Raghu Veer S has not written any posts yet.
Raghu Veer S has not written any posts yet.
Borrowing from the post, how about we categorise between a lone genius: someone who comes up with an idea using a combination of different means available to them such as collaboration, intense study, iterated experiments etc; and a solitary genius: one who’s completely withdrawn from the world and has chosen to rely solely on their cognitive prowess to come up with new ideas, independent of any interactions with the world or the processes and entities in it that are usually known to assist in the generation of new knowledge.
(Differentiating based on the other meanings of the word, that is, lone can mean solitary, but it can also mean single, whereas I feel... (read more)
Not necessarily. Globalization has had many negative second-order effects. For example: As much as air connectivity has helped us travel across the world, it has also increased the risk of infections travelling longer distances quicker than if we had a localism-based model. If we are epistemically humble enough, it is not difficult to see how many COVID-like events might have happened in the past in various isolated parts of the world, that we do not know of, but never ravaged the entire world.
Globalization has benefits, not saying that it is not useful, but describing progress as a function of globalization is what I take issue with. Progress is a multiscale phenomenon. You need a strong localism-based core for innovation and you also need decentralization to accentuate the process, and then you can use globalization to scale. And then there is also the part where you need a lot of wisdom to know what should be scaled and what shouldn't be.
Neat article. Few things I myself have been struggling with and would like some insight into are:
One reason I can think of is the intersection of the English speaking populations of the world. India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Philipines, and Bangladesh constitute over 25% of the world population. And these are also some of the largest English-speaking nations. It seems to me that the only way to cater to their needs given that only a fraction of the population can speak fluently would be through reducing the number of redirections. This is to say that it would be surprising if the incentives of one of the largest dictionary manufacturers in the world were not affected by a customer base that large.
If I am understanding this correctly, I feel the map is multilayered.
First, you have the territory and the map within language itself, a few of the aspects of "linguistic freedom" in this context I feel can be addressed right away using existing linguistic tools like Polysemy, Metonymy, Metaphor, etc. They clearly tell you that the freedom that you are enjoying is due to the categorical representations(the map), which holds true even for non-existent and newly formed words with tools like aureation, retronym, portmanteau, etc. The only place I feel where the existing tools fail is in addressing the emergent aspects of these phenomena like the potentialities of a word, possible use... (read more)
Mental model that works for me is that of Self-Organization (from cybernetics and complexity theory). Use interactions to enforce redundancy of potential command(See McCulloch). This way you still retain the agency as the command is initiated by you, but the emergence of order(i.e., the execution of that task in our case) can be orchestrated by changing the nature of interaction. One example would be to decentralise the decision making process when you sense the beginning of dissolution of willpower: commitment contracts(eg. beeminder), substitute activity(eg. using stairs to compensate for lack of exercise), automating tasks that can be automated, fractal attention(eg. picking up a different book when you are bored with the book, instead of stopping reading altogether) etc.
I can understand the sentiment of being subtle, articulate, and precise as long as it remains within the bounds of "nitpickers gonna nitpick" or "dislikers gonna dislike" stage, but if you are treading in the realm where you have (or can possibly cultivate) haters, I don't think focusing on presentation works. Also, IMO, if the emotions have already gotten to the stage of being hateful, you might as well stand your ground and say what you have to say instead of selling nuance and subtlety as a point. The reason I say this is because it is a great heuristic to follow when you are already aware of the theme driving... (read more)
I feel that framing matters here. For eg. Look at how the words tradition and celebration complement one another in some of these situations. In the case of Olympic fireworks or Times Square gathering, how much effect does the instinct to preserve a long-standing tradition come into play? but when you look at scientific accomplishments it is too disparate and of varying significance to even be equated with the likes of Olympics or a New Year’s Eve. I have a strong feeling that to be celebrated, an event must either form a part of an existing (celebratory) tradition or create a new one, which is also why I feel Nobel(Old) and Twitter... (read more)
Have you used Syntorial, the synth-learning/tutoring software? I think it makes great use of adaptive interactivity(learning), which I feel tools like brilliant or explorable explanations, although great in terms of UX, lack severely. In fact, I have also found Syntorial to be very effective in terms of memory-related things like remembering patches etc. I think it has that neat quality of helping with both learning/doing and remembering what you learn. Maybe you could look into that too for some inspiration.
Remarkable achievements indeed, but I would also note that there is always more to it than meets the eye. He lives a solitary life now, but he was an active mathematician up until 2004-05 at Steklov. We don't know how his stay at Courant, Stony Brook, or UCB shaped his ideas. Additionally, his work builds upon Hamilton's Ricci flow, which he had been working on, more or less, since 1992, which happens to coincide with his time at Courant and Stony brook. We don't know the people with whom he was in regular correspondence. Also, the analogous results were proved by Smale and Freedman for dimensions higher than 3, now what did... (read more)