A team of Japanese scientists has announced the discovery of a sea slug that has a disposable penis.

…

Sea slugs are hermaphrodites.

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Sea slugs mate with both sets of sex organs, concurrently. I imagine (reminding you that sin lies not in the desire, but only in acting upon that desire) that double-sex must be a pretty tempting proposition, one that could lead many a sea slug astray. Twice. And at the same time. Sea-slug Craigslist postings must be novella length. Questions abound: Does the involvement of four sex organs automatically make the most mundane Monday-night, post-“let’s-see-what’s-on-Netflix” sea-slug encounter an orgy?

More here.

It’s been more than a month since the horrific assault and rape of the woman referred to variously as Jagruti, Amanat, Nirbhaya, or Damini. (I think Jagruti is the most representative name among these.)  What have we learned after a month of introspection?

What Causes This?

Several causes have been put forward.  Here are some that I agree with:

• It’s cultural.  The patriarchy views rape and sexual assault  as a loss of honour not for the perpetrator but for the victim.  The patriarchy believes it has the right to control individuals’ sexual behaviour, preferences, and choice of marriage partner.  Such behaviour creates an unempowered group of women who lack the means of resistance or retribution.  In addition, the patriarchy has also occasionally used rape and other forms of sexual assault (eg., stripping) to assert control over women often for exercising their choice over sexual relations.
• Bollywood. Bollywood promotes eve-teasing or other obsessive fixations on women and submissive or powerless roles for women.  Disrespectful behaviour towards women is promoted as manly, humorous, victorious, and heroic.
• The police. The police weren’t doing their job.  But more importantly, they create a culture of fear.  Victims are terrified of approaching the police, because the results are unpredictable.  The police are more  likely to blame the victim than believe her, and will often take advantage of the victim in various degrading ways.  More indirectly, victim intake processes are also degrading.
• The Law. Laws in India relating to rape are antiquated and do not provide sufficient nuance to adequately prosecute rape cases.  Procedures required by law are degrading to the victim.  The execution of rape-related cases and language used in those cases is insensitive and is part of the reason victims are reluctant to participate in the legal process.  The laws also explicitly minimize certain forms of rape, such as marital rape.
• The political system/the political class. Politicians at various levels are part of the problem.  Tribal panchayats still subscribe to outmoded notions and view rape in terms of honour and virtue.  In various ways, many elected male politicians subscribe to the same misogynistic prejudices against women that various tribal patriarchies do.  They hold a deep belief that when a woman is raped, the woman must have poor character (which is the cause of the rape).  Other suggestions likely to originate in the political class are the woman’s choice of apparel, choice of location, or the fact that the woman has a boyfriend.  Those politicians who have slightly clearer thinking on the topic nevertheless have  unintelligent or insensitive reactions.

Reactions

People had various reactions.  Here are some of the more insidious ones.

• Sheila Dixit.  Claimed it wasn’t her responsibility, since the Delhi police weren’t under her jurisdiction.
• Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi.  No reaction at all.
• Manmohan Singh.  “Theek hai?”
• Sushma Swaraj. ”Even if she survives, she’ll never be truly alive again.” (Said while Jagruti was still alive)
• Abhijit Mukherjee.  (Referring to protesters, apparently of the opinion that he can decide how female protesters ought to dress) “Those who are coming in the name of students in the rallies, sundori, sundori mahila (beautiful women), highly dented and painted”
• Sushil Kumar Shinde.  (Attempting to explain why there should not be protests) “…tomorrow Maoists will come here to demonstrate with weapons.”  Also (giving a reason why the protests should have stopped, and attempting to ingratiate himself with Sonia Gandhi): “Person like Sonia Gandhi met the delegation of students at midnight.”
• Asaram Bapu. ”She should have taken God’s name and held their hands and feet…then the misconduct wouldn’t have happened. … Galti ek taraf se nahi hoti hai (mistakes are not committed only by one of the parties)”.
• Banwari Lal Singhal.  (On banning skirts in schools) ”It should be prohibited keeping in view the rise of social crimes against women. The school should have pant-shirts or salwar suits as uniforms for girl students,”

With a large number of people, the immediate reaction was to demand various forms of crowd justice.  The death penalty was sought by a large proportion of protesters, irrespective of procedure and law, a trend that Chief Justice Altamas Kabir critiqued.  Samajwadi Party MP Jaya Bachchan stated that the culprits should simply be handed over to the crowd.  The demand for extreme punishment appears to stem from the general assumption that new laws enacted can be applied retrospectively to the perpetrators, in particular to definitions of juveniles (there is doubt about the age of most brutal of the rapists, and he will likely be tried as a juvenile, with a greatly reduced maximum sentence).  The supreme court has clarified that this is not possible.  The Justice Verma committee, constituted to make recommendations to the government on reforms to laws on sexual assault and rape, has produced a report that seems to include opinions from various stakeholders and experts.  Foreign women have spoken up about their experience as tourists, and have described nightmarish experiences of groping hands whenever they visit public places.

