Month: January 2021

Decentralized Finance

A citizen of Sherwood Forest was popular this past week, and things got plenty weird plenty quickly.

Outrage aside, it is better to build than to scream, as Naval suggested on Twitter…

… and if you are interested, read this…

Decentralized finance (commonly referred to as DeFi) is an experimental form of finance that does not rely on central financial intermediaries such as brokerages, exchanges, or banks, and instead utilizes smart contracts on blockchains, the most common being Ethereum. DeFi platforms allow people to lend or borrow funds from others, speculate on price movements on a range of assets using derivatives, trade cryptocurrencies, insure against risks, and earn interest in a savings-like account

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_finance

… and watch this:

Twitter stories: Learning more about the Carolina reaper

Twitter showed me this tweet the other day, because a person I follow replied to it:

Reading that conversation, and clicking on arbit links got me to this tweet:

https://twitter.com/BenMathisLilley/status/1120813782157156352

…. which helped me read the article cited therein:

Every pepper has its uses, depending on the desired flavor and degree of trauma. But this day’s unavoidable star is the Carolina Reaper: lurid red pods, rumpled and warty, ending in a pointy tail. It’s possible to navigate this party without encountering the Reaper directly, to have plenty of pleasant and fulfilling conversations, but impossible to ignore it completely. It’s the steady subject of whispers and boasts. The heat of peppers is measured in Scoville heat units. An everyday jalapeño might clock in around 6,000; habaneros are closer to 350,000. The Reapers here for public consumption are billed at 1,560,000.

https://deadspin.com/conquering-the-carolina-reaper-requires-self-deceit-mi-1834153829

And a related YouTube search landed me up on this:

And that is how I ended up spending an hour this past workweek. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why Twitter Stories ought to be a weekend thing.

And if you haven’t already, please read Masala Lab by Krish Ashok.

A Hoarding Index. Because Why Not?

Are there easy, fun ways to combine what you learn in a classroom with easily available technology? Can these learnings be deployed for everybody to see and play around with, and can meaningful data emerge from such an exercise?

I’ve been asking myself this question for a while now, and have bee playing around with a couple of ideas in my head. Today’s post is about one such idea: it is me thinking out loud, and inviting you guys to throw suggestions, criticisms and potential problems my way. If anybody reading this wants to run with the idea, please – whatcha waiting for?

There isn’t an Indian road that isn’t riddled with hoardings. I mean, there may be the odd exception in each city, but it is safe to say that over 90% of all thoroughfares in all Indian cities have hoardings.

Calcutta learns no lesson from Chennai, hoardings boom - Telegraph India
Image Credit: Telegraph India
Original URL: https://www.telegraphindia.com/west-bengal/calcutta-learns-no-lesson-from-chennai-hoardings-boom/cid/1704998

What if two students got on a bike once a month, and took photographs of every single hoarding along a three kilometer stretch of road in their city? Same road, on the same date, every single month. What if this was done for many roads in may cities in India?

Almost all phones these days will allow you to geotag your photographs. Take the photos of these hoardings, and identify which ones have an advertisement on them, and which ones have those “CONTACT” signs, which effectively means that there is no advertisement on it for that month. Identify which ones have advertisements related to real estate, and which ones have non-real-estate advertisements.

You needn’t restrict yourself to only No advertisement/Advertisement for real estate/ Advertisement for non-real estate, of course. Make it as granular as you like!

And once you have the data, start to automate reports about it. The index could be a barometer for how well the local economy is doing, and how well it correlates with the state’s economy, or the Indian economy. You could build separate indices for all the sectors that you tag in your database. You could measure month-on-month changes, quarter-on-quarter changes, and you could build your own time-series data.

If enough students in enough cities get in on the exercise, you could do comparisons across cities, and across time.

This would, of course, naturally raise questions about which roads in which cities. How many roads in each city? Is MG Road in Pune city comparable to Baner Road in the same city? Why or why not? Are hoardings in Pune comparable to hoardings in Mumbai? What about Cochin? What about Bhopal? What about Lucknow?

