seagullz

Only the rich, rather than the market, were free in this apparently in any meaningful sense of the word, beyond the incidental outcomes.

The US taxpayers who invested trillions (largely in the guise of military expenses) in inventing the tech [1] didn't get to decide freely how the business to be conducted or how the profits to be shared. The Chinese workers (or similar ones elsewhere) didn't get to move freely to places for work with competitive wages.

The rich had the freedom to take the publicly funded tech, to exploit the confined sweatshops, all the while without even paying regular taxes that the ordinary Joe has no way to avoid [2].

[1] https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/what-the-ste... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2016/03/04/w...

Apparently was a (sophisticated) just so story ... http://www.boop.org/jan/justso/

Your question "So, why despair?" becomes redundant then.

If "free will does not exist", are we free to choose whether to despair or not?

John Pilger's 2010 Documentary The War You Don't See (https://vimeo.com/67739294) is also great; it references Bernays too.

Would check this one.

Not disagreeing with you. But two complementary points:

The other ill of much of high-school and some engineering math teaching is not having adequate focus on "how to apply" the math in modeling real world problems. That, in turn, exacerbates further stages of learning the deeper "why" questions.

Besides, "getting used to" part is apparently inescapable, at least at some point. After all, as great a mathematician as John von Neumann said "Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them."

Jeff Erickson's Algorithms text is a great resource: http://jeffe.cs.illinois.edu/teaching/algorithms/

The entire book -- including the portions labeled Models of Computation, Director's cut, and Extended Dance Remix -- presents accessible introduction to much of the CS theory landscape.

Someone already praised the shorter book titled "Algorithms" by Dasgupta et al, and I second it. Tim Roughgarden's "Algorithms Illuminated" series is in this genre too.

I'd also recommend the MIT lecture notes on Mathematics for CS: https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.042/spring18/mcs.pdf This is distinctive for its intuitive explanations with essential, approachable formalism. The exercises are fine too, if you are really mean it.

Sipser's book on the Theory of Computation is great and the one by Hopcroft et al is also very good (as suggested by others). But the most beginner-friendly (or, light on math) coverage of this area is apparently in Peter Linz's book "Introduction to Formal Languages and Automata". An alternative flavor in the treatment of much of the same topics is in this free book: http://cs.brown.edu/people/jsavage/book/

Speaking of Knuth, he is extraordinary in this regard apparently as the rigor of his expositions matches his attention to the historical details. Add to that his meticulousness for properly (and aesthetically) spelling people's names for good measure.

“There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.”

― Gore Vidal

Right. People at large are not really aware of the severity and expanse of own vulnerabilities -- addiction, coginitive bias etc. Or are even unwilling to seriously think through that angle.

This seems to call for a balance of perspectives and responsibilities. Partly similar is probably the case of traffic safety: driver's vigilance and responsibility has to be matched with sound regulation of all transportation profiteers.

Good point.

Yet, to keep the pernicious effects of those flaws from being amplified by that tool at scale, it needs to be kept in check. Smoking habit may be a reflection of poor self-control on the part of the smokers, but that is no defense against Philip Morris fines.

The following anecdote is from https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.042/spring18/mcs.pdf:

The Invariant Principle was formulated by Robert W. Floyd at Carnegie Tech in 1967. (Carnegie Tech was renamed Carnegie-Mellon University the following year.) Floyd was already famous for work on the formal grammars that transformed the field of programming language parsing; that was how he got to be a professor even though he never got a Ph.D. (He had been admitted to a PhD program as a teenage prodigy, but flunked out and never went back.)

In that same year, Albert R. Meyer was appointed Assistant Professor in the Carnegie Tech Computer Science Department, where he first met Floyd. Floyd and Meyer were the only theoreticians in the department, and they were both delighted to talk about their shared interests. After just a few conversations, Floyd’s new junior colleague decided that Floyd was the smartest person he had ever met.

Naturally, one of the first things Floyd wanted to tell Meyer about was his new, as yet unpublished, Invariant Principle. Floyd explained the result to Meyer, and Meyer wondered (privately) how someone as brilliant as Floyd could be excited by such a trivial observation. Floyd had to show Meyer a bunch of examples before Meyer understood Floyd’s excitement — not at the truth of the utterly obvious Invariant Principle, but rather at the insight that such a simple method could be so widely and easily applied in verifying programs.

His ties to KSA is peripheral -- an extension of his ventures with UAE/MBZ, and especially after MBS came to call the shots in the KSA.

