#otto neurath

[dinnickhowellslikes]

Took me ages to recall the name "Gerd Arntz" when I was doing research on a project. I knew he was one of the most famous symbol designers of the 20th Century, yet a google search was absolutely no help at all, surprisingly. That tells me he is really forgotten outside of design academia. Thankfully I used the great AI research tool Perplexity.ai to help me find him. As soon as I described him and his work, it landed right on Gerd Arntz (and Otto Neurath who hired him). This image shows just the tip of the iceberg of his work. Apparently he created upwards of 4000 icons (or isotypes as they called them), as well as maps and infographics. You can learn more about him here

And amazingly, you can download a free, high-res PDF of his gorgeous, minimalist Atlas Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft (Atlas of Society and Economy) HERE. This is the project that Otto Neurath hired Arntz for originally, for his IsoType Institute. The (seemingly out of print, and therefore very expensive) book about his work, is featured HERE And a very good article HERE and HERE from Nightingale, the Journal of The Data Visualization Society.

[disciplinethepainter]

[tagitables]

My heart ! 🤍

[henriduree]

Zitat d. W. 30

[geopolicraticus]

Frontiers - Spring 2023

Many years ago I retrieved a book from a free book bin. It was Carl Hempel’s Fundamentals of Concept Formation in Empirical Science. I was intrigued by the idea of concept formation, and the book has turned out to be an ongoing influence on my thought to the present day. Hempel’s monograph was squarely within the tradition of Anglo-American analytical philosophy, featured as Vol. II, No. 7 in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science (IEUS), an ambitious but unfinished positivist project, closely associated with the Vienna Circle and logical empiricism.

I have since acquired several other monographs from the IEUS. In Vol. II, No. 1, Foundations of the Social Sciences by Otto Neurath, I found an anticipation of big history in which Neurath imagines, “all sciences as dovetailed to such a degree that we may regard them as parts of one science which deals with stars, Milky Ways, earth, plants, animals, human beings, forests, natural regions, tribes, and nations—in short, a comprehensive cosmic history.” (p. 9) However, the unity of science imagined by Neurath was reductive rather than emergent, being based upon the conceptual framework of early twentieth century positivism. There is a collection of papers, Otto Neurath and the Unity of Science, edited by Symons, Pombo, and Torres, focusing on just this difference between reductive and emergent conceptions of unified science.

Another monograph in the IEUS, Vol. II, No. 5, The Technique of Theory Construction by Joseph H. Woodger (who, in another work, The Axiomatic Method in Biology, has given a spectacularly reductive account of biology), includes this interesting aside: “The mere ordering of statements does not of itself create new information.” (p. 77)

While this is true, it ignores the fact that the ordering of information has a significant bearing upon emphasis and obviousness. The reductive unification of the sciences orders knowledge hierarchically, emphasizing the fundamental nature of physics in a material universe. An emergentist unification of science also orders knowledge hierarchically, but with the emphasis on the implicit possibilities that flower into later complexity. Both are true; each is complementary to the other; and each puts knowledge in a decidedly different light.

The logical empiricists, largely neglected today, are to be admired for the consistency and thoroughness with which they set about the reorganization of knowledge built from the bottom up by an explicit program of concept formation that built a common conceptual framework for the enterprise. Big history also seeks a thorough-going reorganization of knowledge on emergentist lines. Pulling back from the detail both of traditional history and of reductivist theories of knowledge, big history is a re-ordering of knowledge that places the facts of the world in light of the bigger picture—perhaps this is not new information, but it is a new perspective on information.

Big history would do well to study the history of concept formation, the better to understand the process of concept formation, and to pursue its own systematic effort at big history concept formation no less ambitious than that of the logical empiricists. There is much material upon which to draw. Years after I found Hempel’s monograph, I got a copy of Heinrich Rickert’s The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science: A Logical Introduction to the Historical Sciences. This work also systematically approaches concept formation, but Rickert belonged to those philosophers who thought that history requires a method distinct from that of the natural sciences, so his work is complementary to that of Hempel.

