Arun2009

Here is a rebuttal to the article: http://all-about-sanskrit.blogspot.in/2015/06/my-response-to... . Note that the article itself is from 2015.

Major points I could gather from the rebuttal:

- The recorded language was not "Sanskrit". There are a few Sanskrit-sounding words and a some names of seemingly Vedic-deities mentioned (along with several other non-Vedic deities).

- Some scholars even contest whether PIE was an actual language and is not just an artificial construct.

All in all, it seems to me that the writer's claim that

> Amazingly, Rigvedic Sanskrit was first recorded in inscriptions found not on the plains of India but in in what is now northern Syria.

is quite a bit far fetched. I tried locating a paper referring to the Mitanni treaties (http://sci-hub.io/10.2307/595878), but it doesn't include the text of the treaty itself (which anyway I wouldn't have been able to understand, seeing as it is not even Sanskrit). At any rate, what the HindutvavAdis seek to resurrect is mostly classical Sanskrit, which most definitely is Indian, just as English itself is, well, English, any external influences and contributions notwithstanding.

I also find these kinds of strained attacks on Hindutva extremely disingenuous and ultimately counterproductive. You want the other party to listen to you, not to shut down and shout their positions even louder, marking you as an enemy. We could begin by acknowledging some of the valid points they raise.

I for one think that there is some truth to the allegation that we (Indians) are not aware of our own intellectual traditions. I myself hadn't heard of the likes of Nagarjuna, Dharmakirti, Prabhakara, Bhartrhari, and Abhinavagupta until very recently, and I understand their theories still less.

These sentences capture my takeaway from this article.

Every man is the sum total of his reactions to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes.

So it would seem foolish, would it not, to adjust our lives to the demands of a goal we see from a different angle every day?

...to put our faith in tangible goals would seem to be, at best, unwise. So we do not strive to be firemen, we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors. WE STRIVE TO BE OURSELVES.

I don't mean that we can't BE firemen, bankers, or doctors—but that we must make the goal conform to the individual, rather than make the individual conform to the goal.

...beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life.

In doing this... he avoids frustrating his potential (choosing a path which puts no limit on his self-development), and he avoids the terror of seeing his goal wilt or lose its charm as he draws closer to it

Summary: rather than fixating on specific goals, find a way of life that maximizes your potential for self-development and lets you be your most authentic self.

I'd hope that by then AI would have advanced well enough to enable us to navigate the language jungle more easily. Who knows, maybe the theory related to this will be one of those seminal Mandarin papers?

I keep a private blog for my side-project, with key links and resources in pages specifically set for them. For example, I might have a page on market research with links to posts on specific topics. But probably I should be more systematic about it, since a lot of my documentation related to the project is also in miscellaneous text files (committed in the /doc folder of the project), and also a few Google docs (for sharing with others).

I find it really handy to figure out how your thought process about the project has grown over time.

I just love how everything about China is huge! The three gorges dam, the grand canal, the great firewall and the great wall, the nation itself, and now this. Befits a nation whose founding myth itself is centered on an engineering project.

If anyone else is wondering like I did how to pronounce it, visit this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrbZSYlR_bM . It's apparently the name of a shrub and also a color: http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/fuchsia

I unfortunately kept pronouncing it "fucks-yeah" in my mind and was wondering why on earth would google name it as such, until I discovered that it's actually "fyushya".

Here's the wikipedia article on this statement by experts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainstream_Science_on_Intellig...

Quote:

> Mainstream Science on Intelligence was a public statement issued by a group of academic researchers in fields associated with intelligence testing that claimed to present those findings widely accepted in the expert community. It was originally published in the Wall Street Journal on December 13, 1994 as a response to what the authors viewed as the inaccurate and misleading reports made by the media regarding academic consensus on the results of intelligence research in the wake of the appearance of The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray earlier the same year.

I tried to tease out the "meat" of the article excluding the filler as follows. It's mostly the same old cliches - nothing new.

* What makes a genius? We don't know the answer, but science offers some clues. There isn't likely to be a single factor, since genius is too elusive a concept. But intelligence, creativity, perseverance, and good fortune may be a few factors that contribute to it.

* Intelligence is often considered a crucial factor. Lewis Terman at the Stanford University tracked the careers of a 1500 high IQ school kids. Many of them did turn out to be successes. But IQ in itself was not a guarantee - some high IQ people struggled to thrive, whereas others who didn't make the cut went on to win Nobel prizes.

* Creativity: the aha moment often emerges after a period of contemplation. Information comes in consciously, but the problem is processed unconsciously, the resulting solution leaping out when the mind least expects it. The creative process relies on the interplay of... different parts of the brain at once—both the right and left hemispheres and especially regions in the prefrontal cortex.

