Archis's Blog

April 21, 2013

What rescue training taught me about dealing with problems

Filed under: Personal, philosophy, Preaching, Technology — archisgore @ 8:46 am

My first MBA-style “how to do stuff” list. If I get time, I’ll even give it some forced-acronym like “The Five E’s of handling pressure” or something. This will sound a lot like a self-help book as well. You have been warned. If it’s any further warning, I would never read the crap below and follow it myself. So there!

I recently went through a major high-risk scenario at work. When you’re in my line of work, these things are your worst nightmares. We have computational theory itself against us – what we code cannot be verified for correctness by a machine. So we do the best we can, and hope it works. Literally. Even the “best of the best” amongst us is reducing the odds that something could go wrong, rather than improving the odds that everything is right. There’s a big semantic difference between the two.

An year ago, I’d have handled the situation very differently. Usual responses by a human include a lot of things. First is blame. Second is “how do I get out of this as soon as possible?” Third is, “how do I justify my actions”? etc. However, I realized I could handle the pressure with great enjoyment. I’ve been called a masochist before, but this wasn’t that. A few recent rules learnt in my diving world, played a huge role in preparing me to handle anything.

Anyone who has techie friends knows we love our jargon. You can’t walk into a bar in Bellevue without overhearing boasts of “mission critical” and “strategy” and “tactical decision” and all sorts of awesome that would make James Bond walk out in shame.

When you’re training for rescue scenarios however, it is VERY REAL. A wrong decision and someone dies. You can do everything right and someone can still die. Those words actually mean something. An “emergency” doesn’t mean “oh I need a promotion, so I’m going to make things seem important.” An “emergency” means “unless you act now, and use the next 30 seconds correctly, someone is going to die.”

But here are five things I learnt out of diving and rescue training that can really relieve your pressure when dealing with “mission critical” situations.

1. Have reserves for the worst: This is a fundamental rule you learn after you’ve been in horrid situations and have exhausted yourself earlier. Everyone else can say it, but you only mean it when your life is at risk. When you are trying to salvage a dive halfway through, and someone’s reg starts to freeflow and he runs out of air, and you drained your resources in debugging a smaller issue, someone is going to die. When prioritizing, ensure that if at that moment, your entire company’s service went down or your product on millions of machines suddenly has some critical vulnerability, you have the energy to deal with it. If you’re using your reserve energy for anything else, you’re doing it wrong. Take a rescue class and you’ll gain the backbone to tell people to go away. They are important, no doubt, but are they important enough to burn your reserves on at that moment? Reserves are called “reserves” for a reason.

2. You’re not in a life-threatening situation: When you really have been in a situation from which you’re glad to have simply come out alive, you’ll find stress in life goes way down. Lost keys, or a disappointing interruption in internet connectivity, or some pissed-off coworker or whatever the heck you get worked up about, it’s not like you took your last breath, your reg won’t open, and unless you figure it out in 30 seconds, you’re not sure you will ever breathe again.

3. Use your importance: An year ago, I would have double-checked, questioned, and hesitated. Life-threatening situations teach you one thing: you’re the best chance the victim has. By definition you are the best person equipped to make decisions. Use that power. Make those decisions. That is not the time to educate a bystander on the physiology of emergency oxygen. It is not a time to build “consensus”. Nobody can validate your actions. That is the time to get that oxygen in the mouth of the victim as soon as possible. Everything else be damned! Also learn to hand over charge when someone more qualified comes along (a medical doctor for instance.) Life-guarding school should be mandatory to every MBA in dealing with “mission critical” stuff. When you’re dealing with an emergency, and someone says, “He should never have done that in the first place.”, you learn to treat that statement as “noise” rather than a discussion to be had at that moment.

4. Partial aid provided is better than full aid withheld: This is one statement they will drill into your brain every other minute. Derives from point 3 above. When you’re the BEST hope the victim has, everything that you do is helping. If you forget rescue breathing, that’s bad, but not the worst. Others didn’t know WHAT to do at all. As an owner of some task at work or in life, YOU know how something works. YOU have more information than anyone else involved. No matter how disturbed you are, or how tired you are, or how pissed off you are. YOUR bad decision, is statistically likely to be better than someone else’s random guess.

