23 The Parsimony Principle in the decision process

Here’s a very interesting take on the decision process: the Parsimony Principle. Parsimony, without referring to the dictionary, is the art of making more with less, of extracting the last bit from a thing or activity, of achieving the most with the least resources. In this respect it is not different from the efficiency principle or maximizing returns and minimizing costs. But it goes beyond that; it implies, in life decisions, the principle of reducing the demand for resources, and is concerned with avoiding needless activity. It therefore refers not only to the ladder (the means), but also where you put it, the wall you want to climb (the end)!

I heard a very instructive story from an associate of yore (he retired to farm pigs, and I’ve not been in touch for some years!) that nicely illustrates the Parsimony Principle. I may say, in fact, that I owe this insight to his story. He was a man who liked to befriend judges, and they depended on him to sort out things with officialdom. One such exalted personage asked him to get an exemption from octroi payment (that’s the taxes they levy on the border between states or provinces of a country) for a new fridge he was getting from the neighbouring state (to take advantage of a lower sales tax, perhaps). My friend’s reaction was: Pay the five dollars! To get the octroi waived, he would have had to approach every rung from the State headquarters down to the guard at the last gate, and the personage’s name would have had to be dragged through the mud and muck of all these offices. So, just pay up, and do not grumble! This is an admirable application of the Parsimony principle: keep your influence and contacts for the big things, don’t fritter it away for a trivial matter!

 One aspect of the way this principle works itself out is in getting things done:  go to the lowest level feasible. People often pride themselves on ‘going straight to the top’, for instance if your coffee is not piping hot, you will phone up the Chairman of the airlines or hotel chain. This only establishes your own inflated sense of your self-importance, and not your importance as such. I once overheard just such a self-important bozo berating a girl on the ground staff of the airlines for a 15-minute delay in the flight: he was asking her the telephone number of her Chairman to complain. I remember one of the things she said: I work in this job because I love to serve, and not just for the pay. Going to the top, or threatening to do so, only exposes  you as a jerk, and does not elicit better service! An honest approach to the guy (or gal) on the spot usually works better.

Another story illustrating this principle: as the police verification for my wife’s passport was taking time, I was tempted to go over the head of the police constable responsible for this right to the Police Superintendent. To tell the truth, I wanted the certificate without my wife actually being in that place (in station, as they put in official-speak). The top man, far from expediting the certificate, hauled up the constable for taking up the case without the physical presence of the subject! The constable later came to me and reproached me for going over his head; for showing extra smartness, when he was doing it his way and would have got us the certificate on his own time. It’s a different story that we finally got the passport with the help of a Foreign Service uncle; but at the field level, it doesn’t pay to be too smart, or ‘over-smart’ in the local idiom!

These are just stories, but the principle is that you choose a solution that makes maximum use of existing resources before going to new resources. Often, we want to change the whole system, instead of tweaking the offending small portion of it that is causing the problem. Ever since the economy was given a fillip by reducing tariffs and liberalizing the issue of licenses, people have started asking for major ‘structural changes’ rather than ‘business as usual’. But this may be enormously wasteful of resources, and play into the hands of those self-interested persons who want to milk the system for their own windfall gains. If there is a damp patch on your wall, for example, you will investigate its cause and perhaps realize your drains need cleaning, rather than breaking down your whole house and rebuilding it. Your contractor may, however, like to inveigle you into scrapping the whole structure: beware the slippery slope of home improvements! Similarly for other things in life.

The 20:80 'rule' (post #11) is in fact another nice illustration of the Parsimony principle. If we can make do with that 80% of what we want out of something, we need only invest 20% of the resources that would be required to satisfy all our imagined wants. As Gandhi said, we have enough to satisfy all our needs, but not our greeds. The cost of satisfying all our greeds is a whopping 80% of our resources; a parsimonious approach would satisfy 80% of our desires (by no means a self-denying satisfaction level) with one-fifth the resources! Who said you cannot have it all and retire to a happy holiday home?

To summarize, search for the simplest explanation and try the simplest fixes that will demand the least resources. Go to the lowest level at which your work can be done. In science, also, those hypotheses have the greatest chance of persisting that require the least number of special assumptions and can explain the largest proportion of cases with the least number of exceptions. It is termed ‘Occam’s Razor’, I believe, in the jargon of the logic of scientific thinking.

