Tandarin

When professional cyclists were told they were racing against their own best times, they tended to match those times, even when the times were faster than they had ever raced. I wonder how useful that sort of influence would be if we applied it to other areas.

In a few years it will be feasible to create a virtual version of yourself - an avatar - that lives a better lifestyle in the digital world than you do in the real world.

The avatar would have a healthier diet, exercises more, be less shy in social settings, more assertive at work, and perhaps have a more perfect batting skills. If you spent a few minutes every day observing your avatar doing what you wished you could do, would the peer pressure motivate you to higher achievement?

I think it might. In a way, this would be the high tech version of writing down your goals every day and visualizing success. 

The avatar would simply make the visualization easier.

Perhaps calling this effect peer pressure is not doing it justice. It might be more of a case of unlocking your potential in the same way that the first runner to break the four-minute mile unlocked the potential of those who followed. For any given task, we all seem to have a mental switch that is stuck in the "yes you can" or "no you can't" position.

Sometimes you need to use mental tricks to flip the switch from no to yes. I wonder if your avatar could help.

Very often, successful people seem to have had meaningful interactions with other successful people prior to making it big themselves. That could be a case of coincidence or selective reporting, but I suspect causation.

When you get to know a famous person, your mind says, "If that idiot can succeed, how hard can it be?" That flips the switch in your mind to "yes I can."

I also wonder if programming your avatar to smile or laugh would immediately put you in a good mood. I think it would. I think your avatar could also improve your table manners, help your posture, and move you in the right direction a hundred different ways.

At some point in the future of humanity our avatars will be so well-programmed with our preferences and memories that they will live on after our deaths and have no idea they are not the real us.

And since that future will last forever for the avatar, perhaps in a continuous loop, while your mortal life is limited in years, the statistical reality suggests it already happened and you are an avatar of someone who went before.

Yes, you knew I was going there.

Feeling rather peckish the other evening, and having some time to spare between a trip to the dentist and an evening visit to a family friend, I popped into an speciality North Indian restaurant in Mangalore and was pondering the menu when a waitress came up and asked me how I was today.

Oddly enough, a check-out maid at 'Big Brother' had asked me exactly the same thing only a few days ago and for some reason had looked less than interested when I told her of the problems I was having with my heels and ankles, particularly on the left foot.

So this time, I decided to start at the other end of my body.

"Interesting that you should ask," I said, "for I have just emerged from a visit to my very expensive dentist who has, I hope, finally succeeded in putting right a problem that he performed last year."

"It had started wobbling dramatically, and not for the first time", I hasten to add, "and I would not have made a fuss but for the fact that I have a temporary filling on the other side of my mouth and had been advised not to bite on anything harder than a scrambled egg."

"So what with the filling and the problem, both sides of my mouth had become no-food zones, and I feared that I was in danger of starving."

She tried to draw my attention back to the menu, but I thought I ought to fill her in on a few more details.

"When he first put the implant in," I said, "he had been unable to locate the right titanium screw, so I think he used another one that had been left by the builders."

"Not long after, my crown fell out and he had to replace it, but then the screw developed a wobble and he had to take the whole thing out and start again."

"By the time that was done, he thought the problem was solved, but as I said, it recently began to wobble again and he could not get the crown off to tighten it, so he drilled a narrow hole through the crown just so that he could get the screwdriver in it."

"Frankly, I don't see why they can't have some sort of powerful X-ray electromagnetic screwdriver that can do the job through the crown."

"But the dentist said that was impossible, so he did it the hard way and has now tightened the screw and left an access hole in case he has to do it again."

"I'm sorry to hear.." she began, but I thought I ought to mention the huge dentist's bill I had paid to undergo all this inconvenience.

"You know," I said, "my builder, who is not the sort of fellow to leave screws behind, recently put in a whole new extra-large window extending down two storeys and a new door for the same price as the dentist charged for just one tooth."

"And neither window nor door has wobbled at all."

"I'm sure that with a bit of Polyfilla, he could have furnished me with an implant that would have done the job perfectly well, though I am not so sure I would have trusted him to do the earlier extraction with a pair of pliers."

"I'll have the Sheesh Kabab, please."

She hastily scribbled down the order and rushed off.

I really don't see why she asked how I was today if she wasn't interested.

And I hadn't even started telling her about my strained calf muscles and other ailments.

If you have a round peg that doesn’t fit in a square hole, do you blame the peg or the hole?

You probably blame neither.

We don’t assign blame to inanimate objects. But you might have some questions about the person who provided you with these mismatched items and set you up to fail.

If a lion and a zebra show up at the same watering hole, and the lion kills the zebra, whose fault is that? Maybe you say the lion is at fault for doing the killing.

