Sundar's Law of Collective IQ's

Ever wonder why a group of smart individuals behave in a way that is abnormal for their individual IQ? 

Ever wonder why bigger the gathering, more difficult to come to conclusions faster?

Ever been in a meeting with folks who are the "who's who" in their field and not be able to agree on anything?

Why can't a husband and wife agree on the best way to change a diaper?

Stop wondering!

Sundar's law uses empirical evidence to come to this fundamental conclusion "The collective IQ of a group of people is reduced by the variation in the individual IQ's" and as is customary with most laws, this one gets an equation:

Collective IQ = Average of Individual IQ's in a group - (Range of the Individual's IQ/2)

Let's try out a few examples. Say my for example a husband's IQ is 135 and wife's IQ is 145. Left to them as individuals they might change a diaper okay. Put them together and the formula gives us

Collective IQ = (135+145)/2 - (145-135)/2 = 135!  The advantage of a person's higher IQ is gone! Now we have no good way to change a diaper.

Lets take a group meeting where there are 5 guys with IQ's ranging from 100 to 180.. say 100, 120,140,160,180.. 

Collective IQ = 700/5 - 80/2 = 100. No consensus. 

Last but not least, take a street protest with a hundred guys with IQ's ranging from 50 to 150. The Average IQ of a crowd might be a 100. Given most IQ is within 2 Standard Deviaitons and 98% of folks have IQ between 70 and 130, it is not a bad starting point for this hypothetical. 

Collective IQ = 100-100/2 = 50.. So the bigger the crowd and more the IQ spread, closer they are to idiots as a collective. 

Have always wanted to have a Law named after me... I am definitely hoping this Law catches on simply by word of mouth and brings me fame!

Now.. most Laws will also need some line drawings, graphs and charts. Those come over time! 

I am also expecting the high IQ society to contact me with an honorary membership for just coming up with this gem! 

Now a lot of folks have asked me questions like "did you just do this because you were Vetti?" 

"did you put some thought into this?" 

"then how do you explain crowd sourcing?"

"what is wrong with the simple law of averages?" etc. 

I did put some serious thought into this to try and explain what I have seen at work and outside of work both as an individual contributor and as an experienced manager.

When I was an individual contributor years ago, it was an observation that meetings with my peers would be very productive and creative but meetings where our new boss whose core expertise was not our core expertise would be very unproductive. Now he was a smart guy who just did not understand what we were talking about. He also had a position of power. Now if it was a simple law of averages, one added person (if you can call him low IQ) would not have brought the average down.. but the Range makes a difference. 

Think of our Senate and House! There are many smart folks there as well as idiots. Okay, mostly idiots! The collective is absolutely useless. 

Now come to things that are funded by many sources. If the sources act independently and they do not impose on what is being funded, then great! That is how crowd funding works. Everyone throws in 5 bucks and someone raises 250k and they do their thing. Now imagine one idiot throws in his 5 bucks but wants status updates every two days. Boom! Down the tubes it goes!

This actually happens in all cases where the Government funds things. They contribute <5% of the total, yet they impose bueraucracy on the other 95% and slow things down. In that case the Government is the idiot that brings the Collective IQ down. This is why a lot of companies and University labs do not want Government involvement.

As for the Range by 2, it was to avoid negative numbers for the large part. The concept and empirical values seem to go together nicely. If we actually do an experiment where we do a test to evaluate Collective IQ by the time it takes for folks in a room to agree on something simple vs. time it takes for individuals in the same room to get to a solution and what % of times they are right, it would make this complete. 

Unless I switch jobs to become a behavioural sociologist, that might not happen. Maybe someone will take it up?! 

When sanity gets fooled

A few words of caution...

Remember the Iraq war? The war that was falsely co-related to WMD's and cost so much in lives and is turning our kids futures a little darker than it needs to be? Remember how that war came to be?

There was a mass hysteria in the US for retaliation and not many stopped to think of the consequences. To top things off there was the "You are not patriotic if you don't support this war" rhetoric?

That always reminded me of my previous company where a bunch of middle managers would say "Let's do what is right for the company. Let's do blah blah and blah..."

The relatively new (read <3 years experience) engineers would look at each other and go "but that is stupid. if you do blah blah and blah it is not the right thing for the company!" but some older wiser folks would advice us to "let it play out". Eventually things will come to light that said ideas are not good for the company. As a collective though, the young ones got to keep their jobs and not be thrown out for calling the "emperor naked" and the older wiser ones had enough headcount to get their stuff done. The whole thing was a wasted exercise and would sometimes take up months of your time chasing wild geese!