Reactions from the legal community have been confused and have shown a disturbing disregard for due process.  The Saket court bar association refused to represent the rape accused, and attempted to stop lawyers who agreed to represent them by engaging in a public physical tussle with those lawyers, on court premises.

Consequences

The Verma report appears to be a progressive document, and the government has taken its recommendations into account, to some extent, in an ordinance that was promulgated recently.  It looks like a step forward.  Apart from defining multiple categories of sexual assault and increasing penalties for rape, it also includes jail terms for government servants who obstruct justice in such cases. (I’m not sure whether this extends to the police.)  But there are parts that are puzzling.  For example, “A man who rapes his estranged wife during separation can be jailed for seven years”, indicating that marital rape deserves a lesser penalty.  It’s also not clear what the effects outside Delhi will be.  Delhi is pretty bad, but the problem is not restricted to Delhi.  Various accounts estimate that the rural incidence of rape is higher than the urban incidence.

In broader terms, attitudes towards rape are influenced by a general disregard for individuals’ privileges and sovereignty  over their own bodies.  Symptoms include police torture, army excesses and rape, ragging in colleges, corporal punishment for children in their schools and homes, assaults on unmarried couples out and about, various central and state government attacks on free speech, subversion of various investigation agencies to carry out political revenge missions, as well as sexual assault and rape.

I hope we are able to find real solutions.

I upgraded the memory on my old Lenovo T61 recently, and thought it was a good time to upgrade Linux as well.

When I began looking for candidate distributions, one of the big problems with Linux became apparent: the community struggles to hold on to gains that it has made.  Excellent, painstakingly developed features are often discarded in favor of a “refresh” or new direction.  Many times, it isn’t clear at all that the refresh accomplishes anything.

This happened to Ubuntu, the distro I’ve been using for several years now, with their decision to develop a completely different UI (Unity).  I decided to install a less deviant distro, and went with Linux Mint 14.1.  Not too big a step, since Mint 14.1 is based on Ubuntu 12.10. Linux mint is pretty good, but like most linuxes is a little rough around the edges.  Here are my experiences, which I’ll update as time goes by.

The good:

• Except for one minor hiccup, the install process was excellently simple and effortless.
• Lenovo dock integration works with zero tweaking (when placed in the dock, the display switches to the external monitor, and vice-versa).  This is very important.  (This completely stopped working… I’m trying to figure out why and how to make it work again. Update: It seems related to this previous post of mine.)
• Videos play without too much stutter or jerkiness, even in full screen mode.
• I don’t have to do anything to get sound to work. (See below for a caveat)
• The UIs for various settings are very smooth and intuitive without unnecessary clutter.
• The user interface (panel, menu, desktop) is quite smooth and sleek, most things are placed in intuitive locations, and it is easy to get work done without the UI getting in my way.
• I had existing home directories for a small number of user accounts.  When I mounted those home directories and added users with the same names as before, the userids were set properly and users were able to immediately begin using their old home directories.  I am not sure whether this was just a coincidence (did I recreate user accounts in the same order that I had done previously, and hence get the same sequence of userids? If I had changed the order, would everything have been messed up?).  I was concerned about this, and it’s great that it worked so smoothly.

The bad:

