Setting up the bracket

Meet Bracket!

That's a puzzle drive. It's what accounts for my wanting to decipher Mayan hieroglyphics, for trying to open safes. I remember in high school, during first period a guy would come to me with a puzzle in geometry, or something which had been assigned in his advanced math class. I wouldn't stop until I figured the damn thing out —­­ it would take me fifteen or twenty minutes. But during the day, other guys would come to me with the same problem, and I'd do it for them in a flash. So for one guy, to do it took me twenty minutes, while there were five guys who thought I was a super­genius.

Richard Feynman, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”

I first read “Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman” when I was sixteen. It blew me away. Feynman’s world was far more interesting than mine, one with exciting adventures around every corner, and fascinating things waiting to be uncovered just out of sight. You could look at ants all day and observe how they found sugar! You could learn to pick locks just because it was fun!

For someone brought up with a set script of what to look up to, this was like someone had casually grabbed and sprung open what I’d assumed was a wall. It awakened in me a curiosity to explore anything that seemed fascinating - needing no reason except that it seemed fascinating - which I hold dear to my heart. That curiosity has added a gushing spring of joy to my life.

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Sometime last year, I saw a question on Quora which went “Who are America’s swing voters, and what makes them swing?”

It rattled around in my head. The answers didn’t feel enough. I was able to find a data-based definition of swing voters from 2007 by a researcher named Mayer. I was able to find a FiveThirtyEight article about it (of course), but it was trying to put a number to swing voters, not profile them. As it turns out, demographically, US swing voters look just like any other voters (which makes sense, because that’d be the easiest targeting any political party would do) — but politically, they have a very different identity. So how do you try to understand them? I thought the best way would be to profile their political views, and see where they point.

So I downloaded a voter-level dataset from the ANES, classified swing voters using Mayer’s definition, and tried to dig into their political views. I won’t digress with the details (the piece is here), but here’s the short version: They don’t have a partisan identity or a political label. They don’t see a large difference between the parties on positions. And they’re less likely to be politically involved or even regularly discuss politics. But they definitely see themselves as moderates and are unlikely to vote for someone perceived as extremist. This answered the question to a certain extent for me.

Like so much of my writing, that came from something that tripped me up, rattled around in my head, and refused to let me re-watch Parks and Rec for the seventeenth time in peace. And it ended up being a really fun trip that taught me a lot!

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I don’t want to declare that this is what everyone should do, all the time, always. We all have jobs to do in the morning, and dishes to wash, and Parks and Rec to re-watch for the seventeenth time. And of course, the state of information is such that there are bad numbers, and there are misleading numbers, and there are outright lying numbers. Research is often paywalled, in one of the most hilariously transparent scams of our time. (Researchers pay $$ to get published, readers pay $$ to read. Reviewers review for free. Editors don’t always get paid. $$ —> Journal. Cool business.)

And then of course, institutions don’t always do their jobs well. There are smart people whose jobs rely on conveying information to the public, and they are sometimes astonishingly bad at their jobs. There are smart people whose jobs rely on conveying misinformation to the public, and they are sometimes astonishingly good at their jobs. You get the point.

But I want to suggest to you that digging into the research or the data about a topic to form an informed opinion can actually be fun!

Let me take another example. Denialism of Climate Change in the US has had me stumped for years. I couldn’t help but wonder how that came to be: how does half of the supposed centre of power in the world choose to wilfully shut its eyes to one of the biggest challenges facing humanity?
The answer, as it turns out, is a little complicated. This is a recent phenomenon - the number of Americans who believed global warming was real dropped 20% in about three years between ‘07 and ‘09, because the number of Republicans who believed it nearly halved from 62%. It hasn’t recovered since. Driven by a polarised media and political landscape, then, a small Republican minority has come to dominate the debate - and shut it down. (Again, full piece with an interesting story here.) Assembling this (sliightly long, yes - why do you ask?) piece opened my eyes to a lot of dynamics that often move public opinion.

But then of course, there are the jobs to do in the morning, and dishes to wash, and Parks and Rec to re-watch for the seventeenth time. And there are numbers, and numbers look suspiciously like homework. I work with numbers every day, and I find myself having to consciously stop skimming when I’m seeing too many of them.