5. Look Cool Doing it: Perhaps the big point I learnt from GUE folks. If you’re doing something, do it well. There’s no excuse to not have your skills up-to-date. Others derive their cues from you. When you falter, they lose confidence. In a way this derives from point 3 & 4: People have already decided you’re the best hope they have. If you’re the most qualified person, where your decision is likely to be the best one, if you panic, you’re making the situation much much worse. You won’t know everything. But that’s better than not knowing anything. Think of your last doctor visit. If your doctor is worried, concerned, sweating, and informs you that you have a cold, you’re not going to go home very confident. If you’ve not delegated, then you’re in-charge. When people begin panicking, your calm assertive behavior can do wonders to get everyone to focus. There’s a reason I mentioned those IT showoffs. With all that language, it is very easy to lose perspective of the fact that while things are BAD, they’re not THAT BAD. Don’t be the panicking doctor who kills their patient of a heart attack, while informing them they have a cold.

I learnt that applying points 3 & 4 can be quite valuable in emergencies. Whether it’s your service failing, a bad press release, a badly received feature, an angry coworker or whatever it is you’re dealing with. Learn to identify when you KNOW better than others. Learn to USE that advantage to take control because at that moment YOU’RE the best of the worst. Learn to identify a BETTER QUALIFIED PERSON fast and handoff! PROVIDE HELP even if isn’t ALL the help needed. Some help is better than none. IGNORE noise. Remember that all hell can break lose. Your company could go bankrupt. You could get fired. And yet it’s not like someone is DYING. When you face your first panicked diver or your first low-on-air emergency (and I’ve thankfully never had someone go completely out of air on me,) when you’re thinking about whether you’re going to see the surface alive, whether you’re going to surface alone, etc. you really do get a much better grasp on everything else that can go wrong on the surface – you’re ON THE SURFACE! :-)

September 17, 2011

The rise of context-free language

Filed under: philosophy, Science — Tags: , , , , , — archisgore @ 6:48 am

Here’s an intriguing thought. I have a super-intelligent friend (one of those whose guides is Turing Award winner) who works on NLP. We have our occasional long-term phone calls where some or the other topic comes up for discussion. This time it was worth blogging about.

Quick overview – languages have rules, structures, etc. Sometimes, the rules become too complex, or at times, they are so specialized, they turn into a look-up table (i.e., not a lot of generaization.) Whenever you can’t generalize, you add entropy. Putting aside, for a moment, the poetic beauty of a language and the art of eloqution, many rules are redundant.

Consider language as simply a tool, a means to an end rather than the end in itself, designed to express a thought. If so, the less ambiguity something has, the easier it is, and the better it solves its purpose. When one first begins to learn computer languages, or even when they think of “parsing” English, every single person that I know goes through the thought process above. Why not just have a language that isn’t as nuanced? Why not design a simpler language? Esperanto certainly came out of a need, but building out a complete new language may not have been the solution. It appears that the need is already being met by modification to English itself.

I am beginning to believe that the very efficiency computational linquists want in a simple-to-parse language, is also the kind of simplicity the human brain wants. There is a certain idea you want to express. The nuances of whether I will do something, as opposed to whether something will be done by me, while undoubtedly helpful, may not be as necessary as we think. Facebook/Twitter are helping reinforce that idea. If you look at most non-proofread contemporary speech, it almost feels like a context-free language. It appears that what NLP wants, NLP may end up getting, simply because what makes NLP so hard is what also makes language itself so hard for most people.

Texting is the classic blatant example. Most texts are simply a gathering of words put together. There is a certain amount of context and syntax present to avoid ambiguity, but overall, the tools used to elimiate ambiguity are the ones that can do it in as blatant a way as possible, with as little simplicity subtlety as possible. Similarly, few FB/Twitter posts seem to be carefully crafted treatises, but generally just words that present an idea. The less context necessary for the idea to be parsed, the better it is communicated. Five years ago, a lot of “old school” people, including me, would complain of the utter lack of punctuation in sentences. Instead of adapting punctuation correctly, I found that people learnt to phrase their text in such a way that addition of commas and full-stops became unnecessary. A modern FB post is as decipherable without punctuation, as it is with. That’s some creative adaptation, right there.

