Amartya Sen & how friendship damages STEM subjects

Knowledge is a protocol bound epistemic activity which can adjudicate between truth claims. At least in STEM subjects, it is wholly impersonal and objective.

However, 'knowing' can be of many types- it may be carnal, it may be emotional or empathic, it may be mystical or aesthetic. In literature or idle talk, one can generate propositions which appear counter-intuitive or antinomian by the systematic application of category mistakes- in other words, by pretending that Knowledge is actually a non-noetic type of 'knowing'. This may serve a polemical purpose, but it is generates silliness because the opposite point may be made with equal validity. This is the trouble with talking shite or asserting a stupid lie. Anything at all can be deduced because 'ex falso quodlibet'- from what is false anything and everything follows.

Amartya Sen has made a career out of this type of stupidity. The Indian Express has the following summary of a talk he recently gave on 'the isolationist view of knowledge'.

While a beautiful thing in itself, knowledge generates many different types of rewards, from productive use of inventions to the creation of new bonds among people.

Notice that any word whatsoever can be substituted for 'knowledge' in the above. After all, ignorance may be beautiful. It can generate rewards. I don't know how my smartphone works but I can use it productive ways and it can create new bonds between me and others.

The 17th century French writer Rabutin, Comte de Bussy, famously remarked, “Love comes from blindness, friendship from knowledge”.

But this is not true at all. Sighted people fall in love because they see beauty in another person. Friendship can be based on mutual ignorance and a shared desire to play hooky from school.

Love may well result from the inability to see what one is getting into.

So may hatred or the desire to fart loudly.

However, it has certainly enriched the world in many different ways — particularly through the creation of great literature, such as Romeo and Juliet, Abhijnana Shakuntala, and Layla and Majnun.

We don't know whether Shakespeare or Kalidasa or Jami or any other such author ever felt the tender passion. What we do know is that they worked very hard at achieving excellence in their craft. One may as well say that Envy has produced great literature- e.g. the character of Iago- and it may well be the driving force in the spirit of emulation and competition.

But what does friendship produce — whether or not knowledge generates it (as Bussy-Rabutin claimed)?

It depends. Speaking generally, the sentiment of friendship kindles a desire for dissipation- i.e. the search for agreeable ways to idle away the hours. The kid who has a lot of friends on campus may end up without a degree. Johhny-no-friends, beavering away in the library, may gather up all the glittering prizes.

I want to concentrate particularly on the opposite direction of influence emphasised by Bussy-Rabutin — not on how knowledge produces friendship, but on how friendship generates knowledge.

This has never happened. A circle of acquaintances, animated by a spirit of jealous competition rather than any friendly feeling, may be far more successful in generating knowledge. A group of friends are more likely to be indulgent to each others' foibles.  Their mutual admiration society may be highly destructive of their common research program. Arrowvian Social Choice is a good example of a degenerate availability cascade in which a bunch of like-minded people wrote drivel to advance each others' careers. The upshot was that Econ Journals refused to publish such gibberish by the late Seventies.

The understanding that friendship helps the creation of knowledge is particularly important in the philosophy and history of science.

This is wholly untrue. It is not the case that NASA or its Soviet equivalent encouraged people to recruit their friends and to spend their office hours getting high and talking about their personal problems.

Nationalist sentiments may make a country claim a secluded flowering of science and mathematics, detached from the rest of the world (unrelated to what we can learn from others — from our friends), but that is not the way science and mathematics — and ultimately culture, too — proceed.

Utter rubbish. Useful knowledge is siloed and monopolized. Intellectual property matters. Research Institutions hire lawyers and security consultants to prevent 'friends' sharing secrets. That is why Britain jailed Klaus Fuchs for nine years. It did not think the atomic spy's friendship with Communists was an exculpating factor.

It is important that scientists and other knowledge workers feel a sense of pride in the achievements of their ancestors. They may steal ideas from elsewhere but they need to pretend to be the product of an indigenous flowering of talent so as to foster esprit de corps. That is why the Russians and the Italians and so on would make such a fuss to assert priority in a discovery. It may have been unseemly, but this tactic worked. The indigenous researcher felt that she- not some well-connected foreigner- would get the credit for any discovery she made.

For example, the view of ancient India as an island, making its discoveries and inventions in splendid isolation — detached from the rest of the world — is pleasing to intellectual nationalists in India, but it is fundamentally mistaken.

But, it has great instrumental value. If Indian scientists feel that India has always been a shit country, intellectually speaking, they will want to emigrate. They won't feel they can achieve anything on their own. Furthermore, their boss will say 'oh! this fellow hasn't discovered anything new at all. I recall my old chum, Prof. Foreigner McFartyface, mentioning it to me the last time he tugged me off.'

We learn from each other and our intellectual horizons are expanded by being in touch with what others know.

But knowing that a friend is an expert on something is a disincentive to studying that thing ourselves. Indeed, the reason Universities insist that candidates write their own dissertations and examination scripts is because Universities uphold the view that it is what you know, not who you know, which makes you worthy of a credential.