One way to learn research methodology is to sit in a classroom and learn about it in the abstract. Any prof will tell you that a subject like RM can never be taught in the abstract. You need to get your hands dirty, you need to ask yourself these questions – that is when the subject comes alive.

Plus, this project has the advantages of teaching you:

  • Team Building: there will be a lot of enthusiasm to begin with, but these things have a habit of petering out. It needs coordination, the ability to persistently motivate, and the anticipation that people will drop out over time. Do you need back-up teams? For which processes? Who decides?
  • Systematic data collection: creating a template that all team members will follow is hard, at least the first time around. But without that template, documentation ain’t possible, and without documentation, serious research ain’t possible.
  • Documentation: Everything will need to be documented, if you eventually want to make this work at scale. Who is working on which road, in which city, and for how long? How was the data captured? Do you have records of the journey on Google Maps? Are the photos correctly tagged? Are they of acceptable quality? What happens if a particular team visits not on the specified day, but three days later?
  • Sampling: Why this city? Why this road? Is a small notice attached to a lamp-pole a hoarding or not? If yes, then do we take photos of every last little hoarding? If no, then were do we set the cut-off limit? On what basis? Do different cities have different definitions for hoardings? Do these definitions change over time?
  • Dashboarding: How should the end-user (in this case, ideally the public) view this data? How do we make it informative, yet easy and entertaining at the same time?
  • Google Map Overlays: How should we go about building one? Can it scale? Do we have to pay? Whom do we ask?

And that’s just me pecking away at a keyboard, entirely off the cuff. When we begin the work, there’ll be a thousand more questions a day.

But, on the bright side, you will get to learn about:

Hoarding regulations | Pricing | Sampling | Data collection |Team Building | Basic Statistics | Seasonality | Data Storage | Data Pulls | Geotagging | Map Overlays | Dashboarding | Marketing | (eventually) Funding

‘Tis but a thought, but I can’t help that it will be a better way to learn than just look at a computer screen, which is what the last year or so has been all about.

I want to try and gets started on this at my workplace, if possible. I’ll keep you posted about what (if anything) comes of this.

The Long, Slow, But Inevitable Death of the Classroom

If you read enough about Robert Solow, this quote coming up is but a matter of time:

You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics

http://www.standupeconomist.com/pdf/misc/solow-computer-productivity.pdf

Much the same could be said about internet based learning technologies if you tried to measure it in colleges and universities before March 2020. We had lip service being paid to MOOC’s and all that, but if we’re being honest, that’s all it was: lip service.

Things have changed around a bit since then, I think.

We’ll get to that later on this post, but let’s go back to the seeing computers everywhere but in the productivity statistics bit for the moment. Paul David, an American economist, wrote a wonderful essay called “The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox“, back in 1990.

I think of this essay as an attempt to respond to the question Robert Solow had posed – why isn’t the data reflecting the ubiquitousness of the computer in the modern workplace? Read the essay: it’s a very short, very easy read.

Paul David draws an analogy between the move away from steam as a source of power, back at the end of the 19th century.

In 1900, contemporary observers well might have remarked that the electric dynamos were to be seen “everywhere but in the productivity statistics!”

David, P. A. (1990). The dynamo and the computer: an historical perspective on the modern productivity paradox. The American Economic Review, 80(2), 355-361.

Adjusting to a new technology, it turns out, takes time.

Steam-powered manufacturing had linked an entire production line to a single huge steam engine. As a result, factories were stacked on many floors around the central engine, with drive belts all running at the same speed. The flow of work around the factory was governed by the need to put certain machines close to the steam engine, rather than the logic of moving the product from one machine to the next. When electric dynamos were first introduced, the steam engine would be ripped out and the dynamo would replace it. Productivity barely improved.
Eventually, businesses figured out that factories could be completely redesigned on a single floor. Production lines were arranged to enable the smooth flow of materials around the factory. Most importantly, each worker could have his or her own little electric motor, starting it or stopping it at will. The improvements weren’t just architectural but social: Once the technology allowed workers to make more decisions, they needed more training and different contracts to encourage them to take responsibility.

https://slate.com/culture/2007/06/what-the-history-of-the-electric-dynamo-teaches-about-the-future-of-the-computer.html

Again, please read the whole thing, and also read this other article by Tim Harford from the BBC, “Why didn’t electricity immediately change manufacturing?” The article, by the way, is an offshoot of a wonderful podcast called “50 Things That Made The Modern Economy“. Please listen to it!

