Blogging, writing and creativity

I recently came across this piece on the Internet by Clay Shirky. Clay Shirky is in the category of people popularly called “net evangelist”. Quoting from it:

And I’m willing to raise that to a general principle. It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, “If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.” And that’s message–I can do that, too–is a big change.

This is something that people in the media world don’t understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race–consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it ’s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

Ah ahem… excuse me?

If one believed authors like Dr. Shirky, it would seem that giving creative tools to the majority automatically produces great results. This is part of a larger fallacy: that people love to create cool stuff, and therefore, if they’re given the tools to create great stuff, great stuff will be created. And that, somehow, indulging in an act of “creativity”, however silly or prosaic, is superior to indulging in an act of “consumption”.

But is that really true? I’ll discuss this question by looking at “blogging” in the context of good writing, which has been hailed by some as a new social phenomenon, a new way of unleashing the hitherto suppressed creativity of the masses, or, as Dr. Shirky so fondly says in his write-up, a new way of recording and utilizing the “cognitive surplus” of the masses.

Dr. Shirky isn’t alone, though. Other optimistic statements include:

The single most important difference between
the Internet circa 1999 and the Internet circa today is the explosion of user-generated
creativity—from blogs, to podcasts, to videocasts, to mashups, the
Internet today is a space of extraordinary creativity.

This one’s in the book Code, version 2 (Page 194), by Professor Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law Professor and founder of Creative Commons.

What does it take to be a good writer?

What distinguishes good writing from bad writing? Lots of things, but a not-unimportant distinction is that good writing is meant to be read. A good piece of writing confers some advantage to those reading it — whether it is entertainment, information, or experience. A bad piece of writing, on the other hand, doesn’t need to cater to standards of readability.

This means that good writing should, by nature, be “reader-friendly”, it should allow the reader to enter the text, understand it, feel it, appreciate it. Of course, every piece of writing has its natural target audience. If you’re writing a to-be-bestselling novel, you’re targeting a very large potential audience, so you’ve got to create an engaging experience for a large number of people. If you’re writing a cooking guide, you’re catering to all the wannabe cooks in the world, so your words have to make sense to, and provide useful instructions to, those cooks. If you’re writing a self-help book, you’ve got to reach out to the emotional and other needs of the potential audience of the book.

So, a good writer needs to keep in mind what his or her readers really want, or seek, from the piece of writing. In this sense, good writing isn’t just about having something to say, and putting it down on paper. Rather, it involves a process of winnowing down what one has to say so as to give something (information, entertainment, or experience) to the people reading it. So to create a piece of good writing, one needs to step into the shoes (and minds) of the target audience.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that one cannot write good stuff for oneself — it is very much possible, but the writer still needs to view himself/herself both as a writer and as a reader. In other words, good writing, at the very least, necessitates something that goes beyond the need to simply write.

A closely related feature of good writing is, in general, its ability to transcend space, time and context. Of course, not every subject of writing lends itself to the possibility of transcending context — for instance, a text in category theory (a branch of mathematics) is naturally embedded within a certain cognitive context. But in so far as is possible, good writing allows “reuse”. So, a great book on category theory will transcend the specific context in which it was written (namely, a single person writing a book to help with a specific personal goal) and reach out to people seeking to learn category theory at different places, different times, with different degrees of prior knowledge, and with different goals.

What is blogging for?

Literally, “blog” is short for “weblog”, which is, loosely, a log of personal activity, that happens to reside on the web. It’s an online version of a personal diary. Not all blogs are in the form of personal diaries, but this still dominates the general purpose of blogging — getting on paper (or, in this case, the web) the events, experiences and reflections one wants to record. The key element here is the freedom to record things the way one wants, rather than having to conform to standards or ethics. So, for instance, I can blog about how I fought with my girlfriend, what happened in a lecture, or how my trip to the beach went. There’s a strong “I” element to blogging.

From this viewpoint, blogging is about writing things because one feels the need to write them; not so much for writing things that need to be read. Arguably, this remains true, even if the blog is open for anybody to read. In fact, most of the blogs that my friends and acquaintances keep, are largely designed either for their own use, or for a select group of people who may be close friends or within the same social circle. This blog and this blog are just some examples.

At the risk of over-simplification: while writing is hard because it forces a person to transcend his or her local context and produce something that can be read or understood, blogging is the very opposite: it allows a person to enforce and assume his or her local context. The structure of blogging, as essentially a time-based enterprise (somebody blogs, some people comment, then another post comes up), further reinforces this.

This isn’t to say that all local, time-based information is bad. But blogging tends to reinforce the local even at times when it isn’t necessary. Thus, we see bloggers often use acronyms, abbreviations and slang that are intelligible only to a small group of people (for whom the blog was intended) and valid only for short periods of time.

So does every blog qualify as a piece of creativity, a positive utilization of the “cognitive surplus” of the people? Let me take that to an extreme. Does every piece of chatter, gossip, every scribble or doodle, every remark, qualify as creativity? If yes, then blogging may be creativity, but it is by far a tiny drop in the ocean of creativity. And if every piece of chatter and gossip does not qualify for creativity, then, how is blogging really different?

A stark truth is that writing of any kind, which involves systematically recording events, opinions, biases, or what not, is a challenging task, and not many are cut out for it. Yes, I’m sure everybody has the inner talent, but not everybody is willing to or keen to take the effort. Blogging could, in principle, allow people to start out small, and then gradually improve the quality of their writing to produce stunning pieces. In practice, the culture of blogging does not exactly encourage people to move up the ladder of quality, usefulness and good writing.

The incentive system in blogging

People respond to incentives. This is a core principle that economists have unanimous agreement about, and it is a principle that pervades the thinking in any discipline or practice that involves dealing with people. So let’s apply it to blogging. What are the incentives in the blogging system?

Arguably, blogging is a noncommercial, or “sharing”-based activity. This means that people blog out of their natural instinct to share, do good, and feel part of a community. Let’s assume that a majority of bloggers come with such motives (though, of course, people who blog for money also have financial incentives). So what are the metrics that show how great a blog is? Wait, let’s think.

The first metric is comments. Blogs usually have this feature called comments, which allows anybody (yes, anybody, though in some cases, comments may be moderated by the blog-writer) to write just about anything as a comment on the blog. It’s not in general clear that the better blogs get more comments, but comments do tell the blog-writer (and others who chance upon the blog) that people have read the blog and chosen to respond. That’s positive feedback for somebody who wants to “share” and be part of a “community”.

So why do people comment on blogs, and does it reflect on the blog’s quality?

• People comment to see their name out there, under somebody else’s blog. In other words, comments allow one to have the pleasure of mileage on somebody else’s effort.
• People comment to get links back to their own website. This is the back-scratching theory all over again. True, search engines don’t follow links in comments, but people do.
• People comment when they find something outrageous in the blog, or they have a sharp point of disagreement with the blog.
• People comment out of a friendly reciprocity. This is particularly seen in the small blogs meant for friends; here, commenting is a lot like saying “Hi” or “How d’ya do” or “I read your post”. In the language of transactional analysis, it’s a “stroke”.
• People comment to thank the blog owner for a good and insightful post.

Apart from the last one (which is a very small fraction of the overall comments I’ve seen) none of the comments reflect on the quality of the post. It may even be said that a great post is a detraction to would-be commentators. That’s because commentators, like most blog-writers, are lazy, usually don’t have much to say, and seeing a blog post that actually has a lot to say can be a bit off-putting to somebody who wants to post a comment like “Hi; nice post. What you doing these days?”

Also, the problem of having too many blogs to read has to be solved by something, and that something, more often than not, is web search. In principle, the Internet, allows people to transcend local boundaries and find any blog, even if they don’t know the owner of the blog personally. In practice, web search, personal referrals, and links are the main tool for this. What implications does that have for what constitutes good blogging? Good blogging is all about getting the largest number of inward links to your site.

Finally, the economic model for blogging is singularly unrewarding to good content. I’m talking of the advertising model. This model says: don’t charge people for reading your blogs, instead, put Google Adsense (or some other advertising model) so that visitors clicking the links automatically make you money. Literally, this means that the way to make the most money is not by creating actively engaging content that sucks people in; rather, it is by allowing people to be sufficiently distracted to click ads. “Knowledge wants to be free [with Google ads]“, I think I heard somebody say.

Is this blog post anti-blogging?

Hardly. Sorry to give the impression. What I’m trying to point out here, is that blogging hasn’t unleashed any tremendous masses of new creativity. It hasn’t made people fundamentally more lazy or more creative. It has given opportunities for people to channel certain kinds of creativity, but its larger benefit is to just allow (creative and non-creative) people to record activities on the web that may otherwise have gone unrecorded. This might be helpful to them and their friends, and might prove a boon to historians, sociologists, and other people in search of data.

Good writing and solid creativity continue to remain the province of a few, and very few of these few are “made” by the Internet. Indeed, the best of bloggers are people who have achieved fame in other spheres, often through dint of hardwork, talent and slow and painful drudgery. Merely giving everybody the tools or the right to publish doesn’t make everybody a good writer, because good writing requires effort and personal commitment. Nor do people become more creative just by writing and not listening — which is what a large chunk of the blogosphere is about.

The other main idea I’d like readers to take home is that being “noncommercial” or “sharing” is not in itself a virtue, or something to be praised. Just because blogging is free, that doesn’t make it, in any sense, superior to newspaper articles or books. Again the best of blogs aren’t just free offerings; they’re usually written by people who also make money out of something very similar. For instance, a software professional may blog about trends in software, an economist may blog on recent trends in economics, and so on.