Once acquired, our newly learned knowledge expands under its own dynamics and we can give to the outside world much more than we received from it.

Nonsense! Research is costly. It does not 'expand under its own dynamics'. If it did, why the fuck would scholars apply for research grants? Let them go cuddle with their friends while knowledge expands under its own dynamics.

Consider the golden age of Indian mathematics.

There was no 'golden age of Indian mathematics'. At different times, some localized schools flourished. But there was never a general, pan-national, efflorescence. Why? The thing was not particularly utile.

This was not the Vedic period, contrary to what is often claimed (exaggerated claims about Vedic mathematics have tended to generate a world of fantasy in parts of university education in India today).

For all we know, it may have been the Vedic period which is largely pre-historic. Any claim whatsoever can be made with respect to a period of which we know very little.

The golden age of mathematics in India was, rather, the classical period in the first millennium, quite close in time to the flowering of the great literature of Kalidasa, Sudraka and other writers. The great mathematical revolution in India was led particularly by Aryabhata, born in 476 AD, and developed by Varahamihira, Brahmagupta, Bhaskara and others. Aryabhata’s departures had sophistication and extraordinary reach that were quite uncommon in the mathematics of his time.

All this is mere supposition and tendentious mythologizing. The problem here is that Aryabhata, Varahamihira etc. themselves believed that the mathematical sciences had existed in greater perfection during a 'golden age' remote in time from their own fallen era.

There is much evidence that while deeply original, Aryabhata’s mathematics was substantially influenced by mathematical developments in Greece, Babylon and Rome.

There is even more evidence that links with Sumer and Egypt and so forth where even stronger in a much earlier period. This is why all knowledge systems across the globe had a mythology about a golden age when Wisdom was greater and esoteric arts widely known.

There was outside influence, and yet in Aryabhata’s hands, mathematics in India — and astronomy too — took gigantic leaps that were pioneering contributions for the whole world.

Sheer nonsense! There were no 'gigantic leaps'. The 'whole world' was wholly unaffected. Only when the mode of production changed such that ships circumnavigated the globe and industrial processes financed their own refinement through Scientific Research & Development, did mathematical advances make 'pioneering contributions' across the whole world.

India learned something but gave to the world enormously more than what it had learned from outside.

India learned something because a small number of Indians were concentrated in regional centers where they believed they were developing something wholly indigenous which had previously existed in more perfect form. They had no compelling concept of 'Babylon' or 'Rome' or 'Athens'.

And as new understandings were born in India, they spread abroad, not only to Greece and Rome, but particularly to China, where they played a central role in the extraordinary progress in Chinese astronomical work (even the head of the official Chinese Board of Astronomy in the critically important 8th century was an Indian mathematician, Gautama), and to the Arab-speaking world which would become the most important vehicle of mathematical progress in the 8th to the 11th centuries.

So what? China and the Islamic world had, like India itself, became, till very recently, a byword for intellectual stagnation and a superstitious belief in magic and astrology.

What began with India learning something from others soon became India teaching a lot to others,

This is sheer nonsense. There was no such concept at that time. No doubt, there was a brief Islamic 'Enlightenment' where ideas were distinguished by their national origin but that Enlightenment was evanescent. It is wholly anachronistic to speak of Aryabhata as learning from the Greeks and, to return the favor, loading them with gifts. The fact of the matter is that Greece and India and Islam and China came under the domination of Turkic or Mongolian people. Friendships based on Knowledge exchange, if they genuinely existed, proved no sort of defense against this outcome. By contrast, fostering a Nationalist spirit and using science and technology to defeat the enemy, was highly utile.

and these others, in turn, made huge contributions to the world of mathematics. Friendship, in the broadest sense (including the ability to learn from each other), played a central role in this interactive process, each step reinforcing the next, across national boundaries.

Name one mathematician who had a foreign friend of this sort. It is not the case that the Greek mathematician would email his latest paper to his Chinese of Nigerian friend. Nor did these guys get together for regular conferences where they could drink beer and chew pizza in between writing equations on blackboards.

Emerging in a primitive form in Sumeria and Babylon, trigonometric ideas received the attention of Euclid and Archimedes in Greek mathematics in the 3rd century BC and Hipparchus in Asia Minor a century later.

Trignometric ideas emerge where they are useful. Friendship and beauty and cuddling with buddies from China and Nigeria plays not part in this.

In the first century BC, Surya Siddhanta in India aired trigonometric constructions with further sophistication.

Why? Because the thing was marginally useful and could pay for itself. But only marginally, which is why it could disappear so thoroughly over large parts of the country. Invasions played a part in this.

The Greek influence was clearly present in Indian mathematics, but Surya Siddhanta had more developed trigonometry, particularly applied to astronomy, than what Alexander and the Greek settlers brought to India. To consider one example, when, towards the end of the 5th century AD, Aryabhata produced his comprehensive account of advances in mathematics, the concept of the sine, which is still perhaps the most widely used trigonometric notion, found its definitive exploration.

