Comment by rramadass | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rramadass | Hacker News Reader

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You understood it wrong.

It is the Concepts/Models/Ideas/Intuitions as given by the "Masters" which we need to focus on and not the specific language/phrasing they were expressed in (as long as they are not relevant) since these are a artifact of their Time/Context/Culture. Think of the differences between Transliteration vs. Translation vs. Interpretation while maintaining fidelity to the original either in a different language or the same language. The early scientific papers were written in various European languages, but in the absence of reading the original paper in the original language ourselves (due to not knowing the language or the language being too archaic and unfamiliar) most of us nowadays study them only in English trusting to the translator/author to do their job faithfully.

Two examples;

1) In the Principia, Newton uses the phrase "Quantity of Motion" to define what we call today as "Momentum". The former conveys intuition while the latter is merely a formula.

2) "Imaginary Numbers" were called "Lateral Numbers" by Gauss which is intuitive in a geometric sense (without generalising too much).

Those are 2 good examples. A lot of the old terminology is very powerful because it doesn’t try to be slick/pc. Saying ‘variance’ is slick but it doesn’t convey as much as dispersion. Statisticians also speak in terms of first raw moment which has a lot of physical meaning behind it - saying ‘mean’ doesn’t convey anything. We frequently use coefficient of variation in the old texts. It tells you right away that it has something to do with variation, so you can dig into it and find you are normalizing the dispersion by the expectation so basically how much variation for a given amount of expectation. Instead of saying useless jargon like sharpe of vtsax is 0.7 on a 3 year timeframe, you could as well have said a coefficient of variation of 1.4 - that tells you right away how much dispersion you can expect in your return, whereas by saying sharpe you are simply gatekeeping and putting william sharpe on a pedestal for what is essentially a very silly ratio that statisticians have used for centuries without any fuss. I notice that in all the Indian news channels, they have translated the word monkey and the word pox, and then combined the two translations into a compound word, which right away gives much more useful information than calling it mpox because of dei reasons. So the people speaking Hindi or Tamil or any Indian language know right away what the disease refers to, whereas saying mpox gives you zero info. The next generation will simply be told mpox and think thats an actual word.

Your username brings to mind Newton's definition as "Fluxion being the instantaneous rate of change of a Fluent" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluxion This too is intuitive since when you consider something "flowing" its "rate of change" becomes easier to think about.

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