Skin In The Game

 

The basic premise of the book is that one should not believe the opinions or forecasts of others unless they have some "skin in the game." Results are all that count—opinions and talk are worthless. It is so easy for people to utter nonsense, so unless they could potentially suffer the consequences of being wrong, you should ignore them. This is especially true for intellectuals in academia. However, "hard" science seems immune to this problem because of the redeeming nature of falsification, while "scientism—the excessive belief in science—is worthless.

As always both accessible and iconoclastic, Taleb challenges long-held beliefs about the values of those who spearhead military interventions, make financial investments, and propagate religious faiths. Among his insights:

• For social justice, focus on symmetry and risk sharing. You cannot make profits and transfer the risks to others, as bankers and large corporations do. You cannot get rich without owning your own risk and paying for your own losses. Forcing skin in the game corrects this asymmetry better than thousands of laws and regulations.
• Ethical rules aren’t universal. You’re part of a group larger than you, but it’s still smaller than humanity in general.
• Minorities, not majorities, run the world. The world is not run by consensus but by stubborn minorities imposing their tastes and ethics on others.
• You can be an intellectual yet still be an idiot. “Educated philistines” have been wrong on everything from Stalinism to Iraq to low-carb diets.
• Beware of complicated solutions (that someone was paid to find). A simple barbell can build muscle better than expensive new machines.
• True religion is commitment, not just faith. How much you believe in something is manifested only by what you’re willing to risk for it.

The phrase “skin in the game” is one we have often heard but rarely stopped to truly dissect. It is the backbone of risk management, but it’s also an astonishingly rich worldview that, as Taleb shows in this book, applies to all aspects of our lives. As Taleb says, “The symmetry of skin in the game is a simple rule that’s necessary for fairness and justice, and the ultimate BS-buster,” and “Never trust anyone who doesn’t have skin in the game. Without it, fools and crooks will benefit, and their mistakes will never come back to haunt them.”

You can't chew with somebody else's teeth, and your fingernails can best scratch your itch, and there is nothing without skin in the game.

The author has beautifully summarised the book with a long maxim. 

No muscles without strength, 

friendship without trust, 

opinion without consequence, 

change without aesthetics, 

age without values, 

life without effort, 

water without thirst, 

food without nourishment, 

love without sacrifice, 

power without fairness, 

facts without rigor, 

statistics without logic, 

mathematics without proof, 

teaching without experience, 

politeness without warmth, 

values without embodiment, 

degrees without erudition, 

militarism without fortitude, 

progress without civilization, 

friendship without investment, 

virtue without risk, 

probability without ergodicity, 

wealth without exposure, 

complication without depth, 

fluency without content, 

decision without asymmetry, 

science without skepticism, 

religion without tolerance, 

and, most of all: 

nothing without skin in the game.

Cubbon Park

 

Cubbon Park is still untarnished by Bangalore's extreme urbanisation and excessive development pace. A park that gives you a touch of cool breeze, the sound of trees swaying, and birds chirping. It's so rightly stated in the book: The eight gates of Cubbon Park: "Every gate is a window into the city."

I got to know so many anecdotes and facts about Cubbon that I didn't know about it so far. It has given me a different perspective on the park, which has so much history attached to it and is one of the two lungs of Bangalore City (the other being Lalbagh). It is not an ordinary park. This historic landmark, 152 years old, resides in every Bangalorean's heart, a welcome buffer zone under an open sky. As the author mentioned, the park has always been a space that carries within itself the very DNA of the city that Kempegowda built. This book is as much about its people as it is about the park.

Originally created in 1870 under Major General Richard Sankey, then British Chief Engineer of Mysore State, it was Sankey who designed the swathe of land that rose behind it, towards Cubbon's house, and the extensive 100-acre park that would go on to become one of the city's most beloved green spaces.

It was first named Meade’s Park after Sir John Meade, the acting Commissioner of Mysuru, in 1870, and subsequently renamed Cubbon Park. The park was again renamed Sri. Chamarajendra Park; different people along the way would try to give it different names, but one and only one would stick: Cubbon Park.

