Probably Approximately Correct

This was originally written by Prof. Mitra and I am posting on his behalf. This was his reply to this exchange of mails.

Dear Prashant,

Thank you for your mail and the links to the blog comments. They truly
reflect perceptions of reality most of the time. However, though they
mostly consist of truths they are also mixed with some half truths and
untruths. For the last two categories, read incorrectness in facts or
unverified hearsay statements. I certainly do not insinuate any planned
disinformation.

There is also a strong element of interpretative ‘judgments on’ and
‘bashing of’ whoever is in charge. I will not attempt to elaborate further
on this to you. From the appended quote (Appendix I) from your own blog, I
know that you understand the genesis and effects of such ‘perceptions’. I
may also put here a link to this eye opening and brilliant piece from
Kalam: http://www.uttishthata.org/2007/07/06/a-letter-to-every-indian-apj/

I would only like to add that whether you agree with Marx or not, it is
difficult for any of us to ignore his famous poser: “The philosophers have
only interpreted the world in various ways - the point however is to
change it”. This of course holds true only when you are sensitive to the
fact that things are not perfect and feel that you can play a role to make
it better.

Blogs constitute a very effective means for airing views, opinions and
perceptions. But unless they are used ‘responsibly’ they may create havoc.
This naturally brings up the question of accountability. How do you bring
that about? ‘Authority bashing’ - the Faculty, the Parliament, the Campus
Life …- involves asking these ‘executive formations’ to be accountable.
However, especially when you do it through ‘blogs’, you run the risk of
falling into the trap of being irresponsible yourself. Particularly if and
when, in the process, you have taken yourself out of the ‘ecosystem’ and
have placed yourself in the position of a user and not in that of a
participant of the ecosystem.

Inevitably you also fall into the trap that you have landed yourself in,
in answering to Manan’s comment on your ‘Farewell speech posting’
(Appendix II). You talk about stereotypes of ‘roles’ (Student-TA,
Faculty-student, Parliament-student body, Saas-Bahu, Sauce-tamatar etc.
etc.:-). And consequently you end up using the argument: ‘in this role I
can be irresponsible’ but ‘how can you in your role?’

So how can we do things differently - and better? May be all of us can get
together and try to rewrite Kalam’s letter replacing the context of India
as a country with IIIT as an ecosystem consisting of student, staff, and
faculty - not to forget the alumni and the parents.

Best wishes and do keep running the blogs. The April posts are certainly
thought provoking, and many of them have been written very responsibly.
They can be even more effective with a little more of ‘accountability’
and, at least for some of the bloggers, a shift in their ‘roles’ - from
‘users’ to ‘participants’.

Abhijit

ps. Will you please post this reply in your blogs?

(Appendix I)
==============================

What follows in my speech is a humble attempt to answer a few of these questions in a  radically poetic form. This poem is also a plea to the university, it’s professors, it’s students, it’s staff and all it’s stakeholders.

Long ago, there was a village in which every person was blind. They had to select a representative for their village and they selected a blind representative. One day an outsider came and was reviewing the village administration. He appealed to everybody to understand how weak their village administration is and how vulnerable they are to external attacks from other kings. He said a representative who is blind could not ward off danger of the village. All people were angered and did not value his logical argument and they looked at him as a spy from another kingdom. They all then collectively tied him up and blinded him too.

Here are some pointers to think about

1. It’s important to question. In a village like this,  to progress further you have to start questioning the weaknesses of the system, the way outsider did  in the above story. We the students should start questioning. But the irony of the situation is that we have been trained for years to answer, we were taught how to answer math, physics, chemistry, questions in 11th, 12th, we were taught to answer engineering questions in undergraduate, but we were never taught to question things. Probably, questioning is something we have to learn by ourselves. Remember that the process of questioning is the vital to research in any field.
2. Collective blinding is bad. In this story the outsider is blinded and it lead to a situation of collective blinding. A similar collective blinding is happening at various walks of our life. For example, take students copying assignments. This act nurtures friendship among students and probably contributes to the unity of batch, but on the other hand they are collectively blinding each other. Do we need an unity which is a result of collective blinding ? We can give numerous examples of this collective blinding. On a long run such collective blinding leads to a situation in which a team of students start performing much lesser than what they can individually. This act of collective blinding is unhealthy and is an impediment to the progress. 
3. I leave it to students to decide whether they want to blind themselves in a collective fashion or question the weaknesses in the system to progress forward and ward off dangers.