Most of those folks who prefaced their sentences with "let's do what is right for the company.." would end up in the management fast track and be out of sight within a year or two flying to far away places on company dime doing more things that were right for the company! In a culture like that, lot of folks who could not in good conscience "let it play out" would leave, a lot of good effort would be wasted and the worse case was monetary gain not realized for the entire employee base!

Same thing happens to a country and what do we have? Lives lost in the hundreds of thousands, a future generation ending up with heavy debt, a wave of next generation terrorists created and a world destabilized for years to come. 

I now see my friends in India going through this spiral with the Delhi Rape Case. Physical, chemical, biological castrations are being suggested as potential deterrants to future rapists.  Do not see how that will stop a castrated and possibly more frustrated individual from shoving some other object into some poor woman. Maybe you should ask for a Lobotomy instead of a castration if you want to hold down that line of logic?

If someone doesn't speak up, India might end up enacting laws that would not be much different from the Taliban run Afganistan and we all know how women fared and are still faring in Taliban controlled areas. They will be raped in their own homes with no way to let the outside world know and with no one to come castrate their menfolk who made or interpreted the law to suit their needs against the better interest of women!

The public hangings and stonings and castrations are going to be a bandaid or a cast in the sense that the damage is done and it is a punishment after the fact. Hailing such calls for castration as a sign of victory is not much different from what happened when we went to war with Iraq. Years later you will realize that while most rapists continue to go undetected, some poor kid who hands a girl a love letter will be wrongfully convicted and castrated! We will create an even more sexually repressed class of men and one shudders at the thought of that prospect. We have our legistlators watching porn in their phones while being in the Assembly! So enough said..

Just look at the TSA for crying out loud. One guy tries to set his shoe on fire and now millions of people around the world end up removing their shoes, belts, get x-rayed repeatedly and harassed in the name of security while their chances of getting killed on the ground by a drunk driver or deranged gunman with a semiautomatic are much higher than being blown up in a plane with shoes and you still hear of cases where folks smuggle things through just to prove that the TSA are stupid!

Most laws are only as good as the infrastructure that is set up to implement them and the common sense that goes into the laws. As a daddy of two girls it is not easy to sleep knowing there are folks like this out there. I remember very vividly getting flamed badly for a blog post where I had questioned the safety of India, because my parents cautioned me about a place near Delhi called Nithari where some guy killed and ate people "silence of the lambs" style almost ten years ago and also because I happened to be an NRI at the time.  

Now everyone seems to be telling me that "this type of stuff happens only in Delhi". This is not Delhi specific.  It happens everywhere! Delhi, Philadelphia, Karachi, Beijing.. everywhere and there are different stats coming from all these places which have different laws and social norms and cultures. 

Please think this through before passing laws that will eventually not do anything to stop such crimes, be abused more likely than be enforced properly and have a long term net negative impact! 

Do these laws really reduce the occurance of rape? If yes, by all means go ahead. If not, do what it takes to prevent rape. Punishing at that point doesn't do much.

There should be an educational excercise for young adults and children. If the school system is not going to provide that, as responsible parents, we can do a sit down with our kids and have a conversation with them when they are ready for it. 

This is not different from the Sandy hook conversation we had to have in our house. It was tough but it had to happen. Going to tell you guys of an actual conversation that happened just a week after Sandy Hook incident.

Jr. wanted to go attend a Christmas party at a friends place as some of her other friends were going. Personally didn't know the girl or her parents and Jr. had never mentioned her as a close friend in previous conversations. She also mentioned that her friends dad knows Obama personally.... because her friend has shown pictures of her dad with Obama! So I made a casual joke saying "I cannot allow you to go unless I know two things. Do her parents own a gun and does she know where that gun is? If the answer is yes, then definitely you are not going!"

She threw her hands out in frustration and made a sincere face and said (brace yourself for this)

"Her mom is innocent. She can't have a gun. She is Chinese! Chinese and Indian people don't have guns Appa! You of all people should know that!"

In one sentence she pretty much zapped me! So I asked her nicely "how do you know that?" and the response (brace brace brace) "We talked about this in school and asked our friends who has guns in the house and only non Indian and non Chinese people have guns in the house!"

It took me a good 30 minutes to explain to her that :

a. Not all Indian and Chinese households are gun free

b. the biggest college massacre in US school gun violence history at Virginia was carried out by an Asian kid

c. Not all "non Indian and non Chinese" households have guns

d. Innocence has nothing to do with gun ownership

These were no easy conversations with a girl who just turned 10 with her very smart 7 year old sister lapping up all this information .. so she can use it in her school survey!

Coming back to laws, just remember one thing! We live in a world were most of the rules were made by a powerful minority! Every now and then, the tides turn on that powerful minority when the powerless majority gets a say. Be it the French revolution or India's independence or the Arab spring  the same thing happens over and over again. 

