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?! 

Mor Milagai (மோர் மிளகாய்)

Most of you know that I am the Chairman of the Cupertino Thachchi Mammu Rasigar mandram. It is a known fact that the folks in our house can eat Thachchi mammu (rice with plain yogurt) 3x faster when using a deep fried hot chilli pepper as a side! 

Most of my non-desi colleagues at work have tasted the chilli and found it to be unbearably hot. We made some recently given the hot weather. 

Half dried..

Fully dried after 1 week! 

Every grandma has a slight variation on this recipe. This is San's Madras grandmas recipe. 

step 0 (this is being added as a correction! my apologies for missing this on the orginal post) : Soak a spoon of Fenugreek (methi) seeds in a small cup of water overnight.

Take long chillis (in our case I got them from the local Indian store. They were Thai chillies, for best results use the desi Chillies) and cut a slit in them along two sides.

Step 2 : Soak some tamarind in warm water(1/2 cup) for few hours and filter it. (you want the water).

Step 3 : Take soaked Fenugreek seeds and put it with the tamarind water and beat in mixie

Step 3 : Put this in plain buttermilk (you want the ones which dont have the yellow stuff in them) 1 cup

Step 4 : Soak the peppers in this for two days (keep indoors)

Step 5: Drain the liquid (dont toss it, save it) and spread the Chili in Sun to dry

Step 6 : at night put the half dried Chili back in the liquid and soak

Repeat steps 5 and 6 till you run out of liquid and then dry for a few more days till the Chili are completely brittle dry.

Deep fry in oil and you are ready to eat some Thachchi mammu!

Will update this later with my grandma's recipe.. 

Lemony Snicket's and the Fighting Irish

Last week was mostly spent at a conference at the University of Notre Dame. This University is in a place called South Bend in Indiana and the best way to reach it is to fly to Chicago and drive 2 hours from there on three or four different freeways. 

My first stumble was with United Airlines. They were 45 mintues late. Apparently they were waiting for the incoming aircraft. No sorry. No apologies. 5 minutes before boarding time, they pushed it out 45 minutes.

My plan was to drive from O'Hare airport to my sister who lives 20 minutes from the airport, get some rest and start driving first thing in the morning. The flight which is supposed to land at 10:15 in the night, lands at 10:50 and the pilot announces "There seems to be a traffic jam at the gate with three planes stuck in our area. So this will be a few minutes". After doing three rounds around terminal C, he finally gets us in. It is 11:10! Traffic jam in an airport?! Experiencing this for the first time after so many years of flying. 

Raced out of the gate to find the Budget Car rental, only to realize the one has to catch a Budget bus that takes you offsite and then you get your car. The Budget bus guy circled the airport twice to fill up the bus before deciding to exit and there is a jam at the airport! It takes him 20 minutes just to get to the office outside the airport somewhere.

Then the fun begins. I am 15th in line and there are a whole bunch of simply frustrated people standing in line in this middle of nowhere place. The guy in front of me says he has already been in line for 35 mintues. Apparently the new cars that were being returned were not automatically showing up on the computer. So after doing paperwork, the guys at the counter were manually going out to the lot, assigning a car to the contract and sending the customer on their way, a process that took 10-12 mintues per customer. 

There was no sorry, no apologies from the counter folks. "If you want a car you can wait for however long it takes. Your other option is to call corporate and get a refund." is what this guy told a very frustrated lady with two small toddlers.

I watched helplessly, as a few other angry folks in the line moved over to Avis, which was the only other counter in that area. To their credit, they were in and out in 15 minutes.  Before you know it, the Avis line was full and by now I had already waited an hour!

My sister has almost given up on seeing me that night and she texts me to say "just call us when you get to the parking lot". Finally got a car assigned to me at 12:55 AM after a sudden improvement in the counter speed for the last four customers in front of me. Made it to my sisters place at 1:20 in the night. We chatted for a few minutes and my sister said "I will get up in the morning and make you some breakfast!". I almost teared up. It was already 1:45 in the morning. 

So set the alarm for 5:30 and my sister is already up making me idli's for the on road breakfast (and lunch) and she has packed me some stuff for dinner and the next days breakfast given my allergy history. In short enough to cover me till the return trip through her house to O'hare!

Gladly took all the food and started driving over to Indiana. Then came sequel to Lemony..

Google maps put the time at 1 hour 55 minutes and gave me nice directions. So given that, and the fact that it was raining like crazy to the point that using the windshield viper at max was still useless, drove at a steady pace. Just 10 minutes before I got to the exit for Notre Dame, got a rude shock! The time jumped an hour from Central to Eastern time! Almost cried. Why would any state have some counties on different time zones?! Why?!

Unlike flight timings where they tell you the arrival time with the local time in mind, Google Maps is not smart enough to tell you that when you arrive at your destination you will lose an extra hour.  Luckily there was enough time for me to go do the formalities there. 

There was a short break from all this angst when spending time on the campus. What a beautiful campus! Apparently, it was the day they showed all the new kids a tour of the football stadium. Thousands of kids all wearing green "Fighting Irish" T-shirts crossed the roads as the few conference goers waited patiently to find their parking lots.

Checked in later that evening into the Inn at Saint Mary's. Given that this place is in the middle of nowhere, this hotel was awesome! The best room I have had a chance to stay in to date on any business trip. For 100 bucks (with a discount for being part of the conference) I got a room with a Jacuzzi! 

When it was time to come back stopped by my sister's place again. My Chai buddy who still lives in Fermi Lab after all these years showed up and we caught up. It is amazing how you can catch up on 3 years in 30 minutes with friends.

When it was time to leave, United did it again. Boarded early morning in Chicago and they pushed the time of the flight by 40 mintues, shortly after boarding. The announcement was brief :

"There is fog in San Francisco and that is causing delays in air traffic control. So the flight is delayed, ONLY by 40 minutes. We might make up some time in the air. Thank you". 

No apologies. No sorry. Nothing. The old lady next to me said "ONLY by 40 minutes. See, they know we all cooped up here like rats and we got nowhere else to go! That it why she takes that tone".

We discussed in bullet points, how:

- SFO being two hours behind will almost always have a pre dawn fog

- by the time our flight gets to SFO 4 hours later, the fog should be gone

- what a pathetic excuse etc. etc. 

Somehow the talking moves to how often I travel and we get to "how is traveling in India"!

I told her about an India trip two years ago, when our flight got cancelled and we were offered seats on a competitor airlines flight to the same destination at no charge. She went "What?!" and I said "Yes. There is competition now in India and customer service is getting better because they know if they do that, the folks will remember what they did and come back!" and now we have gone from "We are extremely sorry that the flight is delayed by 10 minutes" just a decade ago to "It is ONLY 40 minutes delay".  

We both agreed that we live in interesting times. 

Finally made it back home to kids who rushed into my arms. Lemony Sicket's was over!

Both United and Budget car rental want feedback on my user experience as of yesterday. It should be fun giving them radio button answers on a scale of 1 to 10, not that I think it will make a difference!

Life is an adventure. Get to go to new places, meet a lot of new people, experience different things that improve  understanding of the surroundings and open my eyes to the world and if I am lucky enough to keep traveling, see changes and patterns. 

This was one interesting trip!