The now utterly irrelevant TED talks

Like many people, I am among those who derive much joy from listening to TED talks. The format is a compelling one: A great idea presented by an articulate speaker in not more than 18 minutes.

The conferences resonate across the world; speakers take pride in flaunting it as a badge of honour if they have been selected to speak at one; audiences lap up every word of what is being spoken about on stage. What started out in California with some of the world’s most influential thinkers as participants a little more than 25 years ago is now a global phenomenon.

Because these talks took off so well, the organizers thought up TEDx—a TED-like event that can be organized anywhere in the world by a local community. But the organizers carefully curate the speakers, who have to adhere to TED’s format and rules; and if they make the cut there, they stand a chance to go on to the global stage.

As is my wont, when I need a break, I often head to listen to TED in the hope that I may hear something interesting. It was on one such occasion that I stumbled on a talk that sounded incredibly promising. “Why I read a book every day (and you should too): The law of 33%" by Tai Lopez.

Lopez kicks the talk off with a compelling proposition: “Everybody wants the good life, but not everybody gets the good life, right? Imagine for a second. If right now, today, how much more successful you would be if you just started a company 50:50 with Bill Gates as your business partner and he was using every trick of the trade that he used to build Microsoft into one of the biggest companies in the world?

“Imagine how much money you would have in your bank account today—how much more money, I should say—if Warren Buffet was teaching you how to invest in the stock market, showing you what he used to build Berkshire Hathaway into a $140 billion company. Imagine how much happier you’d be today if the Dalai Lama was your personal guide, showing you how to find fulfilment in life, in the little things that most people overlook."

He got my attention right away. I latched on to every word of what he was trying to say because on stage was a man who had just promised me by the end of all that he had to say was I could read a book a day. Between what resides on my shelves and Kindle, I have a few thousand books, a good number of which continue to remain unread—not for lack of interest, but a function of daily exigencies that often take over.

He continued in the same vein and I continued to hear him out: “You should divide up your life and spend 33% of your time around people lower than you. You can mentor them, you can help them. And they will help you back by making you feel good about yourself. Right? It’s good to know somebody’s doing worse than you. That’s that 30%." He followed it up with something about 33% of people who are at your level and ought to be friends. And then there are those in the 33% who are 10-20 years ahead of you. Those, he argues, are the ones who ought to be your mentors. “I call it the 10x Rule," he said with a straight face.

“All right," I muttered to myself. “Come to the point." He finally did.

“How do you read a book a day? Sometimes I take a week. But sometimes, books only have one or two things that are worth reading. In fact, most books only have that." So, Lopez suggests, you take a good look at the cover, then the back of the book, a hard look at the table of contents to figure if there is something in there that matters, flip through the book to see if something else that catches your attention, read it, and you are done.

“See yourself like a gold miner just looking for that one nugget. Then put it back on the shelf." That out of the way, he went on to say something abouts Stoics versus Epicureans. The audience applauded, I nodded my head in appreciation, he soaked it all in, and I was ready to listen to another talk.

This one sounded equally compelling: “How to multiply your time" by Rory Vaden. He sounded all the more credible because one of his books, Take the Stairs, appeared on the New York Times bestseller list in 2012.

Starved as all of us are for quality time to do all of what we want to, Vaden raises a pertinent question. After warming up to the audience later with a heart-warming story of a brown-haired two-year-old girl who wanted her daddy to spend time with her, he launches into the central premise.

“In fact, there is no such thing as time management. You can’t manage time, time continues on whether we like it or not. So, there is no such thing as time management. Really, there is only self-management." Profound, I told myself.

What followed next was a brief history of time management. Iteration one of time management, Varden points out, gained traction in the 1950s and ’60s. The next iteration emerged in the late 1980s led by Stephen Covey. “He gave us something called the Time Management Matrix, where the X-axis was urgency, and the Y-axis was importance, and the beauty about this was that it gave us a system for scoring our tasks, and then based on how they scored in these two areas, we could prioritize tasks, one in front of the other."

