So the question I have is once a large fraction of the population believes that free will does not exist, will that change society. Although this is a dynamical systems question where the belief of free will is some aspect of the state of the system and what I ask is how the system evolves subsequent to reaching a state of no belief in free will, I will address it using language that still connotes some sense of agency or directed action since it is more convenient to do so. However, keep in mind that everything I say is with respect to how society will evolve after it attains a state where there is no longer a belief in free will.

One possibility is that people will become more relaxed and not worry so much about the consequences of their actions since they have no control anyway. I doubt this will be the case because people are so hard wired biologically to believe in control of their actions that intellectual knowledge will not affect their day to day life. People will still feel regret and remorse, joy and sadness. So, I don’t think society will lapse into a hedonistic free-for-all for example.

I think it could change the legal system though. As I posted before, if there is no free will then it will become less useful to view crime in terms of intent and motive but rather on what should be done for maximum benefit to society, including the perpetrators welfare. However, the emotions governing fairness, revenge and vindication will still exist so people may still want to keep some aspect of punishment. This may end up in a political stalemate where some fraction of the population will insist on maintaining the need for retribution whereas the rest will simply view justice in terms of containment of defective machines.

Will it affect personal relationships? Will it take the bloom off of love and romance? Will people still treat one another in the same way as they do now? My sense is that people will still basically do what they do now although with a meta-level twist to it. Some may not take insults so personally. The knowledge of no free will may actually reinforce the notion that communication between people is important and desirable since people will be more attune to the fact that their words can impact a person’s behavior. How a person acts will depend on their internal states and the external inputs they receive. People may become more strategic in providing those inputs, something masterful manipulators already do today.

Will it make people more open to socialistic notions since a person is not responsible for their successes or failures? People are just cogs in a big machine rolling along after all. They have no control over how hard they work or how creative they are. Those things are just a combination of genetics and environment. Like in a restaurant where the waiters pool their tips together and share it equally, would people be more inclined to share the wealth of society? I have a feeling that this issue will remain as divided as it is today. So, my guess is that knowledge of no free will won’t affect our lives dramatically.

‘If you can’t win over her, kill her’- that’s what seems to be on the minds of people in love these days. In fact, it’s ignominious to identify them as lovers. People no longer seem to understand the sanctity of love.

Talking of love, the Taj Mahal should certainly light up your mind, now that it’s become the talk of the town. The sheer radiance of this marble-clad massive mausoleum basking under the sunlight or its sparkling reflection rippling through the adjacent Yamuna river by the moonlight are inspiring enough to make one fall in love. The Mughal Emperor Shah Jehan made this architecture over the tomb of his beloved wife Mumtaj Mahal to exhibit his eternal love for her.

On the one hand, we talk about voting for this epitome of immortal love to bring it into the new Seven Wonders of the World, and on the other hand we hear about people resorting to killing their love in desperation. Well indeed, love has diverse definitions; that’s the parody of life. Anyway, the news channels are making big business either way!

Cases of people slaying down their own fiancées have increased multi-fold. It’s almost become an everyday episode. It was barely a couple of months from now when this 24-year-old software professional Kaushambi Layek, a TCS employee was murdered by her boyfriend at a suburban hotel in Mumbai. And now it’s this girl, Sushma Nikam who was brutally stabbed to death by her ‘lover’ on the busy streets of Thane amidst all the passers-by rushing to their workplaces. But despite their busy schedules, the otherwise-always-on-their-toes Mumbaikars did find the time to watch the ‘tamasha’, though they refrained from coming forward to the victim’s rescue. Due respect to the one lady who lent a helping hand – laudable! (I think everyone should start wearing ‘choodiyan’, if that makes one brave!) The victim was stabbed 21 times by the attacker in broad daylight, and that’s precisely the kind of social situation where we prefer to stay mum and stand as oblivious onlookers. Well, no one can be blamed. The sight would have been gruesome enough for anybody to think of taking instantaneous action. Picture ourselves witnessing such cruelty. We never know how we would react given the same circumstances - terrified…petrified…mortified…stupefied? A real situation is not an ideal situation! But people will be people – great talkers, little doers, especially when it comes to condemning each others’ doings. And the Press will be Press, when it comes to dramatizing the audience's reactions to add some spice to their hottest selling news!