• Why create a DVD-size install disk (800-odd MB)?  I didn’t have a USB stick handy, and it was pure luck that I had a blank DVD lying around.  I’d expect CD-size install disks to work better.  But this is a minor problem.  I imagine most people would use a USB stick.
• The install process is excellently simple.  However, one part of the process gave me some nervous moments.  I have a complicated partitioning scheme.  When I was setting up partitions manually, the “format” option for some partitions was grey, while it was white for others and had an “X” for yet others.  I wasn’t sure what the grey meant and it wasn’t explained anywhere, leading to nervousness because I wasn’t sure whether my data-filled partitions would be formatted.  In the end, they weren’t formatted and it all turned out ok, but I’m still no wiser as to what the grey formatting box means.
• When logging in, it says something about Run XClient Script.  I installed the Cinnamon version and know about MATE, but what is this XClient Script?  Need to stop referring to things people are unlikely to know about without an explanation.
• No switch user button in the menu.  I have to lock the screen to get a switch user button.
• Right after installation, none of the package management software (including synaptic package manager) would start because of a malformed line in the sources list.  I had to manually edit the file to fix this.
• X is unstable.  Sometimes I log into an account and get blank white squares instead of icons or letters, and various parts of the screen are blanked out or garbled.  Installing the nvidia drivers appears to have fixed this.
• Nowhere in the manuals or release notes is installation of nvidia drivers mentioned.  You just had to know to install them.
• Synaptic still hasn’t gained the ability to install selected packages in the background while you continue to browse other packages.
• The login/logout system is generally unstable.
  • If I switch users or log in and out 2-3 times, the computer crashes and I have to reboot.
  • Even when it works, switching users results in some peculiar behavior.  The screen blanks out, I see a blinking cursor, then the screen blinks a couple of times before the login screen appears.  Sometimes there’s a text login that appears for several seconds before the graphical login window comes back.  An nvidia splash screen also becomes visible sometimes.
  • The login system doesn’t play nice with the docking system.  If I switch users, the new login screen disappears from the external screen and only appears on the laptop screen (which I have to open while it’s in the dock to proceed).  After logging in while docked, attempting to switch users leads to peculiar bugs, including the inability to view programs started, even though they show up on the taskbar (there’s just no window for the program).
• After installing software, it’s sometimes necessary to log out and back in for the menu search to detect it.  (Other times it is detected right away.)
• They chose to include a crippled Add Users program.  There is already a program that lets you add users as well as set various permissions through group membership (like the ability to mount CDs or use a printer or VirtualBox).  In Mint they inexplicably discarded the feature-rich version in favor of a program that only allows you to add or delete a user.
• The alternative package management tool (mintinstall) is a frustrating mix of good and bad.  It has this great feature where you can begin installing some packages in the background while continuing to browse other packages (I can’t believe synaptic still can’t do this).
  • However, it isn’t possible to quickly select or queue multiple packages for installation — there’s no right-click package selection.  To select a package, you have to double-click on it and then click an “install” button.  To then select another package, you have to hit a “back” button, double click on another package, and click the install button.
  • Also, and this is quite important, once an installation is started there seems to be no way to interrupt it or cancel.  The cancel button doesn’t work.  If it is closed during installation, the tool closes the UI but continues to install packages in the background.  During this time it locks the package management system and there is no way to communicate with it.  So I ended up waiting a long time for it to finish downloading and installing packages I had changed my mind about.
• There still doesn’t seem to be any way to mirror the desktop over DLNA.  And still no way to stream PulseAudio sound output over DLNA or AirPlay.  There are no DLNA control points available that work with any of the music players.  There are supposed to be some programs that enable some of these, like rygel, xmms2-plugin-airplay, pulseaudio-module-raop, and a totem airplay plugin.  None of them works.  C’mon — it’s 2013, for goodness’s sake!  Even my Android cell phone can do these basic things.
• Caveat Sound seemed to work out of the box.  Then it just stopped working.  I can no longer see the local sound device.  The only device that sound can be sent to is “Dummy Output”, which seems to be like /dev/null for sound.  That is, I can no longer play sound at all.  This problem went away after rebooting, but it’s quite unclear why it occurred and seems likely to recur in the future.
• Ubuntu One isn’t installed by default.  I don’t buy very much music, but unless it’s much more expensive or lower quality than 320 kbps I prefer to buy on Ubuntu One, as a way of supporting Linux. This is minor (Ubuntu One is easy to install), but since Mint is based on Ubuntu, I feel they should have included Ubuntu One.

There appears to have been a great deal of popular support for Hazare’s initiative.  However, there are some who question the idea of using a hunger strike to achieve ends.  For example, this blog says:

Of all the hypocritical actions that Gandhi indulged in publicly, fasting to death is most definitely the most remarkable. … Hazare’s fasting to death and the public support that he has enlisted shows how immature India is as a nation.

I think these comments miss the point entirely.  Anna Hazare merely provided a focal point to people who have already had corruption on their minds for several months now.  A hunger strike is sometimes a form of blackmail, but when it reflects popular sentiment it is more properly seen as merely an expression of a threat to the government that already exists in the minds of the people.  The point of a hunger strike is not simply to blackmail the government.  Others have tried this and failed, for example some of those pressing for Telengana, who were neatly castled by having their demands agreed to simply for the purpose of bringing their fast to an end.  (This might even happen with Hazare, who has shrewdly promised to renew the agitation if the Lokpal bill isn’t passed within a reasonable time frame.)

The point of a hunger strike, I think, is to raise an extreme and very visible protest.  Such a protest could be violent and uncultured (witness the damage to public property and rioting done in Hyderabad by supporters of a separate Telengana state), or take a more serene form, like a hunger strike.  By supporting the hunger strike, even to extent of joining in, I believe the nation has shown great maturity.  We didn’t go about smashing public property — but we made sure the government sat up and took notice.