The book has touched upon the history of a variety of statutes and buildings, including those depicting King Edward, Queen Victoria, Sri. Chamarajendra Wodeyar, Major General Sir Mark Cubbon, and the Statue of Sir K. Sheshadri Iyer that one comes across amidst the confines of the park.

Exercised

 

In Exercised, Harvard professor of evolutionary biology Daniel Lieberman explains that to truly understand exercise science, you must first understand something about human evolution and anthropology and how the body evolved to handle exercise. The mantra of this book is that nothing about the biology of exercise makes sense except in the light of evolution, and nothing about exercise as a behavior makes sense except in the light of anthropology.

 

That avoidance of exercise makes sense because exercise is a fundamentally strange and unusual behaviour from an evolutionary perspective. When all is said and done, exercise, despite its manifold benefits, requires overriding deep, natural instincts. So instead of shaming and blaming people who avoid exertion, we should help each other choose to exercise. But as the last few decades have shown, we won't succeed solely by medicalizing and commodifying exercise; instead, we should treat exercise the way we treat education by making it fun, social, emotionally worthwhile, and something that we willingly commit ourselves to do.

 

As Lieberman wrote, "nothing about the biology of exercise makes sense except in the light of evolution, and nothing about exercise as a behavior makes sense except in the light of anthropology." Using this evolutionary/anthropological framework, Lieberman sets out to explain how the body works when at rest (sitting and sleeping), when active (walking, running, lifting, fighting, dancing), and what this means for establishing effective exercise habits in the modern world. Along the way, he explains many of the myths associated with exercise and health. The word "myth" probably explains his take on these. Among some of the exaggerations are: is sitting as bad as smoking, do we need 8 hours of sleep each night, is the wear and tear of running bad for the knees, is a glass of red wine really as good as spending an hour at the Gym, is exercise useless for losing weight, and others.

 

 

The author used evolutionary and anthropological perspectives to explore and rethink dozens of myths about physical inactivity, activity, and exercise. Are we born to exercise? Is sitting the new smoking? Is it bad to slouch? Do you need eight hours of sleep? Are humans comparatively slow and weak?Is walking ineffective for losing weight? Does running ruin your knees? Is it normal to exercise less as we age? What is the best way to persuade people to exercise? Is there an optimal kind and amount of exercise? How much does exercise affect our vulnerability to cancer? 

 

The first thing to understand is that humans spent most of their 200,000-year evolutionary history as hunter-gatherers, with the invention of agriculture occurring only around 10,000 years ago and the modern industrial revolution beginning only about 200 years ago. The key to understanding our relationship to exercise, therefore, is found in the study of these hunter-gatherer groups.

 

Three useful definitions:

Physical activity (noun): any bodily movement produced by skeletal muscles that expends energy.

Exercise (noun): voluntary physical activity that is planned, structured, repetitive, and undertaken to sustain or improve health and fitness.

Exercised (adjective): to be vexed, anxious, worried, or harassed.

 

Below are some points that I jotted down that I found interesting while reading this book.

• It behooves us, however, to remember that exercise is a truly odd sort of medicine. It is largely medicinal because the absence of physical activity is unhealthy. Further, exercise not only is an abnormal behavior from an evolutionary perspective but also never evolved to be therapeutic. Instead, we evolved to spend energy

• Make exercise necessary and fun. Do mostly cardio, but also some weights. Some is better than none. Keep it up as you age

• Eating sensibly and exercising don't guarantee long life and good health; they just decrease the risk of getting sick

• Exercise is done against one’s wishes and maintained only because the alternative is worse.

• We evolved to be physically active as we age, and in turn being active helps us age well. Further, the longer we stay active, the greater the benefit and it is almost never too late to benefit from getting fit

• "Everyone knows they should exercise, but few things are more irritating than being told to exercise, how much, and in what way. Exhorting us to "Just Do It" is about as helpful as telling a drug addict to "Just Say No."