Anyway, returning to my point, I was mentioning the different dimensions of love, or is this a typical case of pure love versus lust? Cliché as it may sound, but that’s the fact! Desire - want – get – acquire, these are the thoughts occupying people’s minds. Whoever said, one should learn to give in love. Forget giving one’s own life, even that’s an offence punishable by law! But taking away someone else’s life? This only confirms that we show no concern for anybody but our own selves. Self contentment is all that matters and we can stoop to any level to acquire that, though that may account to somebody else’s grief.

Can we still call ourselves humans or are we turning into callous and cold-blooded creatures, heartless hooligans? All said and done, one thing is confirmed – ‘All’s fair in love and war’, and people seem to have taken that a bit too literally. When this was phrased, little would the author have expected that there would be a phase, where love would lose its face following this very adage. And with many more ‘lovely’ centuries to go, even God might not be able to answer where mankind would lie and where humanity would be…

I do hope Professor Armin Falk of the University of Bonn was paid exactly what it was worth for this study showing that money, or even the thought of it, can makes us high.

It's hard to put a price on such knowledge but it does provide great value for headline-generators such as myself.

"Money like a drug," the Herald headline begins and it's an apposite analogy for the times, as governments around the world inject cash into the banking system while everyone else is suffering from withdrawal (or maybe 'non-withdrawal' is better) syndromes.

Back to the study itself, which, according to the Herald story, suggests "that the human brain is innately susceptible to the illusion of wealth that money can bring".

At its core, Falk's study supports the notion that most people are distracted by headline numbers and pretty crappy at applying simple maths to reality.

But as this story on US website Portfolio.com demonstrates, sometimes investment professionals are pretty crappy at applying reality to mathematics.

You may be sick of reading about credit default swaps and collateralised debt obligations - the financial instruments copping the blame for our current little financial crisis - but the article (originally published in 'Wired' magazine) is particularly illuminating about the way financial types measure risk and how the beauty of a single formula blinded many to the ugly - statistically speaking - real world.

"They think they can model just a few years' worth of data and come up with probabilities for things that may happen only once every 10,000 years," the Wired story concludes. "Then people invest on the basis of those probabilities, without stopping to wonder whether the numbers make any sense at all."

Now that's a real money illusion

Abstract

In this article, we discuss the classic proof that girls are evil. The author will briefly discuss the origins of the problem and review the classic proof. The author then indicates a mathematical flaw in the argument, invalidating the statement. The article concludes with a revised and corrected statement of the result.

I. Introduction

I recently received an email discussing the differences between men and women from various mathematical and engineering points-of-view. Most of it was extremely funny, and sooner or later all shall certainly appear within the mathematico-humorist community, properly researched, and appended with standard references in the literature.

However, one portion of the email included a mathematical “proof” of the fact that girls are evil. This proof is doubtless familiar to many readers, having circulated a few times in mathematicians’ inboxes. However, for those readers unfamiliar with this well-known proof, we present it now.

II. Statement and classical proof of result

Theorem. Girls are evil.

Proof. It is axiomic in all cultures that girls require both time and money, and any man with either a deficiency in available “quality time” or “disposable income” knows that this a joint-proportion, whence

Similarly, it is has been proved that “time is money”..

Therefore, the Substitution yields

We also know that “money is the root of all evil”, whence

Substituting again yields

Squaring on the right-hand side of the equation yields

establishing the result. Q.E.D.

III. Identifying and resolving the flaw

The above “proof,” so-called, is widely known to mathematicians, leading to the widespread belief that girls are evil.

It will therefore come as a surprise to find that the proof above is flawed, and indeed, the result is incorrect. There is a subtle flaw in the above argument that seems to have escaped most diligent readers for quite some time. In the interest of correcting this mis-truth, which has improperly vilified girls as being evil, we present now the correct statement and its proof.

Theorem (Corrected). Girls are absolute evil.

Proof. Arguing as above allows us to conclude

However, let us more intently examine the consequences of money being the root of all evil. A moment’s thought shows that it is incorrect to conclude that

To see this, recall that evil is a inherently negative concept . We cannot take square roots of negative quantities in the real world, lest we are will to assume that money is imaginary. (Graduate students in particular may choose to investigate this concept further ) Thus, we are therefore forced to conclude that

Substituting again yields

Squaring on the right-hand side of the equation yields

establishing that girls are absolutely evil. Q.E.D.

IV. Conclusion

We sincerely hope this clears things up.

