Omnipotent Beings

I just finished the book "God's Debris" by Scott Adams. Its a great book and you should definitly read it.

However, I don't agree with everything in it. In particular, I don't agree with his conception of an omnipotent being. In particular, he thinks that since there is nothing an omnipotent being couldn't know or do, nothing would challenge it aside from the possiblity of destroying itself.

I, however, have a different idea of an omnipotent being.

Side Note: I'll probably refer to the being an question as "he" for this post. In general, I don't think he or she works, and it sounds awkward. No offense to any other gender is intended.

An Old Paradox

Here's a familiar paradox. Can an omnipotent being create a burrito so hot that he can't eat it? It would seem that an omnipotent being should be able to create a burrito so hot that no being could eat it. It would also seems that an omnipotent being should be able to eat any burrito, no matter how hot. So which is it?

I would argue that there cannot exist a being that can do both things. Therefore, an omnipotent being cannot exist, at least not in the sense most people think of it, i.e. a being that can make any state of reality true. Lets call this a "super-omnipotent being."

Conclusion 1: A super-omnipotent being cannot exist.

Potency

To really talk about omnipotent beings, we need to be able to compare two beings in a relavent way. Lets say being A is "more potent" that being B (A > B) if A can do anything B can. More precisely, for all states of the world, X, if B can change the state of the world to Y, A can change the state of the world to Y. (Note: techincally we're dealing with equivilence class of beings that can do all the same things, not beings themselves).

So, lets take two beings, A and B. Is it necessary that A > B or B > A? Clearly not. Right now, I can tip over a chair in the coffee table I'm at. However, at the same instant[1], most other beings cannot. But, many of them can tip of a chair somewhere else where I cannot. So, > is not a full ordering on the set of beings. However, we can easily imagine two beings A and B where A can do anything that B can (even if A and B are not human). As a result, > is a partial ordering on the set of beings.

Maximally Potent

This allows us to create a new defintion for omnipotent beings:

A being is omnipotent iff they are maximally potent.[2]

I.e. a being is omnipotent if no other being is more potent than them. This may seem like the same as the original definition, but its not. Since its possible that A \> B and B \> A, we might be able to imagine two *different* omnipotent beings. We might be able to imagine this, but can we?

We can imagine a being that can eat any burrito no matter how hot. We can also imagine a being that create a burrito so hot that no other being can eat it. We can also "build" an omnipotent being with each of these skills. How? Just take a being with the ability to eat any burrio, and keep adding abilities that are not contradictory (such as being able to make any burrito) until you can't add anymore. You can do the same a being that can make any burrito. So this gives us two distinct omnipotent beings.

God's Personality

Here's the thing. We might be able to imagine an omnipotent being that can't move mountains or turn water into wine, but I'd bet that there are an infinite number of omnipotent benings who can and can basically do anything that we can imagine (including creating reality as we understand it). So this means, that traditional views of god allow for a whole range of omnipotent beings.

Why is this important? Becuse it means that there are things that god *cannot* do. What are these things? I have no idea. But three things come to mind:

Either god cannot create any burrito, or good cannot create any burrito.

Either god cannot lift any stone or god cannot create a stone that no one can life.

Either god cannot create an unstoppable force or god cannot create an immovable object (or god cannot create a force that moves towards an immovable object, etc...).

All of our desires come from things we cannot do. We can't guarantee food, we cannot love forever, etc... Maybe god's desires come from the same place. I have no idea what god can and can't do, and I don't even know if these are things humans can comprehend. But at least, this gives us a reason for god to *want* anything.

Assuming, of course, there is a god.

[1] Maybe if we take into account relativity things change, but I doubt it.

[2] Technically we have to prove that a maximally potent being exists. Generally, in a partially ordered set, there may not be any maximal members. E.g. if we take the integers and say "a is more awesome than b if they have the same parity and a is larger than b" then "more awesome" is a partial ordering on the integers withou a maximal integer. A large part of the difficulty in "potency" is in how we define "the power to do thing."

Respect

I just had a great conversation with my roommate. Its the sort of not drunk but not sober conversation where people are very honest. He is a native of India and I am well... not...

The core of the conversation was about respect. We agreed on the following two things:

• India could learn from the US about respect for labor.
• The US could learn from India about respect for the past.

Three examples might help.