The effectiveness of Hazare’s action (and Mahatma Gandhi’s innovation) is twofold.  First, that it effectively focuses a widespread public sentiment into a single spearhead that can be used to goad the government, much as a magnifying glass can focus the sun’s rays and ignite things.  And second, handled properly, it is a spearhead without undesirable side-effects like riots and destruction of public property.

Of course, as many other bloggers pointed out (and I’m not including all links here) the agitation as well as the bill are only minor battles in the war against corruption.  We’re all corrupt, a sea of corruption, and these are just a few drops of purity.  Corruption will start to die when, for example, we not only refuse to pay bribes, but refuse to evade paying income tax as well.  (Something I believe 99% of even the most self-righteous 1% of the population do.)  That’s an important but completely different issue.

But what if you have a variable called x, and you want and the value of x in the title?  For example, if the value of x is 3, you want to appear.

I’m sure there’s a simpler solution, but here’s the simplest one I’ve got:

1. First, note that it would suffice to type in plot(1, main = expression(paste(S[A], ” = “, 3))).  Of course, we want the value of x there, no matter what it is — not just 3.  If we try plot(1, main = expression(paste(S[A], ” = “, x))), that will result in appearing in the title, not what we want.
2. The solution is to create the string we would have typed if we knew the value of x.  We do this like this: s <- paste(“plot(1, main = expression(paste(S[A], \” = \”, “, x, “)))”). If we now print the string s, it will show “plot(1, main = expression(paste(S[A], \” = \”,  3 )))” (if the value of x is 3).
3. Now, we “run the string”: eval(parse(text = s)).

There are some more complicated but flexible solutions, like integrating postscript output from latex into R graphs (using psfrag).

A while ago, I wondered whether New Delhi really needed to spend $3 billion to build a new terminal.  I was in New Delhi a few days ago, so got a chance to see first hand what all the fuss was about.

The good: The new terminal is large, shiny and new.  It features a lot of fairly attractive decor.  Most international airlines have been relocated into the new terminal, as well as several domestic ones, such as Air India and Jet.  This is great because in the past it was always a pain to switch between the international and domestic terminals, especially if you were encumbered with a lot of luggage.  There’s a food court just outside the check-in area that stays open 24 hours.  It’s clean.  It’s got a lot of shops.

The bad: The first bad thing that struck me is the carpet (ha! but yes, that’s what struck me first).  I don’t think it’s generally a good idea to carpet an entire airport, because it will lead to high maintenance costs.  They also chose a chaotic orange, red and brown print that I think is atrociously ugly.  More importantly, I got the impression that they built way too big and didn’t know what to do with all the space.  In departure areas, you walk long distances through corridors and walkways that house absolutely nothing.  You’re not walking past departure gates or anything, just featureless spread out corridors that are so long they needed to add a lot of expensive moving walkways.  Possibly they might add gates to those corridors at some point, but that would involve ugly construction that everyone would have to walk through.

All in all, I have the feeling that the terminal is fairly nice, but it’s too large and it’s going to cost us a lot to maintain it.  I don’t have any idea how much it costs to build airports, but $3 billion seems a high for a single terminal, even a big one with a lot of ugly carpet.

A group of girls bathing at dawn in the Bay of Bengal off Vizag after a night of fasting for Maha Sivaratri.  There’s quite a large turnout, with thousands of people (families, groups of youngsters, and the elderly) enjoying a dawn dip, some spirituality, and a bit of fun.  Dawn, March 03, 2011, Vizag.

Under fire from Baba Ramdev’s supporters, and questioned by his own party, Congress MP from Arunachal Pradesh Ninong Ering began blabbering about his loyalty to the Family.  After getting into trouble for making apparently anti-Indian comments, Ering began talking about how it was all because of his love for Rajiv Gandhi.  See here. That is the best hope for a Congressman nowadays: when in trouble, express love and devotion for the Family.  It might save you.

Watson uses the correctness of previous answers to try to understand what a category means.  For example, in a “Name the Decade” category, Watson wasn’t sure what the category name meant — so it didn’t know that it could restrict its answers to the set {1900, 1910, 1920, …, 1990, 2000}.  When it is unsure in such a manner, Watson uses previous correct answers in that category — possibly by its competitors — to narrow down what the category means.  It was clear on the third day that Watson didn’t understand what certain categories meant, even after observing opponents’ correct responses.  This meant it did poorly on those categories as a whole.

Watson’s natural language processing, I think, is tailored to the task at hand — winning Jeopardy.  Like I said before, it doesn’t understand sentences the same way a human would.  While watching the show, I found that many of the answers were found in the intersections of two or more sets, but Watson didn’t identify all of the sets.

