Imagine this: you are going to the theater for a movie (in a post-covid world!) and you enter the parking lot. You have to make a choice as you drive towards the theater: do you pick the first open spot that you see (which means you have to walk longer and might miss the opening... Continue Reading →

I am currently reading ‘Enemy of all Mankind’ by Steven Johnson. It is a fascinating story of a pirate .. and in the introduction, he writes the main motivation behind the book: “we tend to think of grand organizations like corporations or empires coming through deliberate planning: designing the conceptual architecture for each imposing structure,... Continue Reading →

Last week, I talked about ‘perfection being the enemy of good’ in problem-solving. However, what if we swing the pendulum to the other extreme and draw conclusions from anecdotal evidence? In other words, are we susceptible to ‘narrative fallacies’? In ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’, Daniel Kahnemann describes a (now famous) thought experiment that he and... Continue Reading →

Voltaire first mentioned this - he is supposed to have picked it fron an Italian aphorism. Shakespeare said it better, ‘Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well’ (King Lear). And as anyone who is in the business of problem solving outside the classroom would tell you, one of the practices that really distinguishes the... Continue Reading →

The other day, I saw a t-shirt slogan – ‘Update your priors!’ These nerdy t-shirt slogans are not uncommon in the Silicon Valley. This one caught my eye – to me, it has never been more relevant given the current swirl of data and analysis around Covid-19, now that epidemiologists and statisticians are in a... Continue Reading →