Tales from Ghzbd Vol I

What is more difficult, organizing the commonwealth games or a delhi wedding. Sheila Dixit would have you believe they are quite the same. And I think she is not too far from reality. Before we proceed let me clarify this, I don't have any, and I mean not even an incidental experience in organizing weddings. The support for Sheila dixit isn't politically colored either, it just so happens that for the last one and half months I have been managing a project myself which draws a curious commonality with organisation of a wedding - working with dozens of small-time contractors/vendors.

If you can efficiently manage a project dealing with people who are not induced by money/recognition/threat (yes, we had to play this bluff as well) , who don't even understand the concept of simultaneous activities, who refuse to discuss anything in concrete terms preferring always to maintain a haze ("ho jayega aapka kaam" !), who always seem to be biting more than they can chew then organizing bigger projects with well documented scope, timeline and payment terms is no big deal.

There have been so many specific instances of well planned activities going haywire that I have renounced all faith in project management tools. Many are the tricks these contractors play on you. Ranging from 'i am helpless/my laborers have gone missing' - the most ingenious, you can't help but feel sympathetic - to the most ridiculous 'aujar nahi he/barish ho rahi he'.

And while you think you can play good cop bad cop with them, they are playing you on a different level altogether. The contractor will criticise the lazy laborers while the laborers will crib about what an unorganised fool the contractor is. And this mutual appreciation to disorient you doesn't stop here. While the painter will tell you how shoddy the carpenter's work is, the carpenter will use all his leisure time in pointing out the hundreds of flaws in painting of walls. Needless to mention, had they been in my position neither of them would have paid the other person a single penny for the worthless workmanship.

Of course, no matter how bad the work is if at all there was any work during the day, at e.o.d. you are expected to pay them. Because 'majoor ko dihadi chahiye' otherwise they will stop all work. Not that they will go on an indefinite strike or something, they will just go AWOL, and before you know, the contractor will go missing as well. And if some sunny morning the entire jing bang turns up at the site, you are made to realise that they had not fled its just that the mobile fell into water and wasn't working the entire week.

The one thing I have learnt from my experiences - the scale of a project is immaterial, if you are getting something done always go for turnkey solutions.

Of buliding high expectations

Creative writing, I have always believed is all about timing. And twitter has more than validated the hypothesis. Allow me to explain.

I am an inherently creative person and still somehow I am not very prolific at producing blog entries. One blog post a month just about borders a respectable average. Not to mention that the averaging period is chosen carefully to hide an immensely abysmal performance in the last one year (statistics, lies what is the difference !) . What can be a plausible reason? The Freudian will jump at the naive conclusion that I am deceiving myself - 'has anyone ever complimented you on your creativity, let alone creative writing'! Caution, don't be tempted to accept the simplest explanation (Screw Occam and his rusty razor). So what is the truth.

The truth is that the shelf life of an original idea does not extend beyond a few minutes, seconds in case you awake with a start from the spark of the idea (the latter one is very tricky, not because of 'false awakening' but on account of logistical problems like groping for a pen and paper in complete darkness of night). And therefore, you are more likely to preserve the idea in a scribblar form or worse forget about it than write about it. To conclude, creative writing is all about timing - you should be in a mood to write about an idea or you will never look at it again.

And how exactly has twitter validated the theory? Well it hasn't so far :D It will, in case I start tweeting big time !

The Curious Monty Hall Problem

This one was hidden in my blogs folder as an invisible document for the last four years, discovered it today while reorganising the desktop ! Penned the article after reading the ‘The curious incident of a dog in the night-time’. Found the book an interesting read, partly because I could relate to the mannerism of the protagonist !

In the novel ‘The curious incident of a dog in the night-time’ Christopher Boone tells only one joke. And the joke says that Mathematicians are the ‘best’. Better than economists, and logicians.

Discounting the fact that it was a joke, please bear with the hair splitting analysis. Taken out of context ‘best’ can mean anything, it may mean mathematicians are best at solving partial differential equations which is true (tautological that is). But it may also mean mathematicians are best at understanding purposeful human action, which is not true because economists are best at that.

Now because I like the novel so much and the way the protagonists explains things, I would also explain things in his style of narration.

Beginning of Christopher Boone style narration

Some mathematicians think that they can apply Probability to unique events to make decisions. For example, in the novel ‘The curious incidents of the dog in the nighttime’ Christopher Boone tells an interesting story about The Monty Hall Problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem). The problem is about a game of luck which he tells to show that numbers are not straight and how intuition can be wrong, and this is called an illustration.

He uses probability to justify Marilyn vos Savant’s claim that “you should always change and pick the final door because the chances are 2 in 3 that there will be a car behind that door”. But this is so stupid because it is silly to say that the chances are 2 in 3, since picking up the door is a one off event.

End of Christopher Boone style narration (rather difficult I say!)

If you try to pin down the meaning of the statement ‘chances are 2 in 3’ you really won’t achieve anything but a feeling of futility because in the context of a specific event it does not have any meaning. It is of course true that numbers are not straight and I think to an extent it is because mathematicians want it to be that way.

The statement that “the chances are 2 in 3 that there will be a car behind that door” implies that the specific event of choosing the door is part of a class of events and that 2/3^rd probability implies a frequency of occurrence of a particular event#. But the truth is a person playing the game is not going to play it more than once. So in such a case, does a probability of 2/3^rd play any significance in the decision making process of the person? None whatsoever!

The non-applicability of concept of class probability to case probability situations can be generalized to all situations where a person is gambling. Statistics and probability calculations may comfort a gambler punting on a victory for Australia meeting Zimbabwe but he is still a gambler and the past performance of the two countries still has no bearing on their next match.

#To illustrate the concept of ‘class of events’ and ‘class probability’, visualize a small island where the total population is 1000. For sake simplicity, assume that the population has remained at this level for the last 100 years. It has been observed that for the last 100 years, a total of 10 people die every year on the island. We then say that the number of deaths is a class of events and the class probability is 1%. L.I.C. can come and insure the population against an event of death with a fair degree of certainty that every year it will have to pay to families of 10 out of 1000 people.

This is different from case probability, where there is no class of events and the uncertainty is on account of a lack of knowledge regarding all the factors determining an outcome. In the example of the Monty Hall problem, the uncertainty is arising on account of the players non-knowledge of what is behind the door – a goat or a car.