The best writers are great readers

If good writing is meant to be read, then to aspire to write well, one’s got to read well, and read a lot. If you want to produce great movies, then you’ve got to watch at least a few movies. And this is my core objection to Dr. Shirky’s paragraph: he seems to imply that creativity, however inane, is superior to consumption ,which is a passive activity.

Taking this logic to its extreme, kids would be better off creating stuff all the time, than watching television, reading books, or learning about the world from others. The idea, I guess, is that doing stuff oneself and being in control is more important. But just going around creating stuff doesn’t make one a great creator. Doubtless, the need and the urge to create, as well as constant attempts at creating something, are needed. But what’s also needed is the ability to consume stuff that exists, to critically examine it, to soak it till one is deeply familiar with it and knows at an intuitive level what is going on. It’s hard to imagine people who like to write their own stuff and abhor reading, transform themselves into great writers.

To be fair to Dr. Shirky, I don’t think this is the point he is making. And it is doubtless true that the opportunities presented by the Internet give people a chance to both create and consume. But his writings, and those of many other net evangelists, undervalue the importance and necessity of all the hardwork (a lot of which appears passiv eand boring) needed to create good stuff. And in so far as people somehow make believe that blogging is a short route to great writing without having to do all the hardwork, it will continue to be the case that the best bloggers are people who have established and gained their expertise through other ways.

Think!

It distresses me when people use a combination of “logical reasoning” and “emotional hype” to come to conclusions that would, in the ordinary course of things, require a lot more data, input, understanding, and a lot better “feel” of the situation. I see this all the time — people coming to conclusions about things saying “it’s just that simple” when those very same things have so many different facets and when such little information is available.

I remember how, a couple of years ago, there was huge anguish about a policy of “reservation” for the OBCs in post-secondary educational institutions in India. For those who don’t come from India and haven’t heard of reservation, it basically comprises marking off a certain fraction of the admissions in the educational institution for people from a certain community. In this case, the communities were certain backward castes in India, as per the oppressive and unjust caste system that evolved in Hinduism, a dominant religion in India.

For those familiar with affirmative action in the United States, reservation’s a bit like that — except that instead of having loose guidelines for universities to proactively seek students of color or students from backward communities, reservation imposes fixed percentages.

Till 2006, there was 22% nationwide reservation for people from the most deprived castes: the so-called Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs). A government ruling in 2006 sought to provide an additional 27.5% reservation for Other Backward Classes (OBCs), who were oppressed, though not that much. This raised the total reserved fraction of seats to 49.5%. Not surprisingly, there were immediate nationwide protests, from students in these educational institutions, who argued that “equality” and “merit” were being compromised. Newspapers and TV channels caught on quickly by holding debates on “Caste versus merit”. Most notably, students made a protest outside AIIMS, India’s leading medical institute and an important hospital, and blocked the gates, forcing patients to climb walls to seek treatment. Adding to the confusion and chaos, I blogged about this.

Recently, while reviewing the contents of my mailbox, I came across this alarmist message that had been sent to me:

Subhash Srivastav an AIIMS
student died at 6:44 pm on 20/05/2006, because of hunger strike protesting
against reservation. Media is not allowed to cover it. Please pass this
to all and help not to let down his sacrifice.

WHEN WILL THE GOVERNMENT RISE TO THE SIMPLICITY OF THE PLAIN AND SELF
EVIDENT TRUTH AND NOT LET THE EVIL OF RESERVATION GOBBLE UP THE
FUTURE OF ACADEMICS IN INDIA …..

MAKING AN EARNEST PLEA TO THE NATION TO RISE AGAINST THIS MENACE OF
RESERVATION …..

MAKE THIS SACRIFICE WORTH ITS VALUE .

Now, let’s parse that. Somebody didn’t like reservations. Therefore that person went on a hunger strike. Nobody was forcing that person to go on a strike. The person went on a strike due to certain personal beliefs. Then, that person died. if a person goes on a hunger strike against something and then dies, that doesn’t mean that “something” is evil. This is false logic at its best.

The greater irony, though, was that nobody had died. This “Subhash Srivastava” was somebody’s fabrication, in an attempt to garner attention and gain support for the cause. Yet, the many forwards and circulations of this information (and I got them through multiple online sources) seemed oblivious to the burden of verifying the truth of the statement.

The larger point here isn’t whether reservations are justified or not (which is a deep and complex question, and certainly outside my area of specialization). My point here is about the tools that people use to spread their message about the harm of reservation. I got a lot of emails from people urging me to sign certain “Youth For Equality” petitions, and while not all of them were in capital letters, they focused on “simple premises”. Here’s an intelligible piece from the Youth For Equality website:

Current policy of reservation is unjust and dangerous
-Caste based reservations can only accentuate the already existing divisions in our society.
-Caste based reservation have failed the SCs and STs in past 60 years. They are unlikely to succeed in future.
-Such reservation are like providing crutches to those do not need them and often, to those who do not seek them.
-Most important, these reservation are actually a ploy to deviate attention from inability to provide quality primary education

This sounds like an excellent list, but note that none of these simple premises have any justification attached to them. It’s possible (and probable) that the author of this piece (Dr. Vishal Sharma, UCMS, Delhi) had some solid reasons and research behind his statements, but he didn’t choose to share those with readers. The general idea here seems to be that most of these points are incontrovertible.

But if you think about it a little more, there’s very little that principle, logic and reason can tell one about the impact of reservations on an educational system. For instance, a lot of great institutions manage to take in a small fraction of their students based on huge fees or because of their political connections — a “reservation” of sorts and a compromise on merit (this is true for some American institutions; for instance, Princeton has historically been a place for politicians to send their children, yet the quality of its research remains unquestioned). There has been a huge spectrum of results for the introduction of different kinds of schemes to give preferential treatment in admission policies for students from deprived backgrounds. I’ve heard people tell me that the quota system in Tamil Nadu has helped, to some extent, to reduce caste barriers, at least in the big cities (this is hearsay, and I don’t have a lot of first-hand experience). Then, there’s also the contention that once a few people from some backward communities make it to an educational institution, others will aspire harder to get there. While I again don’t have personal experience with this on a large scale, I do know that having one person from a place go somewhere or do something, increases the chances of other people doing that thing. (For instance, after I qualified the Indian National Mathematical Olympiad and went to the International Mathematical Olympiad, there was an interest in my school in the next 3-4 years regarding the Olympiads, and 2-3 more students from my school made it through the national Olympiad. And many of the people who came to my not very well-known undergraduate institution CMI told me that a crucial factor in their decision was the input of another person from their community, or village, who had also been to CMI.)

Social inequality too can take subtle and not-so-subtle forms as I described in an earlier blog post. So it’s possible for people living in cities, in high-status, high-caste families, to be largely oblivious to the “other side” of the picture.

This isn’t to offer arguments in favor of reservations per se, but rather to point out that the issue is extremely complicated, and “simple premises” need to be treaded on carefully.

Of course, people on the other side of this issue don’t seem to lack “simple premises” either. Here’s one favorite pro-reservation simple premise: “In a truly equal society, representation of different castes in society should be by their representation in the population. Thus, reservations just help make the society truly equal”.

I can go on about arguments resting on simple premises and drawing “simple” conclusions, but I’ll just give a list and leave it to interested people to look at the arguments:

1. A certain person said something positive about a , that person is evil and bad. Read this criticism of Larry Lessig, Creative Commons founder, and if you’re left utterly bewildered, you can check out this criticism of the criticism.
2. A lot of people are starving while a few people have huge houses — so the people with the money are the evil ones.
3. People with money are people who were smart and hardworking and earned it.
4. A certain country does something you don’t like so that country is against the values and goals of the world.
5. Theft is when you actually deprive somebody of something. When making digital copies, you’re not depriving anybody of anything, because they keep the original. So piracy isn’t theft.
6. Intellectual property = property, so piracy is stealing, so piracy should be punished as theft. Thus, any circumvention of DRM tools is illegal.
7. Any criticism of Wikipedia, the blogosphere, or modern culture is a criticism of “THE PEOPLE” so if you dare to criticize Wikipedia you’re an elitist and credentialist and you’ve got a big fat head.
8. Anybody who reads Wikipedia or blogs is a shallow person who cannot understand in-depth arguments.

There are many other examples, but one thing they all have in common is: they start out with some simple premises that are questionable, then make some leaps of logic that are questionable, then state a moot conclusion, and finally top it up by something that associates some kind of insult to people who don’t agree. I’ve heard arguments like “any sane person would …” for things where, in fact, people could be in a lot of disagreement.

So how do we tackle situations where people present these kind of arguments to us? How do separate fact from hype, and remove false logic from the scene?

The answer is simple: think! That doesn’t quite mean that every question can be resolved by thought and analysis — in fact, analytical thinking is severely limited in solving complex social problems. However, analytical thinking does usually reveal gaps in simple premise-logic, and makes you realize how little logic and reasoning and “principles” can guide one in a world of uncertainty.

Secondly, gather data. it never hurts to gather raw, boring information, rather than condensed opinions sans raw data. The Internet is a great source for condensed information, with Wikipedia leading the way and a number of bloggers keen to summarize and have the final word. But the Internet is also a great source of raw data. So if you are serious about understanding or forming an opinion about something, go through it in excruciating detail. For instance:

1. Read original, primary sources. Before forming an opinion about a book, read some pages of the book. View some videos by the author of the book. Before forming opinions about the reservation or caste system, go ahead and learn more about how the caste system came into play, what the original motivation and plan for reservations was, and how things have evolved.
2. Use diverse methods of reading secondary sources. Do not restrict attention to specific secondary sources. Use web search, library search, personal communication, attending lectures, and other tools to try to capture sources in all kinds of ways, so as better to be able to triangulate on the truth.
3. Be on the lookout for “simple premise” logic. While listening to it, make a note not to be unduly influenced by it.

