[HN Gopher] Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and P...
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Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500
Author : zazerr
Score : 52 points
Date : 2024-06-20 14:50 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (calculatingempires.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (calculatingempires.net)
| SI_Rob wrote:
| Beautiful from a conceptual arm's-length distance, and clearly a
| massive effort invested in this. But I find myself asking who
| this is meant for?
|
| A lot of unavoidable, but still quite subjective compromises had
| to be made to project the very high-n space addressed by this
| infographic into 2 representational dimensions. A lot of stuff
| got mapped to the zero vector here.
|
| On that note, when I drill into the details I see things that are
| initially puzzling, such as the lineage starting from cartesian
| geometry seeming to end abruptly at vector calculus, to be
| resumed (but without guiding connectors) both above as
| forecasting, and a panel or so rightward as Markov Chains and
| further on, the somewhat loose cluster of concepts headed by the
| word "Transformers."
|
| And... what's with all the hunched-over shoegazers? Are they here
| to pay off a debt? Their multiplicity and contextual
| disjointedness with respect to their surroundings somehow gives
| off MidJourney vibes. First time I've ever felt a pang of
| sympathy for clip-art.
|
| It looks like the authors were inspired by those mind-bendingly
| complex biological cycle charts published by Roche, but didn't
| want to attempt the extremely tedious (and necessary, IMO) bird's
| nest business of cross-linking causally influenced (but rep-space
| remote) systems with a spaghetti of directed connectors and data
| detailing that those charts made famous.
| Vvector wrote:
| I cannot think of a more annoying way to present this information
| hosh wrote:
| This is a fairly Western-centric view. I don't really see any
| entries on innovation outside the Western world.
| SI_Rob wrote:
| the chart, for all its flaws, doesn't seem to conclude anything
| interesting about innovation per se, but rather suggests that
| the development of technology is ultimately motivated by the
| desire by the few to abstract, concentrate and consolidate the
| levers of power in order to cultivate the values and actions -
| the culture - of the many to suit the preservation of their
| status as elites.
|
| Indeed, there are a great many non-western examples of this as
| well.
| hosh wrote:
| My beef with this isn't about whether it concludes anything
| about innovation, but that it presents itself as a
| comprehensive and universal map of various technologies,
| ideas, and innovation when it is anything but. It is mainly
| concentrated in advances in the Western world. I wouldn't
| have a problem with this if it were titled as, "Calculating
| Western Empires: A Genealogy of Technology ... " because that
| is what it is.
|
| Examples from the 1500s and 1600s are definitely European-
| centric -- meaning that there are little, if any examples
| drawn from ideas outside of Europe.
|
| I look at the category for Education, and it has "Saving
| Souls with School". Where are the non-Christian examples of
| innovation in Education?
|
| The category for emotions (of which there are rich traditions
| and thought on this in many cultures). Or "Era of Humors",
| "Cartesian Dualism", "Embodying Class". Those are all
| Western-centric ideas.
|
| One curious example -- specifically talking about the import
| of teas and porcelain from the East. The implicit frame here
| is that it doesn't matter for this set of comparisons until
| those items became available in the West. What about the
| history of when tea (and spices!) were cultivated, and
| porcelain were made? (The porcelain that were exported out of
| China were mass produced and considered the bottom grade
| unsuitable for the domestic martket).
| sergius wrote:
| I wonder how this connects with this book:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_West_Rules%E2%80%94For...
| varenc wrote:
| I'd really like to download the entire chart as a vector graphic
| and print it out on a huge plotter.
| bbor wrote:
| Amazing! If the authors are in here, I'd love to chat ways one
| might make this architectonically unified, AKA fractal in
| composition. As-is, this is probably the coolest and most
| ambitious literary thing I've seen this year, so I'll take that
| as a win! I wonder if they're using Genealogy in a technical
| sense re:Foucault's Archaeology, or if they're just generally
| invoking progress.
|
| I will say that there's a lot that could be added before and
| after Frege that would be helpful, for the programming languages
| bit. Whitehead, Russell, Peirce, and Chomsky would be nice to
| see, not to mention Aristotle and Hegel
| spacemadness wrote:
| Is this trying to imply there wasn't computer speech synthesis
| until 2000?
| dgulino wrote:
| Neat! Consider embedding links to source material, like
| wikipedia?
| dgulino wrote:
| Now that this is done, AI can copy the form, automatically
| generating this type of visualization for anything. Can you spot
| the hallucinations?
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