Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Recently, I was amused by the heading of an article titled “No ‘ ghar wapsi ’” for Nitish to the Mahagathbandhan. Given that ‘ghar wapsi’ is a phrase used to describe the conversion back to Hinduism, it felt kinda funny to use that phrase in the context of a possible return to the so-called “secular” side… On a completely apolitical note, the phrase also reminded me of Kathryn Schulz’s wonderful terrific book, Being Wrong . At one point, she talks about Whitaker Chambers, an ardent one-time Communist and committed atheist who flipped back to God and Christianity in the 1930’s. During a subsequent denunciation of one of his former colleagues, he said: “I became what I was. I ceased to be what I was not.” Rather than admitting that he had changed, Chambers felt “he had simply resumed his true identity”. Schulz says this claim is a “common feature of conversion narratives”: “Indeed, the very word “conversion” comes from a Latin verb that means not to change but to retur...

Watson, the artificial intelligence computer, is old news: but in case you didn’t know, it was developed by IBM and can answer questions posed in natural language (aka human speak). Watson shot to fame back in 2011, when it competed on the US game show, Jeopardy , against 2 former winners and won. That should give you an idea of how good it is. Obviously, Watson has a massive repository of both structured and unstructured content that it refers to. The IBM team then attempted to teach Watson the Urban Dictionary, an online dictionary meant for “slang or ethnic culture words, phrases, and phenomena not found in standard dictionaries.” Soon the researchers discovered that Watson couldn’t distinguish polite language v/s profanity! So they decided to delete the Urban Dictionary from its memory. Nicholas Carr didn’t approve the decision to delete items from memory and wrote the following lines : “I know that God takes a lot of heat for giving us the capacity for sin, but I give...