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.
I discovered The Economist in the 1970s, and unlike most news magazines, it seemed to remember that there were people living in places like Africa, South America and southern Asia. A friend of mine remarked that this was the old colonialist attitude with the British Empire having a finger in every pie. I never did subscribe, but I'd pick up an issue now and then to read on the Eastern Shuttle.
Yes, it went way downhill by the early 90s, and it always had an out of touch editorial page.
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?
The idea of a "true present" strikes me as rather 19th century. I can't figure out a good definition, especially in this context. Is it a reference to an individual's awareness? How would this be measured, and wouldn't awareness always lag external reality? It can't be about reaction time as that is about a process and there is no "now" there. What little we know about the brain is that it seems to be about using something like Bayesian probability to integrate partial data for making guesses and predictions, so sort of a soup.
I think we have the same problem with robots. They could obviously make certain types of decisions and react more quickly than humans, but when is their "now"? A lot of modern robots use multi-level approaches like Rodney Brooks's subsumption model in which the overall process works in parallel at numerous levels. Can we define a useful "true present" by choosing one particular node in the graph?
One approach I've seen is to synthesize a "now". Virtual reality systems have to do this so that the graphics pipeline can keep up with the subject's movements. The system can update the graphics only so quickly, and it needs to integrate inputs to figure out when the viewer's head will be where. Getting it wrong can induce nausea. I gather systems have gotten much better at this, but even that "now" is just an vomit minimizing artifact not a philosophical truth.
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?
I don't think he's a centrist. One side is annoying, but they have a cause and assibaya. The other side are mediocrities blaming a monstrous regiment of women for their failure to be rich and famous. Maybe it's just me. Or, rather, if he is a centrist judge, he is an East German-style one...
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).
I had thought it was translation, but also alchemy, astronomy, and algebra? And that al-Khwarezmi worked on both sides? But I may be misremembering. And I do remember that very little is known for certain...
I haven't looked into any of this deeply, or for a very long time. But this from Wikipedia on the subject of al-Mansur seems appropriate as a preliminary, and rather different from what one sees in the general mathematical history literature.
"Al-Mansur had Persian books on astronomy, mathematics, medicine, philosophy and other sciences translated in a systematic campaign to collect knowledge.[31] The translation of Persian books was part of a growing interest in ancient Iranian heritage and a Persian revivalist movement which Al-Mansur sponsored."
One should add to that this description of the House of Wisdom, again from Wikipedia.
"In the Abbasid Empire, many foreign works were translated into Arabic from Greek, Chinese, Sanskrit, Persian and Syriac. The Translation Movement gained great momentum during the reign of caliph al-Rashid, who, like his predecessor, was personally interested in scholarship and poetry. Originally the texts concerned mainly medicine, mathematics and astronomy; but other disciplines, especially philosophy, soon followed. Al-Rashid's library, the direct predecessor to the House of Wisdom, was also known as Bayt al-Hikma or, as the historian Al-Qifti called it, Khizanat Kutub al-Hikma (Arabic for "Storehouse of the Books of Wisdom")"
If you take the story from general histories of mathematics you'll just read about Indian texts being translated into Arabic (as the texts of interest in that context are things like the Aryabhatiya which is said to be about "mathematics and astronomy" though I think at the time they would have called it "astronomy"). On the other hand the Arab translators sometimes pulled out individual chapters on mathematics.
I understand the foundation of Baghdad itself reflects a shift of the center of political gravity to Persia. I suppose you can look at this whole business as similar in some ways to the recovery (and printing) of classical texts in the Renaissance - and the enthusiasm that went along with it.
NB: When one speaks of a translation "from" Sanskrit into Arabic the meaning of that is rather unclear to me. For a text like the Aryabhatiya it seems perfectly possible that a good Farsi version would have been used. I have no information at all about that but it seems like a natural question. I think that some of the "Persian" books in the first quotation above are the same as some of the "Sanskrit" and "Chinese" books in the second, and may reasonably be described in both ways. The oldest surviving translation of Euclid into Latin was made from Arabic ... one does what one can.
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.
Say, rather, that you decide to monetize your brand equity by destroying the quality of the brand's product...
