Rahul GaitondeOnce you wake up, everything starts competing for your attention: every single channel on your TV, every single application on your phone, that device that you plan to use today needs special attention because is not charged and has full memory, the light bulb is blinking, the heating unit stopped working and you have notifications over notifications on your phone.
How Focus Became More Important Than Intelligence
From a profile of Robert Cottrell, who reads over 1000 articles a day for his newsletter:
Robert has built an AI to help him read even more articles.
As I said before, I’m currently constrained by my physical capacity to read so many articles in a day.
Last year, I began working with a computer scientist named Jeremy Davies to build a machine learning algorithm to read articles for me.
Basically, what we’ve done is trained the algorithm on all of my past issues of The Browser. And we can set it to read thousands of posts that I don’t have time to read, and judge them.
This ML is essentially learning to be me. It’s basically an output from the virtual Robert Cottrell.
It’s still very early, but if we set it to read 1,000 articles it will return roughly 50 articles as being high quality. Of those, roughly half are going to be false positives and I’m going to look at them and think, “What’s going on here?” The other half of them are going to be real. I’m going to say,“Yes — exactly, I can see why it has chosen this.”
When it becomes better trained and a little bit better overall (when it’s finding three or four slam dunk pieces a day), I won’t have it fully substitute for me, but I’m going to use it to read more things. So, if I’m able to cope with a thousand feeds already, I can send the ML to go read 10,000 feeds.
While Cottrell is doing this for extreme productivity, the idea of a personal AI reminds me of the human editors that Neal Stephenson describes in his book Fall.
In the rural parts of the country, there’s “Ameristan,” where the poor and uneducated live steeped in misinformation, hoarding ammunition for a war that will never come and crucifying those they deem to be heathens.
But the coasts and the cities are full of wealthy elites who pay to have professional editors weed out fake news from their digital feeds, and regard the rest of the country with a kind of disgusted anthropological fascination.
We already live in an age of misinformation, and an AI to help readers sift through data to glean credible knowledge is already necessary and would be hugely valuable. Whether it’s made broadly, cheaply available versus commercially distributed will determine whether we end up with a schismatic future of the sort Stephenson sketched, or we understand and collaborate with each other. At this moment, information discovery services like Twitter, Facebook (.com/Whatsapp) and Google (search/Now/Youtube) are doing a pretty pedestrian job.
Growth investors invest in companies that exhibit signs of above-average growth, even if the share price appears expensive. Value investing involves buying securities that appear underpriced by some form of fundamental analysis.
Speculation and some data on why growth investing has beaten value investing for a while now in the US:
… it makes sense that computers are winning in arbitrage-style hedge fund strategies, where an asset worth 95 cents is bought in one market and a quasi-identical one is sold in another market for $1.00. Most of those traditional hedge fund strategies are rules-based, and if anything, data ubiquity means computers have a huge advantage in parsing ever-increasing amounts of data not only to find that often temporary discount, but also to step in front of slower investors for a smaller spread if necessary, essentially beating them to the punch… even if the specific metric used for implementation of value (say, a price-to-book or price-to-earnings ratio) changes because of market conditions, competitive dynamics, or the financial reporting tendencies of corporate executives, computers are far better positioned to identify the shift faster than we are.
On the other hand, growth is perhaps harder to spot. It’s not just that doing so involves making simple forecasts about the future — computers generally beat humans at that, too, by the way — but it requires something more than that. In my experience, successful growth investors have an ability to synthesize unstructured data across multiple, often seemingly unrelated, domains.
Since inception in 2010, the AI index has absolutely crushed the average hedge fund, with the machines annualizing at 12.8 percent per annum versus just 5.0 percent for the humans. If efficiency is the enemy of alpha, then computers are its worst nightmare, hulked out on steroids.
Given this, there should still be a window (months? years?) to create high alpha value based funds that use technology in India. There has never been more compute power available for cheaper. Machine learning’s also a relatively new field and hasn’t been applied widely to Indian data sets. This means you can make failures (cost) free and successes real. The race is then for the best data.
The current government has mentioned ‘ease of living’ a few times in the last two years.
That interested me because if it meant ‘quality of life’ in terms of public spaces, waterfronts, air pollution, urban transport and the like, it’s never been an area of focus for India’s governments, certainly not at the highest levels, despite these being historically extraordinarily badly developed and maintained.
I first came across this a couple of years ago, without any context of what it meant in the government’s context:
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has asked his ministers to tell the people how his government has worked for improving their ease of living.
Government has worked to ease living conditions of people, November 2017
In 2018, we begin to get some idea
Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Sunday night that his government is working hard to make the life of citizens easier with the mantra of “minimum government, maximum governance”… Modi said his government has scraped 1400-1450 outdated laws, made procedures simple… The Prime Minister said that his government is developing next generation infrastructure in the country keeping in mind the needs of 21st century… our government used direct benefit transfer scheme and saved over Rs 57,000 crore of money which could have gone into wrong hands… his government had introduced insurance for 10 crore poor families which can avail benefit of five lakh rupees annually.