But here’s the part that stood out for me from that piece I excerpted from above:

“Eventually, businesses figured out that factories could be completely redesigned on a single floor. Production lines were arranged to enable the smooth flow of materials around the factory. Most importantly, each worker could have his or her own little electric motor, starting it or stopping it at will.”

https://slate.com/culture/2007/06/what-the-history-of-the-electric-dynamo-teaches-about-the-future-of-the-computer.html

Colleges and universities are today designed around the basic organizational unit of a classroom, with each classroom being “powered” by a professor.

Of the many, many things that the pandemic has done to the world, what it has done to learning is this:

each worker learner could have his or her own little electric motor personal classroom, starting it or stopping it at will.

In fact, I had a student tell me recently that she prefers to listen to classroom recordings later, at 2x, because she prefers listening at a faster pace. So it’s not just starting or stopping at will, it is also slowing down or speeding up at will.

Today, because of the pandemic, we are at an extreme end of the spectrum which describes how learning is delivered. Everybody sits at home, and listens to a lecture being delivered (at least in Indian universities, mostly synchronously).

When the pandemic ends, whenever that may be, do we swing back to the other end of the spectrum? Does everybody sit in a classroom once again, and listens to a lecture being delivered in person (and therefore synchronously)?

Or does society begin to ask if we could retain some parts of virtual classrooms? Should the semester than be, say, 60% asynchronous, with the remainder being doubt solving sessions in classroom? Or some other ratio that may work itself out over time? Should the basic organizational unit of the educational institute still be a classroom? Does an educational institute still require the same number of in person professors, still delivering the same number of lectures?

In other words, in the post-pandemic world…

How long before online learning starts to show up in the learning statistics?

Additional, related reading, for those interested:

  1. Timothy Taylor on why “some of the shift to telecommuting will stick“
  2. An essay from the late, great Herbert Simon that I hadn’t read before called “The Steam Engine and the Computer“
  3. “The role of computer technology in restructuring schools” by Alan Collins, written in 1990(!)

A Conversation With Rationality

I’d gone to the RTO the other day for some work, and I suppose you know what comes next.

I wouldn’t say it is impossible to get work done without the help of an agent, but it is certainly true that it isn’t a breeze either. And if one teaches opportunity costs, it makes sense to take the “help” of an agent. Sure you can do it yourself, but it then becomes eye-wateringly expensive in terms of time. And therefore, money.

And while I waited in the numerous byzantine lines to get my work done, I reflected, like every good economist should, on what could be done to reform the system.

Just ban agents, my understandably irrational brain screamed as a first pass solution. Why doesn’t the bureaucracy come up with a better process map that just gets out of the way instead, Cold Calculating Rationality suggested.

Because they aren’t incentivized to, C.C.R went on to reason, proceeding to shut me out of the conversation altogether. Although I was, truth be told, a very interested bystander by now.

But why aren’t they incentivized to – isn’t that the next logical question to ask, mused C.C.R.

I mean, won’t it make their job easier if they make their processes easier?

Well, yes, but they earn the same either way, no? It’s not like payments are linked to productivity increases.

How would they earn more?

Maybe through a Coasean solution in which there’s connivance with the agents, and they get a cut? That is, make the process impossibly cumbersome, and continue to keep it cumbersome, no matter what any well meaning committee proposes. That then facilitates agents stepping in and “helping” blissfully ignorant citizens get their work done faster – for a fee, of course.

They take a cut of the fee – and hey, there you have it! Bureacracts have an incentive – but not to simplify the system! They have an incentive to continue to clog up the system.

C.C.R needed a break at this point in time, so it and I played a couple of rounds of Fruit Ninja on my phone.

