Tag: gossip

Eating Alone

In the last 2 weeks, about 4 times I had lunch in my office cafeteria. After a small health scare in early October (high HbA1c), I carry my own (self-made) lunch to office every day now (since I can’t reliably find low carb food around). On these days, I took my lunch to the cafeteria and ate along with colleagues, some of whom had brought there own lunches and others bought from the on-site caterer.

This, to me, however, is highly unusual behaviour. First of all, taking lunch to office is highly unusual – something that till recently I considered an “uncle thing to do”. Of course, now that I’m 40, doing “uncle things” is par for the course.

More importantly, eating lunch in the cafeteria is even more unusual behaviour for me. And in the last couple of days, most days I’ve sat there because a colleague who sits near me and brings lunch as well has called me on his way to the cafeteria.

A long time ago, an old friend had recommended to me this book called “never eat alone“. I remember reading it, but don’t remember anything of its contents (and its average goodreads rating of 3.8 suggests my opinion is not isolated). From what I remember, it was about networking and things like that.

However, as far as I am concerned, especially when it comes to lunch on a working day, I actually prefer to eat alone (whether it is at my desk or at a nearby restaurant). Maybe it is because my first “job” (it was actually an internship, but not my first ever internship) was in London, on a trading floor of an investment bank.

On trading floors, lunch at desk is the done thing. In fact, I remember being told off once or twice in my internship for taking too long a lunch break. “You can take your long break after trading hours. For lunch, though, you just go, grab and come and eat at the desk”, I had been told. And despite never again working in an environment like that (barring 4-5 weeks in New York in 2010-11), this habit has struck with me for life.

There are several reasons why I like to eat alone, either at a restaurant or at my desk. Most importantly, there is a time zone mismatch – on most days I either don’t eat breakfast, or would have gone to the gym in the morning. Either ways, by 12-1230, I’m famished and hungry. Most others in India eat lunch only beyond 1.

Then, there is the coordination problem. Yes, if everyone gets lunchboxes (or is okay to but at the cafeteria) and goes to the cafeteria, then it is fine. Else you simply can’t agree on where to go and some of you end up compromising. And a suboptimal lunch means highly suboptimal second half of the day.

Then, there is control over one’s time. Sometimes you can get stuck in long conversations, or hurry up because the other person has an impending meeting. In either case, you can’t enjoy your lunch.

Finally, when you have been having a hectic work day, you want to chill out and relax and do your own thing. It helps to just introspect, and be in control of your own mind and thoughts and distractions while you are eating, rather than losing control of your stimulations to someone else.

Of course it can work the other day as well – cafeteria lunches can mean the possibility of random catchups and gossip and “chit chat” (one reason I’ve done a few of those in the last few weeks), but in the balance, it’s good to have control over your own schedule.

So I don’t really get the point of why people think it’s a shame to eat alone, or thing something is wrong with you if you’re eating alone. I know of people who have foregone meals only because they couldn’t find anyone to go eat with. And I simply don’t understand any of this!

Why WFH is unsustainable

A couple of weekends back I decided to re-read Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens. Rather than digging into my kindle for the regular version (which I’d read in 2015), I decided to read the graphic novel instead.

I’d purchased a copy of it a few months back, and a month ago, my daughter had finished reading it (it was only after she finished reading that I realised the extent of the sex and violence in the book. anyways).

Since I was re-reading, there was nothing particularly new. It was just a refresher of everything I’d read and enjoyed back in 2015. And one of the things I read was something highly pertinent to what I’d been thinking about the preceding Friday – on gossip.

One of the key points that Harari makes in Sapiens is that what makes us sapiens sapiens is our ability to gossip. Many other animals communicate, but most of their communication is “necessary”. “Oh look, there’s a lion”, or “there is a dead elephant near the lake” types.

Homo sapiens is unique in that most of our conversation is, fundamentally speaking, rather unnecessary stuff. It is basically “gossip”. That we gossip, however, means that we evolved to have a far richer vocabulary. We communicate and bond a lot more. And we are able to create “shared fictions” that means it is far easier for us to cooperate with strangers. And that lets us do more. Then again – it all started with gossip.

This, I realised, is why I find working from home rather isolating. It’s been over a year since I got back to full time employment. There have been two waves of covid-19 after that. This has meant I’ve hardly been to office in this time. Yes, there have been spells when I’ve travelled, or spent a week at office, but they have been few and far in between.

Apart from collaboration with my team, work has been fine. However, what I realise I miss is the general “bonding” that you would come to expect when you work for a company. The problem is with remote work.

