Author: Atanu Dey

In a previous post, I had promised to tell a story if anyone wanted to hear it about how cognitive overload can be detrimental to persuasion. As it happens, Sambaran Mitra and Sridhar Rao (see the comments to the post “How to Tell a Big Lie: Assertion, Repetition and Contagion“), and others emailed me to tell the story. So here it is.
Continue reading “The Fenwick Weavers’ Village”

Those who wield great influence on humanity unfailingly understand some truth about the nature of human collectives. It could not be otherwise. They are able to hold power over the masses because they know — consciously or not — how to manipulate them.

Every individual is unique. Any and all of his mental and physical attributes may lie anywhere along the spectrum of human variations, not duplicated in its entirety in any other person. The individual person is idiosyncratic and unpredictable in his actions. But the masses behave entirely predictably. Humans are rational but only boundedly so. Psychologists who study group behavior have identified biases and systematic deviations from rational behavior. Those who rule the masses have necessarily to be experts in mass psychology.
Continue reading “How to Tell a Big Lie: Assertion, Repetition & Contagion”

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
Continue reading “Happy 4th of July”

The good is oft interred with their bones. Shakespeare, that great observer of the world that fallible humans inhabit, was right on the mark. Being imperfect creatures trying to survive in this material world, we end up doing a mix of good and bad. Sometimes the consequences of the bad bits reverberate through the passages of time — and the good just fades away in comparison. Mr Advani could have withdrawn from that fate but it appears that now the time for that has passed.
Continue reading “The Evil That Men Do Lives After Them . . .”

First day of Summer is here as today is the Northern summer solstice. Here’s a video nicely explaining the solstice. (Of all places, from the Kurdistan Planetarium.) The description below the video is taken from YouTube.

The Summer Solstice occurs exactly when the Earth’s axial tilt is closest to the sun at its maximum of 23° 26′. Though the Summer Solstice is an instant in time, the term is also colloquially used like Midsummer to refer to the day on which it occurs. Except in the polar regions (where daylight is continuous for half of the year), the day on which the Summer Solstice occurs is the day of the year with the longest period of daylight. Thus the seasonal significance of the Summer Solstice is in the reversal of the gradual shortening of nights and lengthening of days. The summer solstice occurs in June in the Northern Hemisphere, in December in the Southern Hemisphere.

At the Tropic of Cancer (23°26’N) and all points to the north, and at the Tropic of Capricorn (23°26’S) and all points to the south, the sun reaches its highest position in the sky on the day of the Summer Solstice. However, between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, the highest sun position does not occur at the Summer Solstice, since the sun reaches the zenith here and it does so at different times of the year depending on the latitude of the observer. Depending on the shift of the calendar, the Summer Solstice occurs some time between December 21 and December 22 each year in the Southern Hemisphere, and between June 20 and June 21 in the Northern Hemisphere.

Worldwide, interpretation of the event has varied from culture to culture, but most cultures have held a recognition of sign of the fertility, involving holidays, festivals, gatherings, rituals or other celebrations around that time.

The word solstice derives from Latin sol (sun) and sistere (to stand still).

The Congress has been arguably extremely successful in maintaining its stranglehold on India despite — and perhaps because of — its evident failures of governance. At the time of India’s political independence from British rule, the Congress inherited a very poor country. Roughly speaking, around 80 percent of the 300 million Indians then, or 240 million, were desperately poor. After 66 years, today that number of the desperately poor in India has more than tripled to around 900 million. For much of that time, the Congress has dominated the political control of India at the center and therefore has dictated those central (and state) policies that are directly responsible for this abominable state of underdevelopment. The Congress’s inability to provide good policies is matched only by their ability to hang on to power. How they manage to do that is fascinating and instructive.
Continue reading “The Reasons that the Congress Survives”