But why, C.C.R asked – for it can take only so many minutes of mindless swiping – would anybody want to be an agent? I mean, there are surely better, more remunerative ways to earn a living.

C.C.R. and I stared at each other in part jubilation, and part horror.

“There aren’t better ways, no?!”, we said in unison.

“I mean, if markets are weakly efficient, nobody would willingly work as an agent, surely”, said C.C.R triumphantly.

“And so”, C.C.R went on to say in that insufferably smug way that is its wont, “if you really want to reform the system, you need to create better employment opportunities everywhere else. Reforming this particular system is just putting a band-aid on a cancer. Because yes middle-mean are bad, but nobody grows up dreaming of being a middleman. Of course the middlemen, and that entire nightmare of a system is going to be up in arms if you seek to eliminate it. The lack of alternative, viable careers: that’s the real problem.”

“So, just more pro-growth policies, you’re saying?”, poor old irrational me asked timidly.

“Well, yes. Easy answer, tough implementation, I’ll concede that point”, replied C.C.R.

“I wonder where else we can apply this line of thinking”, I was about to ask C.C.R… but then it was my turn at the window, and I was so happy that I was finally done with the whole thing that I stopped thinking about it altogether.

So it goes.

Nilay Patel interviewed Marques Brownlee, and I took notes. Lots of notes.

I’ve been watching MKBHD videos for a while now, but a favorite activity for my daughter and I this past summer has been to watch them together.

As anybody who has watched them will attest to, they’re impeccably produced, and always manage to strike that perfect balance between being fun and informative. And trust me, getting that balance right is hard. But my daughter, who notices these things much more than I do, also points out his (Marques Brownlee‘s) diction, the way he sets up his backgrounds (or set, or whatever you call it) – and also how much better his voice seems to be than in other videos.

And since she’s mentioned it, it’s hard to ignore. It’s clear that a lot of work goes into producing these videos – and to put out over a hundred of them in one year is seriously impressive – which his channel did last year. What’s even more impressive is the fact that he plans to launch more channels this year, let alone videos.

I got to know about this in a very well done podcast, in which Nilay Patel spoke with Marques about what I wrote about in the preceding paragraph, and a whole host of things besides. Reading the transcript as an economist was interesting, for a lot of things resonated with concepts we teach (and don’t, but should) in class. They weren’t referring to the concepts, of course, for both are (probably) blessedly unaware of boring ol’ econ texts – they were just solving, or thinking, about the challenges they face in the course of their work.

But if you’re somewhere between the age of 18 to 24, and wondering where the hell (and how) to apply things we teach you in your classes – well what better way to learn than this? Ec101 applied to MKBHD videos – whatay way to learn, no?

Notes and brief explanations follow:

  • “You’ve got to embrace uncertainty.”

    A point that both of them agreed upon, and the context was noise in the background. As a statistician, when I think noise, I’m thinking randomness, and that makes this quote even better. You can have the most refined system in the world for doing stuff, but you have to make leeway for unanticipated stuff. Things can go wrong, pandemics can spread, neighbours can make lots of noise. Anticipate it: embrace it!

    The larger point, in simpler words: make a plan, of course, but budget for chaos. It’s always there.
  • “I couldn’t believe I was finding something that I didn’t see in those other videos. So I was like, the obvious answer is to add to that collection of information, so when someone else is choosing what to buy, they can make a better choice than I did.”

    Scratch your own itch is advice that you often hear in entrepreneur world, and Marques is speaking about exactly that over here. Except of course, he isn’t just speaking about it, he is quite literally doing it. In fact, he did it 11 years ago, and has just kept at it ever since. That’s a pretty good business model, if you ask me.

    Teach like you wish you had been taught is what I want to do in life, by the way, although I cannot claim to have come anywhere close to figuring a business model out.
  • “So there’s a lot more going on, but I think the teamwork of it all is something that can be pretty underrated.”

    Marques says this in the context of how he plans to scale up his work this year. Here’s the thing – learning how to do something (assuming you want to learn it in the first place) is a lot of fun. Teaching others how to do it is also a whole lot of fun.

