I recently had a conversation with a friend about how a guy apologized to him in private after being rude to him over a period in different groups. This made me think of the idea of status games that I read a while back in the book Impro: Improvisation and…

I can’t remember the last time I answered a call from an unknown number. My first instinct these days is to cut the call. It’s fair to say that most of my friends follow the same course as it’s more often than not spam. I find it tragic that an…

Time discounting is the tendency of humans to value things more when they are closer in time to the current moment and less about things further away. Monetarily, one can imagine that one would value getting $1,000 today more than getting $1,000 5 years from now. It is commonly thought…

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins explores various evolutionarily stable strategies employed in nature. Usually, a strategy can be thought of as the position taken during a conflict with another organism over resources. Generally, one would expect an aggressive strategy against a perceived weaker opponent and a submissive strategy against…

We’re all probably overcome by covid news fatigue at this point and I can imagine many who would rather avoid all mentions of it like the plague (pun intended). However, there was one report today on the undercounting of Indian COVID cases by a factor of 90!!!! that really caught…

Science seems to have taken over from religion and I don’t mean it in a good way. The recent coronavirus and its associated events have shown us that little has changed in our reasoning from times of past. Humans in the past followed doctrines mandated by religion and little room…

Growing inequality is a feature of the world today and is often raised as a concern on many fora. It is near-indisputable that richest have gotten even richer and there are more billionaires today than any time in history. …

Technological gains help processes scale. This means that the returns for goods and services are lower per customer but greater in aggregate. For example, a car-wash can service more cars today. As a result, customers pay less per wash but the car-wash earns more by servicing more cars. This is…

Telling the truth has been deemed as a virtue in different societies. As a kid, I rarely questioned this wisdom. Schools often focused on the need to be honest. In India, where Mahatma Gandhi is held in the highest regard, his doctrine of Satyagraha was oft repeated and heralded. Parents…