You do realize military and intelligence leaders are the ones that made the recommendation not to shoot it down immediately, right? It's a bit of a political cheap shot to try and lay the blame on the sitting President. Unless he were to say, ignore the advice of those leaders, which the article makes clear he didn't.
When people withhold answers to reasonable questions in order to probe for some hidden or more "real" intent of the asker. This is a ubiquitous problem polluting sites like Stack Overflow, but can also happen within an org. Always start with the simple answer first, and go from there.
> But I ultimately think of mathematics as a just an invented tool whose only reason for existence is to solve concrete problems.
This might be the source of disconnect. I frequently encounter this perspective and worry there's a fundamental problem with how mathematics is taught if so many people walk away believing this. Whether or not humans ever mastered mathematics, what is and isn't mathematically true would not change. Humans can create notation and formalisms, but they do not invent the truths those mathematics represent.
That's self-evidently untrue. The properties that make a circle would be true regardless of whether a human ever set eyes on a perfect circle. Us identifying those properties is an act of discovery via research. Codifying those mathematical truths into a written notation is the only component of the process that could really be called invention.
I worked at a productive computing research institute for a number of a years. I cannot count the number of times I found research teams duplicating critical algorithms. Research Scientists not only pay the price of the spaghetti nature of the code, they pay it over and over again by not sharing and improving on what has already been built by previous research groups.
The software industry has its own share of problems, but from what I've seen the research community is still largely operating on an outdated software model that shuns open collaboration out of fear of being "scooped".
Oh thanks for the clarification! That was not immediately obvious to me, though in hindsight it does say Part 1. I agree, that is quite the time investment. Like any mini-series, the first segment really needs to nail it to keep the viewer coming back. I share some of your sentiments.
That's pretty presumptive. There are any number of factors that might make a synchronous conversation desirable or even necessary. Merely seeking that out implies nothing about how someone values other people's time.
"You can't censor us, we censor you!" - In all seriousness, this only hurts the ISP's customers. Interesting business tactic. We'll have to see how that plays out.
The facts aligning in the Senator's favor does not make the request partisan. Nor are they the only political figures to reference the widely acknowledged facts that there was no spread widespread voter fraud. Prominent Republican politicians in positions of oversight have agreed with this outcome.
It's step one. Step two is to utilize applicatonis/companies that have your privacy in mind. The fact that you own/control the data empowers you to choose rather become stuck.
There is no reason we cannot treat ethics like we do medicine, where prevailing wisdom is arrived at by a methodical and judicious process that is standardized. Sam Harris's "The Moral Landscape" is an excellent start for building intuition on how to do this. (https://samharris.org/books/the-moral-landscape/)
"...mindless production of mathematical fiction..."
This derisive comment betrays the authors own hypocritical stance, claiming physicists are too close-minded, while simultaneously ridiculing the role of advanced mathematics in formulating new physics hypotheses, arbitrarily declaring them mindless fiction.