I would classify Watson as a mild sub-Singularity event at this point.  If indeed programs like Watson proliferate the way chess programs have — if Watson clones become much more powerful and lightweight enough to run on the computer as personal assistants, perhaps with some help from the cloud — we will be on our way to real artificial intelligence.  Sequential improvements in such programs will eventually lead to super-human intelligence, much as the Singularity gurus predicted.  Eventually, APIs for NLP and this type of reasoning might become commoditized — unless companies like Google prefer to provide access APIs only, and keep all the computation hidden on their servers.

The question that immediately popped into my head when I heard about this Jeopardy challenge for the first time was “why not Google?”.  IBM has a fantastic record of innovation, of course, but the things Watson does are right up Google’s alley.  Search would be greatly improved if you could ask a question and have it answered in addition to being served a bunch of related pages.  Personally I believe Google has already developed a system like Watson.  So why don’t we know about it?  Two possibilities.

First, Watson needed 2800 processors to answer questions one at a time.  The technology that Google has may or may not be equally advanced, but perhaps doesn’t scale up to allow answers for millions of questions yet.

Second, this is a card in Google’s hand that it doesn’t want to show unless necessary.  If a competitor (mostly Bing at this stage) appears to be making significant inroads into its search space, it can add this feature to jump ahead, so it’s insurance.  Revealing everything would just provide Microsoft with a “copy this!” blueprint.

To some extent, it seems Watson is at an advantage because his pneumatic button-pressing system can react faster than any human possibly could.  This severely affected Ken Jennings, who obviously had some of the answers and showed frustration at never being able to get to the buzzer first, shaking his head on occasion.

Perhaps a more fair way to assess Watson’s intelligence (as opposed to his button pushing prowess) is to adjust Watson’s button presser to be more commensurate with the pressing rate of human nerve systems.

Although Watson is doing great, it is becoming more apparent that Watson doesn’t understand the nuances of language in the clues as well as a human could.  There’s a document here (PDF) detailing some of Watson’s programming.

Of course, it’s hard to glean much just watching a TV show, but it seems as if Watson isn’t quite understanding language the way we do.  If a clue indicates the answer is a member of two sets, for example, Watson sometimes seems to ignore the second set.  An example (paraphrased): This word can mean the bend in the elbow and also a thief.  Watson’s best guess was “knee”, which has nothing to do with the second set (words that can mean “thief”) though it does have something to do with the first set (words that can mean the bend in the elbow).  The right answer was “crook”.

Watson seems to do superlatively well when there are unique phrases to be matched, i.e. when the clue contains phrases that are pertinent only to the answer and wouldn’t occur anywhere else.  Perhaps this is not surprising at all.

It’s possible Watson’s thought processes are a bunch of shortcuts completely unlike ours.  It may for example simply be finding a bunch of words and phrases based on associations with keyphrases in the clue and then ranking them.  Rather than searching for words/phrases in the sets that the clue is asking for.

Perhaps the right test is this: is it easy to add a subroutine to Watson that would allow it to rephrase the clue in several simpler English sentences?  I don’t know.  So I’m still unsure whether to call the creation of Watson a Singularity defining moment.

The first is pointed out here:

Pentagram’s Vishal Dadlani exultantly tweeted that the band had a rocking concert in Guwahati and Egypt became “free” on the same night! Then he wrote, “All it took was 18 days, and that the Egyptian people stood up for their rights. Come on India, you can do it!!”

The second one is here:

Even as Indian observers debate the question of why and how Egyptian revolution cannot be replicated in India, the unique characteristics of Egyptian revolution will be of interest to the readers here.

Of course we Indians are interested in what happens in Egypt, some in a general world-news way, some more intellectually.  But these two people (i.e. Vishal Dadlani and V. Venkatesan) are talking about the feasibility of replicating Egypt’s revolution in India.

Wait, what??

How did that idea even enter the mindspace of the Indian public?

Presumably because India has a lot of problems.  A revolution might be an improvement in a country (like Egypt) that has been dictator-controlled for 30 years.  But in a naturally feudal country with an active democracy (like India) that is seeing steady improvements, a revolution is like a roll of a pair of dice — with things getting better if both dice show 6.  Most likely an Indian revolution will lead to a messy neo-feudal society with various warring factions tearing the country apart.

Are these commentators insane?  They have a personal desire for a little excitement, and their way of getting their fix is to encourage revolutions in democracies.

This has been on the horizon for quite a while, ever since Nokia hired long-time Microsoft insider Elop as its CEO, and intensifying with a leaked internal memo Elop supposedly sent to Nokia employees.