At the Office, myself and another American always say hi to the guard at our building. The natives however, seem quite amazed and/or uncomfortable about it.

A good friend of mine would often swear at his mom. I was in shock when he'd tell his mom to "Fuck Off."

My dad frequently corrected on things that were done on the past. I would often say "that is stupid" with a statement like, "Really? Here is why its done that way..." and go no to destroy my statement.

So, without getting into any kind of debate about India and the US, I'm thinking about respect. How important is it? What does it mean?

To me, I respect people who have done something. It may not be famous or great, but a lot of the things that we consider common are in fact very difficult. A good example might be raising a child. I have a younger a sister and, to some degree, I've seen her grow up. I've thought about what might happen if she had parents that were screw ups. I mean, raising a kid requires giving them values, teaching them, understanding their development, knowing whats important to them at each and knowing whats important in life. I mean, for an adult, the mind of a child is very strange. The "society" of kids has values that adults think are small. Its honestly quite amazing that the whole system works at all.

So, I guess I respect anyone who has raided a kid. But thats not all. In history, people have done amazing things. I wonder about the number of amazing people who I don't know about. What did they think? What am I missing from not knowing who they are? Einstein came up with general relativity, but a lot of physicists before him were coming damn close to the idea. As far as I know, special relativity was the invention of Poincare. That may not be true, but certainly the great minds in history took a lot from the people before them. The famous ones are usually brilliant but always lucky to be in the right place at the right time.

Anyway, I guess I wonder what I haven't thought about, what I don't know and how to pick it up. I want to respect what people throughout history and around the world believe and think but I want to distill it, as much as I can, to the "truth." At least, insofar as "truth" even make sense.

Thinking about truth is making me drift back to religion... but perhaps, thats for later.... Its 2:00 AM and sleep might not be a horrible thing. So, I guess my final thought on this entry is, I/we need to be careful who I/we disrespect... we may not understand the understanding of the world someone has picked up.

Sorry if this obvious, but its certainly important.

Religion

So, I've been hesitating to write this post because religion can be a touchy subject, but oh well, here goes.

Before coming to India, I've been to a few Hindu ceremonies. I didn't realize it at the time, but I guess I never took them seriously. Even at the temple, I never got the feeling that people took the ceremonies seriously. It seemed more like a chance to get together and catch up with people. It was great, I'd see people I wouldn't see that often, get some good food and feel proud of myself for being open about religions.

So now, in India, I'm exposed to people who really take it seriously, everywhere. A few examples:

• When coming home one day, we were held up in traffic due to a huge ceremony walking down the street.
• When I went to Thanjavur (for a different reason) we visited a lot of temples. The people I was with all went around and did all the prayers. I stood around awkwardly.
• My cousin's dad prays every morning. He has a special room to do his prayers. The door to the room has bells on it and as he closes the door each morning he carefully rings the bells many times.

Let me be clear. If someone has asked me directly "do you think Hinduism could be correct" I would definitely have said yes. Intellectually I considered all religions to be be "possible" and insofar as I could tell, no other religion seemed more likely. But when I spent time thinking about religion, Hinduism never really entered my head.

So, I guess I wonder, why didn't I take it seriously before?

A part of the answer definitely lies with the nature of Christianity. Christians are definitely more apt to talk about their religion (since conversion is an important part of the religion) and as a result I observed more Christians than members of any other religion. Even without that, a lot of American culture involves references to Christianity and an assumption that people know about it (see for example: http://www.vidoemo.com/yvideo.php?futurama-robot-hell-song=&i=UWl1V000cWuRpSUxPOGM).

However, another part of the problem has to do with Hinduisms similarity to other old religions that we generally don't take seriously anymore (how many people really still pray to Zeus?). Polytheistic religions with extraordinary stories of the gods coming down and fighting in great battles seem overly strange. Stories of the kings talking to gods, getting boons, using them for greedy purposes, etc... don't fit with the way we think about god. God should be at a level above us, not favoring once side, all loving, etc... At least, thats the feeling I got in the US.

So how many of you in the US have really seen Hinduism as a serious religion? Am I alone in this? Is it possible that I'm over analyzing this and this is a residual feeling from when I felt weird being the only Indian kid in school and as a result rejected all things Indian or am I on to something?

(Yes, I realize the questions at the end imply that people actually read this, which I have no evidence of, but oh well).

Many Lines

So, one might ask, "Hari, 3 blog posts in one day?"