* Jazz musicians' brain scans during improvising: the internal network, associated with self-expression, showed increased activity, while the outer network, linked to focused attention and also self-censoring, quieted down. “It’s almost as if the brain turned off its own ability to criticize itself".

* One sign of creativity is being able to make connections between seemingly disparate concepts. Richer communication between areas of the brain may help make those intuitive leaps possible.

* As per an ongoing study, in creative people's brains: “...there’s more communication going on between the left and the right hemispheres, which one might expect in people who are highly creative”. “There’s more flexibility in their thought processes, more contributions from different parts of the brain.”

* Genetic potential alone does not predict actual accomplishment. It also takes nurture to grow a genius. Social and cultural influences can provide that nourishment, creating clusters of genius at moments and places in history: Baghdad during Islam’s Golden Age, Kolkata during the Bengal Renaissance, Silicon Valley today.

* “grit”—drives people to achieve. Duckworth, ...says the concept of genius is too easily cloaked in layers of magic, as if great achievement erupts spontaneously with no hard work. She believes there are differences when it comes to individual talent, but no matter how brilliant a person, fortitude and discipline are critical to success. “When you really look at somebody who accomplishes something great,” she says, “it is not effortless.”

* Prodigious productivity is a defining characteristic of genius. “Most articles published in the sciences are never cited by anybody,” says Simonton. “Most compositions are not recorded. Most works of art aren’t displayed.” Thomas Edison invented the phonograph and the first commercially viable light bulb, but these were just two of the thousand-plus U.S. patents he was awarded.

* Biological traits: “In the same way that Mozart may have had extraordinary hearing,” says Ausubel, “Leonardo appears to have had extraordinary visual acuity.”

Not events, but several trends and crises. Two that personally concern me are the looming water crisis and pollution: I would love to have more water security and be able to breathe cleaner air. I can put up with the haphazard electric supply and the abysmal transport infrastructure. I don't have to bother about such fancy things like the substandard educational system or the endemic criminalization of politics.

But perhaps above all, (a) the dysfunctional governance system that is incapable of doing anything about any of this, and (b) the gradual descent of the society into a more regressive state.

> Is there someone among you HNers who has retained a positive outlook by believing that the universe is a bleak, chaotic place with no intrinsic meaning to the things happening in it?

I see many living things around me - kittens, birds, squirrels, lizards, dogs - who happily go on living their lives without bothering with such things as the bleakness of the universe or its impermanence or its meaninglessness. I then remind myself that I must appear just as wonderful a creature as a kitten, bird, squirrel or lizard to some alien observer. I would find it absurd if the three playful kittens in my house suddenly developed an existential crisis. They are kittens! Their purpose is to be happy. But the same principle holds for me too.

In other words, the problem of meaninglessness of life is a problem we create by fiat. It's a remarkable fact that we're fragments of this grand, ancient universe that have become sentient. That itself is enough of a reason to be thrilled at our existence and everything around us, including the good and the bad!

> Albert Ellis came up with an early form of cognitive-behavioral therapy, based largely on Epictetus’ claim that “it is not events that disturb people, it is their judgments concerning them.”

This actually is presented in Buddhism too, which was where I first encountered it before re-discovering similar principles in stoicism and Ellis's Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. See this sutta: http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn36/sn36.006.tha...

Quote:

"When touched with a feeling of pain, the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person sorrows, grieves, & laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical & mental. Just as if they were to shoot a man with an arrow and, right afterward, were to shoot him with another one, so that he would feel the pains of two arrows; in the same way, when touched with a feeling of pain, the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person sorrows, grieves, & laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical & mental."

But what is nice about Buddhism is that there is a practical skill-training that comes along with the theory. When disagreeable events happen to you, mindfulness training teaches you not to grasp on to the events automatically and start your own narrative about it, but instead, observe them mindfully. This gives you the opportunity to skillfully deal with the situation. REBT in addition implores you to consider the situation rationally.

These are troubling times (especially where I live in India), and I think a little bit of stoic + Buddhist teachings can go a long way in maintaining our composure even as we engage with the world. I still struggle with this from time to time, but I would have been completely lost without these teachings.

> "I am righteously indignant; you are annoyed; he is making a fuss over nothing."

> Notice how the factual content remains unchanged.

I know that I am nitpicking and I am not a logician at all, but the factual content in these usages seems to me to be different when they are interpreted not just as formal propositions, but sentences made in a human context. To be "righteously indignant" has connotations that one is indignant about an important matter, whereas "making a fuss over nothing" implies that the matter is not very important. There is a significant difference in how important the matter is between these usages.