    Building a team of such people, and getting them to do what you want to get done – and that too, just so – that is oh-my-god-hard. “Pretty underrated”? That’s pretty understated!
  • “We have a big cast of characters at The Verge. MKBHD, that’s just you. You are a pretty unscalable property. That group of people you’re bringing in and hiring, is that to help you spend more time in front of the camera or is that an attempt to scale you in a different way?”

    Marques’ answer is pretty instructive, but if you’re looking to start a business, and looking to scale it, one challenge you will face is getting folks to do what you want them to do, plus anticipating the fact that in businesses such as this one, Marques himself is the biggest draw. Imagine The Seen and the Unseen without Amit Varma, or Mark Wiens’ videos without Mark Wiens. You have two choices: plan on not scaling, or fight a very hard battle. It’s easy to draw a diagram that teaches you the theory of scaling – doing it in the real world is bloody hard.
  • “You were just intently focused on completing a motion graphics course that you had been taking. And now it’s several years later and you’re not that deep in the weeds. You’ve just hired a motion graphics person and you’re talking about scaling your business and using your facilities in a different way.”

    That’s part of a question that Nilay asked Marques, but if you’re not thinking pin factory, your econ prof and you need to talk. One important part of scaling is what Adam Smith referred to as the division of labor. You can’t – nobody can – do every single thing in a business. Some parts of it need to be outsourced to lawyers and PR firms, as they speak about in the interview later, some parts to motion graphics persons – whatever.

    But you have to let certain tasks go. Which tasks? To whom? How to recruit the most perfect person possible? How to get that person to stay? How to get that person to work with the other folks on the team? Pretty underrated indeed!

    Oh and by the way, this part we don’t teach you in college. We should, if you ask me, but we don’t.
  • “We’ve basically shot all of our videos with my directors on Zoom and I’m just like, “man, this is not even close.” It’s very fun, and then that novelty fades and you just miss having everybody there.”

    This might not be true (hopefully!) after 2021, but if you’re looking to intern this summer, or start work this year, this is a real problem. Americans have this thing they call “watercooler conversations”. If you’re Indian, we’re talking about chai/sutta breaks. Doesn’t matter if you’re a smoker or not, that’s not the point. Conversations in a more relaxed environment after you’ve been in the heat of battle together is where informal debriefings happen, and that is going to suffer this year. There are businesses trying to virtualize this – but color me skeptical. In person is always better, and that’s the worst part of graduating in this of all years.
  • “One question from our video team that I thought was really interesting: as you’ve been on the path of growing bigger and bigger, you haven’t had a boss. How do you grow and improve when the audience is overwhelmingly telling you that you’re great? Where do you find the incentive or the self-criticism to improve? You’ve obviously wildly improved over time, but where does that really come from?”

    Marques’ answer to this question is worth reading in its entirety, but the larger point is that you need people who have the ability to give you frank feedback. That’s hugely underrated. A spouse, a friend, a significant other, a business partner, a junior – whoever. But you need it!

    This reminds me of a reply that Seth Godin gave to a question Tim Ferris asked him in a podcast some years ago:

    “But the other kind is so rare, so scarce, so precious I only get little dribs of it now and then. Which is someone who gets you, someone who can see right through to your soul who, with generosity and care, can look you in the eye, hand you back something and say: I think this would be better if you did it again. I had a business partner, Steve, who was like that in 1979 and ’80, ’80 and ’81. And finding that again in a consistent way is really precious and really hard.”

    (It goes without saying: listen/read the whole interview. Just wonderful.)
  • “We’ve never really set view count goals, but we did have a goal to make 100 videos in the calendar year and we did end up doing that, which is great. A lot of that stuff that we’re aiming for is more, I guess qualitative is the word, but it’s hard to define.”

    What are you optimizing for? This is related to yesterday’s post, and it ought to be a question you ask yourself everyday. I don’t ask myself this question everyday, but I wish I did. It really and truly helps, because if what you are doing isn’t helping what you’re optimizing for, then you shouldn’t be doing it.

