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Sunday, July 31, 2016

Guest Post - Deer, Predators, and Information Overload


Sriram Subramanian
About the author :Sriram Subramanian is a Chemical Engineer from IIT Roorkee and an MBA from IIM Calcutta. After a decade working in management consulting and corporate, Sriram founded Mind Matters in 2006, which is today one of India’s leading corporate training firms.  Throughout his career,Sriram has juggled multiple interests, including reading, writing, music, travel, sports and parenting. 

Sriram’s writing pursuits started at the age of six, when he faithfully wrote weekly letters to his mother (an English teacher); she marked them for grammar, punctuation, spelling and sentence construction in red ink. His favorite authors include  Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, Honore de Balzac, Dostoevsky, The Bronte sisters, John Steinbeck, Franz Kafka, PG Wodehouse, Salman Rushdie and Rohinton Mistry.You can reach him here.

His debut novel can be bought here. The cover is so awesome that I couldn't help sharing it.



Deer, Predators, and Information Overload
Sriram Subramanian

I’m a nut about structuring.


Specifically, organizing one’s thoughts and ideas logically—grouping, classifying and categorizing—before putting those ideas out in any form of communication, written or verbal. The concept is very simple—when a writer (or speaker) structures his thoughts, the reader (or listener) gets the message with the minimum of effort. Further, there is little scope for ambiguity—different readers won’t go away with different conclusions. The reverse is true when the writer just puts his thoughts out as they occur to him, which is usually in an unorganized dump. (That’s my day job, by the way…training people on stuff like this.)

I’d once written an article on this subject (in a blog, now sadly only accessible to our overlords in Google) and it generated some debate. One responder suggested that with the advent of real time communication technology (e-mail, SMSs, WhatsApp and so on), the cost of not ordering thoughts was minimized. If the writer missed something, or was unclear, the reader could simply request and receive a clarification, at virtually zero cost / effort.

This article is a response to that line of thought, which seems to be quite prevalent (and popular) today.

Yann Martel, the Booker-Prize-winning author of the Life of Pi (of course, there’s a literary connection!) suggested an outline of a fascinating analogy in an interview many years back and it stuck in my mind. Subsequently it seems to have vanished from the public domain (Googling yields no results at all). Based onmy visit to the Serengeti some years ago, I have taken the liberty of embellishing the original with my limited additional knowledge of the behavior of antelopes. So here goes…

Imagine a deer (say a Thomson’s gazelle) in the grassland. As far as his eye can see, the land is flat; the plains endless, interrupted only now and then by a line of short, stunted bushes, or the occasional baobab. He grazes contentedly, though always with his ears cocked up and his nose on high alert, ready to respond to the slightest hint of danger. Now, there are lots of predators on the same grassland – lion, cheetah, leopards and hyena. How does the deer survive? With the exception of the cheetah, the deer can actually outrun them all over a reasonable distance, given his low body weight. However, all these predators are capable of powerful bursts of acceleration, which make them faster over a short sprint.

The deer’s survival mechanism is a very simple one. At any point, the deer maintains a ‘circle of safety’ with respect to any predator. Imagine the deer at the center of the circle. His signal reception mechanisms (power of hearing, ability to detect predator scents and strange vibrations in the ground) have over millennia been synchronized with the safe radius. His signal reception limits equate with the minimum distance he needs to maintain to outrun a predator. If a lion moves into this circle, the deer is able to pick up the signal, process it (checking if it is a harmless or a dangerous signal), recognize the danger and take corresponding action. The usual response would be to move away by a similar distance, so as to maintain the safe distance. Any closer, and the lion would get him because of his short-sprint advantage.

