Disturbed

This happened before the coffee shop painted itself red for Christmas. And before it replaced its brown cups with more festive looking ones that said “Pass the Cheer”.

The day had been rather uneventful. With the semester coming to an end, projects that would be started and finished on the day they were due were commonplace. It was one of those days. And I was punching keys on my computer over my Grande coffee.

I was sitting beside the large window at the far corner. The chair pretty much faced the wall. Outside, wind was blowing heavily and the campus was deserted. I was buried deep in the program that I was writing when I heard some people settle down at a table behind me.

Have you noticed how they say ‘The way I see it’ here. It was the voice of a professor. Or a PhD student I thought. Student of literature or some such thing. I don’t know. What I did know was that he was referring to what was written on the coffee cup. The coffee shop prints some words-of-wisdom of random people under the heading ‘The way I see it’.

Why do people have to play it so safe? Why can’t they just rather say ‘The way it IS?’ He didn’t sound irritated. But he wasn’t exactly at ease either.

Well… probably because they are just not sure that that’s the way it is. All that they know is that that’s the way they see it.

This had to be the professor’s grad student. Student of psychology… maybe?

The man was almost furious now. See? You are doing it too. Why should you say ‘probably’ when that’s what you believe?

Same reason Sir. I’m just not sure. And so I don’t believe it either. I’m just guessing.

Oh come on… you know it as well as I do. We can never be sure of anything. Everything’s a theory. Some just don’t look like it.

I have developed this new way of writing programs. It is called save-the-worst-for-the-last. It works well for me. I spend ninety percent of the time cornering the most difficult part of the program and then I go for the throat. I was in the first ninety percent when this was happening.

How is your thesis on risk coming along?

A third voice? Probably a different pair. This was a student certainly. And he was talking to one too. It is shaping up well. This had to be a PhD student.

It is shaping up quite well actually. I’m using some ideas from the course on Chaos and Randomness. Actually, I think I can explain it to you even if I cut out the math.

This is going to be interesting, I thought. Particularly now that I just had 4 hours left for the deadline to expire and I was nowhere close to completion.

The furious prof was saying…. You know how Feynman once said that we are only sure when we are wrong. Otherwise the most we can say is that we haven’t yet been proven wrong and have no idea if we would ever be.

Yes. But you are missing the point here. I think it is perfectly alright to say that you see something in a certain way. Like it does on the cup here. After all, generally a thing is far more complex than what is seen from different perspectives. And it only helps to know what someone else sees in something.

I was thinking of all my computer science friends to whom this would sound so abstract that they would run away.

Indeed, the prof said. But all this soft talk gives kids the impression that things are all amorphous. That nothing can be said about anything and that somehow making statements which are NOT clear enough is a sign of intellectual maturity.

In the meantime, I missed a part of the explanation of the thesis on Risk.

...the thing is, the student was saying, that it often happens that someone makes a decision that is not the one most likely to succeed. And by sheer chance he happens to succeed. This draws more attention than it ought to and the hasty lot concludes that that was the right thing to do. The symmetric case also is true. By sheer chance, a choice that was most likely to be right proves to be wrong and the same lot quickly concludes that it pays to be wrong.

But that’s not completely nonsensical, is it?

No. The trouble is with criticizing choices in retrospect. We just miss the point that the choice that proved to be wrong could indeed have been the most promising at the time that it was made. Chance is not something that humans have evolved to understand. And that is reason that we miss this point…

The other conversation had begun to smell more of consensus while I wasn’t paying attention. It had also broken free of the cup and leapt into the arena of philosophy of science.

… it is non-falsifiable theories that people are most comfortable with. Because, by definition, they do not have the fear of being proven wrong. Isn’t it ironic that the falsifiable theories, which are more than anything else, likely to model reality correctly, are also the ones that people trust the least?

I heard some shuffling of feet and soon came more voices. One of which said…You know what he says about ownership in The English Patient?

A student? A professor? Philosophy major? I wasn’t getting any better at guessing. But it was looking like I would finish my project on time after all.

Well… he says that he hates ownership the most but later he claims her…

“Sir”, someone called. A woman was standing before me. “We’d love to let you continue your work Sir. But we have to close early today.” “Oh. OK. But why is that?” “It looks like there’s going to be a storm tonight Sir. Also, you see, we have only had you this evening.”