    Marques isn’t optimizing for views. He’s not looking to maximize hits, views or any of those metrics. He’s setting a target for quantity, as he says in the quote above, but he also is (implicitly in the quote, but trust me explicitly in his work) optimizing for quality. As I said towards the end of yesterday’s post, get the process right. The rest takes care of itself. (See also: Goodhart’s law)

    Also read this excerpt from Tyler Cowen’s interview of Jimmy Wales:

    “When we think about things at Wikipedia — for example, we could probably increase engagement if we use some of the very basic machine learning techniques to start showing people random promotional links to other things than Wikipedia and then have the machine learn over time how to show you links that are more interesting so that you end up staying on the site longer.

    Now, it might turn out that that’s completely normal and thoughtful, in fact, if you go to a well-known economist, that it turns out that the way to keep you on the site longer is to show you other concepts of economics and economic theory. But it might turn out, and probably would turn out, the best thing to do is, when you go to look up Tyler Cowen, to show you on the sidebar links to Kim Kardashian, Donald Trump, whatever the hot topic of the day is and so on, which is not really what you want from an encyclopedia.

    When we think about that, our incentive structure at Wikipedia is not to optimize time on-site. It’s to say, look, every now and then, normally at the end of the year, we say, “Hey, would you donate some money?” Nobody has to donate. The only reason people do donate — and this is what donors tell us — is they think, “This is meaningful. This is important to my life. This should live. This should exist.”

    Bottom-line: If you are not clear about what you’re optimizing for, you will struggle. Get that clear, for yourself, and be ruthless about sticking to it. (It’s easy for me to say this, but it is very difficult for me to do it. Just so we’re clear!)
  • “I live inside of Google Calendar and Google Tasks. I would be a lost human without those things. I kind of think about this a lot — how much time I spend doing the thing versus managing how we make the thing. And it turns out that the management part has become a lot more of my job, but almost necessarily, to make it a better thing.”

    Managing time is hard. It is really, really, really hard. I have tried I don’t know how many different things, apps, methods and what not, but it is hard. If you are going to make a plan (for spending your day, for studying for your exam, for starting a business, whatever) budget twice the amount of time you think you will take to do something, because you will waste time. That, I am sad to say, is my lived reality.

    Nilay’s next question is about exactly this, by the way.
  • “I think I tweeted a couple of weeks ago how many emails I get that are just like, “Hey, this is us. We’ve got this idea. When can we hop on a call?” But I don’t really want to do that. If you can’t get your idea down in a couple sentences in an email, it’s probably not a good enough idea.”

    Something that I have started to do over the last two years or so: whenever I have to give an assignment, it’s usually along these lines.

    “Write in fifteen sentences (or lesser) your understanding of [whatever it is that they’re supposed to write about]. No conjunctions, no colons, no semi-colons.”

    It is fascinating to me how what seems to be good news to the students turns out to be a problem, because Pascal.
  • “We say no to 99 percent of the things that we get offered to do. But that last 1 percent of things, we think very deeply about, and work with a lot of people to try to make the right decisions and pull it off well.”

    Derek Sivers has an interesting book about this.
  • “If it’s a bad product, it’s not worth doing it at all, even if we would’ve made a ton of money. If it’s a bad integration or if it’s a bad company to work with, I have to say no, because it just doesn’t fit. So that fit is often more important than the math of the per-minute or per-project basis.”

    The preceding questions (to this quote) are about what metrics Marques uses, and you should read about it if you are in this business, but the larger point is what Marques is saying here – and this was referred to earlier in this post as well. Metrics are all well and good, but do the work – and work means quality work. The rest follows.
  • “I know celebrity culture is different in everyone’s heads, but I look up to Michael Jordan the athlete and nothing else about him.”

    My personal opinion, but that is exactly how it should be. But that is a separate post in its own right.
  • “The way I see YouTube is, it’s kind of like driving for Uber. If you stop driving for Uber for a week, you won’t make any money that week. And I think adding more people to this team makes it feel like putting that Uber on autopilot so I’m not doing quite as much of the lifting, but it still has to drive.”

    Read The Four Hour Work Week.