• You use more than thirty pounds of ATP during a one-hour walk and more than your entire body weight of ATP over the course of a typical day—an obviously impossible amount to lug around in reserve.15 Consequently, the human body stores in toto only about a hundred grams of ATPs at any given moment.

• How Much and What Kind of Exercise Are Best? This one is easy: cardio is better than weights for obesity. As we will see later, weights help counteract some of the metabolic consequences of obesity, but cardio is better for preventing and reversing excess weight.

• Aging is inexorable, but senescence, the deterioration of function associated with advancing years, correlates much less strongly with age. Instead, senescence is also influenced strongly by environmental factors like diet, physical activity, or radiation, and thus can be slowed, sometimes prevented, and even partly reversed. The distinction between aging and senescence may seem obvious, but the two processes are frequently confused.

 

 The bottom line is:

We didn’t evolve to run marathons, play tennis, go jogging etc. Nor did we evolve to sit around all day.

Move often. Eat fresh food. The cardio is good. Cardio with some strength training is better. Just pumping weights is not as good as cardio. Walk sometimes. Jog sometimes. Go hard sometimes. You don’t stop moving because you get old. You get old because you stop moving.

The body keeps the score

 

The Body Keeps the Score.

The Body Keeps the Score is a non-fiction book about how the body stores trauma and what you can do about it.

My most distressing takeaway from this book was how common trauma is. Author Bessel van der Kolk discusses how people from all walks of life suffer from trauma.

I finally wrote a review on this book, a bit longer than expected, but I think it’s worth reading if you haven’t already read it.

Discussions of PTSD still tend to focus on recently returned soldiers, victims of terrorist bombings, or survivors of terrible accidents. But trauma remains a much larger public health issue, arguably the greatest threat to any country’s national health, and it’s a hidden pandemic.

One can see the awareness programmes on diseases like cancer, AIDS, etc. But we seem too embarrassed or discouraged to mount a massive effort to help children and adults learn to deal with the fear, rage, and collapse—the predictable consequences of having been traumatised.

In today’s world, your ZIP code, even more than your genetic code, determines whether you will lead a safe and healthy life. People’s income, family, structure, housing, employment, and educational opportunities affect not only the risk of developing traumatic stress but also their access to help address it. Poverty, unemployment, inferior schools, social isolation, and the widespread availability of guns are breeding grounds for trauma.

Trauma breeds further trauma; hurt people hurt other people. 

We are fundamentally social creatures; our brains are wired to foster working and playing together. Trauma devastates the social engagement system and interferes with cooperation, nurturing, and the ability to function as productive members of a clan.

In this book, I have learned how many mental health problems, from drug addiction to self-injurious behaviour, start off as attempts to cope with emotions that became unbearable because of a lack of adequate human contact and support.

People can learn to control and change their behaviour, but only if they feel safe enough to experiment with new solutions. 

The body keeps the score: if trauma is encoded in heartbreak and wrenching sensations, then our first priority is to help people move out of flight or fight states, re-organise their perception of danger, and manage relationships. Where traumatised children are concerned, we should place more focus on the chorus, physical education, recess, and anything else that involves movement, play, or other forms of joyful engagement.

All of us, but especially children, need the kind of confidence that others affirm and cherish. Without that, we can’t develop a sense of agency that will enable us to assert: "That is what I believe in; that is what I stand for; that is what I will devote myself to." As long as we feel safely held in the hearts and minds of the people who love us, we will climb mountains, cross deserts, and stay up all night to finish projects. Children and adults will do anything for people they trust and whose opinions they value.

But if you feel abandoned, worthless, or invisible, nothing seems to matter. Fear destroys curiosity and playfulness. There can be no growth without curiosity, and no adaptability without being able to explore through trial and error.

Resilience is the product of agency—knowing that what you can do can make a difference. Many of us remember what playing team sports, singing in the school choir, or playing in the marching band meant to us, especially if we had coaches who believed in us, pushed us to excel, and taught us we could be better than we thought was possible.

Trauma constantly confronts us with our fragility and with man’s inhumanity to man but also with our extraordinary resilience.