Once I started actively seeking out works on concept formation I also found Alfred Schutz’s 1954 paper “Concept and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences.” Schutz had attended a seminar held by Nagel and Hempel, and, impressed by their methods, sought to extend the analysis of concept formation to the social sciences, and within a phenomenological framework. Again, this places knowledge in another light, and constitutes another complementary effort from which big history can learn. 

[shituationist]

it's amazing that so many lesswrongers see "sparks" of "AGI" in large language models because

the bulk of them are neo-hayekians, and their widespread belief in prediction markets attests to this

it's now very well documented that "knowledge" which models haven't been trained on ends up being confabulated when models are queried for it, and what you receive is nonsense that resembles human generated text. even with extensive training, without guardrails like inserting a definite source of truth and instructing the model not to contradict the knowledge therein (the much vaunted "RAG" method, which generates jobs for knowledge maintainers and which is not 100% effective - there is likely no model which has a reading comprehension rate of 100%, no matter how much you scale it or how much text you throw at it, so the possibility of getting the stored, human-curated, details wrong is always there), you're likely to keep generating that kind of nonsense

of course, hayek's whole thing is the knowledge problem. the idea that only a subset of knowledge can be readily retrieved and transmitted for the purpose of planning by "a single mind".

hayek's argument is very similar to the argument against general artificial intelligence produced by hubert dreyfus, and I don't think I'm even the first person to notice this. dan lavoie, probably one of the brightest austrian schoolers, used to recommend dreyfus's book to his students. both hayek and dreyfus argue that all knowledge can't simply be objectivized, that there's context-situated knowledge and even ineffable, unspeakable, knowledge which are the very kinds of knowledge that humans have to make use of daily to survive in the world (or the market).

hayek was talking in a relatively circumscribed context, economics, and was using this argument against the idea of a perfect planned economy. i am an advocate of economic planning, but i don't believe any economy could ever be perfect as such. hayek, if anything, might have even been too positive about the representability of scientific knowledge. on that issue, his interlocutor, otto neurath, has interesting insights regarding incommensurability (and on this issue too my old feyerabend hobbyhorse also becomes helpful, because "scientific truths" are not even guaranteed to be commensurable with one another).

it could be countered here that this is assuming models like GPT-4 are building symbolic "internal models" of knowledge which is a false premise, since these are connectionist models par excellence, and connectionism has some similiarity to austrian-style thinking. in that case, maybe an austrianist could believe that "general AI" could emerge from throwing enough data at a neural net. complexity science gives reasons for this to be disbelieved too however. these systems cannot learn patterns from non-ergodic systems (these simply cannot be predicted mathematically, and attempts to imbue models with strong predictive accuracy for them would likely make learning so computationally expensive that time becomes a real constraint), and the bulk of life, including evolution (and the free market), is non-ergodic. this is one reason why fully autonomous driving predictions have consistently failed, despite improvements: we're taking an ergodic model with no underlying formal understanding of the task and asking it to operate in a non-ergodic environment with a 100% success rate or close enough to it. it's an impossible thing to achieve - we human beings are non-ergodic complex systems and we can't even do it (think about this in relation to stafford beer's idea of the law of requisite variety). autonomous cars are not yet operating fully autonomously in any market, even the ones in which they have been training for years.

hayek did not seem to believe that markets generated optimal outcomes 100% of the time either, but that they were simply the best we can do. markets being out of whack is indeed hayek's central premise relating to entrepreneurship, that there are always imperfections which entrepreneurs are at least incentivized to find and iron out (and, in tow, likely create new imperfections; it's a complex system, after all). i would think hayek would probably see a similar structural matter being a fundamental limitation of "AI".

