The "Instant" Syndrome

It is said that the longer you work in a profession, the more it starts affecting your entire personality. A businessman thinks of personal relationships in terms of "profit-loss", "risk analysis", a doctor tries to diagnose, a research scientist looks for a cause-effect in everything, etc. As I sit here for the 12th straight year in front of a computer, I wonder how we computer scientists are affected by our profession. The more I ponder upon this question, the more convinced I am about something unique to me and my next generation: the "instant" syndrome.

We computer scientists (and others who use a computer for more than 3 hours a day) are so used to doing everything instantly with our fingers that sometimes we fail to understand the ways of the world. Over the years I have realized that my patience in some aspects has been dwindling. I attribute it to my "instant" syndrome.

1. Why does it take so much time to find out something? Every week I have an episode of frustration where I try to find out about something and "google" search does not give me the desired results. Sulking I have to make my way to the library. And of course I'd like to find out whether they have what I need without actually going there. So I use their "search" tool. And no, it is not nearly as good as Google. And then I wonder, how did my previous generation conduct any kind of research? The possibility of sitting in a library basement surrounded by actual manuscripts has haunted me many times when I was a PhD student!

2. The other day I had to send my car to the repair shop. The guy said he would call me when its ready, but it would take 2-3 days. I spent the next 2-3 days waiting for a call, waiting to get a "status" check. If I buy something from amazon or dell, it provides me with the ability to track in real-time the status of my order. Why doesn't the rest of the world work this way?

3. The other day I had to erase the whiteboard in my office to explain something to a student. Immediately after I erased it clean I remembered a piece of information that I had written on it that I needed! For a split second, I experienced frustration at not being able to "undo" it :-)

4. A new Aamir Khan movie? Music by A R Rahman? Great! Can't wait to hear it! Literally! As a child I used to see it on Chitrahaar (there weren't really promos on TV then). In my college days I saw promos on TV and posters on screen. Now that I'm away from India I listen to them on the radio. But most in my profession can't wait even that long: the DVDs of My Name is Khan are available in our Indian grocery store for pittance. The gut reaction of everybody nowadays is: sounds interesting, let's download it! Now why can't everything else be free and downloadable?

5. One of the funniest examples of the "instant" syndrome is email. Answer these seriously: how many times have you emailed a person who sits right next to you? How many times have you chatted with a person via messenger when he/she happens to be sitting in the next room? Even funnier, how many times have you emailed someone and then called them to verify that they received and read the email! I am unequivocally dismayed every time someone asks me to "fax" something to them, or submit "copies" of some documents.

Look at world news to find all kinds of examples of the "instant" syndrome! 24x7 TV making the most mundane of activities seem like "breaking news" (its by far the slowest motion I have seen if something continues to be "breaking news" for 4-5 hours). People twittering about their daily errands, orkutting and facebooking about themselves (I once got an email from a person (not the website) informing me that he had added me as his friend on orkut and that I should respond!) No wonder I and my generation represent a section of the populace most frustrated with the governments of the world!

Digital medicine?

So here's my problem with the information age (yes, I do teach Information Technology myself!): it assumes that access to information leads people to make good decisions. I'm afraid that is a very robotic view of the human psyche. I do not think the human mind works by a set of rules without any other influence.

In contrast with India, the US "freely" allows pharmaceutical advertisements on TV about prescription drugs. They range from the specious-sounding "restless leg syndrome" all the way to heart, alzheimer's and depression medicine. They are complete with side effects (mostly for legal reasons according to me) and the euphemistic "talk to your doctor about xxx". I truly pity the doctors of this country: imagine the patient coming to them with a medicine in mind and wondering why the doctor is not prescribing it.

But I concede that most people will believe the doctor more than an advertisement. The much bigger evil is digital medicine. One can find many web sites, some even managed by medical professionals, that provide details on all kinds of ailments. They also mention possible treatment options that a doctor may follow and any side effects of that treatment. They are complete with pictures. In true web 2.0 style, they also offer ways for readers to leave comments on their own experience with these ailments! I'll assume that their intentions are utterly noble: the patient wants to be informed and needs a 24x7 source of information to understand better what is happening to him/her. Doctors can't be "on-call" for every patient, so maybe this reduces patient anxiety....

