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“Nice Guys Finish First” documentary by Richard Dawkins throws some light on why Altruism is a very necessary element. The theme of the documentary is reciprocal altruism, simple explanation given is “Individuals allow themselves to remain in the same state or move to a lower state to help another person go up in state within the community”. The theory was applied to a large set where there are plenty of interactions within the observed group, the race to the bottom was inevitable where exploitation of the resources were present.

The definition of the nice guy was demonstrated using the prisoner’s dilemma as a computer game tournament.  The rules were simple,

  • If two players co-operate then they take equal share of the output.
  • If one of the players does not play nice, then the cheater gets a steal and the loser gets nothing.
  • If both try to cheat, then they end up with lesser output than they would have co-operatively got out.
  • There are more than one turn for each player to play against the same player.

Many people submitted their programs as players in the tournament with varied strategies. The one which Richard Dawkins called as nice guy was the “Tit for Tat” strategy. Tit for tat strategy won the tournament. The following were the observations of the nice guy in a setting were multiple interactions with the same individual is possible.

  • Is always co-operative unless cheated.
  • Keeps in mind who cheats and does not co-operate with the cheaters.
  • Will be the first person to forgive and give a chance to the cheaters to be co-operative.

This also reminded me of the Allegory of long spoons.  I also have seen some real life examples of nice people living the best life than the people around them.

Nice people, do you finish at the top?

Image courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/garryknight/2490056817/

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Einstein explained special relativity to the masses using thought experiments called Gedankenexperiment in German, few examples are here. The kind of explanations given through that experiment was quite easy to understand and relate to. The key point in the experiment was the absurd and almost impossible situations imagined. He revealed that time is just a difference between observed sequence of events and space is the distance between two events that are observed to occur at the same time. Nothing is uniform or static, everything is relative to something.

The reason I brought up Gedankenexperiment is that it should be a key skill developed in every individual right from the childhood. The laboratory experiments are too expensive, needs caution and sometimes impossible to perform. This applies to every field of learning, that is the reason people teach object oriented programming with inanimate objects but give a behavior to it as if it was a living thing. These experiments help grasp the theory much faster and explore the entire lengths of possibilities which in turn helps to apply well when it comes to implementation.

I have observed that many of my trainers were content centric and relied on effective brain dumps. Few of the exceptional trainers really kindled the curiosity and made me explore the roots of a topic and then the thought experiments on the way to the college did the rest. Some of my key learnings were strongly supported by the thought experiments.

Below are some of the points I found useful while learning and teaching

  • Create a picture in the listener’s mind. Visualizations are key to imagination, have a look at a very simple animation done by ‘The Inconvenient truth’ team. A kid can so easily get the idea about greenhouse gases.
  • Kindle the curiosity by planting an unfinished thought experiment in the learner’s mind. I received a lesson in chemistry where there was clear depiction of  how covalent bonds occur between atoms (after explaining the shells and inert gases) such that they enter a steadier state and then the teacher pressed the class to find out another way for atoms to steadier state. We found it and all the teacher had to do was to mention what that kind of bond is called.
  • Encourage silly questions, they trigger the best imaginations.
  • Times change, visualization tools change, keep adapting. Prezi, GoAnimate, Visual Thesaurus  are some of the few which can help in the modern classroom.
  • Time to think, this is as important as the time to teach. Crunching in more sessions and home work can eat away the time without providing enough value.
If you get a chance to teach, try it more visually such a way that it promotes Gedankenexperiment and check the results it brings.

Image: Worakit Sirijinda / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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Just a decade ago the amount of memory for a typical desktop was in the lower 3 digits of MB. 15 years before it was in 2 digits of MB. Yet we had email clients, browsers, word processors, spread sheets, image processors. I read about one financial analyst’s perspective about the inflation and taxation in America. It is such that the purchasing power of money in your hand after taxes is significantly lower than the inflation adjusted money’s purchasing power in 1950. For example; if someone sells her house for in 1950 and then the amount of purchasing power that money had after the tax was significantly higher than what it could do in 2012. The direct and indirect taxes have risen and the inflation has masked the effects of it.

While writing this, I am doing so in a machine which has 8GB RAM, 500GB hard disk and i7 processor. That is a 250 times increase in my computing power than 15 years ago. Though the frequency of the crashes I encounter has reduced to a great deal, there are still crashes and non responding apps which annoys at times. I have observed that the thought “memory has become cheaper than efficient programs” is prevalent for most of the applications barring a few which demand performance. Take a look at the hardware of the Apollo Guidance Computer. We were able to land on the moon with that piece of hardware, but right now even with such excellent hardware we many times end up with non responsive websites. With a workload of just above 1000 concurrent users some web sites can easily choke the best hardware they are running in.

Is there a way that the generous doses of memory and computing power could be used effectively or will be waiting for something like water scarcity or environment pollution to happen to learn to use the hardwares efficiently?