This probably will help Nokia in the long run, but it fundamentally changes the company’s character.  This is a sellout by a biased CEO.  I was with Nokia so far, but I’m switching to Android as soon as I can.

EDIT:

I had a conversation yesterday that got me thinking, and the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that Elop was a Microsoft implant into Nokia, sent in for this very purpose.  Elop apparently made some noises about why he picked Windows over Android, but I doubt he ever considered Android.  The deal is hugely helpful for Microsoft, which was struggling to get anyone to show interest in Windows. It also seems vaguely helpful for Nokia, but it’s simply not commensurate.  Microsoft gets Navtec maps, various services, a ready-made phone distribution net, and a huge share of phone profits from Nokia at absolutely no cost to itself!  Nokia gives all this potentially revenue-generating stuff to Microsoft for free!  All Microsoft is doing is providing the already-developed Windows OS — and even that for a share of the profits!

It refers to an event where a computer achieves certain significant feats of intelligence.  Different authors use it slightly differently, or use different terms.  Sometimes the word means achieving “self-awareness” (whatever that is).  Sometimes it means the creation of a computer that is as smart as a human.  Sometimes it means the addition of a technology that results in a massive increase in ability (the new state is usually one of higher-than-human intelligence).  Some authors speak of multiple singularities — computers caught in an ever-rising spiral of super-intelligence.

The AI promises of the 1980s turned out to be too grand and ill-founded to be realistic.  People thought then that they could program intelligence by programming the minutiae of thought.  This turned out to be a vastly bigger task than anticipated.

For a while, it seemed there were things humans could do that computers would never be able to.  One of the biggest, and most visible, blows was Deep Blue’s defeat of Garry Kasparov.  Today, software (Rybka, Glaurung, Stockfish) running on the ordinary desktop computer will easily defeat the best human chess players.  But Deep Blue and its younger cousins don’t really have intelligence, at least not what we usually mean by it.  They’re “on-rails”, and can do very restricted things on very restricted input sets.

But all this doesn’t mean man-made intelligence is impossible.  Instead of programming intelligence, we can perhaps include techniques like evolving it or learning it.  Is that what Watson has done?

Watson is a massively parallel supercomputer, developed by IBM, that will participate on Jeopardy against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.  Watson can understand a variety of language nuances and sift through its massive database to attempt to find answers.  Given the diversity of subject matter as well as question phrasing on Jeopardy, this is quite a feat.  Does this qualify as intelligence?

It’s not clear to me how Watson works, but the bits I’ve gleaned indicate that it is a collection of a number of hand-written subroutines that interact in carefully human-tuned ways.  There’s no automated evolution or search of algorithms to try to make it better.  In that sense, it is still algorithmic, much like Deep Blue.  But Watson’s algorithm is much more complicated and chaotic than Deep Blue’s.  It sounds complex enough that I view it as a limited form of intelligence.

Perhaps we are hitting the first technological singularity, although it’s not the single explosive moment some have imagined.

Watson might have been a good learning experience — the engineers at IBM must have figured out a lot about how to make computers think.  But it still lacks the essential ingredient that sci-fi authors fantasize about.  We still don’t have automated techniques to take a given computer and make it better.  That is, we don’t know how to make computers improve other computers.  That would be the a real Singularity.

I forgot to mention one thing the PM does have to do.  Whenever the opposition brings up an instance of corruption or ineptitude on the part of the government, Dr. Singh makes a public comment.  He says, “The opposition is playing politics with this issue.”  Corruption at the Commonwealth Games?  That’s just the Opposition Playing Politics (OPP).  The 3G spectrum scam?  OPP again.  Black money stashed in Switzerland?  OPP.  That’s his explanation for everything.

(Like Paris Hilton tried to trademark “That’s Hot”, and Trump tried to trademark “You’re Fired!” (did he trademark it?), Manmohan should try to patent “OPP”!  He’d earn royalties from politicians in democracies everywhere.)

So I wonder what his reaction would be to this bit of ridiculous political grandstanding by Rahul Gandhi.  To summarize, Rahul Gandhi used a rape victim to make a surreal attempt at scoring a political point.  He dared Mayawati to visit the victim.  Presumably he believes Mayawati is personally responsible because the crime occurred in the state Mayawati is Chief Minister of.  Perhaps he also thought Mayawati was responsible because the victim was a Dalit, as is Mayawati.  (It doesn’t make any sense to me, but then this is Rahul Gandhi.)

Now where’s Manmohan with his comments about political mileage?

Hayek

The only good thing that came out of that discussion (from my viewpoint) is it prompted me to glance through some pages of Friedrich Hayek’s Law, Legislation and Liberty.  Specifically, I looked at his chapter on Social Justice.  The entirety of my exposure to Hayek’s ideas is that one chapter, so I’m quite happy to be corrected.

