Surprised nobody is mentioning climate change. Young people are supposed to be contributing and centering their lives around a kind of societal structure which is increasingly seen as doomed. The constant acceleration of capital is bumping up against the material finitude of an increasingly depleted Earth.
Conservatives have a vision of the doomed future, built around walls and hoarding resources against impending scarcity. But liberals don't really have a good answer outside of "bring the super-rich to heel and use their resources to invest in mitigations," a view which is anathema to politicians who depend on the super-rich to continue holding power.
People are depressed because there doesn't seem to be a future.
I think that identifying the ruliad with the "logos" makes sense - the idea that there's some underlying abstract shape to the universe that makes rationality possible in the first place.
> I never got the "emergent properties have special aesthetic and nearly spiritual significance" or "everything is just an <insert structure here>" cognitive confusion that so many mathematicians (especially formalists) seem to have.
People just like spiritual beliefs. There's a reason why a majority of human beings hold non-rational beliefs like religion or money having intrinsic value.
It's not complete bullshit, it just fails to engage with the already existing work on the subject. He's creating his own entire system instead of looking at similar work by others and fitting his theory in with those. If you don't play philosophy on their turf, philosophers won't engage with you.
> The particular thing that comes to mind repeatedly when reading this is the fact that more or less all of mathematics can be derived starting either from set theory or from logic theory.
I don't know if this is the actual foundation of mathematics though - we're seeing more advances in category theory, the Russell-Whitehead project of reducing mathematics to pure logic is generally considered a failure, and set theory's bogged down in issues of axioms in the wake of Cohen's proof of the indecidability of the continuum hypothesis. It's probably better to see these foundational projects as providing windows into the mathematical universe instead of being the actual substance of mathematics.
After all, we do mathematics without pure logic or sets all the time. Axioms are chosen for their elegance and ability to describe conceived mathematical concepts, not the other way around.
I was skeptical until I saw the applications, especially representing groups. Not entirely sure how distinct these ideas are from studying power sets or how to really think about what "color" means here.
It's a pretty cool abstraction. No idea how to use it but worth thinking about.
This really feels like a losing battle - especially the part where you only get warned about being stalked by the AirTag if you have an iPhone. Having the technology to know where things are is great but we need to figure out how to account for bad actors somehow.
I don’t have answers but tech companies can’t create the tools that enable harm and then wash their hands of it. Good for Apple for doing _something_, points for effort.
I'm of two minds about this sort of analysis of social capital.
1. It's interesting; a lot of human behavior involves presentation to other human beings, and social media platforms can definitely be seen as a medium for signalling.
2. It's dismal and reductive and other words that signal that I don't like it for personal reasons.
The idea of applying mathematics/rationalization to storytelling is interesting, but I feel like models get bogged down eventually. There's a reason why the humanities exist as a discipline - any attempt to broadly systematize storytelling (and by extension human experience) gets bogged down in epicycles.
I was wondering about the existence of structured resume formats, so thank you for this random piece of knowledge in a place I did not expect to find it.