Web Notes: March 2024

Review: The Price of Time

I wanted to understand the changes that led to acceptance of interest in the West and in searching, came across this review of Edward Chancellor's The Price of Time.

The danger posed by interest necessitated controls, the most enduring of which was in Deuteronomy 23, which forbade the Israelite from charging interest to his ‘brother’, but permitted it with the ‘stranger’. This traditional distinction between relations of exchange with members of one’s own group, based on principles of reciprocity, and those with outsiders, where no such principle applied, was weakened wherever interest-bearing debt was widely used.

While the church forbade interest, in practice people found a way around it by exploiting instruments such as exhange rates. This sanction on interest also led to animus against Jews, who could licitly demand interest from the Gentiles.

The efforts of the medieval church to outlaw interest were mostly ineffective, as merchants and bankers simply redescribed the many fees they charged to borrowers in less offensive terms, often suggesting that the sum added to the amount borrowed was a ‘donation’ from borrower to lender. The Reformation transformed the theology of money, allowing ideas about interest to catch up to existing practices. Calvin attacked both pillars of medieval anti-usury reasoning: ancient Jewish law shouldn’t be binding on Christians, so long as lending at interest didn’t violate norms of charity, and Aristotle’s concept of the ‘barrenness’ of money was illogical.

Article: Rob Henderson on reading

I am always curious about other peoples reading strategies and this one was good, coming from a very productive auto-didact. Also useful links to the thoughts of other votaries of reading on the matter.

"You will not learn anything of lasting importance from TV, movies, podcasts…they’re junk food. Successful people converge on 3 ways to learn: lots of reading time, some exercises and projects, and conversations with people who are slightly ahead of them.” Dwarkesh Patel: Okay. Let me ask a meta question. What do you think podcasts are for? What is happening? Tyler Cowen: To anaesthetize people? To feel they're learning something? To put them to sleep. So they can exercise and not feel like idiots. Occasionally to learn something. To keep themselves entertained while doing busy work of some kind.

In our busy and distracted society, deep reading is increasingly rare. Deep reading changes people. When you interact with people, you can tell who reads seriously and who doesn’t. This isn’t just a matter of mental ability or intelligence. There is a difference between raw cognitive horsepower and time spent immersed in complex and intricate ideas. You can tell the difference between a smart person who reads and a smart person who doesn’t by how they express ideas, the references they make, and the chains of logic they follow. The former often demonstrates a subtle understanding that weaves together insights from various domains.

Obit: War criminal Kissinger is dead

Refreshing for it no holds barred honesty and dispensing away with the convention that one must not speak ill of the dead.

In 1971, the Pakistani government waged a campaign of genocide to suppress the independence movement in what would become Bangladesh. Pakistan’s Yahya Khan, an architect of the genocide, was valuable to Nixon’s ambitions of restoring diplomatic relations with China. So the U.S. let Khan’s forces rape and murder at least 300,000 people and perhaps three million. “We can’t allow a friend of ours and China’s to get screwed in a conflict with a friend of India’s,” Nixon quoted Kissinger shrugging.

Nixon was not subtle about who he meant by the Eastern Establishment. When the media seized upon the U.S. massacre at My Lai, Nixon remarked, “It’s those dirty rotten Jews from New York who are behind it.” Nixon’s White House counsel, John Erlichman, recalled Nixon talking about “Jewish traitors” in front of Kissinger, including “Jews at Harvard.” Kissinger would assure the boss he was one of the good ones. “Well, Mr. President,” Erlichman quoted him responding, “there are Jews and Jews.”

It was this sort of unacceptable policy that prompted Kissinger to remark, during an intelligence meeting about two months before Allende’s election, “I don’t see why we need to stand idly by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”

After Kissinger and the CIA decided to overthrow Allende after the elections which he had won:

He would be among the first of 3,200 Chileans to die violently under the 17-year regime of Augusto Pinochet and his Caravana de la Muerte, to say nothing of the tens of thousands tortured and imprisoned. “In the Eisenhower period, we would be heroes,” Kissinger told Nixon in a telephone conversation days after the coup, and the same week he denied at his Senate confirmation hearings that the U.S. played any role in it.

Obit: Goodbye, Mom. And thank you.

A loving tribute to a mother. All mothers, really. A reminder that the best thing you can do for your children is set high standard, be role models, and most of all, be there for them. Parenting matters.

She was an incredible friend. My parents had a set of friends consistent for nearly half a century, and they formed and supported each other as the family they too became. She treated everyone she met, regardless of who or what they were in title, exactly the same. The outpouring of stories this week of ways she touched people - in things large and small - have been astounding but not surprising to me.