And from that humble beginning — maybe ordinary quantum mechanics is right, and there exists a formulation of the theory of everything that takes the form of a time-independent Hamiltonian acting on a time-dependent quantum state defined in some Hilbert space — you can actually reach some sweeping conclusions. The fulcrum, of course, is the observed arrow of time in our local universe. When thinking about the low-entropy conditions near the Big Bang, we tend to get caught up in the fact that the Bang is a singularity, forming a boundary to spacetime in classical general relativity. But classical general relativity is not right, and it’s perfectly plausible (although far from inevitable) that there was something before the Bang. If the universe really did come into existence out of nothing 14 billion years ago, we can at least imagine that there was something special about that event, and there is some deep reason for the entropy to have been so low. But if the ordinary rules of quantum mechanics are obeyed, there is no such thing as the “beginning of time”; the Big Bang would just be a transitional stage, for which our current theories don’t provide an adequate spacetime interpretation. In that case, the observed arrow of time in our local universe has to arise dynamically according to the laws of physics governing the evolution of a wave function for all eternity.

Interestingly, that has important implications. If the quantum state evolves in a finite-dimensional Hilbert space, it evolves ergodically through a torus of phases, and will exhibit all of the usual problems of Boltzmann brains. So, at the very least, the Hilbert space (under these assumptions) must be infinite-dimensional. In fact you can go a bit farther than that, and argue that the spectrum of energy eigenvalues must be arbitrarily closely spaced — there must be at least one accumulation point.

Sexy, I know. The remarkable thing is that you can say anything at all about the Hilbert space of the universe just by making a few simple assumptions and observing that eggs always turn into omelets, never the other way around. Turning it into a respectable cosmological model with an explicit spacetime interpretation is, admittedly, more work, and all we have at the moment are some very speculative ideas. But in the course of the essay I got to name-check Parmenides, Heraclitus, Lucretius, Augustine, and Nietzsche, so overall it was well worth the effort.

“Under-promise and over-deliver” is a catchy and well accepted management maxim these days. It’s frequently found hand-in-hand with that other popular wisdom about the need to “constantly exceed customer expectations”. In fact many managers would argue that in order to constantly exceed customer expectations, you need to under-promise and over-deliver.

The marketing and management literature supports the notion that what is delivered to customers must relate to their expectations and this is in large part driven by what was promised in the first place. The real problem is how managers have blindly picked the idea up and assumed that it applies across the board.

Flawed assumption 1: That being positively surprised time and again is a sensible and sustainable thing to do

A common traditional wisdom is that one of the best things you can do is to “constantly exceed the expectations of your customers”. It’s like the customer management version of continuous improvement because it’s a stretchy and aspirational thing to do. But, given the earlier discussion about how customers dislike surprises, is this actually a sensible aspiration to pursue?

Look at the stock market example again- a blue chip stock is defined by the way it delivers the promised results time and again over the years as promised. As one web dictionary puts it- well-known common stocks with a long record of profit growth and dividend payment, and a reputation for quality management, products and services. What happens if a certain stock becomes renowned for beating expectations? Beating expectations quickly becomes the new expectation.

If for example, bank customers generally wait five minutes for teller service, their expectation will be to wait five minutes. To exceed their expectations, the bank will need to shorten the wait to less than five minutes. Perversely though, once customers experience a shorter wait, their expectations are generally revised. The inevitable happens- the bank creates a rod for its back and it feels under pressure to progressively reduce the waiting time, and following the logic, the waiting time will ultimately need to be zero.

One of the key points is that customer expectations are rarely static. The expectations customers hold will adapt and change according to what they hear in the market and what they experience.

Flawed assumption 2: That over delivering pays off

One of the biggest risks of over-delivering is wastage… the sort of wastage that cannot be seen.

It is a well known fact that some very high quality companies around the world have gone out of business. Even Baldridge award winners like Florida Power and Light have gone broke because their quality has been too good for what customers pay. There’s an assumption that great quality and service pays off, but ultimately it is about what the customer gets for what they are prepared to pay. Offer more than what a customer is prepared to pay and it will be the wastage that costs dearly.

Yet, if we explore the psychology and motivation of customers we get a picture why substantial wastage often goes unnoticed. What happens if a customer gets offered something positive they did not expect? First, they will of course usually accept it, especially if it comes with no strings attached. Unless the unexpected bonus is related to something really important and relevant to the customer, then it is likely, the customer will accept it without really thinking much about it.

Take the bank waiting time example again. If a customer comes in and this time goes straight to a teller without waiting, they will undoubtedly feel good about that for a short while. Importantly, the attitude of most customers is usually that this is a little win for them… some serendipity when “it’s usually me, the customer, who gets the raw end of the deal… so I deserve this bit of luck”. It’s likely they won’t attribute this to the good planning and management of the bank, unless it starts happening on a consistent basis. So isolated over-delivery will achieve little enduring behavioural modification for customers in the moderately dissatisfied to moderately satisfied ambivalence area of the satisfaction scale. Customers will take whatever is on offer though- they’d be crazy not too!