Now, I come to the concluding part of my speech. I thought it would be best to conclude with a question.  Some of my friends batch mates are  genuinely interested in research. Given a change to opt for the dual degree program now, they would be more than happy to join the program. Is the the administration kind enough to consider the applications of my batch mates for entry into dual degree program ? 

——————

Acknowledgments: Many thanks to Prudhvi Vatala, Bhanukiran Vinzamuri,  Sharat chandra, Abhishek Sainani, Sashidhar, Praman Kumar, MNV. Kartheek for their timely inputs and criticisms.

This is Prof. Viswanath posting on Prasant’s blog.

Let me summarize what I feel is the essence of Dr. Srinathan’s argument.

1. A deeper and better understanding of a subject leads to better enjoyment.
2. This deeper understanding can not be achieving by routinely listening to the lectures, reading the required books and writing exams, even though a student may do them thoroughly and well. An extra effort is needed. This is research.
3. He asks:   Why are most of us content with the academics done via the most trivial form of research,namely concentrating on a piece of text (book) written in some known human language? Is it not too simplistic, so much so that the end result is the absence of nearly all of academics itself? Is it not a natural tendency for one to wish to maximize one’s academics of IT in the short tenure at IIIT-H? What has happened to this natural tendency and why has it apparently disappeared from our schools and colleges at all levels?

These are important questions and I hope that further posts by interested persons will contribute to a better understanding of these matters.

Here is my attempt to respond to Dr. Srinathan.

1. He says: “A deeper and better understanding of a subject leads to better enjoyment.” I think it is the other way round:  It is enjoyment that leads one to seek a better and deeper understanding.
2. What one enjoys is individual to one. One may enjoy spending an  evening in a music concert and another may enjoy taking a long walk. Ask each one to do what the other does. Both may end up being miserable.
3. I wonder if it is possible to lead a person to enjoy a particular activity. There has to be a natural predilection in the being. One can at most expose a person to an activity to find out if a natural predilection exists or not.
4. To build an atmosphere of research at IIIT-H, let us continue our efforts to advertise that we are an institution that considers research important and try to attract those students who enjoy doing research. We can review how well we are succeeding in this effort periodically and devise better methods of doing it.
5. It is possible that some students enter here and later find that they do not enjoy research.  It is important that they are not allowed to feel that they are inferior in some way. That their capacities are not good enough for research. That they are academic drop-outs.
6. I think that there is no inherent intellectual superiority in doing research. There are no hierarchies in Nature. All hierarchies are made by society and there is no sanctity about them. Would any one think of  ranking the rose, the jasmine, the hibiscus and the oleander in order of superiority? Let everyone flower in their own way.
7. What we can do for those who feel that research is not for them is to help them find out where their true interests lie. Finding that will release their energies and they will naturally excel.

This is Srinathan posting on Prasant’s blog.

Why does one watch a cricket match or a football match on the television? Of course for entertainment and enjoyment, one invariably tends to say. Obviously, I do not disagree. However, does every person watching the same match derive the same amount of enjoyment? Apparently the answer is a clear no. But why is it so? Perhaps for multitude of reasons, one of the most prominent of them certainly being the inherent diversity in the degree of appreciation. It goes without saying that a person who does not appreciate cricket is unlikely to enjoy watching it on television. What appears to be equally true too is that as one learns and understands more about cricket he tends to be that much more appreciative of the same. Let me explain. Suppose a person knows only the following fact about cricket: up to six runs can be scored of any legitimate delivery and the team that scores more runs wins. Such a person is expected to appreciate and enjoy the best only  when a sixer or a four is hit. On the other hand, it is a well-known fact that there are several cricket enthusiasts to whom a beautiful cover-drive for no runs is perhaps even more enjoyable than many a sixer! Indeed,  every instant of a cricket match is usually substantially more enjoyable to a person who understands cricket that much better — a delicate late-cut is certainly cherished much better if, and perhaps only if, you can truly differentiate it from a square-cut. Cricket is but one arbitrary example; in essence, it typically holds that a deeper understanding leads to better appreciation which in turn entails substantially enhanced enjoyment, be it cricket, information technology, science, life or in general the entire Nature. The process of deeper and better understanding is in common terms popularly known as  academic pursuit. Naturally, all other things being equal, a person who has pursued the “academics of cricket” is bound to appreciate and enjoy the game better than someone who has not. Notice that having pursued “academics of cricket” one is  not guaranteed to be able to play cricket well. That requires additional  skill,  training and regular  practice which are usually part of what is known as “ education of cricket”. What is guaranteed by academics though is that he would certainly enjoy every aspect of cricket (like playing it in any form, watching it on TV, listening it on radio, reading about it in Sportstar, writing a book about it etc.) Thus, it is not without any reason that one usually pursues a relevant academic degree before getting involved with one’s chosen career, though in principle he could easily have in no time (or at least in much lesser amount of time than the long years of school/university education)  imbibed all the vocational skills that are necessary for his occupation.