Up until the last bullet point above, this post was 2,455 words in length. That, I suppose, is about enough for a blogpost. But there’s more, much more, in this interview. So please, read/listen to it in its entirety.

But hey, I’m clearly on a roll, so I cannot resist one final piece of advice. Take notes, and write down your thoughts about what you’ve consumed. Even if nobody else is ever going to read it.

It really and truly helps.

CV’s are overrated

… as are examinations, marks, submissions, assignments and NAAC reports. I speak only of my current area of work, but this is true in all walks of life, of course.

There are two aspects to work: doing it, and showing that you have done it. A CV isn’t work, it is showing that you have done the work. So also the list above: none of it is work, it is showing that you have done the work. Meta-work, if you will.

Anybody who has conducted an interview has read the line “Proficient in MS-Office”. And each and every person who belongs to this tribe has rolled their eyes when asked about how many of the people who have written this line actually are proficient in MS-Office.

(My personal favorite among the variants of this line is “Intermediate level knowledge of MS Excel.” It signals to me that the writer is honest enough to acknowledge that they don’t know enough about Excel, but also can’t bring themselves to say that they don’t know enough.)

But ask yourself: what is a CV? It is a document that is supposed to showcase the work that you have done.

It is, as all of us know (but none among us would like to acknowledge) actually a document that showcases work that we hope will land us a job, no matter how tangentially true the content of the CV, and our association with said content.

This argument holds true for examinations as well! Examinations – and the marks you score in an examinations – are supposed to be a reflection of how well you know the subject.

It is, as all of us know (but none among us would like to acknowledge) a process in which we minimize our efforts to maximize our output. It’s even more problematic because the output isn’t learning, it’s marks.

NAAC reports that are submitted by colleges are in essence a manifestation of the many voodoo dolls that students have pricked at over the years, hoping to gain revenge for all the meaningless assignments/submissions/vivas that they have been subjected to while earning a degree. For colleges submit the NAAC reports using the same philosophy that students do while submitting their assignments:

“It doesn’t matter if it is a reflection of what reality is. It must be shown as a real thing on paper.”

We have created, as a society, a culture in which we measure the work that we do through these proxies, and collectively pretend that these proxies are a reflection of reality. Worse, we now spend a vast majority of our time on creating the proxies, rather than actually doing the work.

But to come back to my point (and yes, I do have one), the internet holds out the possibility to change this. At least where CV’s are concerned.

  • Don’t say that you are proficient in MS-Excel. Create, instead, a YouTube channel, or a blog, or an Instagram post, or a Facebook page, or a podcast where you show that you are proficient in MS-Excel. That is your CV, or at least a part of it.
  • Don’t say that you worked on project xyz with company abc. Write it up, and put it up on a blog. Writing’s not your thing? No worries, speak about it, and put it up as a podcast. Prefer video? YouTube!
  • The fact that you are reading this on an electronic device, by the way, means you do not have an excuse to not do it.
  • Worried about “how it will come out”? Do it ten times, and keep all ten up on the internet for people to see. Those ten variants of you describing your internship project is a much more powerful argument than a line that says “willing to work hard to improve myself”. And hey, if you do it ten times, it can only get better, not worse.

Showing that you have done the work tends to make you focus more on the showing, and less on the doing. Measuring work by analyzing what has been shown rather than what has been done is even more problematic, and that’s why firms tend to underrate grades (and increasingly, even CV’s).

Or, if you want to put it in economist-y terms, recruiters these days are like citizens of the Weimar republic. They know that the currency that is being issued is not worth the paper it is printed upon.

Any economist will tell you what happens next: a flight from currency, and into other assets.

That other asset in the context of the CV, is doing the work. Put it up for public consumption, and let the internet work its magic.

As a former India captain was very fond of saying, it’s all about the process. The results will take care of themselves. God, as Navin Kabra reminds us, says much the same thing!

Video for 24th Jan, 2021

h/t Devansh Vora

Twitter Stories

Back in the day, when I had structure, regularity and a schedule here on EFE, Saturday used to be about five tweets that I enjoyed reading that week.

