If Americans reading The Economist "hear it in a British accent", then naturally the perceived 10 IQ point boost to anyone with a British accent comes into play. That perception faded 30+ years ago in cosmopolitan New York, took a little longer in SF and LA, but is still recognizable in the boonies of Central Valley California. I will say that the Economist of the 1970s and 1980s was a very different magazine to what it is now (I stopped subscribing to it in the 1990s). What I think Fallows mistakes is that like so many magazines that once were high quality but catered to a narrow audience, it succumbed to the desire for a wider audience, with the inevitable change in quality. This seems to be so infectious, and goes beyond magazines, (Scientific American being a case in point that became more like Popular Science under the leadership of Rennie), and I recall in the 1980s when an upmarket British crockery manufacturer was taken over by a conglomerate intent on widening its market and subsequently effectively ruined the brand. "Growth" seems to be the corporate version of the sickness of human greed.
Perception. It is interesting that the article uses the time delay in neural processing to ground the argument for prediction. Prior work has used the idea that prediction from past knowledge is an efficient, low cost method to track the present that minimizes cognitive effort. When the prediction does not match reality, there is increased cognitive effort to realign the prediction sequence. If the time delay is important, what would that mean for electronic perception in advanced robots where this delay is considerably reduced, allowing for less prediction to be needed to check against reality? Would such robots be closer to living in the "true present"? Would they be able to react much more quickly to prediction vs reality mismatches?
Liam Bright: Regards himself as a "culture war centrist"? Is that like journalists playing "centrist" and granting equal space to "both sides" when one side is clearly wrong, or even bonkers? 200 years ago, would he have been a "social-economics-centrist", saying that abolitionists and slavers both have good points, with abolitionists being "baby abolitionists" or "insufferable?
The House of the Book was a translation project. The originals are indian. I would guess they had all reached Farsi by then, so it's not clear to me what sources the project was actually using.
It seems to me the text makes al-Khwarizmi sound like an innovator. Our debt to him is the same, regardless.
The Arabs called these "dust numerals" because the Indian style involved writing on sand (and erasing a good deal - similar to blackboard work).
If Americans reading The Economist "hear it in a British accent", then naturally the perceived 10 IQ point boost to anyone with a British accent comes into play. That perception faded 30+ years ago in cosmopolitan New York, took a little longer in SF and LA, but is still recognizable in the boonies of Central Valley California. I will say that the Economist of the 1970s and 1980s was a very different magazine to what it is now (I stopped subscribing to it in the 1990s). What I think Fallows mistakes is that like so many magazines that once were high quality but catered to a narrow audience, it succumbed to the desire for a wider audience, with the inevitable change in quality. This seems to be so infectious, and goes beyond magazines, (Scientific American being a case in point that became more like Popular Science under the leadership of Rennie), and I recall in the 1980s when an upmarket British crockery manufacturer was taken over by a conglomerate intent on widening its market and subsequently effectively ruined the brand. "Growth" seems to be the corporate version of the sickness of human greed.
Perception. It is interesting that the article uses the time delay in neural processing to ground the argument for prediction. Prior work has used the idea that prediction from past knowledge is an efficient, low cost method to track the present that minimizes cognitive effort. When the prediction does not match reality, there is increased cognitive effort to realign the prediction sequence. If the time delay is important, what would that mean for electronic perception in advanced robots where this delay is considerably reduced, allowing for less prediction to be needed to check against reality? Would such robots be closer to living in the "true present"? Would they be able to react much more quickly to prediction vs reality mismatches?
Liam Bright: Regards himself as a "culture war centrist"? Is that like journalists playing "centrist" and granting equal space to "both sides" when one side is clearly wrong, or even bonkers? 200 years ago, would he have been a "social-economics-centrist", saying that abolitionists and slavers both have good points, with abolitionists being "baby abolitionists" or "insufferable?
The House of the Book was a translation project. The originals are indian. I would guess they had all reached Farsi by then, so it's not clear to me what sources the project was actually using.
It seems to me the text makes al-Khwarizmi sound like an innovator. Our debt to him is the same, regardless.
The Arabs called these "dust numerals" because the Indian style involved writing on sand (and erasing a good deal - similar to blackboard work).