I discovered The Economist in the 1970s, and unlike most news magazines, it seemed to remember that there were people living in places like Africa, South America and southern Asia. A friend of mine remarked that this was the old colonialist attitude with the British Empire having a finger in every pie. I never did subscribe, but I'd pick up an issue now and then to read on the Eastern Shuttle.
Yes, it went way downhill by the early 90s, and it always had an out of touch editorial page.
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?
The idea of a "true present" strikes me as rather 19th century. I can't figure out a good definition, especially in this context. Is it a reference to an individual's awareness? How would this be measured, and wouldn't awareness always lag external reality? It can't be about reaction time as that is about a process and there is no "now" there. What little we know about the brain is that it seems to be about using something like Bayesian probability to integrate partial data for making guesses and predictions, so sort of a soup.
I think we have the same problem with robots. They could obviously make certain types of decisions and react more quickly than humans, but when is their "now"? A lot of modern robots use multi-level approaches like Rodney Brooks's subsumption model in which the overall process works in parallel at numerous levels. Can we define a useful "true present" by choosing one particular node in the graph?
One approach I've seen is to synthesize a "now". Virtual reality systems have to do this so that the graphics pipeline can keep up with the subject's movements. The system can update the graphics only so quickly, and it needs to integrate inputs to figure out when the viewer's head will be where. Getting it wrong can induce nausea. I gather systems have gotten much better at this, but even that "now" is just an vomit minimizing artifact not a philosophical truth.
why is the vomit-minimizing perception not a philosophical truth?
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?
I don't think he's a centrist. One side is annoying, but they have a cause and assibaya. The other side are mediocrities blaming a monstrous regiment of women for their failure to be rich and famous. Maybe it's just me. Or, rather, if he is a centrist judge, he is an East German-style one...
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).
I had thought it was translation, but also alchemy, astronomy, and algebra? And that al-Khwarezmi worked on both sides? But I may be misremembering. And I do remember that very little is known for certain...
I haven't looked into any of this deeply, or for a very long time. But this from Wikipedia on the subject of al-Mansur seems appropriate as a preliminary, and rather different from what one sees in the general mathematical history literature.
"Al-Mansur had Persian books on astronomy, mathematics, medicine, philosophy and other sciences translated in a systematic campaign to collect knowledge.[31] The translation of Persian books was part of a growing interest in ancient Iranian heritage and a Persian revivalist movement which Al-Mansur sponsored."
One should add to that this description of the House of Wisdom, again from Wikipedia.
"In the Abbasid Empire, many foreign works were translated into Arabic from Greek, Chinese, Sanskrit, Persian and Syriac. The Translation Movement gained great momentum during the reign of caliph al-Rashid, who, like his predecessor, was personally interested in scholarship and poetry. Originally the texts concerned mainly medicine, mathematics and astronomy; but other disciplines, especially philosophy, soon followed. Al-Rashid's library, the direct predecessor to the House of Wisdom, was also known as Bayt al-Hikma or, as the historian Al-Qifti called it, Khizanat Kutub al-Hikma (Arabic for "Storehouse of the Books of Wisdom")"
If you take the story from general histories of mathematics you'll just read about Indian texts being translated into Arabic (as the texts of interest in that context are things like the Aryabhatiya which is said to be about "mathematics and astronomy" though I think at the time they would have called it "astronomy"). On the other hand the Arab translators sometimes pulled out individual chapters on mathematics.
I understand the foundation of Baghdad itself reflects a shift of the center of political gravity to Persia. I suppose you can look at this whole business as similar in some ways to the recovery (and printing) of classical texts in the Renaissance - and the enthusiasm that went along with it.
NB: When one speaks of a translation "from" Sanskrit into Arabic the meaning of that is rather unclear to me. For a text like the Aryabhatiya it seems perfectly possible that a good Farsi version would have been used. I have no information at all about that but it seems like a natural question. I think that some of the "Persian" books in the first quotation above are the same as some of the "Sanskrit" and "Chinese" books in the second, and may reasonably be described in both ways. The oldest surviving translation of Euclid into Latin was made from Arabic ... one does what one can.