Monday, April 30, 2018

VL Ethiraj - Lawyer Of Yesteryears

V.L.Ethiraj - when the cover takes priority over content...

These photos are from Adyar Times, the 2nd photo is a zoom in of couple of paragraphs of interest from the first picture. The ability to be a successful lawyer without having the legal acumen of other luminaries like Alladi or CP Ramaswamy Iyer needed a different skill set, a feminine one that Ethiraj possessed as explained below.

Well, i searched for a more readable version and found this page. Enjoy...



Sunday, April 29, 2018

Parent Of Enneagram Type 5 Or INTJ

I was thinking today. When we are toddlers, our parents, older siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles would have played with us, fed us, clothed us and generally made us feel cared for and good.

What if suchs caring didn't happen? What if it did happen when we were a baby but we felt the care to be inadequate? What recourse would we, as a baby, have had? This is what was running in my mind, also based on what I had read about what happens when the primary caregiver is absent or is inadequate.

Maybe the child tends not to reach out to people, as that has not helped the baby in the past. The baby tends to become an introvert, perhaps. If the baby find itself to be unable to figure anything out, it thinks the best way is to do what the mom/parent says and not to think for itself. The baby then becomes a J (as in MBTI). Maybe the baby gets scared of the things in its life and tends to switch things out and lives in an abstract world - becomes an N (as in MBTI).

Maybe this is the reason why Enneageam 5 type 5 people (typically INTJ) are supposed to have had a neglected childhood.

Of course I do know of atleast one Ennea type 5, who was not neglected as a child. I can't explain how that child turned out to be be a 5.

This leads to be the next question - as a parent do we know when our child feels neglected and may turn out to be be an Ennea type 5 or an I or N or J?

Of course it's quite possible and likely that a particular child's nature has nothing to do with parenting.

Additional Reading:
http://vbala99.blogspot.com/2016/01/enneagram-and-mbti-comparison.html

Thursday, April 26, 2018

20-80 Rule - Focusing On The Least Important

Recently I had occasion to discuss two issues with a friend of mine.

The first was about not passing bowels everyday and the second was about not taking the garbage out everyday. She is a perfectionist and insisted that both were equally important to her and both had to be addressed.

I believed that bowels was a much more severe issue while the garbage was a less severe issue. The first was Vital while the second was Desirable. The specific issues were that bowels were not passed for the third consecutive day while garbage wasn't taken out on that particular day. So you can see where I was coming from.

And if one didn't differentiate between the two, then one might not do justice to the Vital because one was busy with the Desirable. Just old fashioned theory. While my friend believed that every "drop" was important and that small drops etc.

Now comes the twist. If I am not competent to address the bowel issue I might focus only on taking the garbage out and since I consider both issues to be equally important, I think I was 50% efficient (fixed garbage but didn't address bowels).

Now if we don't understand the relative importance of moving bowels and garbage (let's consider it metaphorically and not literally), we end up focusing on what we like to or can easily do than on what is crucial. This includes a vast array of behaviors such as praying, instead of studying, before an exam (I had a good friend in school who did this. Since he was mentally weak, he visited temples instead of studying).

The classic 80-20 rules tries to identify the 20% things that cause 80% of damage and hence address those 20% issues no matter how difficult.

The 20-80 rule identifies those issues which are easy to address, the low hanging fruits in technical parlance, and mentally claim that they fixed issues that were as important as any others.

Take the garbage out and say "Neatliness is next to Godliness". Kudos to oneself.

Monday, April 16, 2018

What Do You Mean Exactly?

A friend told me that some people consider that question (what do you mean exactly) to be very rude. 

I hazarded an answer.
When you ask "What exactly" it makes one answer without ambiguity. And it kinda corners a person. Ambiguity is what FP (as in MBTI) people thrive on. Obviously removing the ambiguity is very threatening (and hence considered rude).

Conversely, if someone answers the  question exactly the same way (that asking such a question is rude) you can decide they are FP.

