Author: Atanu Dey

Carl Jung (1875 – 1961) wrote, “Never do human beings speculate more, or have more opinions, than about things which they do not understand.” He must have been invoking his inner Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744) who in his poem “An Essay on Criticism” cautioned — 

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.

Either drink deep, or don’t drink at all. My motto also.

Superficial understanding does lead to unjustified confidence. With deeper understanding we realize the limits of our knowledge. We are not omniscient. That’s not an amazing claim. Our understanding is severely limited because we are limited beings, and therefore ignorant of nearly everything. That must teach us epistemic humility but all too often experts don’t learn that lesson. Continue reading “AI and Jobs”

In Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” in Act 1,  a guard says, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” expressing his suspicion and concern about the moral corruption within the kingdom.

Now that can certainly be said about the United Kingdom. There’s something rotten, and that rot has to do with a particular kind of immigrants who follow a particular religion, and what they are doing to the British kingdom. More accurately, what those immigrants are allowed to get away with: wholesale organized rape, murder and other assorted crimes.

[Did you recognize the image at the top of the post was the flag of England?]

I am an Anglophile. I admire British history, culture, and language. Their contributions in every field of human endeavor — philosophy, politics, administration, governance, mathematics, science, engineering, technology, music, literature, etc. — is unmatched. Just a few generations ago, the sun never set on the British Empire.

All that is gone now.  Continue reading “England”

“My Dinner with Andre” is a 1981 American drama film set at a restaurant in Manhattan.  It’s a dinner conversation between two old friends, Wallace Shawn and André Gregory. Shawn, a playwright and actor, reluctantly agrees to meet his former colleague Gregory, a theater director.

Gregory had abandoned his career to travel the world in search of enlightenment. They explore contrasting philosophical themes: Gregory’s spiritual journey and Shawn’s pragmatic worldview.

Over their dinner, Gregory recounts extraordinary experiences in his quest to break free from the mechanical habits of modern life. Shawn listens skeptically while defending the value of ordinary pleasures like coffee or an electric blanket. By the end of the evening, both men, though convinced of their positions, leave with much to ponder.

I still recall the movie even though I’d watched it over forty years ago. The entire movie was just a conversation between two friends over dinner. It had no romance, no explosions, no action and (would you believe it?) no CGI. It was just two guys talking. Which is what makes it so special. Continue reading “Bill’s Dinner with Donald”

For people to be able to ask important questions, they have to have the capacity to seek, find and comprehend the answers themselves. That is, the answers are almost but not quite within their reach. The Zen proverb — when the student is ready, the teacher appears — is a version of that. 

A corollary to that is the fact that one cannot learn something from a book that is not implicitly almost known already. To have a chance to gather even the low-hanging fruits, you have to be close to the tree; if you are far enough away from the tree, you can’t even see what fruits it bears.

The less one’s knowledge of a subject, the less aware one is of one’s ignorance. It’s almost paradoxical that the more you know, the more your knowledge of your ignorance grows. Ignorance of one’s ignorance is meta-ignorance. Knowledge of one’s ignorance is meta-knowledge. Continue reading “Knowledge and Ignorance”

Unless one is a hermit or is marooned on an uninhabited island, trade is what everyone does. Even children voluntarily trade cards, marbles, toys, etc., with other children. As grownups, we produce stuff to sell and that allows us to buy stuff that we consume but couldn’t produce. Most of us sell our labor in exchange for wages, and buy stuff we want. Even within a household exchange is ubiquitous even though it is not mediated using money.

If we couldn’t or wouldn’t trade, we’d be forced to consume only what we produce. That would be an all-round disaster; we’d all be desperately poor. Self-sufficiency is a recipe for poverty. Mohandas Gandhi was the prophet of the self-sufficiency religion, and we know how that worked out. Continue reading “On Trade and Trump’s Tariffs – Part 3”

Geographers know the lay of the land but economists do it with models, as the witticism goes.

It takes quite a bit of training to appreciate the utility of models, and how and why they are indispensable in explaining the artificial world we live in.

Many of us are familiar with models from our childhood. As a kid, I used to build model airplanes from hobby kits. Not just as hobbies, model airplanes are extensively used and tested in wind tunnels to design the real thing even in this age of sophisticated computer modeling.

Very complex systems are simulated on computers as models. Weather forecasting relies on running huge models with billions of data points on supercomputers. Climate models attempt to predict what the climate may be like in coming years and decades.  Continue reading “Models”

I used to have a Honda VFR750F back in the days when I worked at Hewlett Packard in Cupertino. I had the 1986-1989 model. BikeSocial describes it as “a truly ground-breaking motorcycle. Not only did it have a hideously complex gear-driven cam V4 engine, Honda matched this to an incredibly advanced aluminum twin-spar chassis and staggeringly high build quality. . . . Despite being designed as a sports-tourer, the VFR’s handling was on a par with the best superbikes of the day.”

Specs:

Engine: 748cc, V-four, 16v, DOHC
Power: 106bhp @ 10,000rpm
Torque: 56ftlb @ 8,500rpm
Weight: 199kg Continue reading “Biking on the Skyline Boulevard”