On Beliefs and Perceptions ..

Lies –

Lots have been written about body language in the detection of lies. Isn’t inconsistency the true hallmark of lies? That is, if you believe there are no perfect lies or, liars. And that lies can ultimately be just as revealing as truth can be. As Christie had so rightly pointed out in one of her books –

For in the long run, either through a lie, or through truth, people were bound to give themselves away.

Closed-Ended –

Imagine being asked a personal question where you immediately realize that the enquirer has already decided upon a narrow and closed set of options in his/her mind; and is only trying to validate/eliminate each such option with you, so as to be able to reach a definite conclusion.

Real life outcomes may be a result of many intertwined stories. As human beings, wherever we lack real-life exposure, we are prone to over-simplifying – as when trying to trace back the one visible result to one of our preconceived and handful set of "obvious" possible causes – thereby grossly undermining the role, the impact, and the sheer diversity of stories possible.

Negative Role Models –

They serve us by being a living model and a stark reminder of everything we don’t want to be in our lives, and to teach us of what we can be or, become in spite of them. In the wise words of Khalil Gibran –

I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.

Appearances –

We do realize that two extremely opposite things may appear the same. After all, that is what we call deception – the fake tries to imitate the real, and hence it’s only natural that it will assume the appearance of the real. Perhaps a more important realization, however, is that dangerously, the opposite is possible too – for the real to have the appearance of the fake; simply because the fake has imitated too far, leaving the real behind in the game – for we may not know what the real in any given circumstance looks like, and may consider the "more" to be the "real".

Originally posted by me on LinkedIn.

Simplicity

Came across this nice talk on the pursuit of simplicity in building software - by Rich Hickey, the father of Clojure. Apart from correcting a few mis-notions around the terminologies of simple versus easy, he also contributes his new-found dictionary word, "complect", to the software vocabulary! And goes on to draw such a nice parallel between the human limitations in dealing with complexity/complected pieces vis-a-vis those in juggling too many balls in the air. Here's his very apt analogy -

The average juggler can do three balls. The most amazing juggler in the world can do like nine balls or twelve, or something like that. They can't do twenty, or a hundred. We are all very limited. Compared to the complexity we can create, we are all statistically at the same point in our ability to understand it, which is not very good.

Tells you something about how important undivided time and attention really is, and why distractions, multi-tasking/context-switching are such sure productivity-killers for even the smartest amongst us!; and why some of the finest minds you meet seem to be frantically striving to simplify and avoid what has come to be known (and dreaded) in software as "accidental"/"incidental" complexity (as opposed to "essential"/"inherent" complexity) - un-tangling things so as to be able to grasp them in isolation, stripping them down to their bare essentials, and putting them neatly back into their right place.

The philosophy of simplicity, of course, uniformly applies to every facet of life in general - for instance, falsehood, in whichever of it's multifarious forms, hugely complicates life by tangling the true with something that is not true. And Christie would extol the virtue of simplicity even in unraveling mysteries! - by claiming that the simplest explanation is always the most likely! :)