Astrologers, Homeopaths & Economists

Astrologers, homeopaths and economic forecasts cannot be trusted because the so-called science they practice is fuzzy at best and hocus-pocus at worst.

Consider, for instance, this delightful anecdote recounted by a senior journalist at a popular Mumbai-based newspaper. Sometime in 1998 or 1999, he wrote on his Facebook wall, the hugely popular astrologer Marjorie Orr took a break. Fearing a backlash from readers, his editor suggested the young man, along with two of his colleagues, ghost write the column until Orr got back to work. Some trepidation later, he got down to follow orders. He did it for six weeks until the astrologer got back from her vacation. Not a single reader from the newspaper’s erudite, English-speaking community wrote in with an angry word that his predictions were off the mark.

The post attracted a barrage of amused comments from other journalists who’ve ghosted for popular astrologers like Peter Vidal in Indian newspapers. Vidal apparently recycles his column by replacing the text for one star sign with something he’s written in the past for another star sign. Most people don’t notice. Then there is Panditji from Jaipur who misses his deadlines every once a while and the poor sub-editor at the desk had to think up “good" days of the week, “lucky" colours to be worn and “numbers to bet on" for each star sign.

“The trick," wrote this veteran desk hand at the magazine in response to the Facebook post, “was to make people believe they were on the verge of a quantum leap in life."

Then there is homeopathy: Generous column inches are devoted to it in newspapers and magazines, and practitioners make a pretty damn good living out of it. The premise around which this tub of crock continues to exist — in spite of a mountain of evidence to prove homeopathy is indeed crock — is that water molecules have memory. 

But even Class VIII students exposed to elementary chemistry and concepts like Avogadro’s number know water molecules have no memory. This is because by then, they are taught the mechanics of dilution. Whatever botanical compound goes into making a homeopathic drug is diluted to an extent that there would be no trace of the molecule left in the drug — except the sugary coating made of powdered lactose, of course.

In homeopathic parlance, on average, most compounds are diluted by 30C. That is 10 to the power of 60, or one followed by 60 zeroes.

To understand how much of a dilution that is, imagine a drop of water with a diameter of 150 million km — the distance from the earth to the sun. It takes light eight minutes to travel that distance. Now imagine a drop of water with one molecule of a substance in it. That is a 30C dilution. 

It is entirely possible that Samuel Hahnemann, who thought up modern homeopathy, had figured he’d gotten it all wrong in the face of this evidence. That is perhaps why he continued to argue water has memory and that even after dilution of the kind he propagated, water retains a “spirit-like" essence of the original compound that is “no longer perceptible to the senses".

Ben Goldacre writes sardonically in his superb book Bad Science: “If water has a memory, as homeopaths claim…water has been sloshing around the globe for a very long time, after all, and the water in my body as I sit here typing in London has been through plenty of other people’s bodies before mine. Maybe some of the water molecules sitting in my fingertips as I type this sentence are currently in your eyeball. Maybe some of the water molecules fleshing out my neurons as I decide whether to write ‘wee’ or ‘urine’ in this sentence are now in the Queen’s bladder (God bless her): water is the great leveler."

Both of these disciplines are similar to another perverted discipline—economic forecasts. It draws from the worst of astrology and homeopathy. While the chances of getting a prediction right using astrology are as good as flipping a coin, homeopathic remedies are no better than placebos where there is no relationship between cause and effect. But economic forecasting relies on both of these to get by and there are suckers by the millions buying into them.

To sift through why economic forecasting is fraught with inconsistencies, Nate Silver’s outstanding book, The Signal and the Noise is a good place to start. He argues this discipline faces three fundamental challenges:

“First, it is very hard to determine cause and effect from economic statistics alone. Second, the economy is always changing, so explanations of economic behaviour that hold in one business cycle may not apply to future ones. And third, as bad as their forecasts have been, the data that economists have to work with isn’t much good either."