For example, if you tell Sunny Leone to not wear a low cut dress and bend in front of the man she is trying to impress, she will consider it rude (because THAT is her essential survival mechanism).

Similarly, if you tell TJs (as in MBTI) to analyze everything logically and that most people are bored with it, will they be happy with the suggestion?

In each case it's the removal of a crutch. Obviously it will be hated.

Saturday, April 14, 2018

Name Of 5th Child - Zaze Puzzle

A friend sent me this puzzle with a standard boilerplate from Facebook - that 99.99% can't solve it and if you solve it, you will be Trump's next playmate and be eligible for $130,000 hush money.



I solved it. Zuze is the answer. But then for Zuze to be the answer another condition must hold true. What is it?

Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

This subject has a lot of key words.. And confusing.


Adaptation is like a mutation...a change in the gene while copying (when cells replicate, the gene is supposed to be xeroxed.. sometimes the copy is not perfect... That incorrect copy is the mutation.)

When this adaptation extends thru the population (as a result of natural selection - meaning those that have the adaptation survive, others don't.. And hence the allele having the adaptation increases in proportion. This increase in allele frequency is technically the definition of evolution).

Now what is allele?
Alleles are varieties of a gene..if you take people size, genes causing fat and thin people are 2 alleles. Similarly blue eyes and black eyes are alleles. BTSA and... similarly. 

From Google: Difference between evolution and adaptation:Evolution can be defined as the change in the allelic frequencies within the gene pool of a population. The term “adaptation” is typically used to describe a newly mutated trait that increases fitness in a particular environment... Evolution is the process by which that beneficial traits spreads throughout a population.

Not every adaption may survive. Its natural selection, acting like a machine, that decides which adaptions survive and which don't. Acting like a machine meaning : if this adaptation helps me be successful (live long and breed well), i will retain this adaptation. And the allele with this adaptation increases in frequency. Evolution will have happened.


Now in the book "Selfish Gene" Dawkins explains some concepts well.


Imagine 2 ring binders having 23 volumes each, each volume having a number of pages.

The genotype (the total of all genes in a body) is like the complete set of 46 binders. Each of the binders is a chromosome. Human body has 23 pairs= 46 chromosomes. (Other animals have a different number of chromosomes.) Each page in the binder is a gene. Phenotype is the list of all observable behavior exhibited by an organism.

I think this is all the important definitions one needs to remember.

Another good source of information is berkeley site. https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/home.php. "Evolution is true". Together these three sites/books,  including the current one are enough to get a great introductory understanding of the subject of evolution. Evolution is true is what i liked best.



And one thing I am completely lost about is the relation between natural selection and Mendel's heredity theory. I need to read this up

Pg 67
The programmer's actual role is rather more like that of a father teaching his son to play chess. He tells the computer the basic moves of the game, not separately for every possible starting position, but in terms of more economically expressed rules. He does not literally say in plain English 'bishops move in a diagonal, but he does say something mathematical equivalent... Then he might program in some 'advice' written in the same sorry of mathematical or logical language, but amounting in human terms to hints such as 'don't leave your kind unguarded' or useful tricks such as 'forking' with the knight... The important point is this: when it is playing, the computer is on its own and can expect no help from its Master.

My comment
The metaphor suggests that the Gene has programmed the human body in the same way that a software programmer programs a computer to play chess.



Pg 158
In terms of how many babies to have or eggs to lay.. The gene that decides is not the one which is preprogrammed with a number but it is one that is preprogrammed to estimate the right number in real time.

My question
Why do parents want to have babies? Why does the Gene want to maximize its own number? What purpose does it serve?

Pg 158
Will it always pay a mother to treat all her children equally, or might she have favorites? Should the family function as a single cooperating whole, or are we to expect selfishness and deception even within the family? Will all members of a family be working towards the same optimum, or will they disagree about what the optimum is? These are the questions we try to answer in the next chapter.