That out of the way, he then launched into how he thinks time ought to be managed. “What we have noticed is the emergence of a new type of thinker, somebody that we refer to as a multiplier, and multipliers use what we call three-dimensional thinking. While most people only make decisions based on urgency and importance, multipliers are making a third calculation which is based on significance, and if urgency is how soon does something matter, and importance is how much does it matter, then significance is how long is it going to matter. (…) when we assemble our to-do list, we say: ‘What’s the most important thing I can do today?’ But that is not how multipliers think; multipliers instead ask the question: ‘What can I do today that would make tomorrow better?’ ‘What can I do right now that would make the future better?’ They are making the significance calculation."

I must confess again, after having heard the talk delivered with the kind of conviction he brought to the stage, I told myself there was enough material here to ponder over.

Call it a sudden moment of epiphany if you will, but for whatever inexplicable reason, suddenly scepticism kicked in.

Through all of the 18-odd minutes Lopez was on stage, pardon my expression, he was bullshitting. The core of his argument was this: Look at the cover of a book, read the flap on its back, browse through the table of contents, if anything gets your attention, read it, and you are done. Some more looking around later, and it turned out Lopez is a smooth talker who made a ton of money starting life out as the promoter of a website called Elite Global Dating. It promised to connect rich men from across the world looking for arm candy.

A closer look at Vaden’s talk points to some interesting things. Two slick slides on what the first- and second-generation of time management looked like, he introduces a third one, but with fancy words like “multipliers", “three-dimensional thinking" and “significance calculation". But there is nothing radical he has to say—save what every productivity hack routinely repeats—don’t check email all of the time, focus on the task at hand, make time for the family and other such assorted noises.

My limited point: So, what if his book made it to the NYT bestseller list? Packaged rubbish in any form is packaged rubbish. Surely, surely the millions of people who routinely listen to the few thousand carefully curated talks on TED can’t be so dumb. And whatever happened to the so-called scepticism I was trained to practise as a journalist who routinely listens to an overwhelming number of platitudes?

So, I thought it only appropriate to look a bit harder at what I, like many others, maintained was intelligently curated content. It didn’t take too long to figure out I was hopelessly behind the times. As early as 2013, Harvard Business Review had published a detailed report on all of what was wrong with TED.

It was prompted by a talk titled “Vortex-based mathematics" by Randy Powell, to which a professor based out of Stanford University raised a storm by calling it “Wow. Such f*** b****. I am a theoretical physicist who uses (and teaches) the technical meaning of many of the jargon terms that he’s throwing out. He is simply doing a random word association with the terms."

The report prompted a good many news outlets to investigate the machinations of what is widely considered a place for the world’s intellectual and elite to congregate and discuss ideas of global significance. When I last checked, the entity that is TED earns upwards of $45 million in revenue. At the very least, participants pay $8,500 to be a part of this three-day event held at plush locations, in spite of which the speakers are not paid. Mind you, not for lack of funds.

Having gone through all of the literature and criticism of the event that is TED, I cannot help but agree with a review of the event by Matt Robinson of the New Statesman.

He posited events like these are all about making people feel good about themselves—that they have emerged cleverer and more knowledgeable; that they are part of an elite group that engaged with the world’s finest minds to make the world a better place to live. “TED’s slogan shouldn’t be ‘Ideas worth spreading’, it should be: ‘Ego worth paying for’," the critique concludes.

 am not suggesting here that all of the content that exists on TED.com is rubbish. There is some compelling content. But the hype around it and the overwhelming amount of nonsense that has infiltrated the portal offers a strong case to give up watching TED talks that promise you the world in 18-minute nuggets. There is no easy way out, but to read more and listen in to livelier, deeper conversations.

If that sounds like hard work, then turn to TED, a “monstrosity that turns scientists and thinkers into low-level entertainers, like circus performers", as described by the globally acclaimed statistician and author of The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb.

This was first published in Mint on Jan 16, 2016

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