Why Most Cars Look the Same

car

A few days back I was at a friend’s party. I was introduced to other men at the party and soon they were all talking about the latest cars to hit the market. This basically played into the stereotype of putting four men in a room and once they are done talking about their jobs, they will be talking about cars.

I find it difficult to be a part of any such conversation because my ability to differentiate between two different car models is fairly limited. Well, I can differentiate between small cars and sedans, and less expensive cars and more expensive cars, but that is where it all ends. Of course, I do recognise the Mercedes Benz logo.

And to be very honest, the only two cars that I can confidently recognise at any point of time are the Ambassador and the Premier Padmini (better known as the Fiat). Both these cars aren’t produced anymore.

This inability to recognise car models gets me into a problem while coordinating with app based cab services. So, unlike others who keep a lookout for the model and colour of the car, I keep lookout for the number of the car.

For a long time, I felt that I was one of the few people who thought that modern cars look very similar. It turns out I was wrong. Cars that are produced these days do look the same. In his book Scale—The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation and Sustainability in Organisms, Economies, Cities and Companies, Geoffrey West, talks about how different the 1927 Rolls-Royce and the 1957 Studebaker Hawk were from the “relatively boring-looking 2006 Honda Civic or a 2014 Tesla”. The modern cars might be far superior machines than the cars made earlier, but it is difficult to differentiate one from the other, unless you are really into them.

What has happened here? As West writes: “It represents the transition from a primitive trial-and-error, rule-of-thumb approach that served us well for thousands of years towards a more analytic and principled scientific strategy for solving problems and designing modern artifacts ranging from computers and ships to airplanes, buildings, and even companies… Sophisticated computer analysis are now central in the design process… The phrase “computer model” is now an integral part of our vocabulary.” It is also used to design cars.

This has led to an unintended consequence, something which wasn’t really planned for but has happened and become a part of our lives, without us really realising about it.

As West writes: “One of the curious unintended consequences of these advances is that almost all automobiles, for example, now look alike because all manufacturers are solving the same equations to optimize similar performance parameters. Fifty years ago, before we had access to such high-powered computation and therefore less accuracy in predicting outcomes, and before we became so concerned about fuel performance and exhaust pollution, the diversity of car design was much more varied and consequently much more interesting.”

The point being that most companies that produce cars are using more or less the same science to produce it, and given that most cars now look more similar than they did in the past, when trial and error was a part of the solution. Now, it isn’t.

As a result, what we have now are much superior machines, but their sameness makes them all so boring to look at. And cars, after all, aren’t all about acceleration, though some people may not agree on this.

The column originally appeared in the Bangalore Mirror on October 4, 2017.

The Mathematical Logic Behind Soap Operas

Kyunki_Saas_Bhi_Kabhi_Bahu_Thi

In response to the last week’s piece (If you are smart, why aren’t you rich?), a couple of readers wrote in wanting to know why do large families in general and large business families in particular, split. Interestingly, this question has been an area of academic research. The British evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar has done some interesting work in this area.

The average individual has his or her strongest relationships with five people at any point of time, suggests Dunbar. As Geoffrey West writes in Scale—The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation and Sustainability, in Organisms, Economies, Cities and Companies: “These are the people we are closest to and care most deeply about.” These typically tend to include our parents, spouses or children. They also include close friends or partners (if not spouses).

At the next level, there are around 15 people. These typically tend to be close friends but not the closest ones. At the next level, there around 50 people. As West writes: “[These are] people you might still call friends though you would only rarely invite them to dinner but would like to invite them to a party or gathering. This might consist of coworkers, neighbours down the street, or relatives you don’t see very often.”

The final level has around 150 people with whom we have social contact with. This number (i.e. 150) is also referred to as the Dunbar number (in the name of Robin Dunbar). The question is why is the Dunbar number limited to 150? As West writes: “We simply do not have the computational capacity to manage social relationships effectively beyond this size”. Hence, “increasing the group size beyond this number will result in significantly less social stability, coherence, and connectivity, ultimately lead to its disintegration.”

Dear Reader, you must be wondering by now, what has all this got to do with large families splitting? Allow me to explain.

If you look at Dunbar’s logic explained earlier, at any point of time, an individual can have close and strong relationships with five people. This basically means that an individual can at best be close to two or three siblings and not all of them.

West gives the example of his grandparents’ family and then compares it with that of his family. His grandparents had eight children. This basically meant that there were 10 people in the family. Ten people in the family meant there were 45 different relationships at play at any point of time. (You can do the maths for this, it is fairly simple. If there are two people in a family, there is one relationship. If there are three people in a family, there are three relationships at play. If there are four people in the family, there are six relationships at play and so on).

When there are 45 different relationships at play, obviously everyone cannot possibly get along with everyone else. As West writes: “If these loosely followed a Dunbar pattern where each child was strongly connected to two or three of their siblings in addition to parents, not everyone could love everyone else equally.” There is also the question of time that one needs to invest in maintaining any relationship.

In comparison to West’s grandparents’ family, his family has four members (he, his wife and their two children). This basically means that there were six different relationships at play at any point of time. And chances of managing six relationships are better than manging 45 relationships.

This is precisely why large families split. Even if they don’t split, everyone doesn’t get along with everyone and there are fights and disagreements happening and conspiracies being hatched. TV  serials all over the world make use of this dynamic, brilliantly. And which is why you rarely see a soap opera around a nuclear family. How many disagreements can happen among four people? And how many conspiracies can they hatch up? The audience also relate to these soap operas in their own weird ways and tend to watch them.

The column originally appeared in the Bangalore Mirror  on September 13, 2017.