22 Pay the five dollars!

Many years back, I stumbled upon a delightful piece in that venerable, and much maligned (by the intellectuals), magazine Readers’ Digest, titled “Pay the five dollars!”.  In essence, it said that there are situations where it is simply not worth arguing or fighting, one complies and carries on. A traffic offence,  for instance: a cop pulls you up because you didn’t stop at a light, or you touched the zebra crossing, or you started moving when the lights were not yet green (the last happened to me!), or because he has year-end targets to fulfill. Of course you could try to contest the cop’s charge, or you could demand to make that phone call to your lawyer, or you could call the entire police force corrupt and demand to talk to your MP… or, you could pay the small fine and whizz off (decorously) and carry on with your life. You need not even wait around for the receipt, but thank the cop for being such a devoted public servant, and ask him to mail it to you!

 Among the many amazing things about life, it is remarkable how a small negative offsets all the positives, affecting  our entire enjoyment of life… the whole trip spoilt by a small traffic fine or by a blown tire or even less, a whole meal spoilt by a slightly chipped dish, and so on. Part of it is probably our sense of dignity, of self-worth; we feel most keenly, not the minor inconvenience or imperfection, but the implicit affront to our sense of self-importance. Such things are not supposed to happen to people-like-us. We do not like to be bundled together with the herd.

Economics has a theory for this syndrome, and they try to explain why a given loss looms larger than an equal gain in normal human psychology.  It says that the marginal utility (the satisfaction you get from the last unit of something consumed) of anything keeps falling, the more you have of it, so that your tenth strawberry  ice-cream isn’t as interesting as your first (at one sitting, that is!). The working out of this principle of diminishing marginal utility compromises our whole outlook on life. It diminishes, or discounts, the value of what we have, and makes us hanker after what we are still to acquire. This also may explain, incidentally, the twists and turns in affairs of the heart (and why an astute lover will play hard to get!).  It also gives us a strong hint that we should count our blessings, since human nature generally tends to devalue or under-value what we have in our desire for new things. It also relates to the 20-80 rule: although 20% of our possessions may satisfy 80% of our wants, we still hanker after the unattained 20% because it has such a high marginal utility in our eyes! It also explains why one man’s nectar is another man’s poison… it all depends on how much of it you have already! It also explains why the home-grown  chicken is like porridge to our taste (to paraphrase a pithy Hindi proverb), and why the richest magnates in our country spend so many millions to build the ugliest mansions in the world… they have such a surfeit of pretty things around them!

 Coming back to the original theme, the principle here is to minimize the hassle factor, and just pay up and get out. We are not going to win every time, in business or in the daily exchanges of life, so we may as well learn to cut our losses in good time, not throw good money after bad, and so on. There is also a wonderful concept in Economics of the sunk, or historic, cost, which I feel deserves a piece by itself, but which tells us to let bygones be bygones, and measure each transaction afresh, without reference to the past. There is also the question of how much baggage we want to carry around in our lives; will we be so affected by small defeats, that we will fight to the finish for every single thing? Or will we toss out some small losses as part of life, forget about them, and carry on with our lives?

21 Why we should be slow to judge

The thing which amazes me nowadays is how judgmental people have become in public life. Whole professions have developed around casting aspersions, such as the RTI activists, the serial public fasters, the media bloodhounds, and so on. All the talk is of how others are useless, and this has bred armies of the idle self-righteous. A lot of retired persons have jumped on to the bandwagon, a panacea for their boredom and irrelevance.

There was a time not so long back, that people realized that good and bad are not distinctly distributed. Each person is a bundle of both, mixed together. We were told to examine ourselves first, before passing judgment on others.  My favourite story is that of the father with three boisterous kids on the train. When asked why he didn’t keep them in control, he replied that they were just coming back from having the mother buried, and the kids hadn’t still realized that she wasn’t coming back and that their lives had irrevocably changed… he was allowing them an afternoon of carefree play before the reality hit them, as it would…

So we need to be careful in passing judgment, even in our minds, for we do not know what is passing over others’ lives. There are many examples of this idea in the wisdom literature of the world. The most familiar is Jesus’ advice to judge not, that we be not judged. Let him cast the first stone, he said, who has not sinned. In today’s world, on the contrary, we are all too eager to make examples of stray individuals, in a form of witch hunting or scape-goating, on a whole range of scales from a small community or group, to relations between nations. The accusers are often no better than those they accuse and revile.

Popular judgment is often a form of gossip-mongering, which can make or break individuals without possibility of restitution or revision.  This is all the more reason that we should suspend judgment if we are not sure of the facts. In my own experience, for example, the way the media project developing events (or non-events, too, for that matter!) need not have any relation to reality. The media often create their own news, or their own version of matters. Film stars and celebrities, of course, are frequently at the receiving end, but because the news channels constantly need to find something interesting, even ordinary people like teachers and doctors and ward assistants become grist to their mill. So we need to take all this with a slight pinch of salt, or a healthy dose of skepticism.