He also has an entire chapter on alternative therapies such as mindfulness, meditation, breathing exercises, and yoga. He stresses the importance of becoming aware of one’s own body, and not just in the sense of noticing when you are hyperventilating or your heart is jumping out of your chest—although these are good things to notice too—but also where memories feel like they are stored in your body. You know where it is uncomfortable to be touched or, in yoga, which positions make you feel vulnerable and why that might be.

 When people think about trauma, they generally think of it as a historical event that happened some time ago. Trauma is actually the residue of the past as it settles into your body. It’s located inside your own skin. When people are traumatised, they become afraid of their physical sensations; their breathing becomes shallow; and they become uptight and frightened about what they’re feeling inside. When you slow down your breathing with yoga, you can increase your heart rate variability, and that decreases stress. Yoga opens you up to feeling every aspect of your body’s sensations. It’s a gentle, safe way for people to befriend their bodies, where the trauma of the past is stored. Studies show that yoga is equally as beneficial—or more beneficial—than the best possible medications in alleviating traumatic stress symptoms.

And last, but not least, most great instigators of social change have intimate personal knowledge of trauma. That brings to mind Maya, Angelou, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King.

More than just O-rings.

 

More than just O-rings. 

When the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after launch on 28th Jan 1986, killing all the seven people onboard, a Presidential Commission was formed to investigate the disaster, it was headed Neil Armstrong, Sally Ride (The first woman in space), and none other than Richard Feynman (Nobel prize winner physicist).

The Challenger exploded because of a leak from one of the solid rocket boosters. Each weighed around 500 tonnes, used metal as fuel: they burned aluminum.

Once the fuel was spent at an altitude of over 40 kilometers, boosters got jettisoned by the shuttle and eventually deployed a parachute so they would splash down the Atlantic Ocean. Re-use was the name of the shuttle game, So NASA would send boats out to collect the boosters and take them off to be reconditioned and refueled for the next take-off. 

As the booster slammed into the ocean, the boosters were basically empty tubes. They were built with a perfectly CIRCULAR cross-section, but the impact could distort them slightly and added stress during the transportation. They were dismantled into four sections, checked to see how distorted they were, reshaped into perfect circles, and put back together. Rubber gaskets called O-rings were placed between the sections to provide a tight seal (we have the same gaskets in LPG cylinders).

It was these O-rings that failed during the launch of Challenger, allowing hot gases to escape from the boosters and start the chain of events that lead to that disaster. 

Famously, during the investigation, Richard Feynman demonstrated how the O-rings lost their elasticity at low temperatures. But Feynman also uncovered a second problem with the seals between the booster sections. Checking if a cross-section of a cylinder is still circular is not that easy. For the boosters, the procedure for doing this was to measure the diameter in three different places and make sure that all three were equal. But Feynman realized that this was not sufficient. 

Feynman recalled as a child seeing in a museum ‘non-circular, funny-looking, crazy-shaped gears’ which remained at the same height as they rotated. Despite not being circles, they always have the same-sized diameter from any direction you wish to measure it. You could make thousands of diametric measurements of a shape of constant widths, such as a Reuleaux triangle, they would all come out exactly the same, despite the shape being very much not circular.

So, if a booster had been distorted into a Reuleaux triangle cross-section, then the engineers would have been able to spot this easily, it might not be visible to the naked eye but still, be enough of distortion to change the shape of the seal. 

The final report bears that performance of the rubber O-rings was definitely the primary cause of the accident. But there was a recommendation and 'finding #5': by investigating the team for how the NASA engineering and management team missed a ‘Significant out-of-round conditions existed between the two segments’. 

NASA undone by simple geometry. 

Feynman's shape with three identical diameters next to a shape of infinitely many identical diameters. Both are obviously not circles.

Kennedy Space Center, Florida - Space Shuttle Challenger launches from launchpad.
Pic courtesy - Wikipeida.org.

Space Shuttle Challenger explodes shortly after take-off.

Pic courtesy - Wikipeida.org.