More about why people present simplistic arguments

Why do people present simplistic arguments? First, it is an attention-grabbing device. The complexities of most of the issues we deal with are breathtaking, and frankly, if you’re already handling a lot of complexity in work and personal relationships, you don’t want to add to that the complexity of larger problems. So, a simplistic argument has a lot more appeal than a huge collection of raw facts, arguments and ideas.

Secondly, the nature of media and presentation strongly supports simplistic arguments. Newspapers and TV channels have been constrained by column width and time length respectively. Ironically, the Internet is in principle a complete solution: you can have very long articles and very long videos without taking up too much of people’s time (because they can watch or read a bit and shift out if they’re not interested). But, while the amount of in-depth material that can be accessed via the Internet has increased considerably, the majority of the Internet remains quick-see-quick-do. That means that if you want to make an impression, the same principles apply as they do to poster design or slogans: be simplistic.

Thirdly, simplistic arguments are in some cases cover-ups for other reasons or interests. This may happen in a subconscious or indirect way. In the politics-industry nexus, money from lobbyists could result in politicians making simplistic arguments in favor of the lobbying parties. People threatened by a certain change make simplistic arguments that paint that change as bad, the motivation partly coming from the very concrete threat they feel, rather than the abstract and simplistic argument they present.

Fourthly, it is a prisoners’ dilemma. If we force our leaders and people in positions of authority to present their views with intellectual integrity rather than relying on hype, and if we exact these standards from people seeking to appear in the news, then people seeking to present simplistic arguments will be at a loss. If, however, everybody else is keen on creating sound-bytes or offering easy quotes, then it doesn’t pay to be a lone voice offering a more complex, refined and balanced argument.

Do simplistic arguments mean there’s no substance?

No. Often, simplistic arguments are offered in situations where a more complete and balanced picture could be provided (for instance, I’m offering a simplistic argument here, while I could offer a more complete and balanced picture). But there are constraints of time and space, and user attention. Finally, there’s the fact that to spread something enough so that it reaches people who’ll actually appreciate your argument, you need to first get it across to lots of people who may not care too much about the details but like the sound and feel of the argument.

Simplistic arguments have a flip side, though: they alienate people who want to get the detailed picture. So my suggestion to people who’re trying to package their experience and thoughts into easy-follow stuff, is to give links, or references, to more in-depth explanations. For instance, Lessig’s videos, which have a style of simplicity that makes their key points well-imprinted, do offer a substantially more shallow and less balanced treatment of his ideas than his excellent books. (For instance, the videos about copyright and remix culture end up showcasing some particular remix videos. If you don’t like those videos (which I didn’t) then the speech seems to have been a tad lame). But since Lessig offers up his books for free, and since his videos do give some hints about the fact that he isn’t keen on being simplistic, I can then go ahead and read his books to get a deeper understanding of what he’s saying.

Doesn’t everything have a simple explanation? Why create unnecessary complications?

Probably, a lot of explanations can be packaged to sound simple. What gets left out, though, is a lot of the other explanations that sounded equally simple and equally plausible but were just plain false. A simple explanation has appeal but isn’t sufficiently self-referential: it doesn’t explain why it is right.

I’m not against the all-important need to simplify and abstract and provide easy bytes. I’m against the converse: just because somebody gave you an easy-sounding explanation of something, doesn’t mean it is necessarily right. Simple things are rarely arrived at “simply”, they’re usually a process of careful elimination, soaking oneself in the situation, and drawing on a lot of experience.

Apologies if this post was too simplistic — probably, it proves its own point :).

Wikipedia: monopoly

When we usually think of monopolies, we think of for-profit corporate companies. For instance, Microsoft, at a certain point, had a near-monopoly on operating systems software (today, there is significant competition from Linux, Apple and many others). The monopoly didn’t materialize. In a similar manner, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, currently has a near monopoly on the encyclopedia business. Again, the monopoly isn’t likely to materialize, but it does give some very clear lessons on how to try monopolizing.

1. Create strong disincentives for competition: Wikipedia has done this in two ways. The first is that it’s free, easy to access, and ad-free. It’s run by a nonprofit organization. This means that competitors aren’t naturally excited about competing with it. I mean, how do you get cheaper than free? It’s a hard question and definitely not an attraction for budding competitors.

   More importantly, Wikipedia works by simply making competition seem silly, and that’s where its “anybody can edit” comes in. Ordinarily, when a big company starts off with a closed system that’s highly popular, other companies want to emulate that system, or provide a comparable system, to increase diversity. But Wikipedia literally made it appear as if people seeking diversity were party-poopers. Instead of trying to start something else, why don’t you go and edit on Wikipedia? Nice way of discouraging competition.

2. Keep costs low. Emphasize costs over quality. Outsource. And to top it all, appear virtuous about it: Wikipedia is built almost entirely on volunteer labor. Most of the labor goes unpaid. Most of our contributions to the Wikimedia Foundation don’t go to all the people who worked hard over all the articles. They go to just pay for the servers, and pay for a few people who are managing the project. Simply speaking, Wikipedia isn’t sustainable if it starts paying people for the tremendous work that goes into writing quality entries.

   But the genius of this has been to turn this apparent drawback: that Wikipedia can’t compensate people for their tremendous effort, into a virtue. Contribute to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, and achieve immortality as somebody who wanted to share knowledge for free. The moral boost is certainly better than working to write a book or journal article at a miserable rate of under $1 per hour. And it’s certainly great for people who’d otherwise never write anything at all.

   And when it comes to questions about whether anonymous editing is responsible for vandalism, Wikipedia’s clear about one thing: nothing should be done to raise the barrier to editing. Anonymous editing is a small price we pay for the tremendous amount of volunteer labor that can be tapped into. Like Walmart, keeping costs low is the top priority, no matter where the supplies come from. The human cost of editors getting disgusted with edit wars, or of people’s biographies getting disrupted by malice is small compared to the benefits of providing people with cheap, nay, free stuff.

3. Be there first, and bear the losses: Simple, and mind-blowing idea: build a free encyclopedia. Laughable? Still, doesn’t hurt to try. Wikipedia became this free encyclopedia even though Encyclopedia Britannica, after trying to have its encyclopedia entries online, had been unable to cope with the traffic loads. But Wikipedia persevered.
4. Choose a killer license: Licenses certainly help. Patents and restrictive copyright licenses are one way to go. But copyleft licensing is the other way to go. By adopting the GNU Free Documentation License, Wikipedia’s winning friends and shooting down enemies. First, Wikipedia wins all the people who’ve mouthed the words “free” and “open” as the new catch-words. We have Richard Stallman abandoning GNUPedia to whole-heartedly endorse Wikipedia. And then, aren’t our volunteers touched that their no-rewards effort will be under a license that’ll allow anybody to reproduce the stuff?

   Secondly, the killer license means that any competitor is, almost by force, chosen to adopt a similar license, if they want to attract the same kind of love and attention. But the great thing about the license is that you can copy back from them. So any competitor to Wikipedia can be absorbed by Wikipedia in a single swallow. Merger? No, you don’t even need to consult the competitor before absorbing them.

   Wikipedia’s recently been making bigger moves. With the advent of Creative Commons, the move forward for Wikipedia is clear. Convert Wikipedia’s GFDL into CC. True, this’ll require a bit of rewriting, but it means Wikipedia’s suddenly won over the support and endorsement of CC. Good for Wikipedia, because CC has around 50 million products under its licenses. Good for both parties, in fact, because this suddenly means an additional 10 million articles for CC, and makes Wikipedia part of the “share, remix and reuse” culture. Not surprisingly, Larry Lessig, the author of Code v 2 (a great book that everybody should read), dedicates the book to Wikipedia.

Hmmm. Reminded of Microsoft, Walmart, and Google? Money really isn’t the only route to power, apparently. It’s about fame and clicks, and winning over the hearts of people who have the right ideological mindset.

Now, this isn’t meant to be a criticism of Wikipedia (apologies if it appeared that way). And while I’m at it, let me mention a few things commonly attributed to Wikipedia’s success, that, in my opinion, have very little to do with its success.

1. An open and collaborative process: A large number of Wikipedia’s editors are anonymous users, and even the logged-in users rarely disclose their real names or affiliations, even in articles where a clear conflict of interest could develop. The process that goes into article creation and the many discussion points are rarely put forward in a palatable manner, that people who come to the article can read and understand. Very few people actually collaborate and discuss the many facets of article structuring. Rather, it’s just a sequence of one edit after another, which includes reverting past edits, unreverting them, putting up articles for deletion, flagging articles that violate NPOV, and so on. Not exactly the ideal collaborative process, and far from open. To top it all, whenever an article starts to feel the heat, administrators emerge and make arbitrary decisions about the fate of the article.
2. The wiki model: The wiki model is cool for collaboration, and certainly the best I’ve seen so far, and my admiration goes for Magnus Manske, Brion Vibber, Tim Starling, and the many others who have worked to make the software better over the years. However, the wiki model isn’t in itself responsible for magic. I think this is best seen in the fact that a lot of places have tried to adopt the wiki approach and it has failed. Most notably, some of Wikipedia’s sister sites, that include Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikinews, and Wikiversity, are still growing at a remarkably slow rate.
3. A cohort of exceptionally minded and brilliantly talented people at the center who coordinate the efforts of volunteers in a great way to maintain an exceptional encyclopedia: Hardly. There are some administrators at the center of Wikipedia, and some of them are doing a good job (though by no means all). But there’s little evidence to suggest that the core body of administrators has worked to push through new and innovative initiatives, or to handle many of Wikipedia’s pressing problems, efficiently and creatively. Most of the administrators are people who have little by way of solid experience in the skills of organizing knowledge and ideas before they joined Wikipedia, and in fact many of them have very little “cool stuff” to boast of even re: their activities in Wikipedia (unless you count banning members, knowing the rulebook of NPOV and NN, and winning AfD debates as cool stuff).

