Beating the dead Khumrah horse
Where I find Khumrah everywhere
Welcome to the first edition of Monday Pirki. As I assume that you have already read the about page, I will dispense with any preambles and dive right in.
Khumrah, Paativratya edition
I hope most of you have read my blogpost on the Khumrah treadmill of outrage. I submit that Khumrah, or the Jewish concept of building walls around the Torah to keep you from transgressing a sacred law is a fascinating concept you can see many instances of. One example I will discuss today is the Hindu concept of Paativratya, or wife's devotion to her husband.
A marriage can be modeled as a game of prisoner's dilemma. (During the lockdown this is literally true). The optimal choice is for both prisoners to co-operate, or both parties remaining faithful to each other. If you are not sure whether your spouse will defect or co-operate, it makes sense for you to keep your options open. When both parties do that, the chance of an escalating spiral of defection increases. To avoid this is, you signal your commitment to co-operation. You adopt the default position of fidelity. It also makes sense as a social norm, because if being faithful is a social norm, it will be difficult to find opportunities outside marriage, and the opportunities that you do find are likely to be people who have difficulty being faithful, so they aren't very good opportunities.
In an iterated prisoner's dilemma game, it has been proven that it is a good strategy to adopt co-operate as the initial strategy, and even forgive the first transgression from the other side. This too makes sense. If you are married to a decent, but flawed human being, he or she will make mistakes. Forgiving the first transgression is a good way to prevent the game from turning into an escalatory spiral of defections.
So I guess that paativratya started as a rational social norm. The wife signaled fidelity to the husband. In return, the husband was expected, not so much to be faithful (because, of course, polygyny was the norm) but to take care of her and the children, and not abandon her. I am not defending the morality of this situation - I am just pointing out how it could be rational.
But then, the Khumrah treadmill began. To prevent yourself from straying into physical infidelity, you commit to abjuring platonic friendships with men. Then to prevent yourself from straying into platonic friendships, you stop yourself from speaking to men, and so on and so forth till paativratya requires you to stop yourself from even thinking about other men. And the norm of forgiving the first few transgressions becomes, once subject to the Khumrah treadmill, the norm of being faithful no matter what kind of man your husband is. Paativratya is no longer the norm for how you approach the institution of marriage and your relationship, but it is who you are. It is no longer an optimal strategy from the game theory point of view.
Pascal's wager and Khumrah
Karthik has a thread on Wokism and Pascal's wager where he refers to Khumrah.
Pascal's wager is that the potential cost of not believing in God is so huge - damnation of the soul and suffering in hell for all of eternity - that even if the probability of that that happening is minuscule, you should choose the side of theism because the expected cost of atheism is small number times infinity, i.e. infinity. His argument is that in American Academia, the choice of subscribing to woke causes and beliefs is similar to the calculation behind Pascal's wager - the cost of wokism is small while the cost of stepping out of line is huge. This cost is imposed by the Khumrah treadmill.
He further argues that the existence of the devil poses a challenge to Pascal's wager. But I would argue that rather the existence of multiple religions poses a better challenge. If there are two religious doctrines, one of which says that doing X condemns you to eternal damnation while the other one says that NOT doing X condemns you to the same, then Pascal's wager breaks down.
Ideally then, pluralism, that is exposure to multiple points of view, should combat the deleterious effects that Karthik talks about. Unless of course, the religious doctrines have compartmentalized into mutually exclusive sects that require you to adopt one orthodoxy or the other. Then Pascal's wager still applies.
What is the point of ICT?
If you have children in school, chances are that they are studying a subject called ICT - Information and Communication Technology, right from first grade. Why is it a separate subject? Yes, IT is the single most important technology that has transformed out lives in the past 50 years, and it is important for kids to know about computers, the Internet, etc. But we don't create separate subjects for every single thing that kids need to know. Transport is an important part of our lives, but we don't have Transportation as a separate subject. We teach about cars, buses and trains as part of other subjects. Likewise, we don't have electricity and power generation as a separate subject.
What is needed is not the grandiloquently named ICT, but Computer Literacy. It is important that children learn typing, word processing, creating a spreadsheet, creating and delivering presentations, and of course, in these times, attending and conducting online meetings, and in general collaborating using communication tools. Arguably, the ability to program is also a basic skill that should be taught to older children. It makes sense to have a separate subject to teach these skills, because they don't fit very well into any of the existing subjects. The hitch though is that these skills are best taught on an actual computer, which most of our students don't have access to. So I guess this is what happened:
We must do something - We need to introduce computer skills to our children, but we have a constraint - they do not have access to computers, either at home or at school.
This is something - This is a syllabus that contains a lot of outdated theory, is age-inappropriate, and designed with no regard to any actual learning goals.
We must do this. - Let us introduce this in our schools so that we tick the box and can claim that we have taught ICT to students.
The result of this is the ICT that is being taught to my sons right now, which gets my blood pressure up whenever I look at it. My son in seventh grade is being taught about databases, and he is being told that hierarchical databases are the most commonly used while relational databases are a new concept - all of this before he is actually taught to create a simple database.
The things you learn while conducting an Antakshari
A few families in our neighbourhood have taken to playing Antakshari on video-conferencing every Saturday since the lockdown started. Each family takes turns to organize it. On our turn, we decided to have travel as a theme, because of course, the lockdown is preventing actual travel, etc. In one of the rounds, we showed pictures of places, and the participants had to identify the place and sing a song that has the name of that place in it. Two things we learnt while preparing for that round:
Patna, despite being an ancient city with a long continuously recorded history, doesn't seem to have an iconic landmark - the best Google searches could throw up was Golghar, a 19th century granary built by the British and never used.
There is only one mainstream Hindi song that refers to Lucknow.