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Showing posts from November, 2012

Of Goodness, Pragmatism and Reciprocity

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Baba Gyani Triviani said: " In Bangalore city, the general public is like the Joker. They work very hard to bring the White Knight down to their level " Just the other day, I was reading an interesting article about reciprocity. Apparently, the maxim " One good turn deserves another " is imbibed into our culture very deeply, so deeply that we remember good turns done to us and return favours invariably, if not immediately then over time. A good demonstration of this can be seen in the experiment by a well known psychologist whose assistant got twice as much money for raffle tickets when he got the people some coca-cola to drink (as a good gesture), than those who didn't get coca-cola - and people who didn't like him but got coke also paid double of those who liked him but didn't get coke. Amazing, isn't it? The author goes on to say that reciprocity works everywhere. But I don't think this theory works all the time at all. In fact, a couple

The Monty Hall problem

Swami Gulagulaananda said: " You showed me a goat and made me a bakra " There was an interesting discussion at office today. I'd heard about this problem before, but didn't know that the name of the problem is " Monty Hall " problem. The problem goes like this: Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice? [ Source: Wikipedia ] If you have not heard of this problem, take some time and think about it. See what the solution is, according to you. Then continue reading... You will encounter views and counter-views. Spoiler Alert: If you continue reading beyond this part, you will encounter answers Apparently the co