Working hard to promote ease of living with minimum government, maximum governance, February 2018
In 2019, there are several references to the term in public (January, April, December), along with a sense of the main thrust – a reduction in unnecessary regulation:
“The Prime Minister made the point that governance should be what makes life easier for citizens. He used the example of Uber, which he said has ensured that people are not dependent solely on the public transport system and made their lives easier, and that of private mobile companies which gave people options other than the department of post and telegraph,” said a source who was present in the meeting. “The focus, he said, should be on ease of living for people and not to get into all aspects of their lives.”
PM Modi to Secretaries: Focus on ease of living for people, June 2019
The point about the need for government to be a “development authority” rather than a “regulatory authority” was also made by one of the secretaries present, who highlighted the fact that the government is saddled with several rules that cannot be implemented, so there is a need for the government to “get out of the system”.
Then, on Independence Day
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has ease of living as his government’s next goal. Now, India doesn’t need an incremental growth, but a high jump… the aim of the government is to ensure ease of living in India along with ease of doing business. “I always ask this question..can we not reduce the interference of Governments in people’s lives? Let our people have the freedom to follow their own aspirations… Earlier, people were happy with merely a plan to make a railway station. Now people ask- when will Vande Bharat Express come to my area. People do not want only good railway stations or bus stations, they ask- when is a good airport coming.
After Ease of Business jump, Ease of Living is Modi’s real goal, Financial Express, August 2019
So. Not exactly the commitment to quality of life I’d been looking forward to, but a move to smaller, less interfering government, which is also welcome. It’ll help getting specifics on what regulations the government’s done away with to improve ‘ease of living’.
“When you walk down the street, how can you feel happy if you’re constantly being reminded of what you don’t have? Advertising breaks your spirit, confuses you about what you really need and distracts you from real problems, like the climate emergency.”
“The French cities trying to ban public adverts“
Especially in cities in developing countries such as India, it’s often struck me just how much of our public space people and businesses have casually, illegally appropriated for advertising. Dozens of hoardings covering up building facades. Stands on footpaths. Banners tied to lamp-posts and signal-posts, often obscuring the traffic indicators themselves, on housing society gates, on fences and walls. All of this in addition to loosely sanctioned official hoardings by the roadside and atop residential buildings.
Technology has made this particularly invasive with neon/LED lighting and animation – motion to which you’re instinctively and helplessly drawn.
In most places, it is impossible for your gaze to not meet advertising – in any direction.
David Heinemeier Hansson, on Twitter:
Oh for fucks sake 🙄. Don’t sacrifice your 20s – or any other decade of life! – on the erroneous belief that unless you work round the clock, you’re not going to be “successful”. The world is full of people who were all work and now are all regret.
@dhh
“Most businesses fail, most people don’t become fabulously wealthy. Design your approach to life accordingly. Regret will haunt”
@dhh
and
When you reduce life to a rat race, all you see are rats. There’s a beautiful, cooperative, collaborative world outside of the rat’s maze. One filled with highly competent, fulfilled, and impactful people who couldn’t give two shits about your mental box. Y’all invited!
@dhh
This hustle-all-the-time culture is not only an path to burnout but also to defining yourself by your work, your title, your corporation. DHH makes the case that only a tiny percentage of people experience the sort of blowout success that makes up startup lore, and that most people who buy into the maxim that success is directly correlated to the hours of hard work you put in don’t design and live their life with this realisation.
This reply on the thread also deserves a mention:
It’s also a matter of focus. If you focus 8h a day on anything for a period of several years, you’ll be great at it. Most people can’t focus. They’re constantly distracted, thinking about the past or the future, but are not in the present. You don’t need to work 60h – be focused!
@sohrab21
The current startup culture is one of extremes of quantity (hours put in, headcounts, DAU/MAU numbers, GMV, followers); quality gets short shrift.
Possibly the worst-designed payments experience I know of, at the recent U2 concert in Bombay:
…customers were required to register (with a name, phone number etc) and then pre-load the card. It was announced that the pre-loading could be done exclusively via a particular payments app. Once this step was completed, customers would need to tap their cards at any of the physical kiosks at the venue in order to update the card with the online balance…
… food and beverages could only be purchased at the concert venue using the RFID card, no refunds would be available and that there would be physical kiosks at the venue for topping up the cards…
To load Rs.1000 into the wallet, the customer was charged a fee of Rs.100. On this fee, there was a GST of 18%, so the payment went up to Rs.1118. This was a total cost to the consumer of 11.8%, as compared with paying cash.
To add insult to injury, the money left on the card was not refundable. What was not spent would be confiscated by the payments vendor. Customers were thus required to estimate their expenses without knowing the prices of the goods up front.
Despite having taken the trouble of registering and pre-loading the card prior to the concert, she now had to stand in two long queues at two separate kiosks: one to first update the card so that the online transaction of Rs 500 was fed into the card, and the other to top-up the card with Rs 500 so that she could make her F&B purchases… payment counters soon became longer than the queues at the F&B counters.