See: https://www.fastcompany.com/90233994/how-a-secret-seychelles... and https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/uae-planned-invade-qatar-...

Not just the politicians, much of the mainstream press too.

Exhibit: that NSA shares US citizen's private data with Israeli spooks is not newsworthy to NYT [0], even though Israeli paper Haaretz thinks otherwise [1].

[0] https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/new-york-times-nsa-israel-no...

[1] https://www.haaretz.com/report-nsa-sharing-u-s-citizens-data...

It is extremely unlikely that US prosecutors are after him for any alleged "backroom talk/act". WSJ reported that the charges against him “ may involve the Espionage Act, which criminalizes the disclosure of national defense-related information.”[0] Accordingly, the implications on journalism are real and far-reaching [1].

[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-is-optimistic-it-will-prose...

[1] https://theintercept.com/2018/11/16/as-the-obama-doj-conclud...

> I did not know we hired them or about the work they were doing...

If true, was this by design, to have plausible deniability, much like the willful ignorance on the part of the military top brass when it comes to massacres etc.?

Regardless, some lack of coordination seems real even as now the scandal unfolds:

> Our relationship with Definers was well known by the media... [https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/11/new-york-times-update/]

The lecture and the Q&A where the points were made predates your comment here and is not necessarily about the pros and cons of an individual on the short term, assessed under rather unfair political-economic regulation.

The analysis is at the macro level, with a view to why/how a society can pursue reforms towards fairer socioeconomic reality, instead of being submissive to the prevailing order. Slavery, for one, seemed unmovable too at one point in history.

This, addressed at the macro level, probably calls for the societies to function in ways that incorporate exercise of sufficient sense of solidarity and empathy.

A relevant argument is made strongly here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBSUkDXekMM

Sans /s probably because "explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog; you understand it better but the frog dies in the process."

Yet, the preferential difference in expressing themselves implies that genders are not identical after all, an idea that doesn't get treated as a truism.

The textbooks and the mainstream media in all places tend to play the "nationalism" card; that's self-serving in all sorts of ways, after all. And no one articulated the 'nationalism' caricature better than George Orwell: "The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."

Agreed mostly. But again the picture is more complicated than what a single sentence or two can convey.

Curiously, many of the lethargy, idleness and sense of pointlessness came through sufism. Sufism itself has also many roots (including Greek, and later Andalusian twists), and has a wide spectrum. Ghazzali (the author of The Incoherence) himself was heavily affected by Sufi themes before he wrote 'the Incoherence'; but that book, a rationalist attack on some form of rationalism itself, has many valid points though.

The Wikipedia page doesn't seem to support the thesis. One can plausibly argue for quite the contrary, IMHO. In fact, many outstanding scholars in STEM of that era, including a few names in the cited Wikipedia page, were also religious scholars (jurisprudence, theology, hadith etc.). Arabs were so much lost before the advent of Islam that the neighboring Persians and Romans apparently had little to no interest in them. History is more complicated/nuanced of course, but these are important points.

‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.'

-- 1984 (George Orwell)

This sounds pretty much like what you are looking for: https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.042/spring17/mcs.pdf

Given that linear algebra has become so vital lately (as others remarked already), the following new book appears better than the lot from an applied viewpoint: https://web.stanford.edu/~boyd/vmls/vmls.pdf

Further elaborations by Chomsky on what he meant: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/noam-...

Some video clips of this interview by Yarden Katz: http://yarden.github.io/pages/chomsky/

Generally speaking, the dichotomy involving "personal freedom" vs. "economic development" does not have to be inevitable if the political consciousness and the relevant constructive action on the part of the people concerned is there. So what ends up happening in China or elsewhere depends on the choices made there, though as outsiders we can speculate.

Ha-joon Chang was not advocating to trade personal freedom for economic development; he was explaining what really transpired, contrary to the official narrative on economic development.

In fact you didn't really have to look up to China to show that. Reading up the first dozen or so pages of "Bad Samaritans" by Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang would reveal how South Korea is a fairly contemporary counterexample to the (largely mythical) official narrative; also worth taking a look at his paper "Kicking away the ladder: the "real" history of free trade"[0].

[0] http://www.personal.ceu.hu/corliss/CDST_Course_Site/Readings...

Late Columbia professor Seymour Melman demystified this in his book "Pentagon Capitalism" back in 1970. And, for a summary, http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/PentagonSystem_Cho...

A lot of preconceptions may be in the way though in trying to understand this.

sure, that makes it state-managed monopoly or whatever else you call it; keeping to the topic, any competition?