but the idea of "fundamental limitations" is one which not only the lesswrongers are not fond of, but our whole civilization. the idea that we might reach the limits of progress is frightening and indeed dismal for people who are staking bets as radical as eternal life on machine intelligence. "narrow AI" has its uses though. it will probably improve our lives in a lot of ways we can't foresee, until it hits its limits. understanding the limits, though, are vital for avoiding potentially catastrophic misuses of it. anthropomorphization of these systems - encouraged by the fact that they return contextually-relevant even if confabulated text responses to user queries - doesn't help us there.

we do have "general intelligences" in the world already. they include mammals, birds, cephalopods, and even insects. so far, even we humans are not masters of our world, and every new discovery seems to demonstrate a new limit to our mastery. the assumption that a "superintelligence" would fare better seems to hinge on a bad understanding of intelligence and what the limits of it are.

as a final note, it would be funny if there was a breakthrough which created an "AGI", but that "AGI" depended so much on real world embodiment that it was for all purposes all too human. such an "AGI" would only benefit from access to high-power computing machinery to the extent humans do. and if such a machine could have desires or a will of its own, who's to say it might not be so disturbed by life, or by boredom, that it opts for suicide? we tell ourselves that we're the smartest creatures on earth, but we're also one of the few species that willingly commit suicide. here's some speculation for you: what if that scales with intelligence?

[mariacallous]

On June 22, 1936, the philosopher Moritz Schlick was on his way to deliver a lecture at the University of Vienna when Johann Nelböck, a deranged former student of Schlick’s, shot him dead on the university steps. Some Austrian newspapers defended the madman, while Nelböck himself argued in court that his onetime teacher had promoted a treacherous Jewish philosophy. David Edmonds traces the rise and fall of the Vienna Circle—an influential group of brilliant thinkers led by Schlick—and of a philosophical movement that sought to do away with metaphysics and pseudoscience in a city darkened by fascism, anti-Semitism, and unreason. The Vienna Circle’s members included Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, and the eccentric logician Kurt Gödel. On its fringes were two other philosophical titans of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper. The Circle championed the philosophy of logical empiricism, which held that only two types of propositions have cognitive meaning, those that can be verified through experience and those that are analytically true. For a time, it was the most fashionable movement in philosophy. Yet by the outbreak of World War II, Schlick’s group had disbanded and almost all its members had fled. Edmonds reveals why the Austro-fascists and the Nazis saw their philosophy as such a threat. The Murder of Professor Schlick paints an unforgettable portrait of the Vienna Circle and its members while weaving an enthralling narrative set against the backdrop of economic catastrophe and rising extremism in Hitler’s Europe.

[migurski]

Great War 1914 - 18, Otto Neurath

[twentythousandvolts]

actually i just have adhd and it's always been like this can you shut up and go like get some bitches or something can you go read xkcd 341-345 instead of commenting on my post. this is mine. i can say whatever i want here

A stick figure, also known as a stick man, is a very simple drawing of a person or an animal composed of a few lines, curves, and dots. Often drawn by children, stick figures are known for their simplistic style. The head is most often represented by a circle, which can be a solid color or embellished with details such as eyes, a mouth, or hair. The arms, legs, torso, and abdomen are usually represented with these straight lines. Details such as hands, feet, and a neck may be present or absent; simpler stick figures often display an ambiguous emotional expression or disproportionate limbs.[1]

The stick figure is a universally recognizable symbol, in all likelihood one of the most well known in the world. It transcends language, location, demographics, and can trace back its roots for almost 30,000 years. Its simplicity and versatility led to the stick figure being used for a variety of purposes: info graphics, signage, comics, animations, games, film storyboards, and many kinds of visual media all employ the stick figure. With the advent of the World Wide Web, the stick figure became a central element within an entire genre of web-based interactive entertainment known as flash animation. Over a period of more than two decades, stick figure animation impacted and shaped the visual landscape of the internet.[citation needed]

History

The stick figure's earliest roots are in prehistoric art. Some of the most revealing and informative markers of early human life are cave paintings and petroglyphs, ancient depictions covering a variety of subjects left behind on stone walls. Visual representations of people, animals, and depictions of daily life can be found displayed across the walls of numerous habitation sites all over the world, such as depictions of mimis in Australia or the Indalo in Spain.

