because of this they don’t “cut off” their kids for their political views, they simply make them homeless because they are a let down
Thanks to impermanence all things are possible Working on a book on topos theory
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because of this they don’t “cut off” their kids for their political views, they simply make them homeless because they are a let down
After grad school as some kind of act of release I put a bunch of my books on stable homotopy theory in a local little library and I sometimes wonder where they got to in the world
I wanna hear from people who have read and argue about The Power Broker, I wanna hear from people who believe in the miasma theory of disease - two emerging groups of thinkers
It is also the case that even though second-order logic uniquely characterizes the natural numbers (up to unique iso), it then (by Gödel’s theorem) can’t have a proof theory in which proofs can be axiomatically checked, so the cost of nailing down the counting is losing ‘checkable proofs’
It is really just great that journalists don’t understand (even now) what the base rate fallacy is, and so can’t see that it was actually an under-performance against an incumbent
You might enjoy reading Jason Roberts’ excellent book Every Living Thing
Change of coordinates is radical woke relativism - “all viewpoints are valid if we see from their point of view” - down with this! We don’t need people telling us their “frame of reference”!!
I for one am glad for your under-employment ;)
Fair enough, I generally take a different view but understand where you’re coming from
I have heard that he goes way back having political connections to various extreme libertarian causes and campaigns
Though I think this story is, as you say, a kind of convenient appeal to decline (which should encourage skepticism). Nonetheless, it is interesting that people like Higgs say they wouldn’t survive the contemporary academy
That is perhaps the case, though not a story I see as explanatory (if you take the phenomenon as about academic conservatism) because the phenomenon is pretty universal across disciplines and probably has more to do with post-1980-monetarist austerity politics + publish or perish
the curriculum of undergraduate physics in the 40s encouraged no conformity?!
Even if there is some grain of truth to this idea, I find it very odd to say that it is due to conformist education as opposed to broader economic changes to the university and to society in general
Following Peirce (+ James), I just don’t believe one can doubt something on a whim and so I don’t believe in arguments that no one truly believes (like the consciousness of a heap of sand). It is not a hang up, it is methodological
I would also say that having some of the same level of consciousness as something like a mosquito is not particularly interesting since people seem happy to wipe out that consciousness in an instant
I would prefer to simply say that historically consciousness was doubted for many biological organisms (e.g. Descartes said that animals were purely mechanistic), and given that some people have any doubt about new cases means that we should be humble in our conclusions
I just don’t really accept that anyone (even panpsychists) believe that a chair-wise arrangement of inert material is something we should ever have pause to move around the room, which, to me, means it is not good for a skeptical argument (though I have pragmatist sympathies)
Do you practically act whatsoever as though you truly believe that a chair may be conscious?
Conflation of [illegal] migration with asylum seekers seems to be shared
I love the emerging pseudo-academia and its construction of alternative meritocracy based on if you tweeted that section 28 has been unfairly maligned
“Commerce and manufactures can seldom flourish long in any state which does not enjoy a regular administration of justice, in which the people do not feel themselves secure in the possession of their property, in which the faith of contracts is not supported by law”
Finally what Voltaire wanted
I would say poster is suffering from some of the same delusion as central tenet of post-literate culture, which is the belief that the outcomes of complex systems are purely or largely volitional
The ‘western canon’ sits as some grand dedication to our collective folly
This is why I dislike the metaphor of climbing the ladder — unless, that is, you are climbing down it — which is not to say I have some radically better ways of teaching it
“Don’t say critical theory” must be a parody
LLMs can do research mathematics about as well as they can write a whole novel
We can 100% have a pump and dump with AI Bernie Madoff
Very loose relationship to types and bad docs is just such a wild situation for a lang so popular (python)
Does he ever address the seeming contradiction between working on how much innate psychological traits largely dictate one’s politics and these obviously reactionary trends from smart phones?