Of course, this doesn’t mean we should be completely neutral between right and wrong, or that we should ignore or condone wrong-doing. But modern democracies do have a rigorous division between different roles, such as prosecutor and judge, or law-maker and law enforcer. We should not collapse these roles unthinkingly, the way the public media are prone to do.  The judge listens to the accusations, but he is not swayed by emotion; he can afford to take a broader, dispassionate view, thereby preserving a sense of proportion in meting out punishment. We do not say “off with their heads!” for every small infraction; there is always a second chance given, a fresh start possible.  To err, as they say, is human; every one of us is undoubtedly guilty of some sort of crimes, small though they may be, which could attract severe penalties if pursued to the logical end.  The separation of accuser and judge, therefore, is a crucial one in modern civilized societies, and any dilution of this will lead to over-zealous application of the law, oppression of the lay people, misuse of power by functionaries, and dysfunctional societies.

One of the sobering things about post-modern life is the realization that any person or society can fall into grievious error. The most civilized, god-fearing society in the most enlightened part of the world, may (in fact, did) come up with the most efficient killing machine that finished off common people in the millions as an act of national duty. Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee, said the poet. Smugness in our own virtuousness is the one thing that we cannot afford to adopt. It was shown ordinary, normal students could be induced to administer lethal shocks of electricity to innocent experimental subjects if they thought they were under orders from a white coat; the propensity to obey persons in authority seems to be built into us, with a corresponding readiness to suspend our own moral thinking. That’s why we should be slow to pass judgment, and why our judgments should be laced with compassion and understanding rather than with the red-eyed self-righteousness of prophets.

20 When do you have the right to get angry?

The short answer is … never. I’m sorry to have to cut to the conclusion right at the start, but it’s as well to make the point up front.

But surely, one would say, there are situations in which one has to get righteously angry at the wrong-doer? This sounds plausible, but it is a mental trap. It assumes that there are black and white in right and wrong, and worse, it tempts us into searching for ways to classify parties as right and wrong. This is especially true in situations where we are ourselves emotionally involved, such as family problems, work situations, national affairs like war and peace, and… but you get the idea.

There are, in my experience, no situations in an average life, that will not be made worse by losing our temper. Whether it is family, or colleagues at work or play, or strangers in the world outside, the moment we lose our temper, communication breaks down, a barrier comes between us, and our capacity to influence or even just communicate, is reduced considerably. If we do it often enough, people start shunning us, or going out of their way to avoid certain topics or situations with us; they will assiduously find ways around and behind us, leaving us wondering why we are always left out.

Not losing our temper, not habitually getting angry or using angry words, gives us considerable leverage in finding ways to work together to find solutions. It increases our influence, even with people we see as wicked, corrupt or stupid. Since, by definition, almost everybody else would fit one of these descriptions, this means that our influence with pretty much everybody in this world will increase!

Many of the principles already discussed apply here: the principle of minimizing the maximum damage, for instance, since hurtful words spoken in anger cannot be taken back. A lifetime of trust can be savaged by a single angry outburst; the damage would be very difficult to salvage. The fact is that none of us harbours consistently kind thoughts about others, even our closest friends or family; but there is no need to share every twinge of irritation or frustration with others, especially in moments of irritation. Always go through life with the principle of minimax!

Another principle is that others don’t really owe you; and moreover, they go through life doing things without necessarily thinking of how you will be affected. There is no use expecting them to live their lives around your convenience, so equally there is no call to be losing your temper about them. In fact, very often our view of things is not the only one that can appear plausible; an impartial observer may be much more even-handed in how things are seen. So it is always better to allow for our own wrong-headedness, and not get on such a high horse in our mis-guided self-justification or righteousness, that we cannot get off it without falling! In fact, it is best not to feel righteous, as it can back you into all sorts of horrible corners, like a friend’s dad who didn’t talk to his family for twenty years; he may have passed on without explaining his silence, which probably arose in pique turned into anger.

The other man, we feel, should know why we are angry and should apologize to us first; since the other man, unfortunately, couldn’t be less bothered about placating us, the world goes on its merry way regardless, leaving us festering in our own pool of righteous anger. In fact, anger does more damage to ourselves than to anybody else; if nothing else, it puts up our blood pressure, leaves us exhausted, and may predispose us to all sorts of stress-related physical ailments like heart disease or diabetes. Even if we have to dole out punishment, we need to do it in a non-angry or righteous way; we should be sobered by the consideration that there, but for the grace of God, go we too.