This blog is written based on a chapter from the book "Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

Book by Matt Parker"

Book's link - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39074550-humble-pi

Perspective

 perspective 

 

As mum had to be admitted at the heights of the lockdown during the Covid-19 Pandemic, that week in intensive care was a bit of a rollercoaster ride, with doctors and nurses needing to keep a close eye on her vitals, and her life was under the support of BiPAP (Non-invasive ventilation), meanwhile, her Covid-19 test result was awaited, a Positive result in the covid test could have opened another Pandora box. 

The oxygen level reached worrying lows, thanks to those God's sent nurses, who would let me see her through video calls, My worry about mum stripped everything else away.

I didn't care about any urgent emails or the calls, I hadn't gotten back to. I didn't have the temptation to check anything which was a periodic task until she was admitted. Even the world news seemed so irrelevant when you are sitting outside the door of an intensive care unit hearing the wails of grief and those ICUs are full of activity and its disturbing noises of equipment beeping, the commotion of nurses and doctors inside the intensive care, raised my heartbeat. 

Intensive care units are bleak places, sometimes, but those sterile rooms full of health care people alight between life and death can be also hopeful ones. The nurses and doctors were my inspiration in the time of darkness. 

The ignominy of this event, I suppose that it takes us such a major event in our lives or the people we love, for perspective to arrive. invariably we take things for granted. I imagined that I could keep hold of this perspective, I would always keep my priorities right, even during good and happy times. I imagined if we could always think of our loved ones the way we think of them when they are in a critical condition. If we always keep the love for them, Love that is always there... So close to the surface, I imagined the love of life and gratitude towards life. 

Well, I am trying now, when my life gets too jam-packed with redundant and stressful junk. I remember that room in the hospital. Where mum was thankful to have a view out of the window or a momentary video call,  I was giving her assurance, everything will be alright mum, you will be fine. 

A marathon without Garmin

A marathon without Garmin

It was just a few weeks ago, I had deactivated my social media accounts (Facebook/Instagram) to use the time more productively elsewhere. The goal was to remain gadget-free as much as possible, I know it's easier said than done, and I slowly started achieving the same, Fiddling with mobile phone reduced drastically. God granted my wish to go gadget-free to an extra level, I ended up running a  Marathon without Garmin (Initially not planned), and I thank God for this blessing in disguise. So here is the story and learnings of this experience of running a marathon without Garmin.


I had signed up for the Auroville marathon at the last moment, post canceling my plans to run the IDBI Delhi marathon, reason, as I had no intention to run a race for timing for now. I just want to enjoy my running and with no race or timing target pressures.

So at the start line of the Auroville Marathon around 4 Am, when I tried to switch on my Garmin watch, it gave a weird display that to save a workout of 90km, I remain puzzled for some time as that how did this happen! As the start timing was approaching fast, I didn't think much and tried to discard the workout of 90km, to my shock Garmin battery drained out, I tried everything to revive the watch without any success. It was not a situation that a runner wants to be in before a race. I had charged it to 100% before embarking on my journey from Bangalore, I without thinking too much went to the baggage counter and kept the watch inside my bag, as it's no point to wear a drained watch.

And I made a decision to run a marathon without a watch for the first time ever.

Just before the start, I saw Anuradha and the gang arrived for their Half marathon, which was supposed to start 1 hour after us at 6 AM. When I told her that my Garmin went bonkers, she offered me her new Garmin watch, which she was herself yet to wear in a race. I declined her offer gracefully, however, I was touched by her gesture. And I thought about her during the run.

I realized quickly there is no need to cry about something which is not in my hand and rather use this opportunity to get a whole new experience, and there is one race where I can actually try this was the Auroville, where you run for the joy for running, literally. So the race started at 5 am, I had decided to run this race by feel and take it easy. With no watch in my wrist, to be honest, it was like I was missing something in my body and it took my mind some time to understand, I brought my wrist in front of the face to check pace only to see an empty wrist, you see, how much a slave we become to it. My subconscious mind was not ready to accept it.