It’s not hard to see why Hayek is held in high esteem.  This small chapter covers a wide variety of issues, many of which I think are relevant to the issue of reservations and affirmative action.  I find Hayek’s writing style hard to read, since his passages sound ambiguous to me.  It’s probably true that he had a precise position on the issues, but his book isn’t written that way and feels somewhat open to interpretation.

I don’t claim to understand Hayek’s theories very well, but some things jumped out at me.  Hayek says that we have the right to set rules, but to expect that once the rules are set and the market is set in motion, it is pointless to speak of the justice of the outcomes of the market (as long as everyone follows the rules).

This is an interesting idea, and curiously it parallels Krishna’s “Karmanyeva adhikaraste…“!  We have the right to decide the rules of action, but not to decide the outcomes, which are subject to much randomness!  It is widely accepted that attempts to make sure everyone has what they need is socialism; indeed, that is often treated as the definition of socialism.  Hayek says that attempts to make sure everyone gets exactly what they deserve is still socialist.  He calls this social justice (or rather, says this is what others mean by social justice).  But Hayek goes a step further in thinking about this, and makes two apparently contradictory statements.

Predictability

First, Hayek seems to agree that laws should not be predictably biased towards or against a segment of the society.  This I think is fascinating and in fact a crucial consideration while framing laws.  At the time we frame a law, it should not be predictably unjust.

Elucidating what “predictable” means here is an interesting exercise in itself.  My interpretation is the following.  A predictable set of people is at time t is a set that is determined by events occurring up to time t, and not after.  Thus “Dalits in 2010″ is a predictable set in 2010, but “millionaires in 2020″ is not very predictable in 2010.  However, “millionaires in 2010″ is of course predictable in 2010. As with all social things, a certain level of fuzziness in defining sets is probably convenient.  The set “billionaires in 2015″ is probably predictable with 99% accuracy in 2010, although the set “millionaires in 2015″ is much less predictable.  Allowing for this slight fuzziness, “Dalits in 2050″ is a predictable set in 2010. (People can and do “change their caste”, often through birth certificate fraud, but so few do it that the set is almost determined in 2010.)  Have I defined predictability precisely?  Not mathematically.  But it seems precise enough for society, law and justice.

When we pass a law that increases the relative advantage or disadvantage of a predictable set of people to its complement, we are doing something wrong.  Thus, if we pass a law in 2010 that will widen the advantage gap between, say, the 40-th and 60-th wealth percentile of the population in 2020, the principle of predictability does not prohibit this (since these percentiles are not very predictable sets).  On the other hand, if we pass a law that will widen the advantage gap between the blind and the not-blind in 2015 (a moderately predictable set in 2010), there is something wrong with that law.  Similarly, if we pass a law in 2010 that increases the advantage gap between Dalits and non-Dalits in 2050 (a highly predictable set), there’s something wrong with that law.  This is the gist of my application of Hayek’s predictability criterion to the affirmative action case.

Of course, it’s not quite as simple as that.  It’s not enough to say widening the gap is bad and narrowing it is good — we should also worry about whether things are getting better for everybody.  If we pass a law that predictably reduces everyone to abject poverty, this might reduce the gap — but it’s not what we want.  On the other hand, passing a law that predictably makes Dalits remain poor while increasing most non-Dalits’ wealth is also obviously wrong — even though it is true that some people have gained, and no one has been harmed (relative to where they started off).  Also, most outcomes will invariably be biased if a short enough time-frame is chosen.  For example, it’s certainly true that, no matter what anyone does, those who are poor on Jan 1, 2010 will overwhelmingly remain poor on Jan 2, 2010 — or for that matter on Jan 1, 2011.  Since ALL laws are biased, should we refrain from passing any laws?  A reasonable time frame has to be attached to the term “bias”.

Thus, this is a very loose principle — laws will need to balance fairness, considerations of where people start off, practicality, enforceability, acceptability in society, timeframe and a number of other factors.  Indeed, I think it’s not possible to state a succinct, simple principle that can be the sole guiding principle behind all laws, or even identify all the factors that need to be considered.

Equality of Opportunity

Now, it seems as if equality of opportunity is a natural consequence of this concept of no predictable bias.  After all, if there’s no predictable set of people that is better off than another, isn’t this the same as saying that the law is equally unbiased towards everybody?  It seems any principle for framing laws should lead to laws that give everyone the same opportunities, even though various random events would likely lead to differences in final outcomes.