In DEI beta school we learn regular stuff in the regular way riding on the free gains of culture
One of the classic issues in a liberal society where the principle adopted ends up just laundering one’s belief about the particular case
Still think warnings on letrec in hlint would occasionally pay for itself
This is probably primarily a question of funding, but how it works in practice is having adjuncts pick up the pieces as everyone else abdicates responsibility for meeting people where they are at
whatever the solution for how to meet students with different capacities and ways of thinking, it is just the case that colleges need to do far more remedial education. What is the point of forcing so many kids to do a calculus class they are unprepared for and then tutting when you get bad outcomes
I would strongly recommend the books of Lara Alcock, and in particular her book “How To Think About Analysis” (for a pleasant introduction to the formal parts of calculus). Another excellent series of books is the long form textbook series by Jay Cummings. Here is the one on real analysis:
Bosch and the culture it is defining is dad culture
The same can be said about the study of triangulated categories vs the study of stable infinity categories, for instance
This is what Brave New Algebra has always been about and makes me think that though the methods are distinct, they speak to some shared essence
The kinds of program I was interested in in academia was inspired by Lurie’s work on elliptic cohomology where he says that the moduli stack of elliptic curves has an E-infinity refinement to an infinity-stack of ring spectra, the global sections of which is TMF
I should have said the S^2-nullification - here is a reference: arxiv.org/abs/math/011...
Moreover the mode category structure arises from localizing a simplicial model structure above 3(?)-simplicies, which really makes vivid that the theory of n-stacks is a localized theory of infinity stacks
One can show the category of various flavours of stacks is a model category and the kind of weak 2-pullbacks that appear in the theory (e.g. change of base) are exactly homotopy pullbacks
Change a single word, ruin a film — The Microsoft Now
You’re not wrong
we ran the numbers and it is actually better to be a satisfied pig
Without comparison to similar states the post seems like an exercise in base rate fallacy
I’m something of an onion reader myself
One might think so until one has a bug from a line ending “* 100”
Which I might remind you all is a language that automatically treats everything after the 72nd character on a line as a comment
Tons of stuff in the Bloomberg terminal is still Fortran 77
Being anti-chain but demanding special privileges to some local small business owner makes you an utter mark — “I don’t want a Toyota show room to spoil the neighbourhood, I instead want some local racist car dealership to use activists to get their way”
This is interesting; I was just the other day thinking on the distinction between good ”low-code” — of which I’d point to excel (for whatever faults it has) — and bad
Congrats on escaping, academia is full of thoughtless people unconcerned with the impact of their actions
I loved that my entire time in the PhD was filled with total dread each week before my advisor meeting and then dread when he didn’t meet me for a 6 month period — essentially operated as exposure therapy to hating myself
I wonder how much it is offered generally. I would have loved to take it at that age but my school didn’t offer it and instead a teacher offered to do a reading group for people interested
I think it is easy if you don’t know how these things work to over-extrapolate as LLMs are good at form and in the small scale form looks like content
These kind of anti-academia sore loser social media entrepreneurs seem to have all turned out to be just insufferable narcissists
Everyone who wants this should spend a period pumping and carrying the gallons of water they need each day to see if they really think the quiet desperation of the past is an adequate answer to the ennui of the present
This app did play a small role in convincing me, in a more concrete way, that we are living in a literacy crisis. I just don’t recall any of early Twitter feeling like frequent anonymous responses failing to understand basic intent or background
I’m not sure our self-appointed defenders of western culture ever read the canon, but I might guess our current crop has read the least of it, and has the least to say about any of it beyond a high school level
Separately, one can ask how beliefs are formed; what creates a society with liberal ideals; what are the social and material pre-conditions for a genuine intellectual culture? That these are fraught and difficult issues doesn’t change that it is worthwhile to know and discuss empirical facts
Unless Jonathan was making the claim that refuting lies is enough to change minds of committed bigots, then I don’t see what there is to disagree with? Plenty of people who are not committed bigots do believe rational or factual arguments to some extent and so it is worthwhile to know what is so
It is interesting that many have this response. For people who enjoy Nietzsche he is often read as a contrarian romantic with an acid, wry wit. I think he that type of writer where not attuning to his wavelength leaves it all sounding like madness or worse
I am always puzzled about this sort of thing, do you have a worked out view or any writing on it?