To get a sense of how difficult this really is, let’s consider the most reliable data we have on the US economy (because it is the most closely tracked). The US government puts out 45,000 indicators each year and private data providers track as many as four million statistics. Since World War II though, they have witnessed only 11 recessions. How in the world is anybody to choose 11 outputs specifically from the data on hand that caused these recessions?

By way of example, consider the maxim “co-relation does not imply causation". What it means is that just because two variables have a statistical relationship with each other, it does not mean one is responsible for the other. For instance, Silver points out, ice cream sales and forest fires are related because both occur more often in summers. But there is no causation. You don’t set off a bush fire in some desert when you buy a tub of ice cream.

On the face of it, there seem to be three reasons why economic forecasts go horribly wrong. The first is arrogance on the part of a large majority of economists. The Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI), based out of New York and London, is widely respected. In 2011, the firm predicted double-dip recession, which is a recession followed by a short recovery and leading into another recession.

When quizzed on the prediction, the firm threw up a lot of data that seemed incomprehensible to most people and obfuscated it with jargon that made no sense. Like this: “ECRI’s recession call isn’t based on just one or two leading indexes, but on dozens of specialized leading indexes including the US Long Leading Index…to be followed by downturns in the Weekly Leading Index and other shorter-leading indexes. In fact, the most reliable forward-looking indicators are now collectively behaving as they did on the cusp of full blown recessions." 

Silver tracked their approach to a stance articulated to their clients as far back as 2004: “Just as you do not need to know exactly how a car engine works in order to drive safely, you do not need to understand all the intricacies of the economy to accurately read those gauges." 

When looked at from this prism, the only thing that matters is data and more complex data—and not even an attempt to get to the story. “There were certainly reasons for economic pessimism in September 2011—for instance, the unfolding debt crisis in Europe—but ECRI wasn’t looking at those. Instead, it had a random soup of variables that mistook co-relation for causation," concludes Silver.

The second reason economic forecasts are notoriously difficult to handle is that the society and the systems they try to predict are dynamic. Nobel Prize winner  F.A. Hayek, in his acceptance speech in 1974, had explained why these systems are difficult to deal with.

Physical scientists can observe and measure the things that drive systems they are studying. But society, and therefore, the economy, is not a physical system. There are millions of variables that cannot be measured or seen. For instance, how will an individual respond to a set of stimuli in a given set of circumstances? There are no universal answers.

But economists, in their attempt to be rigorous, infuse techniques and models used by physical scientists. This is fundamentally flawed because in doing that, they have to ignore that which cannot be measured, in spite of it being integral to economics. The outcomes are incorrect predictions and actions that can harm society.

The third is that humans and the institutions they build are inherently biased. As an experiment, Silver conducted economic polls across organizations that engage in forecasting. Given the same data, he figured that the lower an entity’s reputation, the wilder its predictions. And if your reputation in the markets is higher, chances are your estimates are conservative.

The dichotomy is explained by the fact that if your reputation is on the lower side, you have little to lose. So perchance you hit bull’s eye, the chances of drawing attention is higher. If reputation is high on the other hand, there is an incentive to protect it and you’d much rather err on the side of caution.

Perhaps these are the reasons why Ezra Solomon, an influential US economist and professor at Stanford University, once caustically said: “The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable."

This piece was originally published in Mint on Dec 05, 201

On Essentialism

I confess I have been a bad husband and an even worse father. I must also concede that the missus has demonstrated the magnanimity to give me a long rope. I wonder why. If I were her, I’d have had me flogged at a public square. This, because I have amply demonstrated my inability to deploy a two-letter word when needed most: No.

Mahatma Gandhi put it succinctly: “A ‘no’ uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a ‘yes’ merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble."

That he practised this mantra diligently is well known. In an interview to Greg McKeown author of the global best-seller Essentialism, Gandhi’s grandson Arun spoke of how the Mahatma practised this in his personal life.