Tens of thousands of years later, writing systems that use images for words or morphemes instead of letters—so-called logographies, such as Egyptian and Chinese—started simplifying people and other objects to be used as linguistic symbols.

In Mandaean manuscripts, uthras (celestial beings) are illustrated using stick figures.[2]

In the early 1920s, Austrian sociologist Otto Neurath developed an interest in the concept of universal language. He quickly established the idea that, while words and phrases could always be misunderstood, pictures had a certain unifying quality that made them a perfect fit for his project. In 1925, Neurath began work on what would become the international system of typographic picture education, or isotype, a system of conveying warnings, statistics, and general information through standardized and easily understandable pictographs. Neurath made significant use of the versatile stick figure design to represent individuals and statistics in a variety of ways. Graphic designer Rudolf Modley founded Pictorial Statistics Inc. in 1934 and brought the isotype system to the United States in 1972.

The first international use of stick figures dates back to the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. Pictograms created by Japanese designers Masaru Katzumie and Yoshiro Yamashita formed the basis of future pictograms.[3][4] In 1972, Otto "Otl" Aicher developed the round-ended, geometric grid-based stick figures used on the signage, printed materials, and television for the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich.[5][6] Drawing on those and many other similar symbol sets in use at the time, the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), commissioned by the U.S. Department of Transportation, developed the DOT pictograms: 50 public domain symbols for use at transportation hubs, public spaces, large events, and other contexts in which people speak a wide variety of different languages. The DOT pictograms, or symbols derived from them, are used widely throughout much of the world today.

i dont think you get it. 1980 was twenty years ago. 1990 was 10 years ago. 2000 was 10 years ago. 2016 was two years ago. 2018 was also two years ago. 2017 was last year. 2014 was four years ago. do you understand me now?????

[rxshl]

ON EMPIRICISM: THE VIENNA CIRCLE

Habitual exposure makes things invisible. Fish are unaware of the water they move through, just as we humans typically fail to notice the air around us, unless there is a breeze.

For as long as most of us have been alive, our modern culture’s methods for exploring reality have prioritized mathematical logic and empirical science as the exclusive means to uncover truths about existence. Even spiritual intuitions or faith in a received religion is almost always framed in reference (and sometimes in opposition) to the standards of science. Scientific standards are like the air around us or the water in which fish swim.

Of course, this was not always so. In European culture, it took several centuries of struggle for empirical science and mathematics to push back against received religious “wisdom” about how the universe works. Scientists were often threatened with excommunication or death for promulgating empirical findings that contradicted church teachings (see: Copernicus). Even as empirical science rose in its powers of persuasion and credibility, social fissures developed and violence ensued (see: Darwin).

The cultural shift toward science as the arbiter of truth was not a constant march but rather a fitful, sporadic, and haphazard journey. During the centuries-long transition, it was not uncommon to find people with one foot solidly in each camp. Most notable among them, perhaps, was Sir Isaac Newton himself, discoverer of the laws of gravity and codiscoverer of calculus, who nonetheless produced far more written pages on alchemy than he ever did on mathematics or science.

At some point, though, the balance of power did shift. Science gained ground throughout the nineteenth century, with the advent of the Industrial Revolution. Scientific successes such as germ theory and the electric light bulb were vivid and immediate indicators of its reliability. And with the collapse of the old social orders in the violent chaos and destruction of World War I, momentum picked up speed.