Pg 164
Even if parents do not want to show favoritism, could it be that children grab favored treatment for themselves? More strictly, would genes for selfish grabbing among children become more numerous in the gene pool than rival genes for accepting no more than one's fair share? This matter has been brilliantly analyzed by Trivers in a paper of 1974 called "parent offspring conflict"


Pg 168
Sometimes, as we have seen, one member of a litter is a runt [an animal that is smaller than average]. He is unable to fight for himself as strongly as the rest, and runts often die.  We have considered the conditions under which it would actually pay a mother to let a runt die... A gene that gives the instruction "Body, if you are very much smaller than your litter mates, give up the struggle and die" could be successful in the gene pool, because it has a 50% chance of being in the body of each brother and sister saved, and its chances of surviving in the body of the runt are very small anyway.

But the following is a reasonable strategy for a parent who is undecided as to what is her optimum clutch [batch] size for the current year. She might lay one more egg than she actually 'thinks' is likely to be the true optimum. Then, if the year's food crop should turn out to be a better one than expected, she will rear the extra child. If not, she can cut her losses. By being careful always to feed the young in the same order, say in order of size, she sees to it that one, perhaps a runt, quickly dies, and not much is wasted on him, beyond the initial investment of egg yolk or equivalent. From the mother's point of view, this may be the explanation of the runt phenomenon. He represents the hedging if the mother's bets. This has been observed in many birds.

Pg 169
A child will lose no opportunity of cheating. It will pretend to be hungrier than it is, perhaps younger than it is, more in danger than it really is. It is too small and weak to bully its parents physically, but it uses every psychological weapon at its disposal: lying, cheating, deceiving, exploiting right up to the point where it starts to penalize its relatives more than its genetic relatedness to them should allow. Parents, on the other hand, must be alert to cheating and deceiving, and must try not to be deceived by it. If the parent knows that its child is likely to lie about how hungry it is, it might employ the tactic of feeding it a fixed amount and no more, even though the child goes on screaming. A. Zahavi has suggested a particularly diabolical form of child blackmail: the child screams in such a way as to attract predators deliberately to the nest. The only way a parent can stop it screaming is to feed it.
But they [parasitic brood] do not lack ruthlessness. For instance, there are honeyguides who, like cuckoos, lay their eggs in the nest of other species.  The baby honeyguide is equipped with a sharp hooked beak. As soon as he hatches out, while he is still blind, naked and otherwise helpless, he scythes and slashes his foster brothers and sisters to death: so they don't compete for food. The familiar British cuckoo achieves the same result in a slightly different way. It has a short incubation time and so the baby cuckoo manages to hatch out before its foster brothers and sisters. As soon as it hatches, blindly and mechanically, but with devastating effectiveness, it throws the other eggs out of the nest. And therefore the attention of the foster parents entirely to itself.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Extended_Phenotype
Dawkins summarizes these ideas in what he terms the Central Theorem of the Extended Phenotype:

An animal's behaviour tends to maximize the survival of the genes "for" that behaviour, whether or not those genes happen to be in the body of the particular animal performing it.[2]

Pg 191
Bruce effect: Male mice [presumably not the father of the unborn baby] secrete a chemical which when smelt by a pregnant female can cause her to abort.

Pg 193
It is a rather horrible but very subtle argument. A parent may be expected to desert the moment it is possible for him or her to say the following: "This child is now fat enough developed that either of us could finish off rearing it on our own. Therefore it would pay me to desert now, provided i could be sure my partner would not desert as well. If i did desert now, my partner would do whatever is best for her/his genes. He/she would be forced into making a more drastic decision than i am making now, because i would have already left. My partner would "know" that if he/she left as well, the child would surely die. Therefore assuming my partner will take the decision that is best for his/her own selfish genes, i conclude that my best of course of action is to desert first. This is especially so since my partner may be thinking along exactly the same lines and may seize the initiative at any moment by deserting me... Genes for deserting FIRST could be favourably selected simply because genes for deserting SECOND would not be.



