(This is the 14th post in the one-month challenge series)

I just wrote an entire post and deleted it before posting. It was about marks, privacy and parenting. I thought I had some points to say, but the more I wrote the more I realized this was leading nowhere. I was either roping in too many subjects or getting too vague about some. 

But that was not the real problem. I was myself not convinced with many of the things I had written. I believed in some of it, but my belief was vague. And once I realized that, I had to close my eyes and press delete. There is no point writing something about which you do not have much conviction. Which is what I call writing badly.

But, now you see, I don't have the energy to write one entire new post, so I will just say something real quick.. 

In my Psych class, we once talked about the "pigeon as a quality inspector". The idea was that pigeons are birds that can be trained VERY easily.  So you train a pigeon to compare a tablet (the one that has medicine, not the electronic one) with a prototype and reject all pieces that do not match. With some minimal reinforcements in between (a few grains and water every so many minutes), the pigeon can be used for this. The best part about this idea was that they showed that the pigeons were a lot more reliable (in terms of accuracy in discarding the bad products and letting in the good ones) than human beings.
Of course, they were not only efficient but cost-effective also. Just some food and water. No regular salary, no tea breaks, no 401k. You wouldn't find the pigeons chitchatting during work or engaging in politics and they can work even on national holidays. Apparently, the pigeons didn't get tired as quickly as humans either. Now, obviously no company would be ready to use pigeons as quality checking personnel. Even if there accuracy as higher than 99% and they needed less than a week to train. 

But wait. Isn't this kind of stuff automated now anyway? Of course it is. This paper is a veryold one. But the reason I mentioned it is because there are enough other manual jobs in the world which are no-brainers. And yet we could never automate them by training pigeons or mice.
Which is something for you to ponder. Aren't there some prejudices that prevail unequivocally against overwhelming evidence? If all the evidence in the world stll supported a mouse outperforming a human in a particular task, would you hire the mouse over the human?

Just something to think about..

Reference: http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/amp/21/2/109/ (Article not available for free.)

Free will and all that

(This is the 9th post in the one-month challenge series)

Ya, I know I am back on the boring philosophy track. I don't know why I am a big fan of philosophical questions. Maybe because of this (-that comic was just awesome!)
But anyway. Getting to the topic.

Think about what makes you do what you do. If you never thought about it, it might be a hard question. For eg., I know I love coffee. But why do I love it? I might say it's because all the adults in my family drink start every single day of their life with coffee. So much that, in my mind, waking up is inextricably linked with smelling coffee and hearing the tap-tap on the filter. Followed by a family ritual of drinking coffee and discussing different things. If I think back, some of my earliest memories involve morning coffee. I remember it used to be quite a tantalizing thing in my childhood because my mom wouldn't let me have it and yet all grown-ups could. But I digress. My point is that I can trace my liking for coffee to something in my childhood- Positive reinforcement* from people I implicitly trust as a kid and a lot of Pavlovian conditioning.

Au contraire, I could ask my myself why I am an atheist. This might be the millionth time I am mentioning this but I grew up in an orthodox household. Religion is everywhere in our home. God is mentioned about a million times daily. And I was never sufficiently disappointed with my life to give up on God (like many atheists I know did.) Considering I think of life on very promising, cheerful terms, it is a wonder I ever changed my mind. In fact, I distinctly remember arguing with my atheist friend on why believing made sense. Also, almost all of my friends are theists. Not particularly religious. But theists. Almost all the people who have inspired me- my parents, teachers, relatives, famous people- are again theists.So, you see- almost nothing in my environment could have led me to stop believing. And yet, with some help from the 'God Delusion' (and myself) , I changed my mind at some point.
But if you look closely, you might say it's because I used to read a lot (not so much these days) and am influenced by good books. I am also quite interested in science and biology and debate. For each of these I could again go down a track of why I am interested in that particular thing, but you get the idea. You can pretty much nail down my supposedly contrary behavior to something in my environment.

"Wait", you tell me. "Not everything I like can be traced back to the past. It is too naive to do that. Taking your own example, there are many households with a morning coffee ritual but not all their kids become coffee addicts. Surely there is something innate in me that makes me like some things and be good at some things". Obviously. There is your genetic makeup which plays the other big role in making you who you are. Kids who grow up in the same family often turn out to be complete opposites. (Though there might be SOME influence on environment also there!)

Fine so far. Most people would agree until this point that most of their behavior comes from the genetic makeup or their environment. And as you might have guessed, the real question is- is there something beyond all that? (I am not even going into the argument of religion here- even when I was a theist, I never thought God would bother with the everyday minuscule details of trivial human lives.) If there were another individual who had the same genetic and environmental conditions as you, might he/she act differently? Or, as individuals, do we act completely based on these two factors, or is there something we can choose to do randomly beyond all of our past? In short, is our fate predetermined or do we have free will?

I hate to end abruptly, but because this is a long topic for discussion, I leave you today with just the question and a small note- I used to be a big fan of free will before. However, a course with one of my Top 5 teachers ever, a book by Baum and this amazing man made me change my opinion...

Hope to continue on that later..

*I use the term loosely here.

Why soliloquies?

I am taking this psychology course called "Experimental Analysis of Behavior". (Interesting to note that I haven't found any Indians in the class - maybe Indians are too "brainy" to study something like... um.. well... the "science of the mind" :P) Anyhow, it is an awesome class because we discuss a lot of interesting questions and there is so much to debate about (ya, totally my kind of thing and I'm LOVING it!). Add to that an amazing professor who is very sensible and makes the class so much fun etc etc... Anyway, what usually happens is we discuss some questions in class and often they are too deep for me to think about in an hour and a half with someone else voicing his thoughts about them as well. So I thought I should think about them later again, and maybe write my thoughts down- and that's how I ended up writing this post. Hoping I have enough time to do this, I intend to discuss some questions from my class and put down my thoughts on them and maybe let you wrestle with them yourselves too....

Disclaimer: A lot of the theories/concepts mentioned here are just based on my own readings of these topics and may not be the latest scientific view on the matter. In fact, if you know of new scientific evidence against any of this, do let me know in the comments section. 
Also please view this article as a purely biological/objective discussion of the topics and do not read any religious/other belief-oriented interpretations in it.

So, one of the things we were discussing in the first class was "What is behavior" Sounds simple enough, but when you think about it- you end up with questions like- Is questioning behavior? And is thinking behavior? Apparently, they both are, and so, any pattern of actions, covert or overt can be considered to be behavior (and maybe I will let you wonder whether that is valid or not, and why so).

But what is more interesting is- How come we came to have covert actions in that first place?? And here, I don't mean actions like secretly looking at your neighbor's answers or stealing his pen. By covert actions, I mean actions that cannot be observed, like thinking and deciding and.. ya, you obviously guessed it ... soliloquies.

Let us think of just the last- a soliloquy. How did it happen that man, of all animals developed a tendency to talk to himself and that too, as a part of thinking... (Clearly, I am assuming here that the crows cawing outside your window are not really saying "To be or not to be" in crow language! :P) In fact, how did it happen that man alone began to think and theorize and debate and philosophize and ask questions from "How to cook food" and "How to build homes" to "Why am I here" and "Who brought me here"  and "Is there a God"? How did it happen that man alone started to make these grand theories about a master creator and complex rituals to please him? And mathematical models of economic theories of an abstract theoretical concept called "money"?  (Click Read more for more...)