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rahulpandita's comments

rahulpandita | 8 years ago | on: One Year After India Killed Off Cash, What Other Countries Should Learn

>"It most recent GDP growth figure has fallen to 5.7%, and part of that, too, can be attributed to the policy move from last November."

It would be interesting to quantify what "part". AFAIK GDP growth has many contributing factors both short term and long term. It would really help readers to better comprehend the affect and also help policy makers to be cautious going forward.

>Lesson One: Choose Your Experts Carefully : Agreed, we must choose our experts carefully. However, author is silent on "how". Instead what author presents is his take on who are experts. I am not questioning the authors credentials but as HBR article, I expected authors to present a methodology instead of what seems a subjective view to me.

>Lesson Two: Don’t Ignore Basic Data : Authors criticism that basic data was ignored seems more of a speculation. No concrete sources that such data was not consulted at all.

>Lesson Four: Beware of Digital Silver Bullets : Here I feel author selectively uses the citation to benefit his narrative. The very citation states the following verbatim. http://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/economy/digital-pa... >"Still, it is appreciable that the numbers have not come down by a large amount. There are many who have permanently moved on to digital, which is a bigger benefit."

rahulpandita | 8 years ago | on: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them

We proposed something similar for the field of software engineering research.

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2983986

Pasting abstract here

"Software engineering researchers have a tendency to be optimistic about the future. Though useful, optimism bias bolsters unrealistic expectations towards desirable outcomes. We argue that explicitly framing software engineering research through pessimistic futures, or dystopias, will mitigate optimism bias and engender more diverse and thought-provoking research directions. We demonstrate through three pop culture dystopias, Battlestar Galactica, Fallout 3, and Children of Men, how reflecting on dystopian scenarios provides research opportunities as well as implications, such as making research accessible to non-experts, that are relevant to our present."

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