For various reasons that had affected Arun badly, he was packed off to his grandfather’s place. Gandhi was hugely popular then and his time came at a premium. Be that as it may, through all of the 18 months that Arun spent with his grandfather, Gandhi made it a point to spend at least two hours every day listening to all of what Arun had to talk about. Gandhi’s patient listening had a profound impact on young Arun. Over the years, as the boy grew up, the significance of Gandhi’s daily ritual of listening started to dawn on him.

The Mahatma had his priorities in place. In spite of pretty much everybody in the world clamouring for his time, he knew how important it was that he say ‘no’ to everybody else, so that he could be with Arun. Gandhi knew if he deprioritized his grandson over everybody else, in the longer run he’d strike a fool’s bargain. Because he’d have missed out on an opportunity to provide what only a grandfather can. Equally pertinent, people around Gandhi would take him for granted.

When I first read of this episode, I was ashamed. I can think of so many instances when I have been an idiot. There was this once, for instance, when my wife and I had just had our second child. She was still recuperating and could have done with all of me around.

That was also the time when I was a recent entrant to a fancy gym. I didn’t know too many people there. But as is the wont, like vultures, the instructors swooped on me and demanded a party to celebrate the birth of my newborn. I am not sure if it was the reluctance to say ‘no’ or the exuberance of a proud father. But, in hindsight, I know it was the wrong call. I said, ‘yes’ and took a bunch of protein-craving beasts to pile in all of the meat they could consume.

Even as they raised toasts to my newborn, I could tell from their faces that they were laughing their backsides off at how gullible I was. Nothing came of the banquet. When I visited the gym the next day, all of the blokes who had eaten their way into my wallet were expending energies on their personal clients. I didn’t matter. And rightly so.

Why should they have respected a man who deprioritized his wife and child for people he didn’t know? A firm ‘no’ from me and all of them would have backed off. Chances are if I’d said ‘no’, they’d have treated me a lot more seriously the next day.

I can say much the same thing about work. I quit my last assignment under rather acrimonious circumstances. I don’t intend to use this space to get into the gory details of all that transpired. Suffice to say that a significant portion of my time was apportioned to a promoter who didn’t think twice before condemning me to the guillotine. Once again, in hindsight, if I had managed myself well, there was enough time on that that could have been apportioned to family—notably my older daughter who needed her father around.

But it would be ridiculous on my part to hold the firm’s promoter responsible for how I conducted myself at the workplace. He didn’t demand I sweat my blood or spill my guts. I painted myself into a corner where I believed I had to work bloody hard. This, in spite of the logic in my head arguing I had a choice to say ‘no’. I gave in to the emotional part of me that argued even louder that I had no choice but to cave into an imaginary construct.

As McKeown puts it: “Every time we say, ‘I have to take this call’ or ‘I have to send this piece of work off’ or ‘I have to go to this client meeting’, we are assuming that previous commitments are non-negotiable. Every time you use the phrase ‘I have to’ over the next week, stop and replace it with ‘I choose to’. It can feel a little odd at first—and in some cases it can even be gut-wrenching (if we are choosing the wrong priority). But ultimately, using this language reminds us that we are making choices, which enables us to make a different choice."

What if I had chosen to say ‘no’ to instructors at the gym or the promoter at the earlier firm I worked for? If anything, my life would have been better off. But hindsight, as they say, is always 20/20.

This is borne out in a lovely book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, by an Australian palliative care nurse, Bronnie Ware. For a long time, her career was focused on people living out the last 12 weeks of their lives. In all of her conversations with them, five themes recurred.

1. I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

3. I wish I had the courage to express my feelings.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

On all counts, this is the kind of clarity that terrifies a middle-class man in his midlife. Until now, I have lived to please those around me. I work like a mule. I find it difficult to articulate my emotions. I don’t stay in touch with friends. My happiness is oftentimes sacrificed at the altar of the greater common good, as I perceive what is the greater common good.