After 15-20 minutes into the race, I started listening to my breathing; I felt the rhythm in my legs, the motion of the arms. Overall, It leads to a refined sense of pace and effort. Racing is a skill that might take years to acquire with or without the watch, however, the more experienced you are, the less you rely on the watch. I started enjoying the race more than ever, this was my 4th Auroville Marathon. The first 1 hour we run in complete darkness, Auroville narrow trail with so many markings for turnings, one need to be extra careful in the narrow trail, many sections where only one person can run at a time., you can easily get lost or go in the wrong trail if you miss the markings. With all these things that need to take care you anyway don't have much attention left to check miles marker along the route.

With no watch strapped, I had no idea which Mile of the race I was into and what time was it. I started enjoying the trail. I met few debut marathoners in the trail, I met a young Doctor (25 years) who was running his first marathon there, obviously with no experience, he was running too fast, he ran with me for the first 1 hour or so, we had some good conversation, I warned him that he was going too fast, and he has another 30-32km probably left behind to run, he looked at his watch and said the pace is 5:30 mins/km, and this is what he has planned. Well obviously he was running much faster than what his Garmin was showing him, I could gauge with my effort that we were running probably just under sub 5 mins/km at that point of time. After he agreed to slow down and I went ahead.

We all know that Garmin constantly adjusts your pace to match the GPS’ “current” pace. A GPS watch can be a wonderful tool, it’s not perfect. If you think about it, this little tiny thing on your wrist is acquiring signals from outer space and using that to geolocate you.  with a lot of tree cover in the Auroville trail, satellites aren’t always going to be able to pick you up, which means the measurement won’t be as accurate. Hence that Doctor runner was seeing a pace much slower than what he was exactly running.

The above is a classic example of too much dependency on GPS watches can throw you off the pace and literally can screw your race by showing your wrong data. Relying exclusively on a GPS during training runs, a runner never develops the learned sense of pace that is critical to race day success. Even wearing a GPS device during a race doesn’t guarantee pacing success – what if the signal is lost, it happens in a city with a lot of tall buildings, Chicago Marathon is infamous for that, in trial running like Auroville with a lot of tree covers, to makeover the pace which we think is correct by GPS, we surge or runway faster, and when its actual time to push at the end we bonk, so it's very critical to know how to race and gauge the pace without GPS dependency.

We all have been in a situation during the run when you looked down in your Garmin and saw your pace, you get freaked out, as it is way slower than you were “supposed to be”, so we quickly start to push, and then when you see the next mile, you are now way too fast. Not only that, but you are now breathing much harder than you should be. so we slow down the pace, and then we spend the next entire mile pondering that what just went wrong.

So I reached the finish line, saw the big clock reading 3:32:xx!, to be very honest, I wasn't planning this run a sub 3:40. If I was running with Garmin. I would have purposefully done 3:50:xx

And after running the Auroville, to my surprise. I had no soreness or fatigue. Everyone at the finish line was telling me that I looked fresh and energetic post the run. I realized that the mental pressure of maintaining the pace throughout the run creates soreness and fatigue more than effort.


My two cents to all the runners don't be a slave to your Garmin. I am not telling you literally to give up wearing it. What I am telling is to IGNORE it until you finish the run. I know it's easier said than done, this is the one thing we struggle with the most.

Don't let your watch dictate your run, because by doing so you are not listening to your body. I again repeat I am not saying do not wear Garmin/GPS watch, I love mine and rarely go out running without it. But I rarely depend on them, instead, I listen to my body and rhythm, maybe due to this reason, I could pull a decent timing without much fuss in this Auroville.

So in this Auroville Marathon, I had no ideas of my splits, heart rate, cadence, pace, etc, rather I was overtaken by the joy of running, and this is what Auroville is known for to organize something purely for the joy of running. It considers all the finishers as winners and therefore does not award any prize money for the early finishers. Hence why it is not a timed run. And this is one of the biggest reasons why I look forward participating in this run each year. 

The wodden Auroville Medal and dusty shoe.