What gives? Why do I think Wikipedia will be unable to sustain its monopoly? First, there’s the repeated scandals confronting the Wikimedia Foundation, many of which are summarized well at Wikipedia Watch and Wikitruth.info. But, whether or not you pay importance to these scandals, the key point is that in the recent past, Wikipedia has systematically failed to innovated. There have been innovations and improvements from the software side, but the community has failed to become more organized, and the encyclopedia continues to be edited in a reactionary and patched fashion rather than addressing core issues.

Secondly, it’s clear that the Wikimedia Foundation continues to steadfastly believe in the magic of wikis, with the growth of projects like Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, and Wikiversity. Ironically, many of these have better design than Wikipedia, yet that lack the key elements that Wikipedia had: it was first in, and it stood brave. Had Encyclopedia Britannica been completely online and incorporated user feedback in an easy way, Wikipedia might never have taken off the way it did. As it stands, Wikinews is a singularly unattractive proposition when practically all the print and television news channels put up the bulk of their stuff for free over the Internet, and are complemented by the blogosphere. This doesn’t mean it can never grow. It probably will grow, if it’s fundamentals are in the right place. But it cannot acquire the monopoly that the Wikipedia did, juts because it is “free”.

Similarly, wikisource may be a cool place to locate the source for books in the public domain, but who’d bother when there’s Google Books and many other ways to get the books? Wikisource has to offer something new and something distinctive. And who’d want to go to Wikiversity when there are resources like MIT Open CourseWare and Connexions? In fact, the Wikimedia Foundation itself seems to have decided that promoting these other projects is a non-starter, so it’s living with their tortoise-pace growth as it continues to allow media attention to shower on Wikipedia.

More importantly, competition to Wikipedia has begun in real earnest now. Most of the initial competition to Wikipedia was reactionary: let’s monetize the model by using Wikipedia content with ads. Then came Scholarpedia and the Digital Universe. Though neither took off dramatically, they were at least somewhat well-planned. And finally, we have a serious contender to Wikipedia: the Citizendium. With 6000 articles compared to Wikipedia’s 2.7 million, the Citizendium doesn’t quite look formidable yet. However, they have a sense of community and a vision for the future, and they’re not blindly aping “what worked” for Wikipedia. Rather, careful thought is being given to redesigning fundamentals. It remains to be seen where the Citizendium goes.

Finally, there’s Google Knol. This is the Google idea of having “units of knowledge”. People write signed articles, that are the first thing anybody searching on the subject should read. Needless to say, Google’s search engine will help readers reach this first thing. My guess is that Google is finding the Knol fairly hard to implement, which is why we haven’t heard from from them since December 12, 2007, when they first officially announced it. But if they do manage to get the balance right, it could be an important alternative knowledge source for people.

In other words, you can become a monopoly in anything: provided the conditions are right. Profit, restrictive licensing, or closed code isn’t necessary to achieve monopolistic control. But maintaining a monopoly requires something more than just what is needed to create it. To maintain a monopoly, one needs to constantly innovate and provide solutions to the core weaknesses rather than be reactionary and do patch-fixing. This is something Wikipedia has failed to do, and it remains to be seen how long it is before they’re displaced from the top.

Web 2.0: The promise it has yet to fulfil

At the time I was in high school, the Internet, at least in India, had not taken off. I had Internet access at home on a slow dial-up connection. Going online was not impossible, but it was still an expensive business.

At that time, I had a number of ideas and dreams. I was fond of composing music (something that I did using a PC software that I managed to acquire through my aunt). I was fond of mathematics, and I was fortunate to receive guidance and information that helped me prepare for the Olympiads: something that helped shape my career in mathematics. But by and large, all the little dreams, ideas and aspirations that I had didn’t get to fruition, simply because tools like the Internet that enable easy access to information and the quick ability to publish, weren’t around.

What I hoped at the time was not just to have the ability to easily access information and share ideas and network, but also the ability to easily and effectively learn more skills, get more experience, and become better at more things.

In came the Internet. In my undergraduate college, 24-hour Internet access was a reality. By the time I finished college, 24-hour Internet access was a reality everywhere I went. Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. Blogger and WordPress. Youtube and Flickr. Unlimited free email storage. Free text and voice chatting. The ability to find information, share ideas and publish for virtually no cost.

And yet, the Internet is yet to live up to its bigger promise to me: the ability to provide people who do not have the resources, skills or contacts for a job, with those resources, skills or contacts. The ability to easily facilitate the identification of truly skilled people among the myriad amateurs of the Internet. The ability to offer everybody the ability to improve and build their skills, to learn from their surroundings.

Publishing directly to the people

Publishing a book with a reputed publisher — what does that involve? First, publishers often have niches on what kind of stuff they’ll publish, and quotas for how much. So if you don’t fit the niche or quota, sorry. Secondly, since they have limited resources of how much they can devote editorial and marketing effort to, your stuff has to be “good” by their standards. Thirdly, even if you write a cool manuscript, they’re likely to subject it to intensive rounds of editing to conform to their idea of how a book should look to sell, before publishing it.

In other words, publishers need to make sure the stuff they publish is good, because there are limits on how much they can publish. “Good”, of course, is by their own standards, and the flipside of this is that it could be hard for new authors to write books on topics that the publishers aren’t convinced will sell, however good the book is.

On the other hand, it also means that the process of writing a book, and getting a published, could be a learning and challenging experience, where the author learns the intricacies and details of editing, and learns exactly what the publishers think will sell (and indirectly, what good writing looks like). The process of getting rejects, however disheartening, could still be a guide to authors that helps them improve and finetune their work. In other words, at the end of having a book published, the author is actually much further along the way in terms of skills and abilities, than he/she was at the time of starting to write. Moreover, the sheer fact that people will look at the book and decide whether to publish it, means that the author needs to tune these factors in at the start.

What does blogging and self-publishing offer, in contrast? Blogging means you can publish anything you write at any time you want. Great. Secondly, since you aren’t actually charging people for reading your blog, trying to write stuff that readers will consider “worth their money” doesn’t need to be your priority. On the one hand, this allows creative freedom to explore topics that one is not convinced will sell. On the other hand, it means greater indifference to the needs of readers and greater concern for whatever comes to one’s mind at the moment.

This doesn’t have to be the case with blogging. In other words, it is perfectly possible for bloggers to be just as careful about the quality of their writing, and just as sensitive to the needs of readers, as people writing in traditional media are. In fact, some of the best bloggers do exactly that. A classical example that comes to mind is Steve Pavlina, who runs a website on personal development. But as he makes amply clear in his posts, he’s not merely a blogger. Writing about personal development is his business. It’s just as important to him even if he has to edit and publish himself.

Ironically, though the blogosphere apparently levels the playing field for all to write, the best bloggers continue to be people who have acquired their skills for analytical writing and expression as well as their ideas, from other experience, be it in academia or industry. Some of these people have written published books, many have done Ph.D.s, many have worked in magazines and many have worked in professions that involve a lot of writing. I haven’t encountered many people who’ve just started blogging on day one and become greater bloggers by day hundred.

But why?

The reason is simple: the blogosphere provides tools that allow people to directly publish without going through the rigmarole and process of traditional publishing, yet it does not so readily provide tools that help people transcend from being direct publishers of off-the-cuff thoughts, to people who can refine and reformulate arguments, conduct solid research, coordinate different streams of thought, and come up with a cogent, well-established position. It’s not that these are very hard for bloggers to do. But the incentive system doesn’t encourage this. This means that blogging has allowed the amateurs (like me) to publish, but it has not empowered the amateurs, at least in a prominent way, to improve and polish their writing skills.

Youtube allows anybody to upload videos. But how easy and friendly is the world to people trying to learn how to create a video? It’s easy to put up songs for free. But how easy is it to create a song? Certainly the software and hardware needed for the creation, as well as books and resources that could help in making videos and music, are more easily available. Yet, this difference is in no way at the stage where amateurs can, in large numbers, dabble with creating videos and music and where they can progressively improve to the point where they could become professionals. I’m speaking specifically about people who do not have the right contacts or levels of money needed to access advanced and specialized resources.

There are interests and reasons behind this

The traditional publishing economy was based, at least in part on the premise: sell a few things, and sell them one. Select well, hone and sell. Two problems with this are: often, the publishers may not predict very well what the market really wants, or would love. Secondly, a whole range of medium-level stuff fails to reach the kind of wide audiences it needs.

With free online publishing, both these have changed. Good stuff can now come up even if certain people in authority do not consider it good. And middle-level stuff, that some people might find good, can still come up now. But there’s a flip side to the free online publishing model, and that’s its economics.