Article: The Silences of Eric Hobsbawm

Eric Hobsbawm was a historian and a Marxist. He was a very successful historian, and his books have been on my reading list for a while, since my time in India. All of his books are still in print. He also did not talk about a lot of things, which makes one wonder, how is he popular in the current zeitgeist, where identity and identity politics matter so much.

America is an astonishing absence. Jefferson, Washington and Lincoln are curiously marginal. Kennedy and Reagan are referred to only four times each in  Age of Extremes (less often, for example, than Bukharin). The United States rarely receives the same amount of attention as Germany or the Soviet Union. “He neither narrates nor explains the century’s central story: American supremacy in politics, markets, and mass culture,” wrote Stephen Kotkin in The New Yorker. It may have been the American Century for some, but not for Hobsbawm.

However, the notable areas of silence – about Jewishness and the crimes of Communism especially – are, ultimately, devastating. Can you trust a history of modern Europe which is seriously misleading about the French and Russian Revolutions, which barely touches on the Gulag, the Holocaust and the Cultural Revolution, which has so little to say about women and peasants, religion and nationalism, America and Africa?

Article: The academic study of religion

Paul J Griffith's essay from 2000 about the limits of religion as an academic category.

“Religion” picks out a genus of which there are many species, and we all know what at least some of the species are: Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and so on. It is, in this formal respect, a term just like “currency,” a genus whose species include dollars, deutschmarks, pounds, and yen. But while there is fairly widespread agreement about what makes it reasonable to say that dollars and deutschmarks are species of the same genus (and about what genus they’re a species of), there is much less about what makes it reasonable to say that Islam and Buddhism are species of the same genus (and about what genus they’re a species of).

The historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith puts the matter very clearly in an essay published in 1998: “‘Religion,’” he writes, “is not a native term; it is a term created by scholars for their intellectual purposes and therefore is theirs to define. It is a second“order generic concept that plays the same role in establishing a disciplinary horizon that a concept such as ‘language’ plays in linguistics or ‘culture’ plays in anthropology. There can be no disciplined study of religion without such a horizon.” Smith might have added, though he does not, that such a horizon is, as a matter of fact, entirely lacking.

The book largely succeeds in both these purposes. The analysis of the work of the nineteenth“and twentieth“century founding fathers of  Religionswissenschaft (Max Mueller, P. D. Chantepie de la Saussaye, Gerardus Van der Leeuw, Joachim Wach, Mircea Eliade), though brief, is convincing in its claim that the understandings of religion developed by all of them were informed by theological premises and goals. Fitzgerald does not mean by this that each of them was thinking explicitly about religion as Parson Thwackum did; neither does he mean that they were all Christians (or Jews). He means, rather (and rightly), that they assumed, sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly, “that a transcendental ontology provided the universal reference point . . . for all those forms of life that could be categorized as religious.” Such an assumption, as Fitzgerald rightly says, is crypto“Christian, and thus at least implicitly theological. He doesn’t say, though I wish he had, that it is vastly less interesting and less theoretically productive than openly and fully Christian assumptions.

Article: The rise and fall of Adam Osborne

Adam Osborne was an early rival of Apple's Steve Jobs. He was briefly a superstar before he crashed and burned in Silicon Valley. I was delighted to learn he was the son of Arthur Osborne, famous chronicler of Ramana Maharshi of Tiruvannamalai. Adam spent the first ten years of his life in India before spending the rest of his life fighting his upbringing.

Hey. It’s Steve Jobs,” the voice on the other end of the phone told the astonished young temp. “Is Adam there?” The young man stammered that Osborne was still out of town. Unsure what to do, he asked Jobs if he wanted to leave a message. Yeah,” Jobs replied. “Tell Adam he’s an arsehole.”

After losing it all, he makes his way back to Tamil Nadu to spend his last years.

How could anyone, even an English boy, grow up in Tiruvannamalai, in the ashram of Sri Ramana Maharishi, and not acquire a pride in his roots?” Osborne wrote in an article for Indian computing magazine Dataquest at the time. In it, he acknowledged that he realized now what he had always been. Something he’d never known he was allowed to be: not English, not American, but Tamil.

Paper: Hidden Technical Debt in Machine Learning Systems

Or, ML engineering is absolutely critical, underserved, and I should go all in on it.

Machine learning offers a fantastically powerful toolkit for building useful com- plex prediction systems quickly. This paper argues it is dangerous to think of these quick wins as coming for free. Using the software engineering framework of technical debt, we find it is common to incur massive ongoing maintenance costs in real-world ML systems. We explore several ML-specific risk factors to account for in system design. These include boundary erosion, entanglement, hidden feedback loops, undeclared consumers, data dependencies, configuration issues, changes in the external world, and a variety of system-level anti-patterns.