Yep, I'm not very busy today...

And, I just learned about a really neat algorithm! And... I can't explain it any better than this. So here is the link: http://marblemice.com/2007/09/12/douglas-peuker-line-simplification-explained/

Its so simple and yet elegent!

However, there is also another algorithm I've seen for this which used dynamic programming. We learned it in my algos class at Cornell. I'm lucky that the chapter is on the book's website here (go to section 6.3.):

http://www.aw-bc.com/info/kleinberg/assets/downloads/ch6.pdf

I'm curious to see how they compare, but haven't had time to compare them at all yet. I'll get around to it, but the douglas-peuker algorithm reminded me of the dynamic programming approach and I decided to put it up here.

Ted Kennedy Has Died

Obvioius Statement: Wow... this is big news. This is big international news.

The NY Times article is great, but certainly not unbiased.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/us/politics/27kennedy.html?hp

I don't think I can add much to that artcle... but I would like to point out that wow this story inspired a lot of arguing betwween people. I saw a lot of arguing on Hacker News about what kind of person he was (great or not great) a lot of it centering around the Chappaquiddick incident. Some people thought it completely marred his record and some people were more than willing to ignore it in favor of his accomplishments as as senator.

I'm curious what people think. Is it right to ignore someone's faults and focus on their accompishments after they've died or is it better to look at eveything someone has done?

Time and Space

Nope, this entry is not about physics. If you want to read cool blogs about science, go to http://scienceblogs.com/ where you can read people much smarter than me talk about this stuff.

This entry is about the way I see time and space being thought about differently in India vs. the US. Some of this is well known, but oh well.

Note: All statemetns about India/Indians below or anywhere on my blog are the result of what I've seen in my short time here. As a result, they may not be accurate.

Time

A lot of peole have heard of IST (Indian Standard Time). Its not so much a time zone as it is a delay factor... Indian's are between 15 min and 1 hour late to anything. Well, thas the story anyway. Well, I'm definitly seeing that at work, and even seeing extensions on this.

• We are supposed to come in at 9:30 AM, but I've seen people wander in as late as 11:00 AM and no one seems to mind. Obviously sometimes its with good reason, but from what I'm told this is pretty normal.
• My cousins don't seem to worry if they are late to work. They are never in a rush to get to work on time.
• If there is extra work to do at the end of the day, people seem to stick around and do it without thinking twice.
• There is a lot of idle time (my uncle told me a story about how he was idle for 45 days once on a project).

Even outside of work, things are different. No one knows when anyone will be home, things are done at a leisurly pace. Traffic moves very slowly so it takes a long time to get anywhere.

My sense is that time is just not treated as super important... the opposite of Manhattan where "ASAP" is the phrase and if you go to a restaraunt 15 min late you lose your reserveration.

Space

What constitutes an adequate sized room? What is big? What is small?

For those of you who remember the ex-brothel I lived in, try to remember the rooms there. Not my room, I had a "big" one, but the small rooms. They were probably about 8' x 12'. Big enough for a bed and a small desk.... and to walk from one to the other. When I left, those rooms were about $900.00 a pop.

Contrast that to a story I heard about someone living in Bangalore. The placewas maybe the same size as the room I just described... a bit bigger really, but it had three beds. Yes, one room, three beds, three people living there. One wall was just a cardboard partition seperating it fom another, similar setup. That place cost about Rs. 5,000!

Ok... lets do some quick math. The exchange rate is about $1.00 = Rs. 50.00. So, you say smugly, that room only cost about $100.00. What should you expect? True... in Manhattan if I want a room for $100.00 I expect a very sturdy cardboard box inside someone's closet. But you can't use straight exchange rates. You need to use PPP (purchasing power parity).

Googling around, I see the PPP is more like $1.00 = Rs. 10.00. So by that logic, we see this place is really around $500.00!!

I'm not sure what you can get for $500.00 in Manhattan, but I'm sure you can get something where you have your own room. A quick look at Craig's List and we see a decent number of rooms. Ok, some of them are in Jersey City or other way uptown... but still, its your own room.

Now, to be fair, I just found a place where I'm thinking of moving in. Its also Rs 5,000 a month and I'd have one housemate (seperate rooms, living room, one bathroom, kitchen). But from what I'm hearing from my cousins, this is the exception not the rule.