The war had demolished the Austro-Hungarian Empire and reordered political power throughout Europe. Medieval hierarchies (the church and the aristocracy) were giving way to capitalism, communism, socialism, and fascism. Meanwhile, modern art, music, and writing were flourishing. Eventually, a movement coalesced in Vienna, one that would ultimately solidify what was to become our modern perspective.

From his office at Berggasse, Freud paved the way for a radical new understanding of human behavior. Not far away, Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele were painting, Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg were composing, and Robert Musil and Stefan Zweig were writing.

Within this emergent hotbed of cultural activity, a diverse group of idealistic thinkers came together to concretize the view that empirical science and mathematical logic, exclusively, should guide our understanding of the world. These philosophers, scientists, mathematicians, logicians, and political and social theorists would later come to be known as the Vienna Circle.

They sought to banish nonscientific insights from what they considered reasonable, modern discourse and to purge philosophy of the more fanciful speculations of prior centuries. They didn’t aspire to perform science themselves but sought to catapult philosophy into the twentieth century; with the aid of modern logic, their aim was to make philosophy as scientific as possible.

The Vienna Circle was first gathered in 1924 by the philosopher Moritz Schlick, the social reformer Otto Neurath, and the mathematician Hans Hahn. Meeting regularly on Thursday evenings in a small lecture hall at the University of Vienna, the group referred to themselves as “logical positivists” and immediately entered into a decade of heated, though largely collegial, debate. What mattered most to them was how to characterize scientific knowledge and how to understand the nature of mathematics. Their fervent mission was to prevent philosophical confusion rooted in unclear language and unverifiable claims. They wished instead to convert philosophy into something “scientific” and set mathematics on complete and consistent foundations. As a corollary to all this, they also sought to banish metaphysics from modern thought.

Metaphysics is a field of philosophical inquiry concerned with questions that cannot be answered through an examination of material existence. Any attempts to understand the nature of life after death or the existence of a soul, for instance, would be a metaphysical speculation, as would efforts to comprehend the nature of gods and goddesses, or of a singular creator God.

Until the modern era, statements about consciousness fell exclusively within the realm of metaphysics. Church doctrines derived from ancient texts or spiritual insights—the only attempts to grapple with consciousness available at the time—were all metaphysical.

To a member of the Vienna Circle struggling to push past medieval modes of thought, anything with the whiff of metaphysics was to be summarily dismissed. If something could not be ascertained by empirical science or mathematical formal logic, it was deemed worthless. Indeed, among this crowd, declaring some statement to be “metaphysics” was to suggest not merely that it was wrong but that it was devoid of any meaning or significance. When debates within the circle grew heated, a declaration of “metaphysics!” by an opposing thinker was the ultimate smackdown.

The Vienna Circle led the way for our modern culture to award science and mathematics exclusive ownership over the truth. And the many successes of empirical science—from the development of antibiotics and vaccines to the exploration of other planets—fully demonstrated the power and importance of scientific methods.

As it turned out, though, while the philosophical vision of the Vienna Circle was idealistic and well-intentioned, it was also naive and destined to fall short.

[snowshoe1980]

In the 1930s, Austrian sociologist, philosopher, and curator Otto Neurath (December 10, 1882–December 22, 1945) and his not-yet-wife Marie pioneered ISOTYPE — the International System Of TYpographic Picture Education, a new visual language for capturing quantitative information in pictograms, sparking the golden age of infographics in print.

[taxxpayermoney]

Otto Neurath

[tagitables]

🖊 Phillip Frank

[ameliea1]

Las marcas y su evolución

En ciertos casos, es imperativo realizar cambios en la identidad visual de una marca para proporcionarle una nueva imagen que mantenga una conexión con la actual. Estos cambios pueden variar en su grado de transformación, pero es esencial conservar la esencia gráfica.

En ocasiones, cambios drásticos pueden destruir una marca, convirtiéndola en algo irreconocible, como sucedió en el caso de Twitter.

Este tipo de gestión de marca y su identidad visual va en contra del objetivo de mantener una esencia gráfica reconocible.

