Impedance Mismatch over HTTP

Just a few years ago, learning meant that I had a quiet evening with sheets of white paper for notes, a text book, a pencil and a highlighter. I would go through page after page and assimilate stuff in a structured way. Things changed fast thereafter and I started compiling links to read and more importantly links to avoid which wasted my time. I then printed some material and then read it page by page. Now, it is just bizarre, the information is out there, mountains and oceans of it, it is ridiculous, the textbook concept doesn’t work anymore. One has to learn and apply on the fly. Is it a sign that I need to retool/revise or is the information overload real?

Just as scientists imagine and search for that very simple fundamental concept which would evantually realize the Unified Field Theory, probably information is a lot similar. The mountains of information might be confusing but there must be some very simple and beautiful fundamentals which should make scanning all this information simpler to make sense out of it. Probably I need to get back to basics and revise them and not worry about the mountains. Confusion is inversely proportional to knowledge.

Found the following on his site… 

This week, Charlie Rose presents a Special Edition series of conversations from India. Tune in for exclusive interviews with leaders and thinkers in the political and business sector. Special guests include Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan, business leaders Azim Premji, Nandan Nilekani, Ratan Tata, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Anil Agarwal, Actress/Activist Shabana Azmi as well as Indian journalists.

I found this post on mahalanobis, a blogger who posts stuff on psychology that is relevant to social commentary in our daily lives. The blogger presents very clinical explanations, complete with results from research papers. The blog seems to be a labor of love.

In the post How to fool intellectuals, the blogger reiterates Steve Sailer’s comments on the feminist icon Betty Friedan.

“…much of what we are taught as the high intellectual history of the human race is based more on the magnetism and impenetrable self-assurance of thinkers than on minor issues like whether they were right or not. Freud is a perfect example, a charlatan who befuddled two generations via his implacable self-esteem”

I personally don’t know much about either Steve Sailer or Betty Friedan and this blog makes me google every 2 minutes, which is good in a way because I get a chance to become more aware of some influential people in history.

The above quote resonates with my observation at work, especially in meetings, group discussion scenarios and the medium considered to be the equalizer, the Internet.

Let me start with the internet. It does not matter how good the content is, the person writing it is still more important. The social networking analysis proves this. Along the same lines, at work and in meetings, the person who is loud, boisterous and noisy without substance can also manage to win support.

The blogger elaborates this phenomenon by citing the Vienna Circle episodes as examples. It seems that the guys who acted like jerks at this High IQ, intellectual clique were most revered. The biggest intellectuals seemed to be fooled by the blind self-assurance of a few people. Probably, this has nothing to do with intelligence, it probably is very fundamental and animalistic in nature.

Apparently Bertrand Russell, whose essays I read in school was also floored by boorishness.

I couldn’t understand his objection—in fact he was very inarticulate—bit I feel in my bones that he must be right, and that he has seen something I have missed.

“Wittgenstein treated Russell like an inferior, and Russell was awed by this.”

I can extend the same logic to the bookworms who ooh-aah certain writers who probably are boorish at best and not to mention their followers sing kumbaya as they do not want to be left out.

Manju was honest, courageous and did not budge when threatened. He paid the price for his honesty and was shot dead on November 19th, 2005 by the petrol pump owner charged with selling adulterated petrol, a standard operating procedure at Indian petroleum outlets. The Jessica Lal case should be proof of what will happen to Manju’s killers if we are complacent.

The Manjunath Shanmugam Trust has been established with the following goals.

a. To establish and maintain an award for individuals/institutions working to uphold the values of truth and honesty in the face of danger to themselves.

b. To provide aid to individuals fighting a legal battle to uphold the values of truth, honesty or justice in the Indian corporate, government or public matters.

A team of volunteers is actively working to secure financial help to fight the case in court and achieve the above goals. People with connections to media, police, legal and judiciary can be of great help. A detailed e-mail notice describing of the efforts in place and can be found via Gaurav’s post.
The story barely scratches the surface, beneath the story lies the dark world of Indian Oil Corporation Limited where corruption and nepotism is the order of the day. Stories of petrol pump licenses being handed over to relatives of politicians and people with power and connections are all too familiar. It is hard to imagine that this is only one of the many PSUs in the country that is in this situation.

Sources: Bye, Machan, Manjunath Shanmugam Trust