This is an outdated academic availability cascade. Sooner or later some archaeologist will turn up a cuneiform tablet or scrap of papyrus showing this whole romantic tale to be utterly incoherent.

But how did this Aryabhatian concept come to be called “sine”, which is not a word in Sanskrit or any other Indian language? This bit of linguistic history, which I have discussed in The Argumentative Indian, is worth recollecting. Aryabhata called the sine by the Sanskrit name “jya-ardha” — half-chord — making use of the geometric basis of trigonometry, and often referred to it as “jya” for short. When the Arab mathematicians translated this concept into Arabic, they called it “jiba” — a corruption of jya. Arabic is written only with consonants, omitting the vowels, and so Aryabhata’s jya was represented as “j, b” — the two consonants in jiba. The sound jiba has no meaning in Arabic, but the same representation “j, b” can also be pronounced as “jaib”, which is a fine Arabic word, meaning a cove or bay.
When the Arab texts on sophisticated trigonometry, on the lines derived from Aryabhata, were ultimately translated into Latin (Gherardo of Cremona, an Italian working in Toledo, did the translation in 1150 AD), the word jaib, meaning a cove or a bay, was translated into the corresponding Latin word “sinus”, which is Latin for a cove or bay. And from there — from the word sinus — comes the modern trigonometric term “sine”. The much-used mathematical term sine carries within it the memory of Aryabhata’s Sanskrit term jya, and its sequential Arabic and Latin translations. What came to India from Europe in a somewhat simple form, went back to the world as a more developed tool of mathematics and astronomy.

There was a time when India was more, not less prosperous, than its western neighbors so to say something was Indian added prestige. The same was true, for a brief period, with respect to Islamic lands in connection with medieval Europe. But 'what's in a name'? Absolutely nothing. Why not simply say 'India invented zero- mind it kindly!'. What is the point of repeating this stupid just-so story? 'Argumentative Indian' was a shit compendium of worthless talks of this sort. Sen pretended to know about calendars. But his ignorance was soon exposed. Why double down on those errors? His listeners can look things up for themselves on their Smartphones. They can easily judge that Sen is talking senile nonsense of a self-regarding sort.

The separatist outlook in the development of science, mathematics and culture is seriously misleading.

Really? If so, then the long, very racist, European Nineteenth Century must have been a disaster for the development of science, mathematics and culture. De Morgan, who wrote about the Indian incapacity for abstract thought, must have been shit at Logic. Yet, this does not seem to be the case. It is only after nationalistic governments in Japan, China, India etc sponsored a mythology of indigenous knowledge that these countries began to climb out of isolation or enslavement.

Myths can matter. Sen's myth is about how Indians should concentrate on building relations with their foreign 'friends'. They can praise Indians who lived when Buddhism was still strong in India. However, they must not mention anything Vedic- because that is 'Hindutva'. Still, the fact is, Muslims crushed Indian Buddhism. Furthermore, Indians who concentrate on building friendships with foreigners soon emigrate and settle in the West. They may return home from time to time to say 'Boo to Hindutva! Boo to Fascism', but their return air-ticket is safely in their pocket.

Indeed, the role of friendship applies not only across national borders, but also within borders.

The role of friendship should not apply across hostile national borders. Klaus Fuchs was jailed. As for people living within a country- does Sen really believe anybody says 'don't be friendly to each other. Lose no opportunity to insult and injure everybody you see?'

Divisions, tensions and violence between groups and sects that political separatists like promoting (even within a nation), not only damage our social lives, but also work as barriers to intellectual progress within as well as across nations.

Sen is promoting divisions and tensions- perhaps even violence- within India. He says that some Indians are bad because they praise the Vedic age. This is very naughty. They should only praise the Gupta age because Buddhism was flourishing then. Sen likes Buddhism- though he had a disastrous impact on 'Nalanda International University' which was supposed to be a Buddhist seat of learning.

Indeed, the isolationist view of the progress of knowledge is fundamentally defective — no matter how appealing it may be to the nationalist and the sectarian.

Sen's view is isolationist. He thinks the worthless shite he himself indulges in, under the auspices of Cambridge and Harvard and so forth, has a monopoly of the virtues. Anything else is evil and 'Fascist'.

Friendship is important for our intellectual pursuits.

Will Sen rush to cuddle with Yogi Adityanath? If not, why not?

Of course, it has many other rewards as well, but the advancement of science and mathematics — and of knowledge in general — is an important part of the beautiful impact of friendship.

Sen wanted to be a Physicist. His friend Sukhamoy Chakrovarty persuaded him to take up Econ. This is a clear case where friendship hindered the advancement of science and mathematics- unless we admit Sen was always a cretin. His friends could make him appear an Economist but no power on earth could have turned him into a genuine mathematical or scientific savant with useful discoveries to his name.