And of course, humans are ridiculously messy at processing… anything. We all want to read more of what we already think. We all look for shelters of like-minded folks, and our perceived tribes make us do strange things. We’re bad at even considering things that supposedly contradict each other, or consider arguments from different sides of a polarised landscape. As it turns out, seemingly contradictory things - and some opinions of arguing people - are both true all the time! We all have beliefs about the world that aren’t true, or are just driven by emotions and not held up by reality. Humans have built terribly complex societies, societies that can go to the moon and make six seasons of Community and put together an IPL in the desert in the middle of a bloody pandemic at a couple months’ notice. And yet, their brains can’t process the fact that Che Pujara, in the team to blunt the ball, doing his job is good. Perhaps because emotional reactions of I don’t like this create a bias towards this isn’t good.

And this is something we all do. We all fudge the truth a bit for our own narratives. Or sometimes because it just sounds better.
And yeah, we all don’t floss on too many days.

What this leads to, apart from better money for dentists, is a lot of what we see around in The Discourse. Things that are supposedly addressed to the other side are actually just addressed to your own side to rile them up. (A major pet peeve: Open letters are shit at being letters. They’re written to everyone except the addressee.) The amount of polarisation of the news ecosystem (and the mind-blowingly horrible current state of the Indian TV space!) means little context is shared with someone not already in your group - which complicates everything. And then, things are written in a way that often assumes shared identity. If you attack people and tell them they’re evil, or call them silly names, it makes them less receptive to whatever you want to tell them. Who knew?

It really is hard trying to suspend what you think is obviously true and see what the evidence says, like noticing the air. It’s tough building a case for your point of view that can actually speak to those who don’t already agree with it. It’s way easier - and an order of magnitude more fun - to just dunk on them and say they are literal Nazis. And this is true for everyone. It’s difficult to try to explore how things came to be, or how they can be better. It’s easy to just say Nehru did it.

And yet, this can all be fun stuff!

We’re all constrained - nay, handicapped - in our capacity to fathom this unfathomably complex world. But what life often does, with the jobs and the dishes and the seventeenth Parks and Rec rewatch, is wear down our desire to try anyway. That leads to a backslide into default settings: we start blindly taking cues from our tribe to decide what we believe; we start simply seeking out stuff that confirms what we’re already biased toward; we start believing what feels true.

And that creates… *gestures around* this.

The lack of a desire to explore and wonder, a deficiency of being able to seek what Feynman called ‘the pleasure of finding things out’, is to me a defining feature of what ails our discourse.

Meet Bracket.

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The promise of Bracket, as you saw on the welcome page there, is “data- and research- driven stories about the world, told with careful nuance.” They will be about a lot of different things, from agriculture in India, to emerging climate change denial in the US, and everything in between. I hope to be able to convince you that they’ll all be fun reads in their own way!

Of course, I’m not trying to pretend I’m above all the biases I’m talking about. Sometimes I get carried away and over-complicate things, or see a complex narrative where one isn’t there. I delight so much in finding “everyone’s an idiot!” stories I sometimes find them where they don’t exist. I tend to be pessimistic, and that sometimes blinds me to hopeful possibilities. At my best, I string together a narrative about the world from the data and evidence I find. At my worst, I try to cherry-pick evidence to support the narrative my own biases are telling me. I hope to find readers who are able to spot which is which, and tell me.

I’ll write about a lot of topics, but sometimes it will be about politics. Because it can come up at some point, here are the salient points. I’m somewhat liberal, though I don’t seek a definite label for myself. I’m solidly liberal on social issues. By Indian standards, my views on free speech are apparently (from the last few weeks) somewhat extremist. I’m not entirely left wing on economic issues compared to the Indian centre. Regardless, I’ll try my best to maintain a measure of neutrality while writing. I may make a case, but I’ll make it without assuming you’ve already bought it. There won’t be attempts to vilify anyone. I’ve always been particular about this, but detailed sourcing will be available so that every significant claim is backed up properly, and arguments will be advanced with detailed evidence from a reliable source.

And of course, subscribing is free, and likely will be for the foreseeable future. Unless, that is, I find a baby on my doorstep one day and I need money so I can send her to one of those fancy, really expensive pre-primaries. Then I will charge the shit out of everyone I see.

Jokes aside, this will let you find all my analytical content in one place. Subscribing does something very simple: it lets me find you, the reader interested in reading shit like this. And it lets you find me, bearing the shit you’re interested in reading, without having to come across it on my facebook. Because honestly, even I don’t come across my facebook much.

If all of this appeals to you, you can read some of the stuff I’ve written in the archive. If you like that enough to give me a shot, and would like to subscribe, thank you from the bottom of my cold, grey, electronic heart. All writing ultimately seeks to be read. It makes a world of difference to me when someone reads something I write. Thank you.

Welcome to Bracket!