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This claim of NASA endorsing Sanskrit has been debunked many times. Regardless, its a favorite among a particular milieu [0] -- our beautiful heritage stabbed i

• deleted 6y ago
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• YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
  To be fair to OP, they didn't not propagate the urban legend that "NASA uses Sanskrit for AI", as in the quora thread you cite. The OP simply reported that a paper was written by "a NASA engineer" that promotes Sanskrit for NLP. Some of that seems to be true: the paper was indeed written and the contact details of the single author, Rick Brigs, are "RIACS, NASA Ames Research Centeu, Moffet Field, California 94305". That doesn't mean they were a "NASA engineer"- but they probably were a NASA employee. Besides that, there doesn't seem to be any hint that NASA, as an org, adopted the use of Sanskrit for ... something.
  • srean 6y ago
    All that you said is true, but there is a well funded gaslighting of sorts that goes around in my country along these lines. This flows right from the top, cabinet ministers and all. So there is an understated subtext that is supposed to be understood by Indian readers. Excellent and fair review BTW. I hope you do some reviewing for AAAI, ICML et al
    • YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
      Thanks. So do I- I need to publish something first :)
      • srean 6y ago
        All the best. I am hopeful that the time is ripe for ILP or a merger of logic and probability.
• svat 6y ago
  The “claim of NASA endorsing Sanskrit” is an exaggeration that is easy to debunk, but the paper itself is real: it presents (though in a vague way) something of historical interest, namely a dialect of Sanskrit that was (and is) used for giving precise definitions and statements, attempting to avoid ambiguity. Of course from one perspective this is “just” a historical curiosity and an irrelevant dead end as far as AI is concerned, while from other it's an important landmark in the intellectual history of the world. (See my other comments in this thread if they're visible; trying to avoid repeating myself.) Aside, just remembered: there's a talk on this Navya-nyāya tradition that I listened to recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRiv7uv_C90&feature=youtu.be&list=PL01ilcOJQjCHb8zBKqniz8IEo38y1xE6i&t=470 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRiv7uv_C90&feature=youtu.be... (covers Navya-nyāya in the 2nd half, but may be hard to follow if you're not familiar with the Sanskrit tradition). For a Western audience, these ideas may be easier to understand via the papers I mentioned at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14295285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14295285, or something like the “History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps” podcast, which is good in general (but which covers only the older nyāya and not navya-nyāya so far, in its 62 episodes https://historyofphilosophy.net/india https://historyofphilosophy.net/india).
  • srean 6y ago
    Of course the paper is real, but not one that's particularly influential, notable, novel or one that led to anything more substantial. Regardless, its frequently used to push a political agenda of Indian/Hindu superiority. Either overtly, or covertly.
    • svat 6y ago
      Here's how I think about these things. You can either react to the extreme version, focus on the political consequences, and what the person-on-the-street says/thinks. This is totally valid, and closer to what happens “on the ground”. Or you can (if you can afford not to worry about it) take delight in intellectual curiosity, approach everything like a student, trying to be as scholarly and scrupulously honest as possible, gently correcting people when they make exaggerated claims, etc. I mean, no matter how much you use strong words like “debunked” etc., people will tend to just ignore it and keep bringing up the same dumb thing as evidence of whatever-they-imagine and only think you're ignoring/fighting them, while instead if you non-confrontationally give them a proper judicious account of its role, they at least have a positive valence towards what you're saying and there's a chance the accurate version will sink in. Even if not, it's also good practice for being able to extract whatever good is in something: haṃsa-kṣira-nyāya or nīra-kṣīra-viveka as they say in Sanskrit. (I think I already mentioned this paper being a “dead end” etc in my comments, even in my first comment on this topic from 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14295285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14295285. BTW it did lead to something more: excitement over the paper led to a conference the next year in India—see the only other paper of Rick Briggs listed in DBLP—though that too fizzled out and led nowhere... I haven't even been able to find any record of its proceedings being published anywhere. Anyway, telling people about all this creates a mystery and raises questions—if a lot of people putting their minds together couldn't produce anything useful for AI from it, maybe it's not so useful for AI after all?—and invites them to reconsider their position, and generally leads to better outcomes than quick debunking and denial of false claims, IMO.)