Which, on reflection (and some gentle prodding from Navin Kabra) wasn’t the brightest idea, because that’s what likes and RT’s are for on Twitter. So how about maybe a brief write-up based on a tweet that I read recently?

This week’s tweet that turns into a post is based on a variety of things. First, Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

The Black Swan is kind of like Thinking Fast and Slow, in the sense that everybody claims to have read it, and very few people actually have. If you haven’t read all of his books, please get started. The order doesn’t really matter, but if you’re asking, my favorite is Anti-Fragile.

There’s a lot to like about his books, his tweets and his outlook towards life, and this tweet is one example (note that I am talking about the pics in the reply, not the original tweet):

https://twitter.com/filipkob/status/1352028989381095424

Now, the original tweet, reposted as a stand-alone:

So what is the company about?

Nasser Jaber is cofounder of the Migrant Kitchen, a catering company and social impact organization that hires immigrants, migrants, and undocumented workers to both train them in commercial cooking as well as help gain their cuisines more exposure in the marketplace.

https://stories.zagat.com/posts/nasser-jaber-on-creating-jobs-through-immigrant-cuisine

Read the whole article! I got to learn about quipe (kibbeh, apparently), and esfiha (the spelling differs based on context, so my apologies if I got it “wrong”), among other things.

Twitter is a wonderful, wonderful way to learn more about the world, but it is like a garden, in the sense that constant weeding is required. But when you tend to it just so, it is completely worth the effort!

If you have had moments of serendipity on Twitter that you’d like to share, please, send them along. @ashish2727 on Twitter.

Thanks, and enjoy the weekend 🙂

All of the best about *that* match

Siddharth Monga on Cricinfo

Slightly delirious, if you ask me, but given the circumstances, who can blame Sharda Ugra?

Vivek Kaul pours cold water on this being the rebirth of Test cricket, as only a finance/econ writer can – but a genuinely fun read nonetheless.

Sambit Bal, to end on as perfect a note as we started.

The title of the post is edited (it originally read as “five of the best”) – but here’s more to add in:

Sidvee, being Sidvee. Self-recommending, as they say. (There’s a post about reflections on this essay next week, plijj keep an eye out for it)

Girish, along similar lines.

Greg Baum, gracious as ever.

And a request: send more along! Happy to read as many as you can send, and add all of them in here. Whatay repository this has the potential to be!

Sidvee was kind enough to send along this Twitter thread by @_ImPK. It is ridiculously, impossibly good. Please see the whole thread, for it contains much more – I have only listed here articles from that list that are about the Brisbane test. Thank you, Sidvee and @_ImPK!

Bharat Sundaresan, who points out that this time, it was the Aussies looking at the Indian team in awe. I watched the ’99 series, so I cannot tell you how much this means to me.

There was a point, while watching this match, when – and this is true – I was on a Signal call with a friend who is in Atlanta. He shared his screen with me on the call, because Sony Liv (eff you, Sony Liv, eff you) was on the blink here. Among other things in this post by krtgrphr, this resonated so much.

Geoff Lemon, over in The Guardian.

When Ian Chappell says he’s never seen the likes before, that’s saying something.

Heroes assembled, indeed. Vinayakk Mohanarangan over at Scroll.

Niyantha Shekhar Dunkirks her way through the match. And it is every bit as spellbinding as the movie. For a cricket fan, it’s even better.

For these times, this series. Barney Ronay in The Guardian.

Pant had nine successive scores of 25 or more in Australia heading into the Brisbane test, Rohit Sankar informs us. He does much more than that, of course.

Jarrod Kimber points out that the person who’s been on our screen the most during the series is probably the physio, and it’s not even hypoerbole. (I’m joking, Mr. Pujara, I’m joking.)

Only Prem Panicker can combine Simon Barnes, western novels, and a reference to Horatius in a piece on a cricket match. The Getafix of cricket writers. He’s got one more piece out, but it is behind a paywall, and I cannot read it. But it is Prem Panicker, so sight unseen.

Again, I’m a glutton for more, so if you find more pieces, please, send them along. Thank you.