For e.g., one can differ on the matter of drawing cartoons of a religious figure. You can either be "righteously indignant" or "make a fuss over nothing" about it. These two have different factual content because they convey different claims about the severity of the matter.

A key skill in focusing on something is realizing when you have become distracted and bringing your attention back to the task at hand. The sooner you do this, the better. Usually we tend to get carried away by stimuli and become "lost" for long times at stretch. This not only eats up time, but also consumes mental energy that we could have otherwise used for productive work.

I have been successfully using meditation as a "model problem" to train my ability to become aware when I have become distracted and bring my attention back to the object of focus. A classic analogy of mindfulness meditation is that of an elephant (your mind) tied to a post (your breath or whatever is the object of your focus) through the rope of mindfulness. When the elephant strays, the rope pulls it back to the post.

While there seems to be some scientific evidence that meditation does indeed improve your ability to concentrate on any general task, my own conviction arises from seeing first hand the similarity between countering distracting stimuli during meditation and during general work.

I suggest that you work patiently through a good text on algorithms and data structures that has code samples in it. I recommend "Algorithms I and II" by Sedgewick or "Data Structures and Algorithm Analysis in Java" (or the C++ version) by Weiss. I also hear good things about "Data Structures and Algorithms in Java" by Lafore.

The above books are quite apt for beginners. You should expect to struggle a little but you must persevere anyway. I remember struggling with sorting and matrix multiplication algorithms when I learned it the first time in school. Do not mistake your unfamiliarity with the subject for its inherent difficulty! Once you write a few sample programs and see how the algorithms play out, you'll get the hang of it.

There are a couple of problems that I see with the entire premise behind this article.

1. Web development can be challenging. Writing a simple blog or wiki system in PHP might be "easy", but creating a wordpress.com or wikipedia.org is a whole different ballgame. Latency, scalability, architecture, high availability, manageability, security - the challenges are endless.

2. I don't understand why software developers tend to value the "difficulty" of the technology used in a product over the utility of the final product to end customers. Creating a web app in PHP for sharing daily tidbits in your friends' lives may not be as challenging as writing a compiler for a functional language like Haskell, but its end value may far eclipse that of the latter. Facebook and Twitter after all started as fairly simple applications but are multi-billion dollar companies now. I would even say that there is a certain unix-like elegance in using the easiest, simplest technologies to create the maximum returns in terms of utility to humans. And that, IMO, is far from being a "brain-dead" skill.

> I'd rather figure out what this guy did right and take steps to implement some of those things into my life.

My guess: earn in dollars (or dollar equivalent) and spend in rupees. I.e., first world salary and third world expenses. Works like a charm in India.

From your site I couldn't readily figure out what this offers that a private blog on an established site like wordpress.com or blogspot.com doesn't. At least we know that these players will not vanish anytime soon, and if they do, they're likely to do so "responsibly". I recall another attempt in this space called ohlife.com which has shut down apparently.

I'd recommend you to bite the bullet and work through "Programming in Scala 2E" by Odersky, Spoon and Venners. It's a pretty thorough and systematic introduction to the language and its philosophy.

I can relate to this. A friend once described me as a vector with infinite magnitude and randomly changing direction. At various points in life I have occupied myself with studying everything from Biology and functional programming to Indian Philosophy and Sanskrit. But I never stick to any one project for long. A few months into my study program, I shift to the next shiny thing that catches my attention.

There is a saving grace though: the set of things that I'm interested in remains constant, so that I am not endlessly moving into newer and newer areas, but cycling between a fixed set of subjects. Right now I have come back to functional programming and doing courses from Coursera. I am at the moment quite determined to see this through, but knowing myself as well as I do, I fully expect to jump to something else in a couple of month's time.

My current strategy to tackle this syndrome is as follows:

* Accept that you are interested in multiple subjects and that you may never be a world-class expert in any of them. However, you can be a competent generalist who has sufficient familiarity with a bunch of fields and this can be valuable. It's also a probably more interesting way to lead your life than specializing in one field.

* Keep a journal of your learning activities so that you can learn more about yourself over time. I have been writing every day since 2010 and its fascinating when I look back at what I was doing this time of the year a few years back.

* When you start a study project, focus on short sprints instead of the long marathon. Try to accumulate concrete achievements and most importantly, aim for a closure to your sprint. For example, if you start a book, declare victory once you have studied 80% of the chapters. If you start on a Mathematical topic, upload your notes and problems you solve somewhere where you can look them up later, and declare your sprint complete once you have dome some 100-120 non-routine problems.