Another reason for this is search engines. Very rarely do you search for something like, “Give me movie times for today evening in Redmond.”

The same idea is expessed as simply as, “Movies redmond today”

Over time, it is not difficult to imagine this is how I might begin communication with a friend. Even the verb is implied and not explicitly stated! The parsing rules for this language are just ridiculously simple – tokenize the sentence, and you know what it’s saying.

Then again, I’m not blaming the internet or machines for this phenomenon. I think it is simply been the first time that a large population the entire earth is literate (even 30 years ago, when I was born, I knew plenty of people who couldn’t read or write.) Written language was, no matter how many people may dislike this, an elite previledge – and to some extend, an end in itself. When you are a club of handful people, you can end up in an ego-pissing match. What we might call spoken ‘peasant’ language was always utterly simple and efficient (though I find a lot of ideas I cannot express to them due to the lack of a vocabulary that can convey subtle differences.)

I’m not advocating anything here, but we have to admit that any complex and large system always tends towards reducing entropy over time. It does not mean literary art will have no appreciation, but it is an interesting thought. This would be an interesting hypothesis to test out, if only for the academic validity of the idea. Is modern human language finding a path towards reduction in the energy and ambiguity required to express an idea? Is it a dual-feedback loop where NLP systems are getting better with feedback, but also driving certain generalizations back into the human world?

August 22, 2011

Why doesn’t anyone speak of Law-enforcement in India?

Filed under: philosophy, Politics, Preaching — archisgore @ 2:13 am

I wrote once before about Raj Thakery and had a lively debate with a friend. My objection was simple – he broke a law, and he was not held accountable for it. For all my admiration for Batman, I certainly respect the fact that he is always portrayed as an anti-hero by the writers. A moral conflict that is never really quite resolved.

This month it is the Jan Lokpal Bill in vogue. I understand that the laws we have are not sufficient. I understand that there is a need for anti-corruption law reform. But what we really, truly, desperately and urgently need, is the ability to enforce the law. I took some time to go over the Jan Lokpal Bill discussion on the site, and most of it sounds like one of my algorithm-proving design documents (first we send an integer as a parameter, then we check the integer for non-negativity, thereby ensuring it is always >= 0.) My computer, fortunately, is 100% reliable in performing that integer non-negativity check, which is why the algorithm works. That isn’t how India works though. We have rules. We have the law. It isn’t being followed.

I wrote before about Middle-class morality, and how we like to believe we’re better than everyone else. There is a  reason why Gandhi was such a hard-ass on most people. Before criticizing someone else, he was willing to criticize himself. After he was done with identifying all his own faults, we would narrow down on exactly what it is he wants out of others. The fight with the British was distinctly different from what is happening today, and it didn’t quite begin as an Independence struggle. If I remember correctly, “Quit India”, was a  late-comer to the party once he realized every other recourse had been attempted and proven unsuccessful.

The original conflict, the same as in South Africa was, “If we are under the British rule, we are British citizens. Consequently, we must be subject to British rule. We must enjoy all the rights, previledges and responsibilities of British rule. We want British rule. We _demand_ British rule to the last letter of the law.” This isn’t all that different from the American argument either. It started with demanding a colonial representation in the British Parliament, we they were to pay British taxes. When the Brits refused, did they make demands for independence from the British rule.

What is happening in India is similar, but not the same. Unlike the British, there are constitutional laws designed to protect us from corrupt officials. There is law designed to achieve a lot. What is lacking, is the implementation of the law. Now logically speaking, if the law were implemented, we would never find ourselves in this predicament to begin with. The Parliament represents the Will of the people. Some would claim that isn’t true. I had an argument with my mom about this yesterday, and I must disagree. The Prime Minister is right. The Parliament has no obligation to table a bill they don’t want to. If that is not the will of the people of a constituency, the MP would be afraid of not being reelected. It is a self-regulating system. The interpretation against Anna Hazare, that they are holding the country hostage is not all that far-fetched. Democracy is a hard pill to swallow when it doesn’t go our way.