Between hindsight and the insights offered by Ware, I know I have some way to go—a long way to go actually.

To start with, I now begin my days at 4.30am and am outdoors by 5 am until 7.30 am. The solitude that comes during the early hours allows me to spend time with myself, thinking of what really matters. I have come to believe there is a fine line that divides what matters from what doesn’t. In these hours, I take brutal calls on what ought to be given a pass and what must be acted upon.

I have begun to take fewer calls on my phone after 9pm. That is time I now spend with my older daughter to make up for all that I didn’t give her in the past. As my brother once asked me much to my shame: “What more can a child ask for other than a little bit of your time? And if you can’t spare her that, why did you have to get her into this world?"

I couldn’t agree more. In the short time that I have practised this way of life, I am happier for it.

This was first published in Livemint

What all high performers have in common

This talk will take almost 1:30 hours to listen in. Don’t think of it though as time spent. But time invested. Because we live in a world that is designed to distract us. So much so that if we re-learn how to focus at a task on hand, what we acquire is a super-power.

The economic case for leisure

“What are your hobbies,” Kuldeep Datay asked. He practises at the Mumbai-based Institute of Psychological Health (IPH). I fumbled. He dismissed my intense physical routine as an activity I engage in to accomplish an immediate goal. Indeed. It is aimed to run a half marathon in under two hours. That I enjoy it is another matter altogether. But I enjoy work as well with goals to be met.

“All your waking hours,” he submitted, “are devoted to productive activities so you get better at what you do. What do you do for leisure?” The import of what he was asking wouldn’t be evident until the mind wandered to a conversation with Shankar Maruwada, who co-founded the EkStep Foundation with Nandan and Rohini Nilekani. Maruwada spends his time trying to understand how people learn. “Our obsession with getting better at what we do is making us redundant,” he said.

By way of perspective, once upon a time, medical knowledge doubled every 50 years. Advances in computing have got us to a point where it now doubles every 72 days. Artificial Intelligence is needed to access new knowledge. The human mind cannot cope. That is why, even as medical degrees are conferred, doctors get outdated. Such disruptions are happening across disciplines. How is any professional to stay relevant then?

“We need Adaptive Expertise,” says Maruwada. Individuals must learn, unlearn, and learn again, multiple times, in a single lifetime. But learning can be traumatic. To learn, we must first go through a cycle of incompetence. Remember the time you first got on a bicycle? It was tough. Until, suddenly, it got to be an unconscious act.

Children, he explains, are familiar with this trauma. They learn something new at school every day. Incompetence is not humiliating to them. After formal schooling though, most people forgot how to learn and deal with the trauma that accompanies it. So, we stick to what we know.

Is that why I am not learning to sculpt, for instance, something I know nothing about? Perhaps fear of being perceived as incompetent holds me back. But people in the Renaissance Era, people like Leonardo da Vinci, had no such qualms. While we know of him as an artist, his hobby was studying the human anatomy. People around him thought it morbid. Did he care? He engaged in it when at leisure. Five hundred years later, historians regard him as one of the greatest anatomists of all time.

Ironically, leisure is what all of us crave. But we believe it is time wasted. The import of Datay’s question hit home. If time is not spent on a hobby or leisure, we will be disrupted. Like medical doctors are, 72 days after they graduate.

This piece was first published in in the print edition of Hindustan Times on May 5, 2019. All copyrights vest with HT Media

The Myths we need to survive

Sex and the Indian man

By no means is this intended to be an authoritative treatise on Indian sexuality. Just a piece stoked by the personal interest of a man in his 40s surrounded by friends who often talk about sex in our all-boys club. By all accounts, everybody seems to be boning all of the time, or at least that’s how it sounds to me.

Is all of this male chest-thumping? Or is something the matter with me, I have often wondered in private moments.

