lot — something that apparently happens at other spots when a Universal film scores big at the box office.

Source: boing-boing.

Persistence isn’t using the same tactics over and over. That’s just annoying.

Persistence is having the same goal over and over.

Source: Seth Godin.

As usual, the idealists are 100% right in principle and, as usual, the pragmatists are right in practice.

Source: Joel on Software

In a relationship, you are not meant to make someone else happy; you want to be happy *with* that someone else.

Source: Solitary Dreamer (3rd comment)

The Straight Dope tries to answer the question “How can the Chinese use computers, since their language contains so many characters?” and gives a very fascinating insight into the Chinese language:

(3) Enter the syllable into the computer phonetically using Roman (i.e., our) letters. This takes up to six keystrokes plus, in some programs, one more keystroke for the tone. Typically this pops up a menu of possible characters, six characters or so at a time.

(4) Page through the characters looking for the one you want. With 50,000 possible written syllables but only a few hundred possible spoken ones, each spoken syllable can have as many as 131 different meanings (average: 17), each with its own character. You could be paging quite a while, and you still might not find the character you want–no program includes all 50,000. (Answer to obvious question: in speech you figure out the meaning from the context. Never let your attention wander during a Chinese conversation.)

After reading the whole article I am amazed at how the Chinese have managed to be so computer literate!

Our own problems with Indian languages are similar, and if you have any interest in entering Indic languages into a computer, you should check out Lipikaar.com which is trying to use a similar technique.

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.

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.

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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Years ago, my father told me of an industrial accident he had witnessed. Someone had climbed into a reaction chamber for routine inspection during a plant shutdown, when, unknown to him, a hidden hand opened a valve which flooded the chamber with nitrogen. He collapsed after a few minutes, unconscious. Another person climbed in to see what was wrong, tried to revive the unconscious engineer and himself collapsed. Both died for lack of oxygen soon after.

I remember being extremely surprised and somewhat skeptical - surely they would have felt the same rising panic we feel when holding our breath? There would be enough time and strength left over for a mad dash to the exit, even if it involved a climb… something didn’t add up.

Recently, I heard of a few more such accidents, and remembering the old story, dug around a bit. Turns out that the urge to breathe - air hunger - is triggered, not by low blood oxygen levels, but high carbon dioxide levels! Wikipedia continues: In mammals (with the notable exception of seals and some burrowing mammals), the breathing reflex is triggered by excess of carbon dioxide rather than lack of oxygen, so asphyxiation progresses in oxygen-deprived environments, such as storage vessels purged with nitrogen or helium balloons, without the victim experiencing air hunger. There are other interesting links about using nitrogen asphyxiation as a painless, humane method of killing animals including humans.

He points out that this is such pathetic design that the entire Intelligent Design argument falls flat on its face. Not that it will matter to the creationists, as can be seen from the following flowchart (click on image for full-size):

World Covers Ears, Chants Loudly As EPA Releases Ozone-Depletion Statistics
450,000 Unsold Earth Day Issues Of Time Trucked To Landfill
Small, Dedicated Group Of Concerned Citizens Fails To Change World
Report: 98 Percent Of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation For Others

And this one is not really about the environment, but…
Middle East Conflict Intensifies As Blah Blah Blah, Etc. Etc.

The issue in which the Onion reported on the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US remains one of my favorites. The Onion did a much better job of capturing things than the mainstream media.

And, Our Dumb Century is a masterpiece that is a must read for anyone intererested in a cynical, satirical, and very funny look at the events of the 20th Century.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

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.