That’s the economics of advertising. Google is currently the market leader in advertising, and the typical premise of advertising is: more eyeballs, more clicks. This means that content creators who’re trying to earn money through writing, earn more money if they get more eyeballs and more clicks. Which is similar to selling more copies: but different in various ways. Firstly, it is not at all necessary for people to buy content to view it. This means that you don’t need your stuff to be “good” or “useful” for people to actually shill out money. On the other hand, your stuff should be prominently linked to, and easy to find. So the economics entails commenting on other people’s blogs, using pingbacks, and various search engine optimization techniques to come up high when people search on certain topics. If the traditional news media is encouraged to use hype to catch people’s attention, the blogging industry need not be completely different.

More importantly, giant companies like Google, frankly, aren’t bothered about bad content. They don’t mind good content, but more importantly than content being good or bad, they want lots of content, and lots of people to spend lots of time reading that content. More readers means more eyeballs and more clicks. This means that the dynamic is to get a lot of people to participate and to keep the barriers to publishing and creating stuff as low as possible. So, do tools that encourage people to seek the help of more experienced bloggers for feedback on blog style and content get attention in people constructing blogging platforms? Not to a large extent. In the big picture, it doesn’t matter. What counts is a huge and diverse blogosphere. Picking and honing good bloggers and helping them scale the ladder to writing more impactful and professional pieces isn’t value for money.

This isn’t limited to blogging. What current web-based companies are concentrating on is giving publishing tools to more people. Giving tools to edit and create better content, and to learn how to produce better content, aren’t on their priority list.

This isn’t to underestimate the number of such tools available. There are many writing groups, and many groups and mailing lists by people seeking to be professionals in an area. But they aren’t as ubiquitous or accessible as the good old “write, and click publish” sites.

Content publishers and distributors have the responsibility to educate

A video hosting service like Youtube or a torrent service that allows file exchange, has the responsibility to make it easier for people uploading and using videos to understand issues of copyright, reuse and piracy, and to mark their works clearly in this regard. This doesn’t mean they are liable for every misuse of their service for piracy or plagiarism. But they need to provide people the resources and incentives to understand the current structure and architecture of law.

Come to think of it, providing such information and services isn’t extraordinarily hard. Yet, the reaction of a number of modern-day web-based publishing companies to copyright and legal issues has been to ignore them till they are threatened with legal action, at which point they react by pulling off video content.

An encyclopedia like Wikipedia, that relies largely on the labor of volunteers, has the responsibility to explain to incoming volunteers exactly what they are in for, how people have worked on the encyclopedia, what they can do to help. The typical experience on Wikipedia is Wanna edit? Go ahead — at your own risk. Wikipedia administrators and bureaucracy literally shuts off dissidents and people who complain about article content — but when it comes to being threatened with legal action, Jimbo Wales eagerly complies by suddenly blocking the article and taking it offline.

Google Books has done a great good by scanning a number of books, making their contents searchable, but this was again done with the “shoot first, apologize later” attitude. Namely, scan the contents of books, and then, if an author wants the scan not to be publicly visible, the author must request. Google made it plain that contacting authors for permission wasn’t worth their effort. Not worth their effort? Currently Google has come up with a more balanced approach.

Critics of “Web 1.0″ are quick to point out how much Web 2.0 has empowered individuals as opposed to the big corporations. This is true in some senses — but the biggest potential has yet to be achieved. All it’s done is created a parallel production system. You can read an article on Wikipedia. Or you can spend $100 to buy a book written with years of labor on the subject (the third option, that you get a pirated edition of the book, is out of bounds). Web 2.0 has largely been a time of dichotomies, rather than what I hoped for: a way for people who do not have contacts or resources, to gradually build the knowledge and skills needed to produce quality content.

Creative Commons: How creative and how much of the commons?

One of the great movements that in my view shows the power that Web 2.0 can fulfil is that Creative Commons movement. Creative Commons offers a range of licenses that allow authors to specify redistribution rights with certain restrictions. For instance, I can specify that people can reuse my work and create derivative works, as long as they share alike and use a compatible license. More importantly, the Creative Commons is working towards creating a culture of sharing.

I hope the emphasis on both words: “creative” and “commons”, continues, and that the Creative Commons movement does not simply turn into a slogan for content distributors, but remains, at its heart, a movement of people creating and using content. The troubling thing is that many of the advocates of “free” stuff in general miss the point of creativity: it is somehow assumed that making stuff free of cost, and free to reuse, is a kind of magic cure. In fact, it is important to provide people the incentive systems needed to constantly work on improving content and ideas and to constantly innovate. Having a rich and vibrant commons (something that anybody can reuse without permission or payment) is a crucial part of this. But it’s only one part. On the one hand, there are systems like the Linux operating system that, by and large, have been great successes. On the other hand, there are things like Wikipedia that have been mixed successes. What scares me is that some advocates of a commons seem to view “commons” and “free” as magic words and are therefore blind to the glaring problems with an institution like Wikipedia.

Let us bring our virtual and real existence closer together

Rather than treat online life as a kind of escape mechanism from real life, and view it as a place where we can get away with low-quality, off-the-cuff stuff, we should view it as something that enriches and is, in turn, enriched by, real life. Using our real names and our real thoughts, and being frank and open in online interactions could be a first step. Rather than think of online phenomena like Wikipedia as distinct from the traditional published books, let us work more towards bringing the best ideals of quality, rework and constant refinement into the online world.

This is not to say that instant publishing is not important (after all this blog wouldn’t get published in any traditional medium). Rather, it is to say that there is a continuum of choices between instant publishing and the full rigmarole of traditional publishing. And in fact, the technologies of the Internet can mean that one can actually publish comparable high-quality material in much less time now, and one can network and find people who can edit and provide feedback on content and suggestions. So while the majority of bloggers who, after all, are just writing something like a diary entry, will continue to rely only on instant publishing, others who want to do more with their blog have the tools to grow.

Some recommended reading

An interesting essay by Larry Sanger on how the net changes knowledge

More on choice

In an earlier post, titled Choice: start at low cost, I talked about the potential of simple, low-cost choices, to make the small improvements we need in our day-to-day life. People who read the blog have pointed out to me that coming up with low-cost choices isn’t always easy. For one, it requires a knowledge and awareness of what choices exist. In this post, I’ll discuss some of the techniques for exploring the choices available.

Let me recount a story. A traveler once met an old lady, and wanted some food. The lady had a lot of raw materials for food in her house, but she was stingy and reluctant to offer him food. So, the traveler took out a stone from his pocket, and told the lady he’d prepare soup for both of them using that stone. The lady offered a pot, and the traveler started cooking the stone. He asked the lady for some foodstuffs to be added to the stone soup to make it better, and gradually, got the lady to add flour, potatoes, barley and milk. As the soup stewed, the lady grew more and more excited and pleased. Finally, while the lady wasn’t looking, the traveler threw out the stone. (Read the story in greater detail here.

This is an old folk tale, and at first it isn’t clear what it illustrates. Does it tell us we shouldn’t be stingy in preparing grand soups? Probably, but I think the more powerful lesson is that we often need the stone to make the soup — but finally, the stone can be thrown out. This is the classic if only — if only so-and-so were available, I’d be able to do so-and-so.

In a number of situations, the things we feel are necessary for something, are in fact only helpful in facilitating it. For instance, traveling a lot may facilitate keeping in touch with a large number of people. So one might say: if only I had the time and money to travel across the world. But travel isn’t the only way to keep in touch with people. There is the telephone, there is email, there is instant messaging, and there’s even video conferencing. Having one’s article appear in the editorial page of a newspaper is certainly a cool way to be read by loads of people. But one can also write a blog and have a lot of people read the blog. Doubtless, fewer people read a specific blog than the editorial page of a newspaper. But it’s still possible.

In all these situations, there’s a high-cost alternative: like travel, having one’s article published in an editorial page; and a low-cost solution: like keeping in touch electronically, or writing a blog. Certainly, there are advantages and aspects to the high-cost solution that aren’t available in the low-cost solution. But to think of these as permanent defects or shortcomings of the low-cost solution, is a mistake. It assumes that resources, technology, and the way we use them are severely limited. This, as I’ll argue shortly, is a fallacy, because it puts too much emphasis on things that arise by accident and conditioning rather than through intrinsic differences.

For instance, there are strong differences between face-to-face communication and online communication. In face-to-face communication, there are strong cues of tone and voice, and there are strong physical cues of facial expressions. Smileys in an instant messaging chat cannot convey the same richness of emotion as the slight changes in facial expression. More importantly, smileys can be controlled with deliberation, while facial expressions are valuable precisely because they are, in part, spontaneous and uncontrollable. Thus, a lot can be achieved with face-to-face communication that, as of now, cannot be achieved by instant messaging or email.

But here’s the interesting thing. Once one becomes aware of the shortcomings and defects of electronic communication, it is possible to rectify them. In fact, I often do this kind of dumb thought-experiment: I take a person with whom I haven’t met face to face, and I imagine a setting where I’m meeting the person face-to-face. Then I extrapolate: what all would I say to that person, and what all would that person say to me, if we couldn’t hide behind electronic communication tools? Some of my thoughts take me in wild directions, but I often come up with a few things that I realize can be said electronically; it is just that they wouldn’t occur to me to say them electronically. And I do this quite often. Why? Because I realize that having face-to-face communication with a large number of people just isn’t feasible for me in my current circumstances. But I don’t want to be limited to the kind of topics and styles of conversation that one might associate with online conversation.

What I’ve noticed is that with a few iterations of these dumb thought-experiments, I manage to become more expressive in online communication, bringing to it some (though probably not all) of the features that I cherish in face-to-face communication.

