Leituras pela manhã. Coincidências 🙂

Uma entrevista fascinante sobre a computação, a história científica da computação, as razões e motivações na origem da computação e da generalização do estudo da matemática, sobre o que é a racionalidade e como formalizá-la e para quem, sobre a falsa divisão entre ciência e humanidades... vou procurar o livro dela, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (1988). Interessa-me.

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, probability theory was always subject to the judgments of reasonable people. If the results derived from the mathematical theory of probability diverged from those that a reasonable person might have concluded, it was probability theory that had to be revised and not the reasoning processes of a small elite of “reasonable people.”

That really changes over the course of the 20th century. You see it most vividly in the research done by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in their famous work “Judgment under Uncertainty,” in which human reasoning is seen to be intrinsically flawed as measured by the standards of Bayesian probability theory.

...

Over the course of the 19th century, schoolboys were increasingly replaced by women as the cheapest and most reliable form of labor. We can read interesting correspondences from astronomers at Oxford and Harvard recruiting the first generation of women college graduates to perform calculations for half the wages of men. By the late 19th century, the Bureau of Calculation at the Paris Observatory was entirely feminized.

One part of this story, then, is the association of calculation first with the division of labor, and then with very cheap labor. This is a simple economic story: an employer divides labor as finely as possible in order to employ the cheapest labor available on the market — schoolboys in this case, and then the highly educated, extremely conscientious labor of women.

There’s another element, however: the actual improvements in mechanical calculation, which allowed for the smoother working of a calculating machine. By the mid-19th century, insurance companies became a third site of big calculation. Prudential Insurance, for example, had a workshop entirely devoted to repairing broken-down calculating machines. Technical improvements strengthened the relationship between the notions of mechanical and calculation. Until the late 19th century, calculation was called mechanical labor, but no machines were involved. After about 1870, it was mechanical in a double sense: machines were involved, and the people who did the labor were considered mechanical.

Jack Gross entrevista LORRAINE DASTON 

L D has published widely in the history of science, including on probability and statistics, scientific objectivity and observation, game theory, and much else. Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science since 1995 

Aqui numa palestra em Berlim, com o tema, Mechanical Rules before Machines: Rules and Paradigms. Agora não tenho tempo de ouvir tudo mas ouvi o princípio. As 'regras' de que fala o título da conferência são os algoritmos que tiranizam a nossa vida. Ela é muito interessante a falar.