Enforcement:

The first thing I did to uncover more, was to read the FAQ on the website www.indiaagainstcorruption.org. One of the more disturbing statements on that site was, “The government’s agreeing to Anna’s demands was a democratic (not coerced) victory because the tiny fraction of the people of India who participated in the action represented the hearty desires of the masses against corruption.” I find that statement a bit presumptuous. I could say Osama Bin Laden’s tiny fraction who participated in the action against the US represented the hearty desires of the masses. In fact that’s exactly what Osama himself claimed. If we are to be a democracy, and a representative democracy at that, we can never presume anything. If an inconvenient law, rule, measure is taken against us, we must live by it because that is what we are signing up for. First, we must look at the election process – a lot of measures which benefited the masses have made it for 60 years. If the masses want it, it happens.

So either of two things is happening. Either election process is screwed up – in which case, if the very laws that are supposed to protect our democracy are not enforced, what makes you think any array of new laws would be enforced? Or, as the government is saying, the lack of introduction of the bill is, in fact, the will of the people.

There’s a reason I say this. Are the masses truly against corruption? Do you know that there have been plenty of law-enforcing people I’ve seen in my life, that the masses have kicked out of office? Arun Bhatia is my classic example. We speak of lack of infrastructure in our city of Pune (where I was born.) We speak with cynicism of all that could be done if the city planning laws were followed. Arun Bhatia became the commissioner of Pune for exactly 48 hours. As soon as he took office, and began enforcing the law, the masses – yes we’re speaking of the masses – the common masses – the regular middle classes, lower-income classes, upper classes, etc. – EVERYONE kicked him out of office in 48 hours. What does that say about the will of the masses? In fact, if I had heard that not a lot of people were against corruption, I’d readily believe it. To think that people from my city of birth are against corruption is a joke! Did they hold agitations to enforce the city planning laws? Did they hold agitations to enforce laws against a certain faction that went into people’s homes and beat them up? I know hundreds of “middle classes” that lie and cheat on their income taxes. What right do you think they have of holding someone else accountable? Why should a politician be treated by a different law? Why must he not get the right to lie and cheat? Why the double standard?

What I’m leading into, is this – if we do pass a bill, will it be enforced? What happens when hundreds of these middle classes are caught in land-deals or property purchases whose value is not honestly declared? What happens when hundreds of these people’s undeclared income is brought under investigation? Will we ignore it? Will we demand that it is inconvenient to us, and it must not be enforced?

This is a very real and dangerous possibility, that may bind our country in chains for another century with a big grand farce. Do the masses with the candles on the streets realize the consequences for themselves? This is not about the Members of Parliament or the Chief Ministers or the Prime Minister. This one’s going to hit home, and hit us all where it hurts. Illegal land deals. Illegal constructions. Illegal electricity bill manipulations. Illegal cooking gas cylinders. Undeclared incomes of doctors, lawyers, businessmen, farmers. I’m not sure all those supporters have thought this through. The fight is politically and diplomatically framed against politicians, and we’re all up in arms “against” an entity that we have clearly bounded and defined. I know plenty of people who have moved vehicles across state boundaries without paying the proper taxes. It is because of a corrupt cop who is happy to take $2 that they avoid paying heavy fines. Would they really want that corruption gone? When it starts to hit us, we’re going to demand leaner laws. We’re going to have talk shows and debates about confiscating whether a poor farmer’s undeclared income is ‘fair’. We’re going to cave in. And like the host of other laws that exist, we will have another one that won’t be taken seriously.

Visibility:

Visibility is a big part of the Jan Lokpal bill being promoted. Allegedly, it will allow corruption to be brought to light, which implies that we don’t yet know that India has corruption. Do you really buy that? Seriously? So you’re sayimg, there is corruption in India, not because it is not prevented, but rather because people don’t _know_ that it happens? Are you kidding me?!

To prevent the Jan Lokpal from abusing its powers, there will be populist measures like video recordings of meetings. We’re back to the point above. Do you think I don’t act against police abuses because I don’t know they happen? Do I not prosecute people in power because there is lack of evidence? So that given a video recording of a misdeed, I’m better equipped to fight irregularities there? I’m afraid of the kind of world we live in, if this belief is widespread.