* Realize that your effort is not completely wasted. I first flirted with Haskell in November 2012 but later dropped it and moved on to something else. The next time I took up Haskell again was about a year later in November 2013. I had forgotten most of what I had learned, BUT the second time it was much, much easier to cover the same ground again and I went further in my learning that time. Ditto for Sanskrit. I first tried to learn Sanskrit in August 2013, but later dropped out of my study program. The next time I took it up was in June 2014, and I stuck with it long enough to complete the first part of a correspondence course - a concrete achievement!

I am still struggling with the random-vector syndrome, but I am much better at coping with it. I "know" that the solution is to focus on just one thing, but that strikes me as a supremely uninteresting way to lead my life.

In addition to writing to the government and officials, everyone should also push their ISPs to be more transparent about implementing internet censorship diktats from the government. If we don't know that sites we're trying to access are blocked and the reasons why, we won't be able to take up the matter with the authorities.

I just called up my ISP (MTS) and made enough noise for them to hopefully take notice.

Yes, it is a terrible idea. But you are assuming that the people running the country and the ones electing them are competent individuals who have the best interests of the country in mind.

While not coming from a "mathematics is physics" angle, this bit from "Concrete Mathematics" by Graham et. al. also warns against too much abstraction:

Abstract Mathematics is a wonderful subject, and there's nothing wrong with it: it's beautiful, general and useful. But its adherents had become deluded that the rest of mathematics was inferior and no longer worthy of attention. The goal of generalization had become so fashionable that a generation of mathematicians had become unable to relish beauty in the particular, to enjoy the challenge of solving quantitative problems, or to appreciate the value of technique. Abstract mathematics was becoming inbred and losing touch with reality; mathematical education needed a concrete counterweight in order to restore a healthy balance.

It's just that I don't intend to stay with this project after the MVP stage, and don't want further commitment. Insisting on equity will make things complicated.

I am currently working full-time remotely on the MVP of an interesting start-up. I get paid relatively low fees and some equity (the discussions are on). I am doing this because I like being in 100% control of the development process and deeply involved with the creation of the product itself. It's a great learning opportunity that can come in handy when you get around to working on your own product someday.

Does anyone know why this must be so? I.e., is there any fundamental reason that, provided no-one breaks any laws, in an increasingly globalized, interconnected, technology-centric world, the majority of economic gains must always go to those who own more capital than others in a free market?

I have a wordpress blog hosted on my PC. I backup the journal onto a remote drive service every night.

I googled Dabrowski and Positive Disintegration Experience and was led to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_Disintegration

I found the following especially interesting:

Dąbrowski also described a group of people who display a different course: an individualized developmental pathway. These people break away from an automatic, rote, socialized view of life (which Dąbrowski called negative adjustment) and move into and through a series of personal disintegrations. Dąbrowski saw these disintegrations as a key element in the overall developmental process. Crises challenge our status quo and cause us to review our self, ideas, values, thoughts, ideals, etc. If development continues, one goes on to develop an individualized, conscious and critically evaluated hierarchical value structure (called positive adjustment). This hierarchy of values acts as a benchmark by which all things are now seen, and the higher values in our internal hierarchy come to direct our behavior (no longer based on external social mores). These higher, individual values characterize an eventual second integration reflecting individual autonomy and for Dąbrowski, mark the arrival of true human personality. At this level, each person develops his or her own vision of how life ought to be and lives it. This higher level is associated with strong individual approaches to problem solving and creativity. One's talents and creativity are applied in the service of these higher individual values and visions of how life could be - how the world ought to be. The person expresses his or her "new" autonomous personality energetically through action, art, social change and so on.

I think what we need today are competent generalists - super-teachers if you will - who have deep (i.e., at least post-graduate level) proficiency in what are currently considered separate fields such as Physics, Philosophy, Mathematics or Biology. There's a goldmine of new breakthroughs waiting to happen at the intersection of disparate areas of knowledge. Generalist teachers/professors at the first/second year university levels can help the next generation be more adept at recognizing the connections between fields of study. Currently unfortunately you are not recognized at higher-rungs of academia unless you super-specialize and churn out papers. We really need to acknowledge generalization as well, even when it happens at the cost of any original contributions.

Here's an opinion by Terence Tao along the same lines that I found insightful:

http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/there%E2%80%99s-...

The “post-rigorous” stage, in which one has grown comfortable with all the rigorous foundations of one’s chosen field, and is now ready to revisit and refine one’s pre-rigorous intuition on the subject, but this time with the intuition solidly buttressed by rigorous theory. (For instance, in this stage one would be able to quickly and accurately perform computations in vector calculus by using analogies with scalar calculus, or informal and semi-rigorous use of infinitesimals, big-O notation, and so forth, and be able to convert all such calculations into a rigorous argument whenever required.) The emphasis is now on applications, intuition, and the “big picture”. This stage usually occupies the late graduate years and beyond.

I am once again working outside India - intend to move back to India again!