The main conclusion here is that over-delivery is a dangerous game. Most over-delivery will be happily accepted by customers, but don’t expect to get much back in return. To work, over-delivery must become part of a consistent, on-going offering that customers value and anticipate. And if that is achieved, that is no longer over- delivery, it’s simply doing what is promised and expected. So the emerging wisdom is don’t over-deliver, just “deliver on the nail”.

Flawed assumption 3: That under- promising works

This leads to another popular belief- that it is smart to manage the expectations of customers downwards, so that it is easier to delight them. Even better if you can delight customers by doing nothing different to what you are currently doing! This is so called “under- promising”- one half of the widely accepted “under- promise and over-deliver” approach.

On the surface of it, this seems a clever thing to do. Since the expectations of customers are quite fluid, it is obviously smart to keep them under control as much as is possible.

Let’s look at the bank waiting time example again. Imagine the bank has decided to manage expectations downward to ten minutes, but still deliver on a five minute wait. Note that in the past waiting times were one of those issues avoided if possible in any communications with customers. Obviously, it costs very little to explain to customers that they can realistically expect a waiting time of up to ten minutes. As the theory suggests, naturally, they will be pleasantly surprised if they only have to wait five minutes (the amount of time they have always had to wait)- or will they?

There are a few inherent dangers:

• There’s a negative message to be communicated in order to manage expectations- that that the waiting time could be ten minutes. Keeping in mind that studies show that it takes about 11 positives to make up for one negative, there’s a very real danger that there could be a negative backlash against the bank which could be difficult to overcome. This will be especially so if waiting time is an important criterion for customers to evaluate the performance of the bank
• What if another bank uses the opportunity to promote shorter waiting times? This might be an attractive proposition to the many ambivalent customers of the first bank, even though in reality waiting times in the two banks are the same. Under- promising on a systematic basis can open up an opportunity for competitors when really there is no difference between the two.

In this competitive world, it’s unusual to have the space to under- promise on an ongoing basis, especially to make enough of a difference for the under-promise; over-deliver strategy to stand out to customers.

Much more important to work on is communicating realistically what your firm is capable of, so that there is no misunderstanding with the customer. You could call this “promise on the nail”- the art and science of promising exactly what a customer is going to get.

Where does that leave “under-promise and over- deliver”?

It’s catchy, but it has no substance and it’s not sustainable- “under-promise and over-deliver” rarely works for all the reasons argued above.

Most success will come from promising what can and should be delivered and then doing it- “promise on the nail and deliver it on the nail”.

Although Einstein is best known for his theories of relativity, he was also the main driving force behind the advent of quantum mechanics (QM). His early work in photo-voltaic effect paved way for future developments in QM. And he won the Nobel prize, not for the theories of relativity, but for this early work.

It then should come as a surprise to us that Einstein didn’t quite believe in QM. He spent the latter part of his career trying to device thought experiments that would prove that QM is inconsistent with what he believed to be the laws of nature. Why is it that Einstein could not accept QM? We will never know for sure, and my guess is probably as good as anybody else’s.

Einstein’s trouble with QM is summarized in this famous quote.

"God does not play dice with the universe." — Albert Einstein

It is indeed difficult to reconcile the notions (or at least some interpretations) of QM with a word view in which a God has control over everything. In QM, observations are probabilistic in nature. That is to say, if we somehow manage to send two electrons (in the same state) down the same beam and observe them after a while, we may get two different observed properties.

We can interpret this imperfection in observation as our inability to set up identical initial states, or the lack of precision in our measurements. This interpretation gives rise to the so-called hidden variable theories — considered invalid for a variety of reasons. The interpretation currently popular is that uncertainty is an inherent property of nature — the so-called Copenhagen interpretation.

In the Copenhagen picture, particles have positions only when observed. At other times, they should be thought of as kind of spread out in space. In a double-slit interference experiment using electrons, for instance, we should not ask whether a particular electron takes on slit or the other. As long as there is interference, it kind of takes both.

The troubling thing for Einstein in this interpretation would be that even God would not be able to make the electron take one slit or the other (without disturbing the interference pattern, that is). And if God cannot place one tiny electron where He wants, how is he going to control the whole universe?