The question exacerbated itself last week when my wife and I finally got around to watching The Man Who Knew Infinity. Starring Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons, this movie is about Srinivasa Ramanujan, the much acclaimed Indian mathematician who died at 32 in April 1920. A fleeting scene in the film struck a note in my head. Ramanujan’s wife is waiting for him on their conjugal bed. But he continues to lie on the floor, oblivious to her presence, thinking up answers to complex mathematical problems in his head.

I couldn’t help but extrapolate that moment into our contemporary lives. By all accounts, most of us live in and manage complex circumstances. The wife is the “house manager" and the husband is an “ATM" that goes to work so that he may be replenished at the end of each month.

Over the years, both roles have merged and things are even more complex. So, a lot of the “management" like “child rearing" and “housekeeping" gets outsourced—either to the domestic help or one set of grandparents, whichever is easier. But something has to give in someplace. And my hypothesis is that it is sex.

Now, all kinds of reports exist on what is the ideal number of times a married couple ought to have sex. By all accounts, consensus exists that twice or thrice a week is just about okay from a man’s perspective in the longer run. Most people, it seems, can do with more. But all of these are American numbers. I looked hard, but couldn’t find anything India-specific. So, I thought I might as well mount a study.

I zeroed in on 12 friends, all of whom I have known for a long time, and know will be brutally honest with me. Pardon me ladies, but no women were part of this survey because I am part of an “All-Boys Club”. We like it that way because:

1. We are in our early 40s.

2. We got married 10-15 years ago.

3. We keep long hours.

4. We discovered sex at pretty much the same time—and that was a pretty damn long time ago.

5. When we “boys" meet up, we continue talking about our “awesome sex lives" and those “booty calls" we made in the “good old days".

My questions to each of them were simple:

1. Cut the jazz and tell me, how many times exactly do you have sex in a month?

2. Do you make time for booty calls?

The answers varied.

1. One said he hasn’t had sex in years because of a medical condition.

2. Two of them said they made out with their wives a few times in a year. Not for anything else, but because their definition of sex has changed from “making out" to “spending quality time" with each other.

3. Seven of them told me it averaged two to four times a month.

4. One said he could do with more, but time permitted only six times a month.

5. The only outlier was a bloke who finds time for 20 sessions.

6. Everybody climaxed after anywhere between eight to 30 minutes of the act.

7. There was consensus on one thing: “There is no bandwidth to deal with booty calls any more."

Armed with this limited data, I turned to a few people whom I thought can offer me some perspective. The first calls were made to Anugra Misra, a New Delhi-based psychiatrist, and Kuldeep Datay, a Mumbai-based psychologist whom I turn to often for the routine dump.

“What is wrong with your friends? They ought to be having way more sex. They need help," Misra guffawed over the phone. The outlier doesn’t because 20 times is good. “As for the jokers talking about sex morphing into quality time, it is all bullshit," he thundered. “There is no substitute to good sex."

Datay’s response was more nuanced. There seems to be a direct linkage between high IQ and libido, he said, adding that “men with high IQ may have a lower libido".

When I looked it up, there are many studies which prove that this is indeed the case. For instance, consider this paper published in The Cambridge Student Psychology Journal on “Sex and Intelligence". It posits a number of theories, all of which I thought were rather interesting.

Datay’s take is that it is entirely possible these men get a high out of whatever it is they are doing and that they “don’t need sex to complete themselves or who they are. Their chosen vocation does that for them." Or the two friends of mine who have sex only once in a blue moon.

“It’s actually the first sign that something is the matter with a relationship," Misra countered. “They are just trying to avoid each other. This is a polite way to go about it."

That said, I couldn’t help but wonder if Datay is indeed right—what about the sex maniac that was Albert Einstein? For that matter, that great philosopher Bertrand Russell, comedian Charlie Chaplin or, more recently, Bill Clinton? These are men with high IQ who couldn’t keep their zippers in place.

