The World as I see it - Albert Einstein

Well, I kinda cheated. Didn't really read the entire book, but more like a summary of it :) Still, it was quite a long read - 76 pages of it all.

This collection of letters and essays provides a much needed and wholesome insight into Albert Einstein's ideas and perspective - the things that make him human. With his success in the field of physics, it is sometimes hard to see beyond the E=mc squares that dominate his personality to hear his other ideas.

Here are some things about Einstein, as revealed in this collection, that struck me.

(i) Einstein was astoundingly humble. For example, he felt undeserving of the cult-like status that he received when he was in the US, saying that "This has been my fate, and the contrast between the popular estimate of my powers and achievements and the reality is simply grotesque." He also attributes our blessed existence and environment today - "A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving".

He goes further to say that this culture of individualism and egotism has not only consumed persons, but also society as a whole. "For whereas formerly it was enough for a man to have freed himself to some extent from personal egotism to make him a valuable member of society, to-day he must also be required to overcome national and class egotism. Only if he reaches those heights can he contribute towards improving the lot of humanity." How right he is!

(ii) He's not a big fan of accumulating wealth. "... at last beginning to be realized that
great wealth is not necessary for a happy and satisfactory life." and "The way to a joyful and happy state is through renunciation and self-limitation everywhere"

(iii) While Einstein doesn't believe in an immortal soul, he is religious in some way - he appears to see God more in terms of the beauty and remarkableness of the world that we live in - that can be connected to a form of cosmic experience. "The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science." In the same vein, he rejects atheists who can't marvel at this beauty. "The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer."

To him, Judaism and many of the Asian religions are more of "moral religions", endowing us with moral compasses and ways to lead our lives. "Judaism seems to me to be concerned almost exclusively with the moral attitude in life and to life." And "If one purges the Judaism of the Prophets and Christianity as Jesus Christ taught it of all subsequent additions, especially those of the priests, one is left with a teaching which is capable of curing all the social ills of humanity."

And finally, this is the one sentence that I think really struck me:
"The life of the individual has meaning only in so far as it aids in making the life of every living thing nobler and more beautiful."

The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Just finished reading the black swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. General impressions first! It is a book that really changed the way I think about many things, in particular (and but of course) how to look at uncertainty and randomness. Taleb rants quite a bit and spares no chance to make a dig at people whom he disagrees with, even if they are prominent and respectable people in society today. (I googled one of the names of a judge thinking that he was a severely flawed individual but instead read glowing writings about him online.)

To distill Taleb's ideas, they revolve around the irony that we are blindy confident about our inability to predict the future. The ideas can be broadly listed as follow:
(i) Humans are natural story weavers - we have to rationalise issues ex-post. The problem here is that events make perfect rational sense when we look backwards. This creates a false sense of certainty that removes the important role played by randomness. We in turn project this false sense into the future and overestimate our ability to predict.
(ii) Taleb's Ludic fallacy - using simple games and probability frameworks that we learn to model the world - which is a lot more complex.
(iii) The world is alot more complex. In fact, it is not just complex, but many events don't follow the simplistic bell-curve that we forcefully fit the world into. There are several reasons why the bell-curve doesn't work. It only measures probability, but not the impact of the event. It also underestimates the frequency of such "low-probability" events. Mechanisms such as the tournament effect (where winner takes a disproportionate amt of returns) and the benefits of early wins (events don't occur independently) skew the tail-ends of the bell-curve, making improbable events more likely and more impactful.
(iv) In addition, when analysing and predicting the future, we artificially limit the scope that is being examined and use that to project. However, such a model ignores the so-called "unknown unknowns" - things that we can't even incorporate into the model because we don't even know what they are. However, it is precisely these things that drive the world and its history! e.g. The rise of the internet, world wars, the financial meltdown.

And I guess the next question to ask is so what! :) What should I do now that I know that Black Swans abound! Here's where I like Taleb's idea of segmenting Black Swans into positive and negative ones. The positive ones are those that can generate enormous windfalls some of the time, but costs a little most of the time. The negative ones are no better described than Taleb's example of "picking pennies before steamrollers". You win small most of the time, but one unlucky event will blow you out of the water. For now, I'll just focus on the positive ones.

And the lesson is surprisingly simple. Black Swans are a product of randomness. To reap the rewards of positive Black Swans, one has to bid one's time by exposing oneself to as many events that hold the potential of positive Black Swans as possible. (an immediate example would be expending my energy to network with people. who knows who i'll meet next!)

Creating a World without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism - Muhammad Yunus

Am fostering a growing interest in the area of social enterprise. Decided to pick this book up and join the Singapore Social Enterprise yahoo group to bring myself up to speed on what are the global and local developments in the area.

Here's my own summary and take on this good man and his ideas.

What Yunus is proposing as the future of capitalism is his idea of a social business - an organisation spawned from a social objective but creates a profit-making shell so that it can be self-sustaining. This is a wholly different concept from that of CSR, where a company with a profit-making core attempts to increase the scope of its bottom line to include social and environmental good. As opposed to charities, this allows greater survivability, self-sufficiency, scalability, and ultimately the capability of the organisation to do greater good. Being an absolute noob to the world of business and charities, I can easily imagine myself scorning such an idea if I had no prior knowledge about how much the Grameen Bank has accomplished.

Central to Yunus's philosophy is that economics currently assumes, for the sake of over-simplification, that we are all one-dimensional human beings with only one objective - profit-maximisation. Yunus wonders if we could have a more enc0mpassing view of human desires in economics. This way, two of the world's most pressing problems - poverty and our destruction of the environment - may see some light as the clouds of single-minded capitalism retreats.

There are some other nuggets of lessons from the book, which can be summarised as follow:

1. Contrary to what organisations such as the IMF and World Bank believes (which is that the poor need advice, new regulations, capability building), the poor are able to solve their own problems if given the right resources. In fact, they only need very little resources to do so.
2. This also addresses the other myth that poor people are in their condition simply because they lack the skills (hence the capability upgrading programs). Having said that, the injection of skill can make a significant impact on bringing the poor to the next level.
   
3. One of the few resources that they can tap on - loans from moneylenders - have such high charges that it effectively enslaves the poor and perpetuates their poverty.
   
4. In this regard, microcredit is an appropriate solution to the poverty problem, by providing a cheaper resource.
   
5. Apparently, women are much less likely to default than men!

Overall, a good and very thought-provoking book! Has introduced me to the world of social businesses - let's see where this path brings me!