Watkins wrote his magnum opus on The serpent-slaying myth. You might also like ML West's Indo European Myth and Poetry. So the heroic poetry, mannerbund, the specific characteristics of the King of the Gods who is often associated with both wisdom and war, guest hospitality norms, shared characteristics of epic mythology, the myth of stealing mead / ambrosia. There certainly existed a PIE religion.
I don't question your credentials but I also think many things deemed to be IIr innovations may not even be. IIr came through CW -> Sintashta after all and BMAC influences are overstated. For instance, Soma may have a root in this region, but the myth associated with theft of divine intoxicating drink and it's function as the mead of poetry must predate the specific IIr Soma cult.
The "lord's prayer" in Vedic sounds very out of place due to the choices of inflected forms and some stems even reminiscent of classical Sanskrit.
Without going into depth of that, here's something actually more inspiring (actual excerpt from Rig Veda).
tvā́m ugrám ávase carṣaṇīsáhaṃ rā́jan devéṣu hūmahe
víśvā sú no vithurā́ pibdanā́ vaso amítrān suṣáhān kr̥dhi
> We call for help, the fierce, ruler of clans of men, king of Gods (Indra)
> All of us that is weak, strengthen it. Make the enemies easy to subdue
(The acute accent is an udatta - high pitch, vedic is a pitch accented language. I would expect IAST with accents, not whatever randomly capitalised things it threw at me).
as a ~~south asian~~ (stupid label) Indian, some knee-jerk reaction is justified because people tend to believe in exaggerated time scales (for instance, based on projected dates of astronomical events in the Hindu Epics, which predates the bronze age and the war chariot), whereas the westerners don't have a religious attachment and speak a realistic timeline for Homeric epics.
If we are speaking of the classical times: yes, India was on-par with the greco-roman and chinese world; left a cultural imprint on east and south-east asia and traded with the western world too. But the rise of pacifist religions, being in a nice position to be attacked from central asia, and internal strifes basically rendered it useless in the last millenium. Huge population, uncontrolled urbanization and a corrupt education system is the bane of this century. If we don't solve that, no amount of classical civilization is going to help. Germanic people were considered primitive by the greeks and romans, now look where they are!
It avoids having to include Pakistan in India which if you did causes a large number of people to complain especially if talking about modern things. It is less usual when talking about ancient history.
It also differentiates Indian sub continent for East Asian which covers Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Asian usually covers too much when talking about history.
Oh we have some westerners who believe that the world is 6000 years old due to a particular combination of interpretations of circumstances in the Bible.
I can understand some push-back from other countries, especially when the right-wing tends to embarrassingly parade past achievements as a way to suppress criticism of current conditions, but at the moment the sheer hatred and poison have blown way past what is understandable.
There's no manufacturing sector to employ them if you displace them from agriculture. They'd be displaced into gig economy. This would just increase the population of a handful of metropolitan cities which are already congested. India should fix its cities first.
Present iteration of LLMs are, despite what normies would believe, aren't optimised to provide correct solutions. They are optimized to __sound smart__.
This may be just an undesirable artifact of the RLHF process. But the end result is same. They try (?) too hard to sound smart.
Last generation LLM writing was too obvious in its soulless journalistic nature. But the current generation LLMs do all the following things to appear smart; From the lowest levels to highest level
- use clever writing styles and punchlines. Not X, it's a Y'ed Z. (Though it's not funny and makes no sense).
- Overstuff the technical terms, most often using a +. "Add a shim + iptables rule + signal handler".
- Over engineer the low level design. (Eg rather write a function to do some complex parsing when a way exists to avoid it altogether. Write tricky bash script and parse the output for what could be achieved by stdlib in few more lines).
- over engineer the code flow: this is rather because they're clueless and can't step back. But I have fun seeing the LLM come up with 4 5 levels of branching and then extract it into a function, whereas a human would step back and try to avoid the branching.
- over engineer the high level design: well your mistake is letting the word soup machine lead the design. It will add all and kitchen sink with need bullet points and + marks. Only a pleb not sufficiently educated in the matters of computer science will be impressed with such Markdown kitchen sink designs. It's fine to rely on LLM for brainstorming and discovering how to do A, B and C. But if you outsource the job of design, it's instincts (!) to sound maximally smart using bullet lists and + marks will kick in.
> A great poem is “about” a specific person or moment embedded in a particular culture, composed in such a way that it reaches across time and distance to resonate with readers outside that culture.
Why is this a criteria?
The following piece of metrical poetry from the Rig Veda, is of high importance to me, a bunch of vedic revivalists and connoisseurs scattered across the descendant cultures, perhaps to Indo-europeanists and comparative mythologists who study this in academic manner, even when translated into English. But I don't think most people outside this culture would ever relate to this.
Now, verily, will I declare the exploits
mighty and true, of him the True and Mighty.
In the Trikadrukas he drank the Soma
then in its rapture Indra slew the Dragon.
Now perhaps the LLMs can produce something which sounds lot like this, probably even in old Indic if they're trained enough on it.
But it will never have the allure of the old indic hymns, because there's no riddle to solve, no real riddle that the machine has hidden in the words. When reading the above hymn, whether in sanskrit or English, whether it's me or an indologist like Jamison or Watkins (who wrote "How to Kill a Dragon" on Indo-European poetics), we are trying to imagine the same thing the original writer had imagined.
In case of LLM, it's just a sequence of words that sounds cool. It may have no meaning.
Because defining "good" as "made by a human from the human society" is the easiest way to be able to go on and "prove" that "LLM poetry is not good" (these are scare quotes). She says she used this definition in "over thirty years of reading, teaching, and writing poetry" (this is an actual quote) but I highly doubt she would've found it necessary 30 years ago to define "good" as "made by a human" with this level of explicitness.
Edit: having read the whole FA, the closing sentence makes much more sense (and is also completely at odds with the definition of greatness given earlier):
"Operationally, greatness is measured when tastemakers put them in anthologies so that generations of readers can read them, tear out the ones that resonate, and tape them to their refrigerators."
I don't question your credentials but I also think many things deemed to be IIr innovations may not even be. IIr came through CW -> Sintashta after all and BMAC influences are overstated. For instance, Soma may have a root in this region, but the myth associated with theft of divine intoxicating drink and it's function as the mead of poetry must predate the specific IIr Soma cult.