And finally
the systems at the kiosks for updating the registered RFID cards stopped working… The mobile data network crashed at the venue with thousands of people trying to access it… the merchants inside the stadium stood firm, in unison, in refusing to sell goods to the customers using any other payment mechanism.
This when we now have UPI. And a plethora of apps that implement it, a well-known way to quickly scan QR-codes to pay. It smacks of rent-seeking by a monopoly.
The problem with this private license-Raj behaviors is it puts people off digital payments in general. There are possibly hundreds now for whom this is the definition of a digital payment experience, and who’d much rather prefer using cash in the future.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists profiles India’s pivot away from coal towards renewable, especially solar energy:
India entered the first decade of the 21st-century on a path of massive coal-fired power generation investment, with plans reaching over 600 gigawatts. India now exits this decade with over four-fifths of this high-emission, high-pollution investment intent now shelved, uncompetitive against zero emissions renewable energy.
According to the article, this has been accelerated by two factors: a recognition of the environmental costs of growth-by-pollution, reverse auctions to create low-cost supply backed by large amounts of foreign investments
The result? The government of India enabled $40 billion of new investment and a doubling of renewable energy capacity in just over three years, to 83 gigawatts by September 2019, with another 45 gigawatts of large scale hydro-electricity. (To give a sense of scale, the Hoover Dam generates 2 gigawatts.)
In addition to low-cost electricity, the government of India had introduced another key benefit into its auction process. Not only were the bids being offered about 20-to-30 percent below the wholesale price of electricity, they were also fixed at a flat rate for 25 years. In doing this, India created a deflationary low-cost electricity system running on zero inflation…
The article makes for good reading. It’s worth also reading this November 2019 article in the Mint newspaper for context:
Solar energy tariffs in India are among the lowest in the world, but state governments are keen to push them down further. These dangerously low tariffs are turning unsustainable for some developers, who in turn cut corners on quality. Some state power distribution companies (discoms) are also over a year late on paying their power bills.
State governments, especially in Andhra Pradesh, seem to be holding power producers to ransom, either asking them to reduce tariffs even further or risk having the plug on the contract pulled. This is rich, given that
As of July 2019, which is the latest data available from the Central Electricity Authority, state discoms owe a whopping ₹9,735.62 crore to renewable energy companies. Of this, ₹6,500 crore is due from just three states—Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Telangana. Andhra Pradesh discoms, the worst offenders, haven’t paid their dues in over 13 months.
As long as the state is also in the business of running business, instead of merely policy making and enforcement, it will continue to be a threat to economic – and environmental – progress, throttling potentially thriving growth areas.
All of this when there is so much opportunity and head-room. The share of renewables in India’s energy mix is still low, even compared to China and the US leave alone other Western European economies running to close to 100% on renewables; electricity generation capacity is also a fraction of China’s:
Paper (URL, PDF) by Arvind Subramanian, India’s former Chief Economic Advisor, and Josh Felman, former IMF representative to India. Part of the abstract:
In the immediate aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), two key drivers of growth decelerated. Export growth slowed sharply as world trade stagnated, while investment fell victim to a homegrown Balance Sheet crisis, which came in two waves. The first wave—the Twin Balance Sheet crisis, encompassing banks and infrastructure companies—arrived when the infrastructure projects started during India’s investment boom of the mid-2000s began to go sour. The economy nonetheless continued to grow, despite temporary, adverse demonetization and GST shocks, propelled first by income gains from the large fall in international oil prices, then by government spending and a non-bank financial company (NBFC)-led credit boom. This credit boom financed unsustainable real estate inventory accumulation, inflating a bubble that finally burst in 2019. Consequently, consumption too has now sputtered, causing growth to collapse. As a result, India is now facing a Four Balance Sheet challenge—the original two sectors, plus NBFCs and real estate companies—and is trapped in an adverse interest- growth dynamic, in which risk aversion is leading to high interest rates, depressing growth, and generating more risk aversion.
That there are no easy solutions is encouraging. It means policymakers and regulators are going to have to confront the problems of bad debt head-on: account for it, speed up resolution, speed up divestment of poorly managed public banks and infrastructure companies, and set up more transparent data collection/publishing in place.
Although traffic drives on the left-hand side of the road most vehicles are imported from the United States and are left hand drive.When driving abroad in the Bahamas you should therefore exercise caution, especially when overtaking.
– Driver Abroad.
No kidding. On Reddit, someone’s own account:
Nailed it. So, in the Bahamas, I was riding in a taxi. American vehicle (Left hand drive), driving on the left side of the road. We’re following say…a van…going down the road. Taxi cab driver decides to pass, but he can’t see. At all. Because there’s a van in front of us, and he (taxi driver) is on the wrong side of the vehicle (to be able to see oncoming traffic). So, he sits in the middle of the front (bench) seat. He slides over to the right as far as he possibly can, so he can see if it’s safe to pull out and overtake the van. Now, at this point, he can barely reach the brake, and can barely reach the gas, and leans far into the passenger seat (in the front) and sticks his head as far right as he can, so he can see if anything coming, then he pulls out, and we pass the van. So dangerous there are no words. It should be illegal.
– this Reddit thread.