Of course, they also charge a lot more for bachelors than for familys, but still, I think the example of 3 people sharing a room with a cardboard wall is pretty extreme. But, this whole room sharing thing seems reasonably normal around here...

India: Post 1

Hey All

This is my first post on this blog. I got to India Friday night and have been here for 5 days now.

I promised that this blog would be less narrative and more about my thoughts, but here is a quick summary of whats happened so far.

I'm staying with family for the moment. I think that will change over the weekend, but they've been very helpful. Over the weekend we ate a lot and visited some other family around Chennai. I started work at IFMR Trust on Monday. For the first two days my manager was pretty busy so didn't have time to chat with me... so I spent time reading, browsing, etc... Today I got some reading to do and the next two days are an introduction to the company.

I've only been here for 5 days, so I'm not going to try to draw and broad conclusions about India now. Anything generalities I draw would be premature... so instead I'll talk about what I've learned so far about microfinance. Everything here is from the first 100 or so pages of a book called "The Economics of Microfinance" (http://www.amazon.com/Economics-Microfinance-Beatriz-Armendáriz/dp/0262012162) and some other essays.

What most people know about microfinance comes Grameen's original methodolgy.

• Loans work in 5 people groups. First you loan to two people, whenthey pay back you loan to the next two. When they pay it back you loan to the last person (the leader). If at any point someone doesn't pay, the whole group is "blacklisted." This gives the recipient social preassure to pay and gives the others preassure to help out.
• After these loans are finished, the group can get more (and bigger) loans.
• Loans are given primarily to women.
• Loans are given out only for starting a business.

This was, indeed, the original grameen setup. However, a lot of microfinance loans have given up all of these. Loans are given out individually and still paid back. Why? Because repayement allows the recipient to get bigger loans next time. People realized that even though the recipients were officially women, both men and women spent the money. And, even in the original system the loans were used for other purposed (although they did discourage using this). In fact, even Grameen has started something called Grameen II which abandons a lot of the previous restrictions. Other groups originally copied Grameen but many have found the restrictiosn they put on the loans counterproductive. (Note: I'm not trying to say anything bad about Grameen, they did great stuff and got the movement started).

I mention this because until a few days ago, I thought all microfinance used the group method and that they were primarily given out to women. Pretty neat stuff.

So what am I going to be working on in relation to microfinance loans? One big problem is that the microfinance institutions (MFIs) have trouble getting capital. In addition, most of them focus on one region (and may even narrow down their criteria even more). This is good because it allows them to pick up the necessary local knowledge to decide who should recive loans. But its bad because it exposes the MFIs to a huge "concentration risk." Imagine, for example, there is a drought in an area where some MFI works. This will probably advsersely affect all the loans this MFI has out. What happens? The MFI is pretty much dead.

So whats the fix? Diversification. But thats tough because doing microfinance correctly means gaining a lot of local knowledge. So instead, what IFMR Trust is doing (in addition to other things) is working to securitize the loans. This means buying exposure to the loans, packaging them, and selling them.

So... to you finance people out there (and most other people) you say "but isn't this what caused the subprime crisis?" Well... sort of. The problem is that the banks knew they could sell of the exposure from their loans so they didn't need to do the necessary due-dilligence. To avoid this, two steps are taken.

• The loans are divided into two traunches (essentailly two sets). One traunch is superiod ot the other one in the capital structure (i.e. moneyh that gets paid back goes to that one first).
• The MFI and IFRM Trust both keep exposure to the inferior traunch.

What does this mean? This means that both the MFI and IFRM Trust will be extra careful because they take on the most risk. Its a cool way to give the MFIs funding and still be responsible about it.

Of course, this means that IFMR Trust takes on a lot of risk. Its diversified across MFIs (and therefore across regions, etc...) but it still needs to be monitored. However, the risks aren't well known yet, so I'll be working with them to figure out the risks, model them and create a system around it all. It's going to be a lot of fun since we'll be breaking new ground and starting from scratch.

So far they've only securitized one set of loans (http://www.ifmrtrust.co.in/announcements/ifmr_capital.php) but they've given money to MFIs for a bunch more there is a lot of risk they have.

Note: IFMR Trust is doing a lot of other stuff. If your interested you can take a look at the website.

http://www.ifmrtrust.co.in/

Ok, thats post 1. Nothing new, but hopefully its interesting. More to come!

Hari