Pg 206
Let us suppose that females in the ancestral bird of paradise species preferentially went for males with longer than average tails. Provided there was some genetic contribution to the natural variation in male tail length, this would, in time, cause the average tail length of males in the population to increase. Females followed a simple rule: look all the males over and go for the one with the longest tail. Any female who departed from this rule was penalized, EVEN IF tails had already become so long that they actually encumbered males possessing them. This was because any female who didn't produce long tailed some had like chance of one of her sons being regarded as attractive. Like a fashion in women's clothes, or in American car design, the trend toward longer tails too off and gathered its own momentum. It was stopped only when tails became so grotesquely long that their manifest disadvantages started to outweigh the advantage of sexual attractiveness.

My comment
I had earlier commented about evolution in fashion is similar to natural selection.

"In a way evolution is like fashion. You never know which will catch on and become a hit and reproduce successfully over generations. If you analyzed the fossil record of fashion in the last 100 years, you may find some were stagnant for a period of time and some changed rapidly in bursts. And someone is always experimenting causing the drift or the mutation. The rest is natural selection."



Pg 219
The physical characteristic of the calls [of small song birds] seem to be ideally shaped to be difficult to locate. If an acoustic engineer were asked to design a sound that a predator would find hard to approach, he would produce something very like the real alarm calls of many small song birds. Now in nature this shaping of the calls must have been produced by natural selection... it means that large numbers of individuals have died because their alarm calls were not quite perfect.

One question that comes to mind:
Dawkins often talks about how a particular behavior (say altruistic behavior)may not be a stable strategy because future generations also exhibiting the same behavior may not help it to survive and procreate.
The question is this: 
Is the evolutionary stable / unstable Strategy (ESS / EUS) heritable? These behaviors or strategies seem to be or may be acquired traits and hence not heritable. How do we explain our strategies or adapted strategies to be heritable?
Confused.

Wednesday, April 11, 2018

Acting At The Right Time - Kaalam Arithal

I happened to think of this Thirukkural as I was walking today when I remembered the one below from Kaalam Arithal (kural no. 490).

கொக்கொக்க கூà®®்புà®®் பருவத்து மற்றதன்

குத்தொக்க சீà®°்த்த இடத்து.

Meaning it's imperative that the crane wait until the right moment to catch the fish.

I thought about the instances where not waiting for the right moment is suggested.
  • Generally Systematic Investment Plans (SIP) are recommended than a lump sum Investment at the "right" time. Of course an SIP may also misfire. It's commonly advised that we don't try to time the market.
  • Taxis and autorickshaws in Chennai generally try to get few lucrative customers. Their Bombay counterparts usually take any customer that comes by even if the distance the customer wants to travel is only one km. The ones that make more money is the Bombay taxis, other things being equal (cost of per km, rental for taxi, fuel cost etc).
  • Richard Thaler might suggest that a nudge towards a better timing might be more lucrative.
In light of all this, one wonders. Should we wait for the right moment to strike? Of course, that it depends on the circumstances or one has to have balance are trivial responses.






Saturday, April 7, 2018

Pain Reluctance Matrix To Predict Decision

Let's assume there are three parties in a situation: A, X, Y. They are friends, acquaintances or relatives so that there is an emotional relationship between any two of the three. 

The strength of that relationship is given by the values in the cells in the table below. Value in each cell shows the reluctance in the person in that column to create a pain for the person in the row. Hence, higher the value higher is the strength of the relationship, stronger the bond.

                  Reluctance in
                        A   X    Y
In giving pain  
To
A                     4    2    4
X                     4    5    3
Y                     2    1    1


For example, take the 2nd cell in the last column = 3. This means that Y's reluctance in giving pain to X is 3 in a scale of 1 to 5 where 1 implies very low reluctance and 5 is very high reluctance to give pain.

Once this matrix is created we can see who is sensitive to pain only in self and who is sensitive to creating pain in others.