I can’t prosecute those who abuse powers, because I don’t have the means to. Whether I have a video tape or not, I don’t have the time, resources or guarantee of remaining alive long enough, to fight a case in the courts. Visibility was never the problem. I remember in my own University, I had evidence of breaking of rules and regulations by the director. I have a hatred for that entire institution not because I didn’t have video recordings, but because I could find nobody who would act on the evidence that did exist!

Such populist measures frighten me because if I ever do have a grievance, I will have that video recording thrown in my face, and told to shut up because it shows no irregularity.

Enforce, Enforce, Enforce:

I love the support this issue is getting. I know people are pissed. I know people are frustrated. We’ve had enough. We taken this for over six decades. More bills and laws and authorities are not the way to go. We need to enforce what we have. Enforce laws. Enforce rules. I’m totally in support of adding new laws. But do so consciously knowing what we are all giving up. The sacrifice isn’t the fasts we’ll do, or the protests we’ll hold in the safety of American cities (for us NRIs), or the candles we’ll light. The sacrifice we’ll give up is our own little bribes we’re so used to.

We must ENFORCE! if this is ever to work. Sadly, I’m not convinced that’s going to happen, but am holding out hope that I be proven wrong. I’ll get back to you in one year and we shall see where we stand.

June 2, 2011

Astrologers…

Filed under: Entertainment, philosophy, Science — Tags: — archisgore @ 2:10 am

Did I spell that right? I’m supposed to write a document that’s going to take 2 hours, and I’ve pushed it too far. Good time to get all my thoughts out to the world one at a time. Today, let’s rip on Astrologers a bit.

To give you an idea of the motivation, I picked up a hillarious book at the airport during my last India visit called “Am I a Hindu.” That’s going to lead to a few posts, but you’ll have to wait until the next time I run out of things to do, and face the inevitable document-writing task. Today, I began reading this book to take my mind off some blocking issues. I had read a part of it during my flight, and I recalled an emotional rollercoaster between humor, apathy and perhaps anger (or annoyance). I’m giving you this context because this post is regarding one argument that book made (I’m willing to discuss other arguments.)

Lets get this out of the way - lack of disproof, is not a proof. I’d love to talk to anyone who believes that isn’t true (that was sarcastic; if you think lack of disproof is proof itself, I probably don’t ever want to speak to you in my life). The Indian Government proclaims it’s a science, and I claim I’m king of the world. Neither of the clauses is relevant for this discussion. A common argument we hear from pro-Astrology people is, “Why is it so difficult to believe stars could affect the physical processes within you?”

It’s not difficult to believe at all. I never claimed a remote planet doesn’t have gravitational influence on me. I’m claiming you’re full of crap. When I rip on Astrologers and Prophesizers, I’m making fun of them. I’m claiming they’re full of bullshit. It’s about them! That’s as direct as I can say it (offense intended). I have no problem believing that we might be able to model those interactions, and what the result of that influence would be. I’m not saying it can’t be done. I’m saying you’re not the ones doing it.

“If people can predict weather, why can’t people predict fortunes?”

We could extend this argument infinitely – If people can predict weather, and people can predict fortunes, why can’t people predict when we’ll get a man on Mars? If people can predict weather, the stock market, the next Tsunami, and some Earthquakes, sure, it may be possible to predict fortunes too. Doesn’t change the fact that you’re not the one to do it.

I think the modern Astrology debate has gotten too impersonal. Perhaps we’re trying to be too politically correct, or the Astrologers are just better at reframing the problem than we are at noticing that it got reframed right under our noses. I believe in open-heart surgery, however, if you’re any one of the people reading this blog, I can safely say I’m not letting you come anywhere near my heart. If you tried to convince me, I’d find it midly humorous and highly annoying. It’s the same with Astrologers – science doesn’t deny modelling. Modelling is a fundamental tenet of Science. What we’re saying is, you’re no good at it, and that you have no idea what you’re talking about.

It’s true that all models are merely approximations. That’s why in addition to predicting weather, weather-predictors are also constantly ‘learning’ from the outliers. They’re on the search for new variables, and better sampling methods. I’ve not seen major publications that have indiciated the discovery of any new variables or processes, or models that provide a better fit than what historic Astrology demonstrates. Even if that’s accomplished, a theory that does not demonstrate a prediction record significantly higher than a random process, is not considered a theory at all. Are astrologers willing to submit themselves to a controlled experiment where they can demonstrate their predictors are any better than a random predictor?