Among many other equally important aspirations like developing various (engineering) skills etc., we are all here at IIIT-H to pursue the academics of information technology (IT). In reality, we are all here for education of IT which includes, apart from IT-academics, aspects like IT-skills, IT-applications, IT-practices and more. Fortunately, and perhaps unlike cricket, the academics of IT appears to have no end! It is fortunate because of its consequence — namely, there is no end to the enhancements in our enjoyment too! At this juncture, it is not hard to believe that the academics and appreciation of Nature would perhaps entail  infinite joy, as some of the great (Indian) thinkers have purported.

We, now, ask “ how to pursue the academics of IT?” — the answer is through a well known activity called research. One may ask why research and is it not true that an academic degree can be obtained just by listening to lectures, reading a few books and writing a finite number of exams? While a naive answer to the above question is typically “yes”, any non-trivial attempt at the same may require one to know what exactly is research.Though research may mean different things in different settings, evidently in an academic context, research is the process of obtaining deeper and better understanding. It is perhaps not difficult to believe that for us to understand anything, we require some sort of a  language to encode the understanding, both within our head and for the external world. Thus, if Nature uses some great language (say, Nature’s language) then research activity is nothing but (an attempt at) the  translatation of some “text” encoded in Nature’s language to some other (human) language that is suitable for representation in our head or on paper. Exemplary instances of such a research activity includes at one end the elementary thought processes of a baby dismantling/assembling various components of his favorite toy and at the other end the thought experiments of a renowned scientist attempting to discover the final unified theory of everything.

If one were to know the Nature’s language, then research is just translation from one known language to another — which is exactly what listening to lectures and reading books (in known languages) are all about. Thus, listening and reading in a known language is a primitive, trivial and vacuous form of research. At the other extreme is the non-trivial, complex and complete form of research, namely, listening and reading Nature directly in the (not yet known) Nature’s language.

Consequently, it appears that any sort of academics would involve research (and only research) at various levels of complexity — thereby empirically validating our initial intuition that academic pursuit is done via an activity which is nothing but research. Moreover it is also fairly obvious that the more non-trivial one’s research is (that is the more closer to Nature’s language one listens/reads in) the better/deeper is his understanding is and therefore higher is his enhancement in enjoyment. What is also equally evident is that research is not confined to any formal degree but is a process inherent to any non-trivial human activity — doesn’t our reader recollect the research he did to understand why wood floats on water whereas iron does not? In fact, like research, neither academics nor appreciation and the inherited enjoyment thereof are bound by a formal university/industry of any sort.

Prof. Sangal once remarked that for the students of IIIT-H, “IT- mind” (knowledge of IT) is achieved through  lectures on fundamental aspects, “IT- hand” (skill of IT) is achieved through laboratories/workshops and projects. However, it has been hard to achieve “IT- heart” (dedication/passion for IT). Indeed, it is hard. It is nevertheless possible since IT- heart is, for all practical purposes, achieved if everyone starts to enjoy IT, which we argued as possible through IT  appreciation, We also argued that appreciation is the consequence of deeper understanding obtained through research. which should  the primary objective of our  stay at IIIT.

In such a circumstance, is it not pertinent to ask why are most of us content with the academics done via the most trivial form of research, namely concentrating on a piece of text (book) written in some known human language? Is it not too simplistic, so much so that the end result is the absence of nearly all of academics itself? Is it not a natural tendency for one to wish to maximize his academics of IT in the short tenure at IIIT-H? What has happened to this natural tendency and why has it apparently disappeared from our schools and colleges at all levels?

Though the answers to the above questions are besides the point of this article, it is well within our scope. It is true that academics is not easy since it involves a lot of thinking. Moreover, some environments are known to foster academics while some others are known to hamper the same. Thus, the environment in which an academician or student lives in is of considerable significance.

Our role, at IIIT, should be to create a top notch aura/environment for pursuing academics. IIIT should be known for its Academic Aura!

This post also happens to be the first editorial of the Academic Aura magazine which we intend to start soon. Academic Aura is meant to be a magazine, which aims at enriching the environment and fosters the academic culture at IIIT. The complete version of the first editorial including the topics which the magazine intends to address is at http://web.iiit.ac.in/~prasant_a/aura.pdf  and  http://prasantgopal.com/aura.pdf