Some holiday

Blame this on the statistical machine translation project. Or on me, if you like. Depending on how much you like to treat man as being an instrument of the world. Pardon the mood. Blame it on the book I’ve been reading – Sophie’s World. Or on me, if you like, like I said before.

Correlations are what I’ve been pondering about for a few days now. Unlike a lot of boring mathematics, this is easy to understand. Guess it is best summed up by the story of the old woman who thought that the sun rose because her hen cried. She is not to blame. (At least not more than ultra modern women who play lines like ‘He is a typical Piscean’ and ‘That’s not surprising. She’s cancerean’). Not many steer clear of the correlation-causation fallacy. If two things consistently happen together, you conclude that the one that precedes causes the one that follows. Sounds logical. Evolutionary psychologists would say that it is not you but mindless evolution that is to blame for the fallacy. We’ll come to that, probably.

This is not so much about the correlation-causation fallacy as it is about spurious correlations. In situations where guessing is all that is possible, it might not be a sin, after all, to conclude causation from correlation. (As, is the case in our project, the details of which I decided the reader deserves not to be subjected to).

Events which indeed are related would appear to be correlated. Not surprisingly. But when only finite number of observations are made, there is a good chance of observing correlations among unrelated variables (Can’t help quoting the ‘Typical of a Piscean’ line). In fact, you are more likely than not to make such an observation. The chance of making such observations only reduces as you make more and more observations. Inasmuch as I would like to avoid words of wisdom, Truth prevails over time and spurious correlations die out and only the true ones remain when a large number of observations are made. The trouble, however, is that you might need to make a conclusion even when you have not made enough observations (seen enough of life) and like I said, a couple of spurious correlations will make their way into your system.

Now, spurious correlations would certainly explain some odd coincidences that occurred recently. And if they don’t suffice, we’ll call upon the the-idol-was-in-the-stone argument. The latter, if you are not familiar concerns the sculptor who, upon being asked about his creation said that all he did was to merely expose the idol in the stone. How would you counter that? You can see anything you want in a stone. Well… almost anything. Like in your observations.

Well….well… for starters, I was reading the chapter on Karl Marx and the exploitation of the proletariat while my Grandmom was telling me about a small family here. The woman works part-time in a teashop for Rs. 50 (a dollar and a quarter) a day and the man chops firewood for a living. I must have got to the proletariat revolution part when she said that we’d have to sell off some of our land because we weren’t using it and the government wanted them to be owned by people who could grow something there.

I wasn’t paying much attention to what the neighbour was telling my Grandmom. I was reading about this dangerous idea of Darwin. Simple, small but consistent processes over time can create a world so wonderful that man had to create God to explain it. (Time and pressure, that’s all it takes - Andy, Shawshank Redemption) Thanks to the cocktail-party effect, it was when I was reading about the uniqueness of individuals and ‘random errors’ in cell division (something central to Darwin’s idea) that I paid attention to the discussion going on in the background. It was her two kids that she was talking about. One of the boys studied really well and was on his way to win some kind of a scholarship and the other one had trouble retaining what was taught to him.

After a good dose of Darwin and genes and genealogies I decided I needed a walk. It was really hot and so I wore a mundu (a variant of dhoti, not worn like one though). When I asked my Grandmom if I was wearing it the right way, she said ‘Oh….just like your grandfather used to’.

The next chapter was on Freud. Natural instincts suppressed and locked up in the basement to conform to unwritten rules, the constant tension between desire and guilt…. I could not agree more. Buses here are pretty fast and certainly not the best place to read a thing. But I discovered that a particular position of the bag on my lap and my elbow on my bag absorbed enough shock to limit the vibrations of the book just enough to let me read. The window helped. I could look out. I saw two nuns standing by the road.

I was glad Gaarder shared my views about new age worthless philosophy that I’ve come so much to abhor… not least because of the pseudo-scientific theories I’ve seen people on orkut proposing. And the examples of nonsense books that he provides… are perfect: Life After Death? The Secrets of Spiritism, Tarot, The UFO Phenomenon, Healing, The Return of Gods, You have been here before, What is Astrology? That was almost exactly when my uncle showed me a photo album. They were photos taken during a jathakam kodukkal ceremony. That’s the ritual performed where a book (traditionally a bunch of dry leafs with markings) which predicts all major events in one’s life exchanges hands. And if you lived in this part of the world, you better make sure these things are done like they ought to be done. You never know what the gods might resort to if they are displeased. Gaarder drives the nail home with one line while talking about the list of books he mentions and the kinds of ideas they represent: “The difference between real philosophy and these books is more or less the same as the difference between real love and pornography.”`