Comments on: Of IT and Pascal’s Wager

By: soumen.chakrabarti

soumen.chakrabarti — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:41:52 +0000

“Those who are understand technology very intimately” and “some IT industry insiders (the collection with hammers who cannot imagine that every problem is not a nail)” — I hope you don’t mean Indian IT industry insiders understand technology very intimately! Most of India’s IT segment “leaders” are idiots and/or crooks. They won’t recognize a hammer if one fell into their lap.

We just bought several Hitachi ACs. We had a simple question: if you set the sleep timer, and while the AC is sleeping, utility power fails, what happens when power returns? You should have witnessed the confusion. Finally Hitachi India gave a verdict. We immediately ran their machines and proved them wrong.

We just bought several HP servers. We had a simple question: why are the two LEDs beside each hotswap disk not alight or blinking? We later discovered the answer after opening up a server: they are activated only if you have a multilane SAS/SATA card installed, not if you are running the hotswap disks on the planar SATA controller. Four tech people at HP could not give us the answer.

We just bought a 30kVA UPS from APC. The manual did not say how the 32 12V batteries were to be connected. So we said, any customer should know how to wire up the gadget, why is the installation manual incomplete? It’s been a month and no one in APC India could give us the answer.

This is what happens when technology does not emerge from the masses but is imposed from far away to merely complete work on hire. Our leading tech companies are almost as clueless as the politicians. And Dick Raju has proved that they can be quite as corrupted.

By: anuragdeepak

anuragdeepak — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 19:46:48 +0000

Atanu, you are highlighting a problem of investment governance. How does one manage the limited resources and put them to prioritzed use? The reasons investment governance becomes difficult, when one talks about social benefits, are:
1. You do not have a simplified logical criteria to assess various options.
2. The decision-makers who would rank the options on various criteria are not rational (they are merely literate and not educated).

Both these reasons stem from the fact that “We are governed by democracy and not meritocracy”. One would hope that the two go hand-in-hand but alas that hasn’t happened in free India.

I hope that we as a collective of logical, rational and educated citizens can come up with a structured decision-making mechanism to do this. Count me in if you are interested in such a research/discussion.

By: Srini

Srini — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 19:21:07 +0000

Atanu,

The way you presented the options in Pascal’s wager, it still looks like the best thing is to believe in God:
if the cost of not believing in God is infinite, and the cost of believing in God is nothing (according to your wager, you don’t lose anything if God doesn’t exist, by inference it hasn’t cost you anything to believe), it’s probably better to believe in some God even at the risk of believing in the wrong God, as long as there are only a finite number of Gods. Since the cost of believing in the wrong God, and the cost of not believing in the God are both same (capped at infinity), if you believe in some God, you escape hell with certain probability if God exists, where as you go to hell certainly if you don’t believe at all.
I think your multiple Gods hypothesis just reduces to a Single God Pascal’s wager with the probability of God’s existence adjusted appropriately;
You probably need to tweak the costs such that cost of believing in the wrong God is much higher than the cost of not believing in God at all.

By: vishu

vishu — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 13:16:04 +0000

The critical thinking void is created because of lack of understanding of economics. What is required to educate people is that

1.One needs to priortize problems and work on solutions which give the maximum return on money.

2.Money cannot be created by Government. Taxes which Government collects from one section of people will be used for many of these public policy implementation.

3. The best way to think is will people want their money to be used the way the Government does.If people agree to part with 30% of their money will they want it be used the way Government does.
If one has to educate a poor kid using our own money will we buy him laptop, mobile, broadband or we will give him a slate or book.

Vishal