I do a similar thing with money. I’m not a millionaire, so I cannot spend all the money I want ruthlessly in every possible way I want. But I still think sometimes of all the things I’d do if I had unlimited time, or unlimited money, or some resource in unlimited quantity (which, in point of fact, I don’t). Of the many ideas that come to my mind, I then realize that a few of them can be implemented within my current constraints of time and money, and some of them, often the very best ones, can be implemented at practically no cost and very little time investment!

In other words, to come up with the low-cost solutions, it often makes sense to look at the high-cost solutions and get ideas, and then notice which of those ideas transfer to the low-cost setting. At the core of it is the idea that often the difference lies in how easily a resource facilitates something. But once we’re aware of exactly how that resource facilitates that something, we may be able to facilitate that something without having access to the resource.

Snap judgments and creating new products

Recently, I was reading the book Blink! by Malcolm Gladwell (author of the bestseller The Tipping Point). Blink! talks about how people make snap judgments: as soon as they encouter something, their subconscious makes judgments/decisions about it. This may be a well-parroted fact, but Blink! goes further in a few respects.

Malcolm Gladwell explains that most of us cannot give very good explanations of how we’re making the snap judgments, and in fact, when we try to explain, our judgments often get confused, and we can significantly mislead ourselves. He quotes a study where two sets of students were given a set of problems about a board game. The first set, before being shown the problems, was asked to think about soccer hooligans, the latter to think about college professors. The second set of students did statistically better than the first.

In another study, students were called to a person’s office, and there was a short exercise. For some students, there were “anger” words occurring more frequently in the exercise, while for others, there were “polite” words occurring more frequently. The students who were primed with the anger words were more prone to interrupt another individual than the students primed with the polite words (the experiment was set up fairly carefully).

Perhaps the biggest eye-opener is Gladwell’s discussion of implicit association. Harvard’s Implicit Association Project has a number of tests you can take to determine whether you have implicit associations, for instance, associations of women with driving, or associations of old people with doing the laundry (these aren’t very typical associations).

Where do these findings come in? Gladwell says that there are some people who can train their instincts in a way that they are not misled by their subconscious, basically because they choose to observe what is relevant, and choose to ignore what is irrelevant. Thus, they not only refuse to be budged by irrelevant features, but also observe the relevant features in the very short span of time given by initial exposure. Secondly, they are able to act on their subconscious observations, and do not mis-attribute the observations to incorrect reasons or get fuddled by too many questions or doubts.

When collecting data about the way users will respond to a product, or collecting data about the effectiveness of a service, people may not give very good answers. Why? Firstly, if the survey contains too many questions, that force the person to rate and answer qualitatively, that may actually change the person’s initial snap judgment. Gladwell describes this in a study of jam preferences. Experts and random people were made to taste a range of jams. The random people, in a snap judgment, did almost the same as the experts, and the market, in giving relative ratings for the jams. However, when given a questionnaire to describe the reasons for their choice, with questions about specific aspects of the jam, the random people messed up and changed their preferences. The experts, who were able to store the tastes and understand exactly what was going on, didn’t get befuddled by the questionnaire.

Something similar happened with the Aeron chair — a highly ergonomic chair. The Aeron chair and its variants are now the de facto in the software industry. But when it was first brought out of the lab, there weren’t many takers. People looking at the chair just didn’t believe it’d be great, because it didn’t match up with the conventional wisdom of how chairs should look. It was only with the passage of time, as people started using the chair and found their backaches steadily reducing, that the chair started becoming popular. Today, the chair isn’t regarded as ugly, but when it was introduced, it was considered to be aesthetically repugnant.

This again raises questions about the way we collect feedback about the products and ideas we are developing. It also means that when reading people’s reviews about something, the ‘’snap factor” and the fact that the reasons they state may not be their real reasons, need to be borne in mind.

One example of this is the speed with which people judge things online. For instance, a number of people who look at the Citizendium and find that it doesn’t have an article on an important topic like Bill Gates decide that the encyclopedia isn’t quite in competition with Wikipedia. In a similar way, people may read one article on Citizendium, and decide that the quality of Citizendium is better (or worse) than Wikipedia.

Is this correct or good judgment? Gladwell’s book shows that snap judgments are often surprisingly good, and asking more from people usually leads to possibly misleading interpretations of one’s own behavior. Nonetheless, snap judgments made out of context can be bad and misleading. For instance, considering the fact that Citizendium has been around for only about 1.5 years, compared to Wikipedia’s 7, and the fact that Wikipedia, at a similar stage in time, was in a substantially worse state, means that a current state comparison of the two encyclopedias isn’t a very reliable way. It would be reliable if the information-gathering mechanism took age differences and policy differences into account; and the experienced web surfer would know what pages on a website to look up to get an idea of what directions it is taking.

Nonetheless, with the democratization of the Internet, blogging isn’t limited to savvy and unbiased web surfers who’re on the lookout for understanding policies and directions and evolution of things. The typical web surfer is still likely to take a look at something and say Yes, that works and No, that’s not good enough. This means that a product that is good, but unusual, may simply not receive the attention of large masses of people who are measuring it against metrics they understand.

Does this mean that new and different ideas are prone to failure? No, and this is where the Wisdom of Crowds (as described in Surowiecki’s book) comes in. Even though people on average may have biases, and even though these biases may on the whole may go agianst a product, if the product has genuinely new value to offer, there will be a few people who’ll be willing to deviate from the crowd and go for the product. Of course, there are also a few people who deviate from the crowd when it’s making the right decisions. But as Surowiecki points out, diversity and independence and the willingness of people to deviate from the crowd are what add to the wisdom of the crowd.

How does a new product gain the masses? When Google started out, they had to struggle for three years before their Backrub algorithm actually won the attention of an investor. Before that, their algorithm was popular, and liked, but nobody was staking themselves on it. But then there was an indvidual who could see the potential rather than the current scope of application, and this individual pumped money into the product. Today, we don’t even think aobut it when doing a Google search, but if it hadn’t been for the individuals who really pumped money into it, Google might well have died, or been delayed in its evolution (which may mean, for instance, that GMail would have come two years later than it did).

While some products like the Aeron Chair meet with instantaneous repulsion, others like Google Search meet with a somewhat lukewarm response. It’s good, but I still like my Yahoo! search that has indexed a much larger part of the web may have been the response of people initially exposed to Google search. However, Google was able to break through to become the de facto search engine. How? Because there were enough people who took a bit if the risk and pain of handling a developing product, because they saw the potential. And as the product became better and more comprehensive, the number of people using it became more and more, and it made more and more sense to use Google.

This is common sense, but very important: when a product is in the initial stages, let the masses see it if you want, but don’t let them be the arbiters of its value. Use their feedback, but do not take it literally. Some people will come up with imaginative suggestions, that need to be valued. But often, the objections of people are to the current appearance rather than to the idea and its potential. The more tuned a person is to the rate at which the product quality can change ,the more that person can separate the aspects that can change and be improved, from the aspects that are intrinsic to the new value offered by the product.

As yet another example, take the evolution of computers as a tool for writing. When computers first came into play, people thought things like: the disc space is expensive, it’s easier and faster to write on paper, one can make multiple copies, one can post letters to people across the world. Today, disk space is cheaper, multiple copies can be made and sent across the world much more easily on the computer, and almost all the advantages that paper and pen had over computers, have now been inverted. To top things, we now have interoperability: both scanning and printing are virtually free, and with improved word recognition technologies, writing something by hand would be equivalent to typing it. So if people using the computer had said: there’s just no way it can match up with all the conveniences of writing, they’d have been missing the malleability of the digital technology.

Why don’t they get it?

I’ve often felt like this: Why don’t they get it? It’s so obvious; why are they being so dense?

It could be about somebody who’s making a decision that I consider clearly detrimental to that person; it could be about somebody not accepting what I consider a simple point of logic; it’s basically one or more people acting in a way that I believe defies motivation and justification.

Have you felt that way? I think a lot of people do feel that way. Things that seem obvious to me (or you) just don’t seem to make their impression on the other person.

What differs from person to person is how we take this Why don’t they understand? feeling further. I have seen that a number of my acquaintances come to conclusions like they’re idiots or they’re evil or they’re just being stubborn or they’re kids. In other words, it’s solution by contempt.

There are other people who throw up their hands and say: I don’t know, I’m not in a position to judge. Let me not bother. I often do this myself, particularly in situations where it’s not really in my interests to “show the light” to the other person. For instance, if somebody is spending money in a way that doesn’t make sense to me from the viewpoint of that person’s long term goals, but that person isn’t financially dependent on me, then I might ask a couple of polite questions or make some casual observations but beyond that I can just say to myself it’s their life; not my concern. So I can go on interacting normally with the other person while not comprehending, or trying to comprehend, this feature of their personality. It’s solution by avoidance.

These are the two standard sanity approaches but there’s a third approach I take, ever so occasionally, which is to actually try to understand. It’s an approach I take in situations where I feel that understanding the rationale behind that person’s behaviour may yield dividends to me in the future, in situations where I have to deal with similar people. If, for instance, I plan to enter into the mathematics profession, and I find that mathematics professors have a way of behaving and interacting that I don’t completely understand, then it’s worth my while to take the pains to understand, even if the particular mathematicians whose behaviour I don’t comprehend doesn’t affect my future.

