Evil Ideas

Ask 1600 people to pay you a dollar if you correctly predict the winner of the next One Day International Cricket match between Team A and Team B. To the first 800 tell Team A will win and to the next 800 tell Team B will win the match. Surely, you will predict correctly to 800 out 1600 people and get 800$. Ask those 800 people to pay you a dollar if you correctly predict the winner of the following One Day International Cricket mach between Team A and Team B. To the first 400 tell Team A will win and to the next 400 tell Team B will win the match. Surely, you will predict correctly to 400 out 800 people and get 400$. You can keep doing this till there is only 1 sucker left.

Theoritically, this method can give you approximately 1192$. But practically you will earn much less than that.

Of course, you can earn more by extending the trick to a larger group of people who are willing to pay you something.

Unofficial Guide to Ethical Hacking of Girls

My cousin Margret once told me that girls could know whether a guy had a crush on them even if he didn’t explicitly express it. She proved that, if necessary, girls could even read the lips of a guy. That is, they could “hear” him from the movement of his lips.

Although I didn’t agree with her assumptions, I knew she was almost right. In fact, it is a well known fact that girls are programmed for such pseudo-psychic capabilities inorder to sustain life. A possible application of such abilities can be found when mothers raise their new born kids, or in espionage: FBI is known to have recruited many female lip readers for surveillance.

As with many forms of engineering, there are tradeoffs here too. For example, such pseudo-psychic capabilities make them vulnerable to prejudice and belief in empirical observations. That makes them exploitable or “hackable”. There are endless possibilities as to how such vulnerabilities can be put to use.

Consider a simple situation where you have a crush on a girl. What is the best way to make sure she knows it? Solution: Act foolish, when she is around, like you can’t find words to speak, like you lost all the guts (which you usually have) when facing her. Remember Harry Potter? He accidentally drooled his drink when Cho Chang looked his way. Something like that…

Although a hindsight bias will make you feel otherwise…I find that most geeks (including me) tend to act normal and very formal when their crushes are around. As if that girl is just like any other girl.

Love and Social Acceptance

How can you convince others that you are a successful and capable man? The best way is to be completely superficial in your choice of mates. What would you think if you saw a strikingly beautiful woman with a below-average-looking man? You would think that he must have some desirable hidden traits. Perhaps he is smart, sensitive or even rich. Seeing him with a beautiful woman would increase your opinion of his deep unobservable characteristics. Now, what would you think if instead you saw this same man with an average-looking woman with a terrific personality? Probably nothing, because you wouldn’t know she had a great personality.

If you are in a position where you need to convince others you have a nice personality, you need to pick prospective mates who have great observable traits. Indian bachelors should rejoice after reading this, because the custom of arranged marriages will allow you to do just that….

Happy Valentines Day!

Political Strategy

In this post I would like to propose a strategy to get both the BJP and Congress Party to support campaign finance reform. Some eccentric billionare should propose a campaign finance bill. The billionare promises that if the bill doesn’t get enacted into law, then he will give Rs. 50 billion to whichever party did the most to support it.

If the other party supports the bill then your party have to as well or they get Rs. 50 billion. Similarly, if they don’t support the reform, you should support the bill, and then use your 50 billion to crush them in the next election. This strategy would likely work, and not even cost the billionare anything.

All that glitters are gold…

When Singapore was still desperately poor, its prime minister used neatly trimmed shrubbery to attract foreign investment. The prime minister ensured that the roads from the airport to the hotels were well kept and nicely groomed. He did this so foreign businesspeople would think that Singapore were “competent, disciplined, and reliable.”

The existence of sharply pruned shrubbery in a host country doesn’t usually enhance a multinational’s foreign investments. The shrubbery from the airport to the hotels was highly visible to potential investors, however, and was far easier to judge than, say, Singapore’s level of corruption. What makes things interesting is that the foreign businesspeople knew that Singapore knew that they would observe the quality of the road between the airport and hotels. Consequently, if Singapore couldn’t even go to the trouble of keeping up this road, it would signal that it wouldn’t make future accommodations to foreign capital.

These shrubberies were Singapore’s easily viewed cover, and as we all know , it’s pretty easy to judge a book by its cover. While evaluating a book’s contents takes some time, the message of the cover can be grasped in seconds. A book’s cover provides a signal as to its contents.

Unenforced Cooperation & Involuntary Magical Thinking

(Wow! Thanks to my friends Sentinel and Manu, I have a total of 6 comments + 1 spam on my last post! Thanks guys! I like comments and I hope to get more….)

I would like to clarify some terms I invented in my last post.

1. Un-enforced cooperation is a type of cooperation that evolves out of extreme competition ( described by Robert Axelrod in his book Evolution of Cooperation ). This sort of cooperation is not enforced by anyone. It is evolved. In the previously described IPD scenario the Indian agents could have cooperated with each other to gain more than or as much as its opponents did. But they did not OR they usually don’t. I think this “If I am one eyed, I’ll make everyone blind” atittude is one of the many reasons behind our problems.

Some Digression:- It is not right to expect all IITians to come back to India, because cooperation cannot be enforced. It has to evolve. This absence of synergy is what instills in me a feeling of our inexorable doom.

2. Involuntary Magical Thinking is more prevalent among the un-educated and the illiterate. It is to assume that consequences of karma, fate or a superior being will take care of things OR to assume Revenge as an emotion, not a protocol and thus refrain from it or to indulge in it with an attitude similar to “If I am one eyed, I’ll make everyone blind” instead of “I will be a one eyed Kung Fu master” attitude.

Forgive my funny language…but I hope you can feel my inferior thoughts…hehe