Tipos de Logos

Isotipo o Isotipo:

Era un sistema ordenado de signos visuales desarrollado para superar ambigüedades y limitaciones del lenguaje verbal. Está compuesto exclusivamente por imágenes, sin incluir texto.

El proyecto ISOTYPE fue liderado por el filósofo y economista austríaco Otto Neurath.

Logotipo:

Se refiere al uso exclusivo de letras para representar gráficamente la marca. En este caso, la tipografía sirve como imagen.

Imagotipo:

Es la representación visual de una marca que se compone de un isotipo y un logotipo, elementos que pueden utilizarse por separado. El imagotipo fusiona un ícono y un texto de manera distintiva.

Isologo:

Consiste en la unión de un logotipo con un isotipo, donde la tipografía e imagen se funden en una entidad indivisible.

Icono:

Es un símbolo gráfico presente en la pantalla de dispositivos electrónicos que representa un programa o sistema operativo.

Los iconos han evolucionado desde versiones monocromáticas con pocos píxeles hasta iconos a todo color, con mayor resolución, perspectiva y profundidad.

Me fascina cómo los iconos han cambiado con el tiempo, desde versiones monocromáticas con pocos píxeles hasta diseños a todo color y mayor complejidad. Crear un icono es un desafío que requiere planificación y claridad en los objetivos.

Realizamos un ejercicio de creación de un icono de 8x8 píxeles, lo cual resultó ser un gran reto. Crear un icono en un espacio tan reducido y limitado por colores y píxeles es una tarea compleja y requiere claridad en el diseño.

Posteriormente, repetimos el ejercicio con un icono de 16x16 píxeles y a todo color, lo cual resultó ser un poco más manejable, aunque la elección de colores y la cantidad de píxeles aún presentaban desafíos.

[marbellota]

La parte GRÁFICA y VISUAL  de las cosas

Los íconos son una representación gráfica esquemática que se utilizan para identificar los programas y diversas funciones.

Xerox Star con su primera interfaz gráfica, muestra funciones a través de los íconos, a partir de ello fueron evolucionando a medida que iban avanzando las interfaces gráficas, aumentando la densidad de pixeles

1920: Otto Neurath ingenió un sistema de pictogramas como lenguaje universal para que todos puedan entenderlo, denominado ISOTYPE. Respondiendo a una necesidad que el contexto exigía, periodo post guerra, analfabetismo en altos índices, por lo tanto las imágenes eran mas sencillas de comprender y recordar.

[andreacrialesdgr]

El ícono

Los íconos son metáforas de una idea/concepto del mundo real. Evolución de los íconos: de fotos a cosas simples.

Por ejemplo iOS se volvió minimalista del iOS 6 al iOS 7.

Las interfaces: desde los jeroglíficos que eran formas de comunicación. El icono es una representación gráfica esquemática.

Grillas y gráficos: Primer videojuego gráfico fue SpaceInvaders

En 1920, Otto Neurath inventa el Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture Education), sistema de pictogramas

Isotipo - Imagotipo - Logotipo - Isologo

Pictograma: un código visual universal.

Las imágenes simplificadas son superiores a las imágenes detalladas. Los iconos son planos, sin perspectiva, simples.

Historia de los iconos

Apple Lisa: waste basket, fonts, colores, outline

1988: personalizable el escritorio de Apple

1989: NeXT - skeumorfismo, densidad de pixeles, escala de grises

1990: 16 colores

1993: sombras y 3D

1997: BeOS

1998: IRIX, flotan los objetos con sombras

1999: Rhapsody con transparencia

2001: Mac OS X de Steve Jobs, Windows XP, Windows Vista

2007: smartphones con iconos - HTC, Apple web con flat design (sin degradados ni sombras

Los iconos muestran la evolución de las marcas. Usan la proporción dorada, espiral áureo. TOOL - Lateralus.