The diagonal values from the top left to bottom right refer to the reluctance in each person to undergo pain. High value shows a high pain aversion in self. And these diagonal values depend only on the person concerned - they are not dependent on any other person meaning they are not relationship values.


High values in the non-diagonal cells show high empathy. Low values show indifference. These are relationship values. For example, a person P can have a high value for a person Q and a low value = low reluctance to create pain in R.

Given the data in the matrix above, is it difficult to see how the negotiation will conclude if A,X,Y were to sit down to negotiate? Who is the one likely to take the most pain by the decision reached by these three people? Look at row X - see how X has arranged things so that most people hate to give him pain. 

Interesting, no?

Given the data in the table:

  1. Who should participate in the negotiation?
  2. Who should avoid participation?

F and P (as in MBTI) have high values for reluctance in pain to self. And hence every action of theirs is to avoid it. Is it difficult to see that they survive better? (Read: http://vbala99.blogspot.com/2017/06/relation-between-nt-sf-natural.html)

Interesting observations:
  • When people ask you whether you love them, the meaning is: how high is the call value? How reluctant are you to create pain in them?
  • A person who has in his column in the matrix high values for self and low values for others is like a sadist. He may not actually do things to create pain in others but he may give pain indirectly by not doing what he ought to. This is a completely insensitive person - typically a person having a strong Venus in his Vedic horoscope. The reverse is a person who has low values for self but high values for others, he is like a masochist. 

Thursday, April 5, 2018

How He Made Me Feel

I was discussing couple of people (M, F) related to a friend of mine.

I told my friend that, while M and F are both a pain in the back and seen that way by most people known to them, F was better in that he was socially functional while M was dysfunctional - none could tolerate F. F came and destroyed everything, every relationship. She was a pathological liar, almost a criminal and most likely mentally ill. 

F, on the other hand, was just obnoxious and a person whose absence is eminently desirable. And he was certainly no criminal. 

Now my friend said she didn't care for my distinction and that both F, M had made my friend miserable.

Now I wondered. My friend was using a different yardstick to evaluate - how someone made her feel. A fine yardstick, such as it is.

My metric was what a person was without looking at how they made a particular person feel. Being a person unaffected by either of M or F, I could look at them only based on their character and how they treated others.

But if I were to live with them, I guess how they made me feel would override how they deal with others. Personal feelings truly are a source of bias. And, I guess, correctly so. It's only when one's feelings are unaffected that one can see a larger picture.

Tuesday, April 3, 2018

Analysis Of Hurt: Parent Vs Child

This post is about what we normally call a head vs heart issue.
It's a question of heart (ego) affected vs the right/wrong machine in us which strongly says that our act, of retaliation in response to the said hurt, is wrong. 

We want to know which, addressing the hurt or being right, is more important:

Long term: not doing wrong is important.Transactionally the hurt ego behaves like a criminal, like a hurt child bawling, like a woman seething in fury.

And one is caught between fury and the need to be correct.

Will the transaction, that caused the hurt, recur? Quite possible. Since contrition and regret are absent in the person that caused the hurt. 

When one looks back at one's own life and the path that one traversed, we see the mistakes we made. If we could back in time and rectify it, would we? 
Though the obvious answer is yes, I am not sure. Why am I not sure? Because the feelings, that we had which guided us to making those mistakes, were genuine. And if we realize it and recant our actions in the past, then we also recant our feelings. We then have to accept that our feelings in the past were false and only then embrace that our past actions were wrong.

But we are not just an adding machine, we are part feelings (Child) and part brain (Adult) and part Parent (right/wrong). And each of them begs to be given recognition. 

And often,  the needs of two or all three are at variance, expecting the boss to negotiate a statement. And here one arrives at the crossroads, wondering which of the P A or C to be made the boss and decision maker.

Tough, huh?

When one has integrated the three (subdued two) then perhaps the issue isn't there. That's the mark of a successful / happy person.

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