This is where Hayek seems to make a contradictory statement.  Hayek says that equality of opportunity is also a socialist ideal — not a-priori, but in its implications:

To achieve this government would have to control the whole physical and human environment of all persons, and have to endeavour to provide at least equivalent chances for each; and the more government succeeded in these endeavours, the stronger would become the legitimate demand that, on the same principle, any still remaining handicaps must be removed-or compensated for by putting extra burden on the still relatively favoured. This would have to go on until government literally controlled every circumstance which could affect any person’s well-being.

This sounds correct — it is obviously impractical to demand that the government provide perfect equality of opportunity to every single individual.  But Hayek himself says that

So far as [equality of opportunity] refers to such facilities and opportunities as are of necessity affected by governmental decisions (such as appointments to public office and the like), the demand was indeed one of the central points of classical liberalism, usually expressed by the French phrase ‘la carriere ouverte aux talents’. There is also much to be said in favour of the government providing on an equal basis the means for the schooling of minors who are not yet fully responsible citizens…

It seems that equality of opportunity is perhaps not inevitably socialist or classical liberal, but rather a mixture of the two tempered by the extent to which it is practical.  That is, government should endeavour to provide equality of opportunity up to the point where it has to start taking socialist actions like controlling people’s lives.  The line between providing equality of opportunity and socialism is blurred — so blurred that it’s silly to pretend there’s a line (my thoughts, not Hayek’s).

Affirmative Action

How does all this tie in with affirmative action?  The principle that laws should not be predictably biased would seem to indicate that affirmative action is necessary.  The current system is extremely harmful for Dalits and certain other backward classes.  Indeed, the state completely failed them for several decades, a situation that is only now starting to be rectified. Under current laws, and under any law that completely denies all forms of affirmative action, Dalits will predictably be disadvantaged and continue to be punished by the system for several decades.

It is important to note that this reasoning does not apply to every group that is disadvantaged.  If a Muslim and a Brahmin are equally smart and study in the same class in the same school (I’m establishing ceteris paribus here), I think the Brahmin has no advantage compared to the Muslim.  They are equally likely, or almost equally likely, to find good jobs.  In addition, opportunities available to Muslim and Brahmin kids are the same modulo their own beliefs.  That is, if a community of Muslims chose to reach out and accept the available opportunities, they would be no worse off than a community of Brahmins.  The same is not true for Dalits.  There are active as well as passive forces arrayed against the Dalits.

Thus, Hayek’s own notion of not predictably harming someone via legislation seems to support the idea of affirmative action for Dalits.

The important question whether this can be classified as actively harming non-Dalits.  I don’t believe so.  Increasing opportunity for Dalits in this way certainly decreases opportunity for non-Dalits, but opportunity was lop-sided to begin with, and the lop-sidedness continues to be maintained using marginally legal methods.  With affirmative action, entrance into various lucrative positions becomes tougher for non-Dalits, but still not as tough as it is for Dalits.

My Position on Affirmative Action

For the record, my own position is a guarded support for certain forms of affirmative action in the short term.

I think it’s important to base affirmative action not only on caste, but on as many major sources of predictable variability as practical.  This is the topic of the MIRAA score discussed in my other post.

I also believe affirmative action is nothing but a temporary pressure valve measure to quickly correct certain imbalances.  It is no substitute for free, high quality universal education.  Education, not affirmative action, should be the method of choice for ensuring equality of opportunity.  Education is the only useful very-long-term sustainable means for equality of opportunity.  The only reason for affirmative action is that it seems impossible to equalize “predictable opportunity” using education alone in the next 30 years.

There’s nothing interesting about the politician in question or the backtracking he’s doing; what’s interesting is just how scared this 82-year old veteran is.  Scared of repercussions after he criticized Sonia, he said he’d touch Sonia’s feet if she agreed to splitting Telengana.  The abjectness of his situation, and the culture within the Congress, come through pretty clearly.  Numerous Congress leaders, including his own son, jumped to denounce his statements.

What could the causes be?  There are two potential reasons that I can see.

• The first possibility is that the quality of teaching has declined — that is, the previously existing teachers have lowered their standards for some reason.
• The other possibility is that the existing teachers have maintained their quality, but the new capacity required to handle the increased enrollment hasn’t materialized.

In the first case, the children are worse off than they were a few years ago.  In the second, every child is better off than before, even though the indicator has decreased.

This latter case more likely applies to another measure in the ASER report:

the proportion of Std I children who can recognize numbers (1-9) has declined from 69.3% in 2009 to 65.8% in 2010.

This is perhaps attributable to the newer enrollees, some of whom might have been enrolled in class 1 directly without completing kindergarten.

I’m quite undecided on whether wikileaks is good or not.  I don’t think disclosing all information just because it’s there to be disclosed is good.  On the other hand, we occasionally get a neutral, unsanitized (because it’s not expected to be public) opinion on our country’s politics.