This essay explains the leaps and bounds made by Indian mathematicians in topics like infinite series expansions well before the Western world caught hold of them, and references the desire to make Madhava more of a household name when it comes to Calculus education. I’m learning Calculus as a challenging side-hobby, and have been motivating myself with ADHD friendly micro tasks like learning about the background of trig and inverse trig functions. It’s hard to believe how much math we’ll never get to read about because of lost works from Indian mathematicians like Madhava.
This comment assumes that in the past, governments around the world always made decisions to placate the U.S., as if whether the U.S. approval or disapproval is required for nation-building. While this may have been true for some countries that considered the U.S. response, it wasn’t widely known that if you made an earnest attempt at “new” social organisation, you’d be killed and replaced by a newly minted, U.S. approved fascist.
>Because that is how things work in the real world
It may look like that’s how things work; i.e. make the U.S. mad and suffer the consequences. But in 1970 there were multiple conversations about how to build a country, and by 1973 there was one less. I personally prefer a reality in which there are multiple methods for governing people, instead of this one-size-fits-all approach that, in 2020, appears to be ill suited for solving modern problems.
Thank you for this recommendation! I’ve just come to the close of Heart of the Enterprise—I’m not a manager but I’ve sure been managed, and I think Beer comes closest to describing what a good manager is than anything else I’ve read about it.
Huh. I’ve read Brain of the Firm, and Heart of the Enterprise, as well as Weiner’s Introduction to Cybernetics, and I found that the material is challenging but rewarding, not “sheer gorp.”
Contrary to the summary that this blog offers, cybernetics is defined pretty thoroughly as the study of viable systems; i.e. anything that continues to maintain itself. This “cybernetic” field is named so because of the Greek word for “governance.”
Cybernetics ... well, let's just say it was the "AI" of its time, which eventually evolved into something useful (I guess Germans call operations research this name). Beer had nothing to do with Weiner; he was a hanger on and a professional wanker. Reading Beer in current year would be like reading Eliezer Yudkowsky or Bostrum and hoping to learn something about deep learning.
Mind you I found Beer an extremely likeable mountebank. Compared to current year "AI" numskulls, 9/10 for personality alone.
Phew! Thank goodness someone finally mentioned this. The next step is to ask to speak to a manager and I bet this conversation would have gone a lot better.
> The numbers Joe suggested in this conversation are either entirely fabricated, or belong to the cost of replacing the entire machine if its experienced catastrophic damage. But, after clarifying numerous times about what the numbers actually represent and comparing to previous repair bills for the same issue, my belief is that the rep used a false and obscured repair order to persuade me to replace my girlfriend's minimally damaged screen with a new computer.
I have misquoted a repair before. Either I clicked the wrong box. Because either I didn't do my do diligence or because I was scatter brained and copied and pasted the wrong number. Regardless this is still a reflection of the way apple trains the agents and QC team not catching this agents mistake.
You might want to call back and mention the delamination repair program. If you're still within the 4 year purchase period it should be fixed for free.
I would highly recommend reading Brain of the Firm by Stafford Beer.
It’s the most fantastic layman’s introduction to cybernetics, written from the perspective of the economist behind the “Cyber” in the Chilean CyberSyn project (1970-3).
I discovered him reading People’s Republic of Walmart, another fantastic book about how effective socialist strategies for centralized government are applied in piecemeal to the largest corporations on the globe.
Highly, highly recommended—-and yes, I believe it’s valuable to learn about cybernetics. It teaches us that we don’t need more computers, or faster computers—-we need to use computers in different ways. Basically, we’ve already got the solutions to our problems, but we don’t implement them because we’re trapped by classic civilizational barriers (it’s hard to change people’s minds in the face of a culture that doesn’t want their minds to change).
(Mid-1980s conservative economic reform in the US might be an example, although in that case I suspect the Plaza Accord had more to do with it than pure market forces:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23219277 )
From what I understand, the economic revolution / experiment in Chile was abruptly ended due to political forces, not market forces.
Basically, any socialist (sympathizing) government during the under a US magnifying glass. Oil money went into funding far-right fascist / military groups, which eventually caused turmoil in a variety of industries, including a steel worker’s strike.
The entire CyberSyn operation was conducted on a series of glorified typerwriters—-at the time, they were the only computers that the Chilean government could purchase, due to sanctions.
If the US had stopped strangling the nascent Chilean economy, then it would have been better positioned to handle social turmoil and competing political interests.
Instead, on September 11th, 1973, far right militias backed by US money raided Allende’s central command—-he ended up committing suicide rather than ending up a political prisoner.
(Sorry if this was a bit unrelated to the initial reply—it just bugs me how removed from actual market forces these economies are operating in. I feel like it doesn’t matter what you are exporting—-if the US wanted it post-WW2, they came in and took it).
I haven’t read any of the books mentioned, but as a software worker I’m sure many of us have seen problems which would be solvable, even very simply, if the other parameters (often people) were more readily changeable.
I’ve done some reading on cybernetics but I’ll have to look up Beer.