We also live in a world were most of the rules were made by men and they have done well to protect their interest across the globe. Most solutions to problems that women face never go far enough to address the solution if the solution involves changes that men have to undergo! Most of the solutions center around how women have to change themselves or conform to a different guideline. 

Unless that changes and more women join the legislative and administrative ranks, the right laws that protect women will never see the light of day. It is also a crying shame that those women that do make it to those positions in India are siding with the men once they see power! 

Please take some time to think about real solutions that will enable a woman in India to be as free in every way as a man who walks by her side. 

My previous concerns of raising two girls with certian cultural and social norms is now paling in comparision to new concerns about the world we live in! 

Go have that conversation. Have that discussion with your friends and don't let the anger and rage drive your actions. 

On the gun control side, the solution was to put an armed policeman in every school to protect the kids from bad guys who might come shooting. Just think about it! On the men side it is to castrate, stone and hang rape accused! 

Today one of my friends pointed me to a comment on a youtube comment that "none of these problems will happen if women wear a hijab and we have sharia law in India!" 

Hence the post in-spite of saying "No social minded posts!"

Hands free

As most of you might or might not know (there, I have covered all options) starting midnight, no driving with a phone to your ear in California!

The rule is simple. You can use the phone to dial out. You just cannot talk while driving, unless you are on speaker phone, or you use a "hands free" device!

Apparently the wise powers that be, in the Great state of California, have decided that this law, is going to make the roads safe, or at least, safer.

Word on the street was that the local electronics stores and Costcos were seeing long lines, with the hands free "bluetooth" devices selling like hot cakes. So, checked out a few options today and bought devices for myself and San. After the purchase and during the drive home, the mind wandered "free", and asked a lot of questions, aided by the various things observed in passing.

1. Why would it be okay to dial a phone (when you are hands and eye free) but not okay to talk?

2. Why would it be okay to drink "Starbucks" coffee and drive with one hand, but not hold a phone and drive? Could it be because promoting hands free devices, forces people to go to the store and buy a product which otherwise would be a novelty? and starbucks has not yet come up with a Handsfree drinking mechanism?

3. Could I come up with say, a hat that has a lining where you pour your starbucks coffee and there is an automatic straw that goes into your mouth for "hands free" sipping?

4. would I make a killing in the stock market if I patent such hat and straw?

5. The girl who just nearly missed the signal, being busy with her makeup and hair brushing (and who also pissed off half a dozen drivers behind her on the left turn only lane) would still be a danger on the road. How can we do "hands free" makeup?

6. Based on an average device making 30% gross margin, with the average device selling for 40 bucks, someone out there is making a lot of money this week?

7. How much did those guys pay, to get this law passed?

8. Why are there so many cops on the road today? Are they practicing for tomorrow?

9. If 1/3rd of the drivers with cell phones are safe, and 1/3rd have purchased the devices and paid their dues, the other 1/3rd will pay the fine to the highway patrol and the state government. How much will the State make?

10. Who the hell makes these rules anyways? We are supposed to work more, be more efficient, multitask to the point that dudes are talking to themselves in restrooms while peeing! No seriously, saw this today where it appeared the guy was talking to his thing.. because he looked down and was talking! Then when he was washing his hands, noticed that he had this earpiece on his right ear (which was not visible to me, when I was standing next to him).

For some reason, he thought it prudent to lower his voice in the restroom, which it made it all the more spooky. Thought he was whispering terms of endearment to his little guy! How then in a world where this happens, are we to stay away from cell phones?

11. Already Brahmin boys have to deal with pulling their "poonal", put it around their ears when they go "pee pee". What would happen to a Tambram boy who is wearing a poonal, spectacles, and a hands free? What if the whole thing gets into one tangled mess around his right ear and it all rips loose on the urinal?

12. Why didn't I buy stock in handsfree device companies a year ago? Why? Why? Why? Could have at least made money there, to compensate for what was spent today!

13. Will they actually collect impartial data over the next month or so and publish it to show if this rule actually reduced accident rates?

14. Will they actually share information, on how much money was made in fines and hands free earpiece sales over the next month?

15. Does the I-phone Junta have some cool out of the world device, that makes the cyborg looking thing I bought, look out of date? Is there an I-Free?

etc. etc. etc.

Came home grumpy, knowing that yet again, the average dude is still an average dude. A person who can only feel powerless against a law making machinery that takes ones tax dollars and finds new ways to screw him.

As soon as I entered the house though, the little one and Jr. cheered me up, with their "hands free" hugging. The little one jumped on me, clung tight like "boots the monkey" and said "Don't hold me daddy. Don't hold me with your hands. Keep walking. I keep huggy-ing you!"

