Midweek Readings

Rajeev Srinivasan and Abhishek Puri recently wrote a piece for Open on “The New Knowledge War on why Indic scholars and AI experts (and enthusiasts) need to be alert to the risks posed by unrepresentative data sets that might become the “default” source of curated knowledge. It is worth a read. A brief excerpt (emphasis added):

“There is a persistent concern that Indic knowledge systems are severely underrepresented or misrepresented in epistemology in the Anglo­sphere. Indian intellectual property is “digested”, to use Rajiv Malhotra’s evocative term.
For that matter, India does not receive credit for innovations such as Indian numerals (misnamed Arabic numerals), vaccination (attributed to the British, though there is evidence of prior knowledge among Bengali vaidyas), or the infinite series for mathemati­cal functions such as pi or sine (ascribed to Europeans, though Madhava of Sangamagrama discovered them centuries earlier).
The West (notably, the US) casually captures and repackages it even today. Meditation is rebranded as “mindfulness”, and the Huberman Lab at Stanford calls Pranayama “cyclic sighing”. A few years ago, the attempts of the US to patent basmati rice and turmeric were foiled by the provision of “prior art”, such as the Hortus Malabaricus, published around 1678 about the medicinal plants of the Western Ghats.
This has potentially severe consequences: considering that Sanskrit, Hindi, Tamil, Bengali (and non-Latin scripts), etc are underrepresented on the internet, generative AI models will not learn or generate text from these languages. For all intents and purposes, Indic knowledge will disappear from the discourse. These issues will exacerbate the bias against non- English speakers, who will not think about their identity or culture, reducing diversity and killing innovation.“

Next is a piece on lawns. Some of you are probably aware that they are not great for environment. This piece though has a lot more detail: No Mow May: More Americans are letting their lawns go wild each spring. 

For what it’s worth, we never water our lawn, stopped using weed-killers and pesticides since 2019 and have not used any fertiliser or chemical on the lawn since then. The lawn does look healthier – or perhaps its just post-facto rationalisation !

Changing tack, I stumbled on this thoughtful post on VC contagion: VC Contagion by Kyle Harrison on the distorting effect of easy money, that warps perceptions and destroys value.

Adam Tooze published a good piece last week in which he eloquently outlined the stark global inequality in the climate crisis.

Something that most of us always felt (at least intuitively) now has some good evidence and data to back it up. Long but a must-read: Chartbook 219 The triple inequality of the “global” climate problem.

On a completely separate note, Balaji has a thread on why the Pentagon might be wary of a war with China even in case of an attempt to forcibly take Taiwan. It is sobering. See also The Pentagon Is Freaking Out About a Potential War With China – POLITICO

And finally, the “news” that surprised me last week: U.S. knew about Ukrainian plot to bomb Nord Stream pipeline months before attack

P.S. This is funny (actually not): Man banned from flying with easyJet ‘because of his name’ . What are the chances that you share your name, date of birth and location with a criminal?