{"id":23821,"date":"2016-01-29T05:35:26","date_gmt":"2016-01-29T10:35:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=23821"},"modified":"2016-01-29T10:32:00","modified_gmt":"2016-01-29T15:32:00","slug":"n-cultures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=23821","title":{"rendered":"N Cultures"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Jason Eisner<\/a>, a diagram of \"The Three Cultures of Machine Learning<\/a>\":<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Jason cites Leo Breiman, \"Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures<\/a>\", Statistical Science<\/em> 2001, and also mentions the \"three competing philosophies\" in Bradley Efron, \"R. A. Fisher in the 21st century<\/a>\", Statistical Science<\/em> 1998.<\/p>\n

But the idea of distinguishing small integer numbers of cultures in some intellectual domain seems to go back to C.P. Snow's \"Two Cultures<\/a>\", with various associated rejoinders and extensions. Snow first used the phrase in a magazine article in 1956, though it's best known through his\u00a01959 lecture and book. More recently, Jerome Kagan picked up the meme in The Three Cultures:\u00a0Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and the Humanities in the 21st Century<\/a><\/em> (2009).<\/p>\n

There are various theories of organizational culture(s)<\/a>, developed in the last third of the 20th century, some of which yield small-integer taxonomic splits.<\/p>\n

And\u00a0there are earlier taxonomies dividing nation-sized cultures into a small number of well-differentiated classes.\u00a0A notable\u00a0example is Ruth Benedict's 1946 work The Crysanthemum and the Sword<\/a><\/em>, which according to Wikipedia \"popularized the distinction between guilt cultures<\/a> and shame cultures<\/a>\". I await a statistical re-interpretation of these ideas in terms of the cultural evolution\u00a0of\u00a0loss functions<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Adding the idea of historical progression, we get\u00a0Adam Smith's notion<\/a>\u00a0(1763) that \"The four stages of society are hunting, pasturage, farming, and commerce\", and its development into more elaborate theories of \"conjectural history<\/a>\", such as\u00a0Karl Marx's mid-19th-century idea of\u00a0six historical stages<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Jason presents his intellectual simplex in an a-historical frame, but of course there has been a temporal sequence, as the term \"classical\" suggests.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Jason Eisner, a diagram of \"The Three Cultures of Machine Learning\":<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language-and-culture"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23821"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23821\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23831,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23821\/revisions\/23831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}