While chat (we use Google Chat; other companies use Slack or DBabble of Microsoft Teams or Discord) is good enough for most “quick communication”, the big problem is that everything you say is necessarily in writing. Yes, you can delete or modify, some messengers have disappearing messages and all that.

Yet, because you need to put everything in writing, you say less than you otherwise would. Most importantly, you think twice before you gossip. It takes a long time for pairs of people to build sufficient mutual trust to be able to gossip (and when I think of it, most of this kind of trust has developed through offline interactions). Even if I trust you, I’ll think maybe one and a half times before putting gossip in writing.

So prolonged period of remote work means work gets robbed of the core human element – gossip. And extending what Harari says in sapiens, when you gossip less, you believe in fewer shared fictions (though by definition all of you in your company believe in the fiction of the limited liability corporation). And you cooperate less.

I can’t wait to get back to office (planning in 2 weeks or so), and (hopefully) start gossiping again. It won’t be easy since so far I’ve largely been remote. However, if we can get a sustained period of office work going, we should be able to gossip and bond and be a little more human.

Gossip Propagation Models

More than ten years ago, back when I was at IIT Madras, I considered myself to be a clearinghouse of gossip. Every evening after dinner I would walk across to Sri Gurunath Patisserie, and plonk myself at one of the tables there with a Rs. 5 Nescafe instant coffee. And there I would meet people. Sometimes we would discuss ideas (while these discussions were rare, they were most fulfilling). Other times we would discuss events. Most of the time, and in conversations that would be entertaining if not fulfilling, we discussed people.

Constant participation in such discussions made sure that any gossip generated anywhere on campus would reach me, and to fill time in subsequent similar conversations I would propagate them. I soon got to know about random details of random people on campus who I hardly cared about. Such information was important purely because someone else might find it interesting. Apart from the joy of learning such gossip, however, I didn’t get remunerated for my services as clearinghouse.

I was thinking about this topic earlier today while reading this studmax post that the wife has written about gossip distribution models. In it she writes:

This confirmed my earlier hypothesis that gossip follows a power law distribution – very few people hold all the enormous hoards of information while the large majority of people have almost negligible information. Gossip primarily follows a hub and spoke model (eg. when someone shares inappropriate pictures of others on a whatsapp group) and in some rare cases especially in private circles (best friends, etc.), it’s point to point.

 

For starters, if you plot the amount of gossip that is propagated by different people (if a particular quantum of gossip is propagated to two different people, we will count it twice), it is very well possible that it follows a power law distribution. This well follows from the now well-known result that degree distribution in real-world social networks follows a power law distribution. On top of this if you assume that some people are much more likely to propagate quantums of gossip they know to other people, and that such propensity for propagation is usually correlated with the person’s “degree” (number of connections), the above result is not hard to show.

The next question is on the way gossip actually propagates. The wife looks at the possibilities through two discrete models – hub-and-spoke and peer-to-peer. In the hub-and-spoke models, gossip is likely to spread along the spokes. Let us assume that the high-degree people are the hubs (intuitive), and according to this model, these people collect gossip from spokes (low degree people) and transmit it to others. In this model, gossip seldom propagates directly between two low-degree people.

At the other end is the peer-to-peer model where the likelihood of gossip spreading along an edge (connection between two people) is independent of the nature of the nodes at the end of the edge. In this kind of a model, gossip is equally likely to flow across any edge. However, if you overlay the (scale free/ power law) network structure over this model, then it will start appearing to be like a hub and spoke model!

In reality, neither of these models is strictly true since we also need to consider each person’s propensity to propagate gossip. There are some people who are extremely “sadhu” and politically correct, who think it is morally wrong to propagate unsubstantiated stories. They are sinks as far as any gossip is concerned. The amount of gossip that reaches them is also lower because their friends know that they’re not interested in either knowing or propagating it. On the other hand you have people (like I used to be) who have a higher propensity of propagating gossip. This also results in their receiving more gossip, and they end up propagating more.

So does gossip propagation follow the hub-and-spoke model or peer-to-peer model? The answer is “somewhere in between”, and a function of the correlation between the likelihood of a node propagating gossip and the degree of the node. If the two are uncorrelated (not unreasonable), then the flow will be closer to peer-to-peer (though degree distribution being a power law makes it appear as if it is hub-and-spoke). If there is very high positive correlation between likelihood of propagation and node degree, the model is very close to hub-and-spoke, since the likelihood of gossip flowing between low degree nodes in such a case is very very low, and thus most of the gossip flow happens through one of the hubs. And if the correlation between likelihood of propagation and node degree is low (negative), then it is likely to lead to a flow that is definitely peer-to-peer.

I plan to set up some simulations to actually study the above possibilities and further model how gossip flows!