Hence the title of this post – ‘Astrologers’. Don’t make this about the “Science of Astrology”. I don’t claim it won’t work. This is about you – I claim you don’t work.

May 12, 2010

…therefore God exists

Filed under: philosophy, Preaching — Tags: , , , , , — archisgore @ 6:33 am

As a child I heard this story. Once a prominent mathematician was asked by the King to come to court and prove the existence of God. The mathematician solved some complex problem on the board, and wrote below it, “…therefore, God exists.” I don’t know who the scientist was, but do comment if you know more about this story. I found the story hillarious as a kid, and laughed at how stupid the king was.

As an adult, every day I deal with people using such arguments to make their point or worse, enforce their opinions on us. This is a commentary, and as always will follow with some tips on defending yourself against such people (I personally prefer going on the offensive, because it’s just so awesome to see them try and squirm their way out.) Those who are cursed with a logical mind are unfortunately subject to the constant torture of consciously recognising it all the time. Let’s start with a quick real-life story to illustrate the point.

A couple of years ago, I made a comment about some opinion of a famous personality that I felt was misplaced. As you would have guessed, in less than an hour, my mailbox had the first holier-than-thou super-authoritative mail sitting in it, telling me how great the personality was, and how puny I was in comparison. The mail said nothing of the opinion I commented upon, nor my own comment itself. It said nothing about the issue at hand. The crux of the mail exactly amounted to, “*gibbersh* therefore, you’re wrong.”

Have you ever been at the receiving end of such an argument? Do you feel helpless and frustrated? If it’s any consolation, you’re not alone, and many of us still haven’t figured out a good defense yet. I’ve worked in a “corporate” and “business” environment long enough to know that at least in the top tech companies, this kind of talk isn’t entertained. However, it is too common to be coincidence how much people use this kind of argumentative logic and how often they use it. It feels as if there is some academy where such kind of training is imparted on a mass scale.

The basic premises that lead to such situations are:
1. Existence of a subject in need of attention
2. Lack of sufficient knowledge about the object of the conversation
3. An inherent need for self-gratification by appearing involved in the conversation

As the two premises are fundamentally contradictory, how can they be reconciled? You guessed it! *gibberish* (sub-classed by *tech-gibberish*, *economic-gibberish*, *philosophical-sounding-gibberish*, etc.)

Since actually making a well-thought-out argument is beyond question, and the subject has nothing substantial to say anyway, subject chooses path of lease resistence using the logic ‘afterall, so many people can’t be wrong’ (a blog on this is pending). Stick to the “large corporation”, “famous personality”, or “popular choice’, and you’re relatively safe from being interrogated in depth allowing them to preserve the appearence of caring about bigger picture by rehashing some statements they’d have heard here and there.

Your very first defense against such attacks is identifying the attack. You must be self-aware when a discussion or a debate is moving away from issues relevant to the object. In the case of my story above, the author sent me a 3-page biography of the personality and a lot of info about some program that I did not care about. Knowing that a person is changing the issues of discussion is a vital part of defense. Last evening in another such debate, I faced a new one - a commentator simply pulled out one noun from my sentence and responded with, “Since you said…” and created a sentence of his own using my noun with completely different semantics. It was a new learning for me.

Why should you care? Because they may end up being decision makers that affect your life. Managers, politicians, relatives, etc. When such people become decision makers, it is altogether too difficult to argue or escape from them as their objective is self-gratification only. The best defense is a good offense. They are relatively easy to corner. When cornered, they will go on a last-ditch attack effort by stating more “stuff” which could be things from your past or just general stuff they consider to be your flaws. You see, in their world, everyone is a weasel, and all they need to do is find that one time you screwed up so you will back off. See this as a sign of weakness and exploit it! That is the time to strike back and strike hard. Don’t waste time defending yourself, but quickly bring the conversation back to the topic of focus and you shall win the debate.

The end won’t be as satisfactory as them admitting to being ignorant, but rather with them rephrasing your own point and saying, “That’s what I was saying in the first place.” Leave it at that if you can. That’s the best you can expect.

Any similar experiences you’ve had?

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