Now that is one hands free, that more than makes up for all those other thoughts.

.

Freedom is relative ..

Before you assume that there is some typo in the title and I am trying to talk about any relatives, let me stop you right there!

This post is about "Freedom" and how it is not absolute. It is relative.

To make my point, take a healthy young lion living in a simple 20 square meter zoo cage. It probably feels oppressesed, trapped, etc. etc. and has definitely lost its freedom (in this case freedom of movement). Take the same lion and move it to the middle of a 20 acre park which has a simulated savannah and a fake lake with a few Gazelles which it can hunt every now and then. It probably feels free. It would not bother the lion that the 20 acre perimeter has electrified fences or other mechanisms which would endanger its life, far more than the boundaries of the cage, because as far as its eyes can see, it is "free to move"! It might feel trapped when it gets near the perimeter!

Now, who am I and what have I done to Sundar? Nothing really. While driving back from work today, my thought process, which is prone to wandering in the absence of enough caffeine, sugar or starch for a whole afternoon, went to explore the meaning of freedom. This thought was triggered (as many others in the past), by the public radio news report in the background which said that the President of the USA has asked the White House Counsel, Harriet Miers to ignore a subpoena and not show up for questioning! by a committee investigating the selective firing of Judiciary folks!

My sugar starved brain asked myself a few questions in the following order:

Is the President of the US above the Law ?
Can he actually tell who can and cannot show up when summoned by the Judiciary branch?
Is this because he IS the Law of the land?
Oh wait, wasn't that answer to that question "the constitution" ?
Did I not read my Citizenship test material right about the various branches of government?
Did we not hang a dude in another country in the name of bringing a former head of state to Justice and say things like "no one is above the law! and the laws of that country (which were practically rewritten by the USA) are holding that dude accountable for his actions" etc. etc. ?
Can any leader of any country be above the law of that land and not answer to the people or the law governing that land?

Well, the answer to the last question at least, is a big NO! We all saw how Saddam was brought to "Justice"!. Before you flame me and say "are you supporting Saddam ?" , "he was a dictator who deserved death", "he tortured and killed so many people" etc. etc. I will make it very very clear. This is not about Saddam's death being deserved or not, this is not a pro or anti Saddam Hussein point I am trying to make here (for the record, he deserved what was dished out by his own people!). It is purely to elucidate the fact he was held accountable for his actions by people in his country with their laws (at least according to the world media) with a lot of publicity for "no one is above the law in a democratic land! See what the power of demoscary.. er..democracy can do!".

What definitely strikes me as odd is that we in the USA are supposed to live in a :
Democracy,
Free Country,
Country ruled by the people,
etc. etc.

all of which are supposedly lacking in dictatorial, theocratic, third world nations, which is feeding the demand for "the democratizers" (think of them as Ghostbusters, except they look like ordinary military dudes without any cool gadgets, well.. they are ordinary military dudes!) aka "liberators", "peacekeepers", "nation rebuilders", etc. etc.

This freedom is very weak and definitely "relative". It is more a perception of freedom than freedom itself, much like the case of the lion in a fake safari! When pushed to the boundaries, this freedom is as fickle as the freedom in those third world countries. How else can you explain what is happening today? A majority of the populace is struggling to implement a plan to end an occupation in a foreign land, but is really impotent as long as one man has enough power to just do what he feels like doing?

I do not know! I am still new to this constituion thing and I know I have a lot of catching up to do! Sometimes when I think that a big part of my salary which goes in taxes is directly being spent on buying one way tickets to the middle east for American kids who do not have any other options after high school, or kill Iraqi innocents in the name of liberating them, I have difficulty sleeping.

So what is the freedom that I still have? I have the Freedom of the Mouse and Keyboard! I could still write this post and put it on the internet! I can tell the Gallup poll guy (who always calls me in the evening exactly when I am asking god, why he gave me only two hands and not four to handle two kids) that I do not support the war and I want the American troops back!

I can voice my opinion that instead of sending those kids who joined the services because of a lack of other choices, to die in Iraq, give them interest free loans to get college degrees or better give them a free higher education! As for those kids that really went to the Armed services because that was their calling, instead of rebuilding Iraq, ask them to support rebuilding of all those ghost towns in the USA which have lost their local economy to international competition and start securing this country at its own borders. There are plenty of people still sneaking across all borders who could be a threat to national security (if we are to believe the same world media).

Now that I have written this, I can stop thinking of myself as a toothless lion and go run around in my fake grassland.

Give me a F
Give me a R
Give me some E's..

Gooooooooooooooo FREE country!!

.