Here's the problem: the web sites are truthful when they list a vague list of symptoms for a particular ailment. Indeed a trained medical professional uses extra knowledge and judgment to determine whether a particular list of symptoms likely points to a particular ailment. But the world is full of people who think they are smarter than they actually are! So isn't it plausible that one reads about an ailment, the symptoms sound vague and after reading them once or twice, one starts to wonder if they have them? If you don't believe me, try this: did you get up last morning and feel light-headed? In India we get an "upset stomach" after eating food; we never think twice about it. What if you find entire articles on indigestion that mention it as a symptom of 10 complicated ailments (albeit with a disclaimer that most of the times it is just indigestion and only a doctor can tell if it means more)? In fact to an untrained eye, the worse the disease, the more vague the symptoms seem to get. Moreover I fail to understand the benefits of reading about someone else's experience with a particular disease unless I have been officially diagnosed with it myself. Many of these online fora end up being ranting grounds of patients complaining about the supposed inabilities of their doctors.

I've been told people who like to read about medicine as a hobby and come to their own conclusions aren't unique to our generation: they have existed all along. But here's the problem: the information wasn't nearly as accessible to them as it is now. How many of us would take the trouble of going to a library to read about something like this? How many of us are likely to open one more tab of our internet browser and "google" for it? I assume everybody who can read this blog is perfectly capable of doing this in a second.

To those who think there aren't many people who would do this, and would be swayed by whatever they read, here's a reminder. In India people vote for a politician in return for a pressure cooker or even hard cash. In the US people dump French wine down the drain and start calling things "Freedom fries" because some politician decided it would be a good way to show displeasure. There are still far too many people falling victim to phishing attacks or online viruses because they clicked on something out of charity, intrigue or human desire. Let's face it: as a human race gullibility is part of our sense of community. Very few of us make decisions on our own based on an objective analysis of facts that we alone have taken the pains to gather. Most of us are influenced by people and their versions of facts and opinion. So while I'm delighted to learn about the history of film-making, the El-Nino effect and a video demonstrating a chemistry experiment that bored me in school, some things are better kept within the confines of those qualified to understand and interpret them. Medicine is an esoteric field: only the brightest become doctors after years of training and experience. No amount of copious information available on the internet can replace that training and experience. It simply does not belong to the same category as all the other information that is out there, and its readers cannot be trusted to believe the disclaimers as much as the information itself. The risks of such information being so accessible to everybody far outweigh the benefits of "well-informedness".

Reservations on reservations

The noblest of intentions by Dr. Ambedkar have been turned into a devilish political game in India. Yes, I'm talking about reservations.

The idea of reservations seems very unscientific to me, especially since there are many instances where it clearly helps the wrong people. Now I admit that being a Brahmin boy I stand to lose the most out of every reservation that comes out of our Parliament. So if you view my views with suspicion, so be it. I reserve the right to have an opinion and argue for it.

The current reservation bill however, the women's reservation bill, is something I struggle to oppose. The corporate world has the diametrically opposite trend as the governments of the world. We see more and more female CEOs, entrepreneurs and businesspeople. On the other hand, women all over the world have been traditionally underrepresented in government and under-compensated in society, irrespective of social liberalism and any measure of economic growth. If I claim that USA, one of the most forward-looking societies in the world, has not had a woman at a very powerful governmental post, there aren't many arguments against it (except for Nancy Pelosi who is the current speaker and a handful of senators). Try that argument in many Asian countries like India, and pat come the examples of Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, Jayalalitha, Mayawati, etc. who were either at the helm of affairs, or packed enough power to topple those at the helm of affairs. What's more, the names are followed by how these women in fact did not prove to be the benevolent saints that advocates of women's rights would envision (incidentally similar arguments seemed to work against Hillary Clinton and are starting to work against Pelosi). So again while it may seem that reservations will breed more power-hungry politicians albeit of a different gender, women's reservations can be more faithfully audited and monitored for efficacy. The roles and positions of women politicians can be measured with their male counterparts to see if they toe the same lines on most issues, or do indeed bring a different, fresh and radical perspective to our government. Why audit only for women you ask? I agree! Current politicians should be audited as well! It would statistically prove what everybody always knew: how our politicians make mind-boggling U-turns on issues.

Which brings me to my favourite and somewhat utopian form of reservation: based on economic conditions. While it is easy to forge IT documents, there is at least a measure of efficacy. How does one audit caste, or the more immeasurable effect of reservation on social conditions without considering economic conditions? One can indeed verify if one is living beyond one's "claimed means", but how does one verify whether one is living in contrast to one's caste or whatever other measure on which reservation was claimed? If indeed socially backward equals economically so, why not reserve based on economic conditions? In one swoop it would include all poor sections of society irrespective of caste or religion. If socially backward does not equal economically backward, that says something about the state of the current reservations. After all, aren't all the social ills of the underprivileged the direct cause of their economic states which is what causes all the practical misery in this world? What are reservations supposed to remedy, academic social status or practical economic status? I assume the latter, since everything that is "reserved" leads directly or eventually to economic status: education, job and promotion.