Free speech

Confidence without understanding in speech is like power without responsibility in action.

Customer vs. Steve Jobs

Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company once said:

"If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse."

his point being that it is possible to meet customer needs better than customers can envision.

Steve Jobs embraced the above philosophy. In 1985, he was quoted as saying:

“We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.”

This was shortly after he was fired from Apple.

Now, here's a quote from 2000:
“This is what customers pay us for–to sweat all these details so it’s easy and pleasant for them to use our computers. We’re supposed to be really good at this. That doesn’t mean we don’t listen to customers, but it’s hard for them to tell you what they want when they’ve never seen anything remotely like it. Take desktop video editing. I never got one request from someone who wanted to edit movies on his computer. Yet now that people see it, they say, ‘Oh my God, that’s great!’”

Same content, but there is one very important difference. The customer may not be able to see Henry Ford's vision of a car, but when presented with a car, the customer must agree that the car is better than a horse, even a faster one. The Steve that returned to Apple in 1996 showed far greater respect for this fact that the Steve that had been fired in 1984.

Two doctors and a patient

In a town, there are two doctors and only one patient who is a drug addict. After a particularly bad seizure, the addict goes to one of the doctors. The doctor knows that the addict should be checked into rehab, but also foresees that since rehab is frustrating, the addict will likely switch doctors. Hence, the doctor, acting to avoid the loss of his only patient, administers to the addict a large dose of his own drug to restore the semblance of normalcy. In this way, the doctor buys time to implement a better long-term treatment plan. The other doctor is vocal in his criticism of the treatment method, although one might conjecture that had the patient gone to him instead, events would have unfolded with broad similarity while differing in details.

The analogy with the two-party system and the US economy is imperfect. If the above were to happen, the patient would ultimately die. The US economy will merely be reborn at some point. A part of me would like to believe that a long-term cure can be found for the excessive debt that has accumulated, but experts everywhere seem to not deny that debt has simply changed hands, not disappeared. The best outcome that I can think of is one where the dollar smoothly devalues, in the process reducing the effective sovereign debt burden, and also boosting exports. But a major economic adjustment such as this is unlikely to be without hiccups.

Debt signifies that tomorrow's spending was done yesterday, and in a zero-sum game we must spend less sometime in the future. Since we spent more yesterday, the economy did better than it would have. To quote Kenneth Fisher "Historically, big deficits are followed by stock-market returns that are dramatically superior to those following surpluses--for as long as 36 months out." When the time comes, stock market returns will be less than dramatic as the US government, which directly or indirectly is a big customer of the US economy, will have gone from spender to the opposite. Whether spending will reduce because of higher taxes or fewer public entitlements is something that the two doctors can debate ad infinitum.

Choosing the right animal

A donkey is an inefficient horse. It is smaller, weaker, slower. But that a horse is an inefficient donkey is more revealing, because it is less expected. You see, a donkey has certain traits that are valuable in certain contexts - it is a dull, docile, complying animal.

So if a dhobi (washerman) needs a donkey to carry his pile of laundry to the dhobi-ghat (place by the side of a water body where clothes are washed), then it is a donkey that he must buy. If instead he buys an animal from a sale on race-horses who fell short of racing standards, then the next morning the whole village will watch with a mix of bewilderment, amusement and pity as an out-of-breath dhobi chases a trotting horse with a pile of clothes falling off its back.

Fairness over Equality

In an episode of the TV medical drama 'House', a patient of African origin is offended when the doctor tells him that a certain drug works better on blacks than on whites. He is offended because he knows that we are all equal; the difference is only skin deep.

The notion of equality is widely perceived as positive - as an antidote to discrimination.'Everyone is equal' is a simple idea anyone can grasp, whether they agree or not. Clearly everyone is not equal in the mathematical sense of equality, since if you can tell two people apart then they cannot be equal. But more importantly, I think that this oversimplified axiom prevents the more correct and more important idea of 'fairness' from finding the visibility that is due.

In a world where everyone is equal, tolerance is trivialized. Tolerance is hard. If we were zebras in the Serengeti, our survival would depend critically on the ability to generalize the behavior of one lion to all lions. A broadminded zebra who thought – “I should treat this lion as an individual, even though the last one chewed up my cousin” – would quickly end up as lunch. The ability to generalize is naturally hardwired into the parts of our brain that we have inherited from our ancestors of millions of years ago.

Unfortunately, humans tend to generalize by force of habit along lines that are not fundamental. Most of us here have had no choice in determining our religion, race, nationality etc. but are nonetheless attached to such identities strongly. When our country is insulted, we feel insulted, even though we are citizens simply because, through no choice or fault of our own, we found ourselves there when we first opened our eyes at birth. Every country, religion, race has people who would feel less insecure if people of other similarly accidentally acquired identities were wiped out. Zebras would feel less insecure if lions and other harmless animals that resemble lions could be exterminated.

Tolerance requires that even though people are not the same, they still deserve respect and fair treatment. This is harder. This is also a self-evident truth. Not another well-meaning lie devised for those whom we perceive as too stupid to think for themselves.

Free advice...

... does no good to its recipient, and causes loss of goodwill to the giver.

To each his own

Religious beliefs are like toothbrushes. They can be quite useful to the owner, but it is unwise to think that someone else would want to use yours.