In trying to answer the question, Desmond Morris, one of my favourite zoologists, writes in The Telegraph: “Novel sexual experiences, for instance, suddenly seem irresistible. It is not the mating act itself that is so important—that varies very little. It is the thrill of the chase and the excitement of a new conquest that drives them on. Once the conquest has been made, the novelty of the affair soon wears off and another chase is begun. Each illicit episode involves stealth and secrecy, tactics and strategy, and the terrifying risk of discovery, making it the perfect metaphor for the primeval hunt."

“It’s a hypothesis," says Datay, but that need not necessarily be true across the board. “Then there are all kinds of biochemistry at work," he adds. By way of example, he points to something that is popularly called the “fidelity gene" that was discovered a few years ago in a mammal called the vole.

There are two kinds of voles. The monogamous kind and the playboy kind. Scientists have discovered that by simply altering a single gene, the Casanovas become tame versions of their monogamous cousins, who are now a minority, comprising only 5% of the family.

When all is said and done, both Misra and Datay concur that both of these types—the ones who have too little sex and those who seek too much—are exceptions. They need to seek professional intervention. But as I articulated at the outset, this isn’t intended to be an exhaustive treatise on Indian sexuality—it’s just a set of personal observations.

So, I called yet another interesting man—Biju Dominic, the CEO of Final Mile Consulting—and presented my so-called findings. His is a company that studies human behaviour and suggests techniques to meet marketing, organizational and social needs. He is deeply embedded in the Catholic church as well and spends a lot of time counselling couples.

“I find it incredible," he said, “that in the land of the Kamasutra, we place a premium on being a brahmacharya. Celibacy is placed on a pedestal in our country and it cuts across all religions."

I couldn’t agree more. What else explains the ridiculousness with which successive governments have swept Mahatma Gandhi’s sexual peccadillos under the carpet. On the one hand, the man preached celibacy; on the other hand, in his sexual life, he was a wreck, by all accounts.

“It is the duty of every thoughtful Indian not to marry. In case he is helpless in regard to marriage, he should abstain from sexual intercourse with his wife," he wrote in Indian Opinion, a newspaper he published then.

“In India, as a thumb rule, we don’t understand the difference between sex for intimacy and sex for procreation," says Dominic. By way of example, he asks a rhetorical question. 

“How many couples in their 40s do you see hold hands or walk together in public? You can’t hope to just rush into the bedroom and get into the act. There is no room for public display of affection in our country, which is very important for a woman. I actually advise couples that sex begins much before the bedroom. In the Indian context, even holding your wife in front of the children is looked down upon. Why? What for?"

The way Dominic looks at it is that in much the same way a priest looks at the altar as sacred, a couple ought to treat their bedroom. It is theirs and theirs alone. And it is the duty of spiritual leaders to tell that to their followers that in as many words. But as Indians, all of us shy away from it. “So, how can the frequency of having sex increase?" he asks.

When confronted with these questions at a conference called by Pope Francis, the current head of the Catholic church, the Indian delegation raised an objection. They argued that our divorce rates are the lowest anywhere in the world. To which the pope retorted: “Sure, you don’t have divorces in your marriages. But do you have passion in your marriages?"

Dominic says he couldn’t agree more. “Intimacy is practically missing," he says. “When a girl gets married in India, she is always told she isn’t getting married to a man, but to a family and that she’s got to get used to their way of life and living. Imagine the pulls and pressures it puts on her."

And here, Dominic says, the problem begins with the man. “They are cocooned for all of their lives by their families. That is why Indian men don’t learn how to speak and deal with emotional complexity. So, nothing passionate can emerge out of them in a long-term relationship either. That is something Indian families, particularly the mothers to whom the sons belong, have to understand as well."

So, where does that leave me? All I can offer you is this.

1. I was not part of the sample. So, you can infer nothing about me from this “study".

2. Do take time out to read The Man’s Guide to Women by John Gottman. A female friend first suggested I read it. Bless her.