Maybe you say the zebra should have chosen a safer watering hole. But in the end, you probably conclude that both animals acted according to their natures, so no one is to blame.

However, if this is your local zoo, you might have some questions about who put the lions with the zebras in the same habitat.

Now consider human males. No doubt you have noticed an alarming trend in the news. Powerful men have been behaving badly, e.g. tweeting, flirting, cheating, and being offensive to just about everyone in the entire world. The current view of such things is that the men are to blame for their own bad behavior.

That seems right. Obviously we shouldn’t blame the victims. I think we all agree on that point. Blame and shame are society’s tools for keeping things under control.

The part that interests me is that society is organized in such a way that the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable.

In other words, men are born as round pegs in a society full of square holes.

Whose fault is that? Do you blame the baby who didn’t ask to be born male? Or do you blame the society that brought him into the world, all round-pegged and turgid, and said, “Here’s your square hole”?

The way society is organized at the moment, we have no choice but to blame men for bad behavior. If we allowed men to act like unrestrained animals, all hell would break loose.

All I’m saying is that society has evolved to keep males in a state of continuous unfulfilled urges, more commonly known as unhappiness. No one planned it that way. Things just drifted in that direction.

Consider Hugh Hefner. He had every benefit of being a single man, and yet he decided he needed to try marriage. Marriage didn’t work out, so he tried the single life again. That didn’t work out, so he planned to get married again, although reportedly the wedding just got called off.

For Hefner, being single didn’t work, and getting married didn’t work, at least not in the long run. Society didn’t offer him a round hole for his round peg. All it offered were unlimited square holes.

To be fair, if a man meets and marries the right woman, and she fulfills his needs, he might have no desire to tweet his meat to strangers.

Everyone is different. But in general, society is organized as a virtual prison for men’s natural desires. I don’t have a solution in mind. It’s a zero sum game. If men get everything they want, women lose, and vice versa.

And there’s no real middle ground because that would look like tweeting a picture of your junk with your underpants still on. Some things just don’t have a compromise solution.

Long term, I think science will come up with a drug that keeps men chemically castrated for as long as they are on it. It sounds bad, but I suspect that if a man loses his urge, he also doesn’t miss it.

Men and women would also need a second drug that increases oxytocin levels in couples who want to bond. Copulation will become extinct. Men who want to reproduce will stop taking the castration drug for a week, fill a few jars with sperm for artificial insemination, and go back on the castration pill.

That might sound to you like a horrible world. But the oxytocin would make us a society of huggers, and no one would be treated as a sex object.

You’d have no rape, fewer divorces, stronger friendships, and a lot of other advantages.

I think that’s where we’re headed in a few generations.

Let's say that the country of Tandaria has been discriminating against left-handed people for the past 800 years.

Eventually the lefties organize politically and they fight for their rights. How will the lefties know when they have won the fight?

Conceptually, equality happens when everyone is treated the same. You can easily measure that for an issue such as voting. If lefties have the right to vote, and full access to information, and there are no reports of intimidation at the polls, you're probably there.

And you can easily examine laws to see that they apply equally to lefties and righties. You can even check to see if juries comprised of both lefties and righties convict all types of people at the same rate in all parts of Tandaria.

But how do you measure economic equality?

Obviously you could measure the average salaries for both lefties and righties, and you could measure rates of hiring. But somewhere along the path to full economic equality, the country will have pockets that favor righties and pockets that favor lefties.

For example, some companies will be actively recruiting lefties to comply with political pressures, and other companies will continue discriminating, perhaps at a subconscious level. Some regions in Tandaria will be more progressive and others will lag. And lefty entrepreneurs might start doing some discrimination of their own by hiring mostly lefties.

My question is this: When the lefties can find plenty of employers that favor lefties, and the righties can find plenty of employers that favor righties, and the occupations and compensation across all of these jobs are similar, has economic equality been achieved?

This is an important question for Tandaria because the nation might reach "compartment equality" decades before every individual employer starts treating lefties and righties the same.

Somewhere on the path to economic equality, the problem transforms into one of mobility and information. And in the modern age, neither mobility nor information is much of an obstacle.

By analogy, an army of a hundred fighters can defeat an army of a thousand if the smaller army has better mobility and information. The trick is for the army of a hundred to catch small groups of fighters from the larger army in isolated situations, kill them and run. Repeat.

My view is that left-handed Tandarians have full economic equality when the only obstacles to equal pay are mobility, information, and strategy. And that point happens when perhaps only half of the employers in Tandaria have become enlightened.

I was thinking about this as I read a pundit's article that said Indian women make 60 paise on the rupee compared to men, but in metropolitan areas, young women are starting to earn more than young men.

(Most of my readers already know that the 60 paise figure is bogus, but that's another issue.) My question is this: When should women declare victory in economic equality?

Is compartment equality close enough?