But as I’m growing up and seeing things more and more, I’m coming to appreciate that the ways in which other people affect one’s life are too diverse to predict. The toddler whose behaviour I don’t understand, can provide me insight that can help me take care of my own kids (if and when I have them), it can help me better understand the concerns of parents, it can help if I’m creating goods and services that target little kids and their parents. But there are stranger connections. Understanding the way the toddler perceives mathematics can help me understand what things are more primitive, and it can closely relate with the way axioms are built. I’m not speaking in thin air here; experiences with some young kids has highlighted to me some aspects of mathematical cognition, and made me appreciate how a little intuition in mathematics can save a lot of tedious mental jugglery with simple counting.

In the increasingly connected world that we are entering, more and more people become important; people whom we neither had the chance to nor the need to communicate with. So the ability to figure out why people are behaving the way they are, is a crucial asset.

Now it’s important to realize that it’s often extremely hard, even impossible, to figure out why somebody else doesn’t get it. For one, even if you were so motivated to just ask the other person for their reasons, the other person may not be able to explain, or may feel offended, or may feel you’re trying to reform him or her, or may just think you’re being funny. After all, it may be very obvious to the other person why he/she is acting that way, or it may seem something that he/she doesn’t want to consider. So this approach of just asking may not work.

Questions of why people do things may not even be answerable by experts; these are subjects of big experiments in economics, sociology, psychology and what-not. But what matters is an honest attempt to ask this question, because it puts you in the role of observer and input-seeker rather than judge or dismisser. So, you collect more tidbits that explain the other person’s actions and put them in context, and this may help you predict better how similar people may behave at a later stage. Even if you don’t understand why, you may at the very least be able to establish better patterns of what else to avoid in the future.

Another interesting side-effect is that sometimes, trying to seek a genuine answer to the Why don’t they they it? question may lead you to the realization that one of your assumptions about human behaviour was wrong. This could be embarassing at first to realize (for instance, if you’ve always placed a great value to certain kinds of things, realizing that there are people for whom those things aren’t important may not be easy). A knee-jerk response to this would be to label the other person as an idiot or crazy or kiddish.

Now I do not mean that the other person is actually being very logical or rational or responsible. But a knee-jerk contempt of another person is very different from a realization that the other person is immature, or wrong, in certain respects, and appreciating that. The former might create a sense of contempt, and may even cause one to feel unhappy and frustrated (particularly if there are regular interactions with the other person). In the latter, when you actually accept that there is a fundamental weakness in the other person, that may engender some sadness but it means less resentment and frustration.

This has happened for me many times. There were situations where I thought another person was behaving stupidly, and I resented it, disliked it, avoided that person. Then, when I thought about it, in some cases I was able to understand a rationale, and in some cases I just realized that the person lacked an important ingredient or input that would prevent the “stupid” behaviour, and that it was not in my capacity to provide that input. But when I looked at it that way, I didn’t feel any resentment. I just felt that this person lacked something, may be like the house next door that lacks a glass pane for one of its windows. Something to be sad about, but not something to resent.

Of course, it’s possible that my understanding of the situation was wrong, or itself limited. It’s not absolutely essential to come to the right understanding, as long as one is open to, and actively seeking and integrating, new input. Mistakes can be readily corrected, if one isn’t resorting to contempt or dismissal or rudeness.

Choice: start at low cost

The line that we have a lot of choice in our life is commonly parroted, yet it’s not a line that many of us truly understand and appreciate. Part of the reason for this, I believe, is that much of the current literature on the choice we exercise in our life is aimed at two kinds of audiences: people who’re trying to overcome certain kinds of problems, and people who’re keen on attaining goals. This severely limits the potential audience for the idea behind the theory of choice, because in the real world most people don’t have any compelling need to either solve problems or achieve goals (of course, everybody wants their problems solved and their goals achieved, but few have compelling need or desire for it).

This is unfortunate because there are many aspects for the choice model that are applicable to people who aren’t interested in rooting for sea change in their lives. In fact, most of the benefits of the choice model can be had with a lot of fun and very little effort, and I’m going to describe some of my experiences and experiments in this regard. What I’m really talking of is micro-choice; the choices we have in all the little things in life and how these choices govern to some extent the amount of excitement and liveliness we feel.

There are times when (like many others) I feel in a rut, a bit bored. Not deeply dissatisfied or unhappy, but just that things are too mundane. So on these occasions, I ask myself the question: what are the things I could do, with zero cost, time and effort, that’d make life more exciting? The zero cost, time, effort part may evoke skepticism because we’ve been all told that everything requires effort and hardwork. Yes, sea change requires hardwork, but there are usually a lot of little things that one could do for practically no effort.

Sometimes, it’s pretty silly stuff. For instance, sometimes, even when I’m not feeling bored, I just think, what are the tunes that I haven’t sung to myself, or played on the machine, for the last one month? And then some tune comes back to me that I used to enjoy singing long ago but have somehow just forgotten, and when I sing that, some part of myself that’s been dormant wakes up. Because somehow the tune is associated with certain past experiences and memories of places and people, and when I sing it, I can feel those memories come up. (The association’s usually based on the feeble premise that I used to sing the tune when I was there or around the time I met those people).

Tunes may not excite everybody, for some it could be the decor of the room. What triggers things isn’t the point. The point is the low-cost, low-time, low-effort aspect of it. Singing a tune costs me nothing, takes none of my time (proceeds subconsciously) and hardly requires effort. It doesn’t require ounces of determination or courage. It just requires me to say Hey, what’s been missing?

Food could have similar effect. I greatly enjoy the food I eat, and yet sometimes I feel that there’s some kind of food I used to have earlier that I’m not having now; so I just change the pattern that little bit to have that piece of food and life seems more exciting. What I’m saying is that that slight change with practically no cost, time and effort could have a quantum effect on one’s level of excitement in life.

Another area is staying in touch with friends. Sometimes, I feel that life’s getting into a rut, I don’t get much social or talking opportunities. Now, there are many parts of this I don’t want to or can’t immediately change. I’m not fond of going to late night shows, I don’t have enough time for a number of socializing opportunities, and I’m in a country and culture where I haven’t yet fully adjusted to the system of activities. But there are plenty of solutions that are zero on cost, time and effort. Like, I can just decide to chat with some person whom I haven’t chatted with for a long time. Or send an email. Or visit a discussion forum that I used to enjoy.

The notion of zero cost, time and effort is subjective. Spending a dollar or two may not be any cost worth considering for me, it may be a huge cost for somebody else. Also, the way one spends the money may matter. Similarly, five minutes spent in making a phone call may be significantly more time for a person than twenty minutes spent writing a letter. And the “effort” component also varies from person to person. A safe bet is that for something to be genuinely low on effort, it should just require a one-time action, without any followup, and should not draw upon any skills or resources that put a strain on the person.

In many cases, I come up with these ideas, and there’s really no reason for me not to implement them, I just go ahead and do it. On some occasions, solutions that seem to be zero on cost, time and effort, surprisingly don’t actually reach the stage of implementation, and at that stage it’s really a question of (a) whether the activity really is low on cost, time and effort; and (b) whether the reason I’m doing it for really does matter to me. If on balance I realize that the activity is worth more effort than the fun I’ll get out of it, then I don’t do it, and things are still going on.

It’s on some very rare situations that I realize that although the reason is good and the effort is very low, I’m still for some reason unwilling to do the activity, which indicates to me that there are some hidden reasons which aren’t surfacing. Now, I have the choice of whether to put in the effort to figure out what’s going on, or to say Okay, let’s find something else which doesn’t invoke any hidden resistance. The first approach is good and worthy but I don’t often feel up to it, so I just switch out and look for another solution. The cool thing about life is that there are always so many choices of ways to do things that are low on cost, time and effort, that one thing being blocked doesn’t mean I am forced to resolve it
there and then.

This may seem a somewhat cowardly approach to life, because great things come through cost, time and effort, as we all know. And people who are willing to put in their time, their money and their effort towards stuff are certainly of great value to themselves and society, and they often spearhead change and innovation. But the “find a low-cost, low-time, low-effort” solution isn’t being offered as an alternative in situations where people are already willing to invest and commit. It’s an alternative to doing nothing, to falling in a rut, and it’s a way of making the little things in life shine more.

Moreover, even people who are willing to invest and commit heavily in some areas may not have the same willingness in others; so it’s appropriate to look for the low-cost solutions in other areas rather than just do nothing in those. I may be willing to invest a lot into learning mathematics but not that much into improving my general knowledge, so while for the former I may buy books, spend hours studying and discuss and seek advice, for the latter I might do occasional websurfing and read Wikipedia articles. That’s not because websurfing and reading Wikipedia articles is the best way to improve general knowledge, it’s because it’s low on cost, time and effort for me and I can fill it in the itnerstices.

Another interesting aspect of this is the free demo aspect. By first attempting low-cost and low-effort activities, we can gauge the potential of something better, and for those things that yield more returns, we can then choose to invest more heavily. A number of the low-cost activities may be duds; okay, I sang the new tune and felt better, but it’s not really something that important to me. But I might find that eating a certain kind of food makes me really happy, and then I can invest on a more regular basis on stocking and eating the food.

Wisdom of crowds

I recently read James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds. The book provides fascinating insights into the way crowds generally tend to be smarter than the individuals who constitute it. It begins by exploring the potential of crowds for cognitive tasks, tasks which involve understanding, measuring and estimating. The examples described in the book are interested because most of them do not involve any kind of cumulation of knowledge but rather an operation like taking an arithmetic mean, median or mode. For instance, one of the experiments has people estimating the number of peas in a jar; each person makes separate estimates and the estimates are then totalled up.

