71. Praise the Unknown Quechuan!

If you hang out with me for long enough, you'll see me pause before a meal every now and again. I put my closed fists gently together, with thumbs touching, and I bow my head a bit, usually with eyes open. I'm not saying grace, or at least not any kind of grace I've ever heard of. I'm not praying, to any god or spirit, but I am still giving thanks. "Praise the Unknown Quechuan", you might hear me softly say. But who am I directing that gratitude towards?

Consider the miracle of the modern food supply chain. You can have winter wheat and garlic in the heat of summer; you can have autumn's crisp apples in the springtime; you can feast on summer tomatoes and berries in the dead chill. You can drink milk without worrying about it having gone bad or being contaminated with borax. You can have meat year-round, and reasonably cheaply, too. You can enjoy corned beef and pickles just because you feel like it and you like the taste, and not because you needed to store as much as possible for winter lest you die of starvation in the hunger of February. You can get spices from around the globe, from anise, black pepper, and cardamom to vanilla, wasabi, and za'atar. All of it took work and effort and cleverness to set up, and to figure out how to grow plants and raise animals and store food and keep it fresh and free of spoilage and cart it all around the world all the while; all of it still takes untold masses of generally underpaid labor and expertise to keep that engine running. It thus behooves one to take a moment to be grateful for the sheer scale of the human effort, and the near-literal mountains of resources devoted to your being able to have a nice meal.

More, if you're eating something non-vegan, as I often do, it behooves one to take a moment of gratitude for the animals which had complex preferences - preferences which were comprehensively and spectacularly violated in the service of (say) your bacon cheeseburger. Even if you're eating vegan, how many animals died for the cropland and pest control that your olives represent?

And it doesn't end there. Consider that the humble potato was not handed to us by nature. Somewhere in the Andes, perhaps 8,000 years ago, some enterprising Quechuan farmer saw promise in a poisonous and barely-edible nightshade with slightly engorged tubers. They worked and selected and bred and perfected and perhaps 50 years later they died. Their successors took on the task and bit by bit, they sculpted the root, ending up with a staple crop able to be left in the ground until needed or freeze-dried in the thin air and freezing nights atop the mountains of the Andean range to store for later. But none of them, none of these Quechuans whose efforts we rely on, ever got to eat garlic mashed potatoes. Or french fries. Or a knish, or a latke. And none of their names survived that we might learn them.

Praise, then, the Unknown Kazakh, who brought us apples for pie, and garlic and onions, those indispensable vegetables, those alliums which count themselves princes among vegetables. Praise the Unknown Papuan, who gave us bananas for splits and especially sugar cane for all manner of sweets. Praise the Unknown Nahuan who gave us succulent tomatoes from a different nightshade and who gave us corn, so widely-grown that it is now basically an agricultural platform and not just a food.  Praise the Unknown Han who gave us rice and soy, two more of the most important staples in the world, and who gave us tea to prevent monks and scholars from falling asleep. And for that matter, praise the Unknown Ethiopian, who gave us coffee, beloved of thinkers and knowledge workers everywhere, and praise the Unknown Guarani who gave us mate to the same stimulating effect.

And, of course, praise the Unknown Quechuan, they of the potato.

"Her face was like an open word
When brave men speak and choose,
The very colours of her coat
Were better than good news...
The wise men know all evil things
Under the twisted trees,
Where the perverse in pleasure pine
And men are weary of green wine
And sick of crimson seas."

Skill issue.

(Contra "The Colors of Her Coat", with no apologies to SA.) 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

4. Seven-ish Words from My Thought-Language

Seven entries from a dictionary that will never exist, even though it should. The words in [brackets] show up with some frequency in my thoughts, and I struggle with English’s semantic poverty. Some of them show up in other languages, like Korean or Lojban. Others among them, people I’ve spoken to share in wishing were wider-used words. [untranslatable 1: word-clogged/interference-silent] (adj): Of a person or their state of mind. Descriptive of the phenomenon where a person has multiple different things to say about a specific topic, or multiple different responses or reactions to a remark an interlocutor has made, only one of which can be taken. To be tongue-tied not out of a lack of things to say, but out of an overabundance of mutually exclusive things to say, all of equal priority, especially when each thing to say would result in following importantly different conversational paths. Often used instead in its natural verb form, which means “to be silent as a result of [word-clog]”...
Read more

20. A Sketch of Helpfulness Theory With Equivocal Principals

You may rightly wonder what else I’m up to, if it’s not just blogging and the occasional adventure. The short answer is that I spend most of my time and mental energy taking part in a summer research fellowship in AI safety called PIBBSS, where my research direction has to do with questions like “how does an agent help a principal, even if the agent doesn’t know what the principal wants?” and “how much harder is it for the principal to teach the agent what they want, and how much worse are the outcomes, if the principal doesn’t know for sure what they want?”. The long(ish) answer is this post. I’ll avoid jargon, mathematical notation, and recommendations to read other long papers, but some amount of that will be unavoidable. Here’s the basic setup - called a “Markov decision process”, sometimes with adjectives like “decentralized” or “partially observable” - which forms the ground assumption for the entire subfield my research direction lies in, called “inverse reinforcement learning”:...
Read more

11. Why the First “High Dimension” is Six or Maybe Five

Image
(Epistemic status: morally correct, in the mathematician’s sense; here to give flavor and intuition without too much rigor.) People toss around the concept of “high-dimensional space” a lot without having a good idea of where that starts. Interpretability researchers staring at vectors in hundreds of dimensions are clearly contemplating a high-dimensional space - loss landscapes packed full of saddle points and spheres where any given pair of vectors is almost certainly nearly orthogonal - but do they know what it means to be a high-dimensional space? Surely we can do better for ourselves than Justice Stewart’s infamous maxim - “I know it when I see it”! What do we care about, when we want to tell how many orthogonal axes we need in a space to start calling it high-dimensional? I claim that we should care about looking at unit-radius disks - like, literal filled-in two-dimensional circles - and in particular, checking when, whether, and how pairs of those unit-radius disks overlap when...
Read more