(As an aside, lions counter this by hunting in pairs or threes, usually one lying hidden in the bush, while the others approach from the opposite end to nudge the deer in the direction of the one lying in wait. The reverse counter is provided by deer staying in herds—their effective radius increases, and they seek safety in numbers—statistically their chances of individual survival go up, though the lions would always get one or two, each time)

Now imagine this deer suddenly has access to modern communication technology. Say someone clamps a pair of headphones or RF antennae on the deer, so that now, magically, the deer can pick up signals at twice the original radius. Theoretically, this should be good for the deer, because there might have been some instances when a deer’s signal detection radius proved limiting (and fatal!)—say there was an unusually fast lion just outside the original circle. With better technology, the deer should be able to react at much greater distances.

What do you think will happen?

What will most likely happen is that the deer would go nuts.

Earlier, the deer would ignore all signals outside the circle, good or bad. Now the deer would go this way and that, as he responds to each movement of a predator outside the original circle, even if most of these movements pose no incremental danger to him. He would probably fall down out of sheer exhaustion. Not a moment’s peace left.Unless of course, the reception technology was combined with additional information processing capability—i.e. the deer also had double the brain he does, which he doesn’t.

The point is this—as humans, there are physical limits to the amount of signals / information we can deal with, without going nuts. The explosion in the last two decades is seriously worrying—on an average day, we watch TV, read news, check FB multiple times, respond to every WhatsApp ping (and boy is that irritating), get Twitter feeds, check out Instagrams, get SMSs, respond to so many calls, get office mails everywhere, anyplace, anytime. Our reactions are not dissimilar to the hypothetical deer.
Imagine you and your friend agreed to catch a movie at the theater just 20 years back, when there were no cellphones. (Sorry, millennials—you’ll just have to imagine this world. Think it’s Westeros, for instance) Presumably you would have agreed to meet outside the ticketing office, say 15 minutes before the start. If one of you got delayed, the other would have a coffee, watch the crowd, look at the posters or queue up to get tickets. Basically, wait patiently. And you know what, 9 out of 10 your friend would turn up in time for both of you to catch the show. Worst case, you’d be a few minutes late.

Contrast with the situation today – how many communication flows would happen within those 15 minutes—“I’m running a bit late / stuck in traffic / where the #$%% are you…” and so on, across 5 different apps and devices.

For all our endeavors, there is a period of planning and a period of execution. While the need for course corrections during execution is self-evident, it is also highly desirable that we have a frozen planning period—i.e. a period where we will continue executing the original plan, despite new information coming in. All corrections should be made beyond this period, which will in most cases correspond with a safe-holding zone, where we recognize, process / interpret and decide corrective measures. We shouldn’t be in a purely reactive mode and throw the planning / holding periods out, just because our reaction abilities have advanced manifold. The same applies to the need for original structure in communication—we can leave it to back-and-forthing, but the long run costs will be significant.

It is of course entirely possible, that the human brain adapts to our new situation and its processing power increases manifold, thereby enabling us to get all the benefits without incurring the costs.
Just yesterday, I flew from Delhi to Pune, and my flight landed on time, at around 11 PM. The wheels had barely touched the tarmac, when everyone’s cellphone was out, flight mode off, and a hundred conversations started all at once. ‘Flight’s landed. No, we’re still taxi-ing. 20 minutes lagega. I’ll call you once I get the baggage. Then you start from the place you’ve parked (illegally) and pick me up. Etc. Etc.’

Outside the terminal, utter chaos reigns as everyone tries to time it to save those two minutes—the net effect is everyone probably spent 10 minutes more than they would have if nobody had called anybody. If our brains are really getting better, I’m seriously scared the only way I have to explain it is I’m getting more brain dead as I age.

I’m no Luddite, though I am a relatively late adopter of new technologies. There has been much that is good achieved in the last two decades, and there’s no going backwards. However, I see signs of deer fatigue around me all the time – increased stress, reduced attention spans, loss of patience, inability to hear out a complex argument and so on. Any suggestions on dealing with this are welcome.

(If you asked me for a specific suggestion, I’d say, switch off all those devices and pick up a good book. Paper book. One with pages that turn, which you can touch, smell, feel and place gently, in its place, in your bookshelf.)




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