I didn’t need to read Surowiecki’s book to know that crowds can be wise; I’ve seen enough demonstrations of this in real life, and that’s because I’m a first-year student at the University of Chicago. The situations where I’ve seen crowds behave wisely involve more cumulation, though; individuals put in their bits and pieces to construct a solution. I’m talking about the approach that the first-year office in Chicago usually takes to solving problems in the three-times-a-week assignments we get as part of our compulsory coursework. The problems seem almost too hard, impossible, to solve on one’s own, but the crowd’s never failed. Somebody or the other (sometimes, multiple people in unison) always manages to come up with a solution of sorts, and the solutions are scribbled all over the chalkboards in the first-year office with DNEs.

What Surowiecki (and perhaps those designing the first-year coursework) don’t address explicitly is the question of where the wisdom of crowds takes the individuals who are in the crowds. Surowiecki in fact makes the point that being in a crowd could make us individually stupider and yet collectively wiser, but he doesn’t address in detail the question of how the individual can harness the crowd to become individually wiser. Arguably, the goal of a course is to make those studying the course individually wiser, so that when they work as individuals in other collectives or groups, they can take that added wisdom to the new group.

This constitutes a different view to the goal of problem-solving, and a different focus on the way the crowd and the individuals constituting it need to behave optimally. If current performance is the goal, the strategies to be adopted are focussed on and measured only by current performance, which, in the case of assignment problem-solving is the rate at which one solves assignments. So it’s common to hear questions like Where are you placed currently? being interpreted as Are you working on algebra, analysis or topology assignment? At the collective level, it further means that where the first-year currently is, is directly correlated with the sum total of problems solved as yet by first-year students, which means that if a problem is already solved by one individual, another individual can then skip thinking too much about that and work on a different problem.

On the other hand, in situations where it’s not just current performance but the regular gains that the individual takes back that counts, the strategy gets modified somewhat. The first question is: what are the gains over and above getting a sufficient understanding of the solution to write it down? This could be a hard question, often in situations where the assignment problems themselves seem unmotivated and directionless (which does happen every now and then). In cases where there is a mid-term or final examination, one goal could be to develop the ability to solve similar problems when confronted with them in an examination-like situation. In other cases, there isn’t any clearly defined uniform goal for all individuals. If there isn’t a uniform goal for all individuals, the crowd cannot adopt a strategy on a uniform consensual basis. Thus, the individuals who are there in the crowd, even if they have specific things they want to gain, feel it’s better to flow along with the crowd and focus on the common and uniformly accepted goal: understand the solution enough to write it.

This is interesting because somehow the whole idea hasn’t taken off with me. It’s not that I consider it morally inappropriate to just focus on solving assignments; it’s more that I consider it highly boring to feel like part of a herd that’s hopping from board to board scribbling solutions that’ll be copied religiously and may never be seen again. That’s not exciting, and surprisingly, it may not be saving that much time for its individuals. Though the crowd often solves all problems early on, the time it takes for the solutions to dissipate to everybody is often long, and the general air of lethargy just drags on.

On the other hand, I remember one situation where the crowd experience was fun, because it was more structured and individuals saw more to gain by paying attention. For the Algebraic Topology course last quarter, Professor Madhav Nori set us an Assignment 7 which we didn’t have to submit but which would be used heavily in the construction of the final examination paper, so it was up to all of us to solve it. We decided that everybody would try to solve the problems, and then, the day before the final examination, we all got together in one classroom, and all the solutions would be presented by individuals who had solved the problems. The explanations would be problem by problem, and the other students would pose questions and get things straight. Mike Miller and Emily Riehl independently volunteered to take notes during the proceedings and they sent PDFs of the solutions to all of us, so the others could focus on listening and absorbing.

There were a lot of differences with the usual first-year assignment-solving experience. Firstly, everybody was present, together, at one time (it was remarked that this was the first time in more than a month that all first-years were in one room). Secondly, everybody had a goal, which involved more than just writing down the solution now; it involved understanding the solution well enough to reproduce it in an examination situation. Thirdly, everybody had tried independently (or by discussions in smaller groups) to solve the problem and even those who had failed to solve some problem, or not tried hard enough, at least had a background with which to listen. Fourthly, there was an organizational effort, and a better, more conducive environment for learning (the explanations were all done in lecture halls, which have sliding chalkboards and a better ambience for listening).

These differences all highlight that the way in which crowds get together, and what each individual brings in and hopes to take from, the crowd, determine how the crowd behaves and what the individual gets out of it. It also highlights the importance of having people at the head, and people who decide to choose appropriate settings and background for optimal operation. In other words, it requires individuals to figure out how to optimize harnessing the crowd’s potential.

The key point is that individuals can better the crowd by harnessing it, and we can thus get wiser individuals and hence a wiser crowd tomorrow. But the crowd doesn’t tell individuals how to harness it. Let me illustrate this point by looking at yet another example of the wisdom of crowds: the World Wide Web. Google knows what the wisdom of crowds is; that’s what it harness to get good search results. Wikipedia harnesses the wisdom of crowds to build an encyclopaedia with virtually complete outsourcing, and with a few people at the helm adjusting the strings every now and then.

But the individual who now has access to these resources can better them. As an individual who can use Google search, I can harness the power of it for my individual goals, and an as individual who can read Wikipedia articles, I can harness their content to meet my needs. But I can do more; I can layer my intelligence over these and construct resources for myself that depend on, but outshine, the resources that are obtained through the collation of the wisdom of crowds. If I do so, and if enough other people do so, then we reach the next layer of individual and collective wisdom, because our current individual efforts become part of the crowd that tomorrow’s individuals can tap on.

Most people don’t see it that way, they see the wisdom of crowds as something the individual must passively accept and make good use of; which is possibly one reason why individuals aren’t getting wiser just as fast as they could. But it’ll soon catch on; this is the first time that individual creativity can really take on, not from individual knowledge and potential, but from collective potential, so that today’s individuals are as wise as yesterday’s crowds.

I think Surowiecki’s book views individuals as independent agents who may collaborate in specific ways, but are acting in self-interest, and whose actions together constitute the crowd. What we can really do is to see that the individuals can access the total harnessed wisdom of the crowd and grow upon that, which means a paradigm of faster growth. This is very different from individuals trying to tap on the crowd’s collective wisdom while part of the crowd, it’s about moving one paradigm up from the crowd.

Religion — guide or chore?

It is commonly believed in Western lands that India is a religious and mystic land; yet surprisingly it seems to me that in a way, people in the United States (where I have been staying for the past four months) may actually be more religious than people in India. India has often touted itself as a land of culture, religion and values, but is it really such? How does religion contribute to the lives of people in India, as compared with in Europe, America and Africa?

Let me take the example of Hinduism, the “dominant” “religion” in India. More than 80% of the population of India is Hindus, and many Hindus pray to God every day, go to the temple regularly, and even go on pilgrimages. This would suggest that Hinduism has a crucial impact on the way people live and make decisions. Yet, in my experience, Hindu religious activity constitutes yet another chore in many people’s lives, a chore that they believe is important to be “good”, but a chore that is done and forgotten.

Religion can be viewed in two ways: one, as a system of beliefs about the universe, and the other, as a guiding system of values and beliefs that helps one cope with and make decisions in life. For religion to function effectively in the latter way, and to make an impact on the life of people, religious leaders and activists need to play the role of problem-solvers and guides: people to whom individuals can go, share their problems, and get strength and courage to proceed further in life. Further, religious leaders should tackle issues about daily life that concern people the most. This tackling issues could be in many ways: it could be through taking rigid positions, it could be through offering perspectives, it could be through explaining to people how to make sense of the situations. Religion should, in this respect, offer a sense of community and solidarity.

In the traditional Church system, the local priests and vicars play the role of guides; they make statements about current issues, they explain how to interpret current events and the role of such events in their lives. True, some of these views may not be agreeable to all followers of the religion; some of them may be considered oppressive or exploitative, and some of them may be based on an erroneous understanding of recent developments. Nonetheless, the religion makes an attempt to provide a framework relevant to one’s current life. The rabbi plays a similar role for the Jews.

Hinduism has no such canonical reference point. While it’s hard to say whether this is good or bad, what is probably more notable is that there is hardly any reference point for Hinduism. There are some modern-age gurus who try to address problems of modern-day life, yet the typical image when one thinks of a Hindu priest is as somebody who arranges ceremonies, leads processions, and chants mantras. I do not know anybody who would consider going to the local Hindu priest to make a confession. Hindu temples are rarely places where a lot of people get together to discuss matters of day-to-day importance, or to pray together. There is no equivalent of the namaz that Muslims do every Friday.

This is also seen in the interplay of religion and politics in India. Politics in India is hardly affected by actual religion; the effect is more in terms of “religious politics”. In a number of more modern countries, churches and religious organizations have an active set of demands regarding prominent issues that affect the people; often these demands get voiced. In India, most demands of religious politicians center around the building and re-building of religious monuments, the declaration of religious holidays, and playing one religious subsection against the other.

In fact, I have a strong feeling, contrary to popular wisdom, that it is the very irrelevance of religion in the life of many Hindu Indians that has led Indians to adapt so quickly to the world; not influenced by too many religious beliefs, and not really believing strongly in any approach to living, Indian Hindus have readily taken to Western habits. This is not so much the case with people from other communities, particularly Muslims. Having a greater sense of community and closer direction and guidance from religious precepts may actually have encumbered Muslism from adapting.

It is possible that the irrelevance of religion in the lives of people in India, apart from the occasional ritual here and there, is a recent phenomenon. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is debatable. What is unfortunate is that though the guiding value of religion in daily life is low, the effect on superstitions, prejudices, and inter-community separation continues to remain high.