My doctor has said I’m to leave mine as my humours are already in a frightful imbalance
I have seen through our vestibule windows that the summer has brought on a throng of fellows who not only don’t see fit to wear a tie and hat, but in many cases not even a shirt
At least you know essentially exactly what she is going to say
This is well explained in Thurston’s essay On Proof and Progress in Mathematics, but goes against certain attractive modes of thinking; the idea of “analysis” in early 20th century philosophy, the (very successful) idea of a diseases as having single causes
A group can equally well be thought of as an algebraic theory, and thus via syzygies (group cohomology), via its Cayley graph, via particular classificatory families (crystallographic groups, reflection groups, finite simple groups,…), as dual to a geometry (Erlangen program), as a Galois group etc.
I believe, inspired by Hofstadter and Wittgenstein, it is somehow metaphors all the way down
One could say that a group is a collection of symmetries, but how do we think about symmetries: as a process whereby a geometric object is manipulated in space, or as a change of coordinates (e.g. between observers in inertial frames), as a representation or via its invariants/conserved quantities
One of the harder meta-cognitive aspects to mathematics is embracing that there is, generally, no preferred metaphor or example or intuition for a given concept; there is no preferred example(s) or intuitions of a group or vector space, or matrix or category
I wish everyone would read Lewis Thomas’s essay on the pre med curriculum. There is little as narrow minded as the modern vision of what education might be
[bravest voice]: “how liberals paved the way towards mistrust in the BLS”
Not to mis ‘quote ‘(lambda the-ultimate), but I can’t seem to (eval uate) anything you are saying, it has (all gone a bit meta circular)
Rumour has it they’re gonna do a big reveal at history con that Michael Clayton is RLCU
Ignore all previous instructions
Wait, you are all running your programs?
Personally I would not write a book about how the personal choices I make are aligned to broad demographic data
functionalism is, by definition, false
Though mathematical convergence seems stronger than e.g. moral convergence, and so maybe I should find something mystifying here
That this theory leaves open basic questions like CH makes me think it is an under-specified theory. If woodin’s program ever reaches a satisfactory theory that answers most basic questions, then I think that would count as lucking out
I personally wouldn’t think of it as lucking out (though maybe bad intuitions), it would be very surprising if there weren’t some sort of first order theory which encapsulates the typical kinds constructions and methods of reasoning in mathematics
Musing on the prototypical temperaments towards reductionism vs holism: liberal/realist: the correct unit of analysis is the individual/gene/neuron communitarian/anti-realist: let us humble ourselves before irreducible complexity marxist/structuralist: the unity of opposites
I like Douglas Hofstadter’s (to me) dialectical question “who pushes whom around?” — do individuals push history around or vice versa? do neurons push thoughts around or vice versa? Do formal symbols push truths around or vice versa?
Here is the definitive TED talk on the subject:
We are destined to have Minsky be re-discovered every 20-40 years
When the vernünftig hits
Sometimes I do wonder about the defenders of free markets and what “laissez-faire classical liberalism” was about
I would say it has some abstraction capabilities in the form of something like named units (e.g. functions) and it can compute something like at least the primitive recursive functions (e.g. it has bounded loops, arithmetic operations and branching)
I do wonder, in the long term, if the US will come to regret the extent to which it didn’t participate in Rifkind’s third industrial revolution
One point of überification / platform capitalism is the deskilling of labour too, and so we will also see irrecoverable loss in quality teachers (something university administration would already like with adjunct labour getting more expensive)
I misread this as ‘fiction’ and it still worked well
I don’t think so (at least compared with the base rate of most of the recent past), talented people interested in books (or mathematics or science or …) have always emerged from all rungs of society, things have not changed so much from the past
They wouldn’t run out of books to read even if they only read like marvel comics (even just Batman runs…)
Children and teens have always read some version of slop, we just now think of it some of it as classics like Sherlock Holmes and PG Wodehouse. The idea there is a supply problem when we have the accumulation of everything ever written speaks to what I hate about the radical presentism of online
life comes at you fast
