pnin · HackerTrans

năm ngoáidiscuss

The senior title comes first -- Prof. Dr. Dr. Honorary doctorates are "honoris causa", abbreviated h.c. If you get multiple of these, you write Dr. h.c. mult. So you occasionally find Prof Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. X (would have been the correct way to address Umberto Eco, for instance). After introductions, people generally name only the most senior title, if any.

pnin

2 năm trướcdiscuss

Thanks for the data.

pnin

2 năm trướcdiscuss

As far as I can tell, o1 is the best model for anything to do with mathematics, by a solid margin.

pnin

2 năm trướcdiscuss

Please read it again, carefully. Hamkin is not trying to convince anyone of accepting CH.

pnin

2 năm trướcdiscuss

I think it's a bit like PG Wodehouse. The world of Bertie Wooster or Clarence Threepwood, 9th Earl of Emsworth is certainly an idyll; at the same time no one would pretend it is a classless idyll.

Tolkien would not refer to that class structure as "economic exploitation" - that is part of his politics. That does not mean he did not understand that society very well, and seek to portray it in an idealized form.

pnin

2 năm trướcdiscuss

Neither Poincare nor Lorentz are relevant to the genesis of General Relativity. The only relevant priority dispute is whether Einstein or Hilbert wrote down the correct field equations first. This was after a long correspondence between the two, in which Einstein explained his ideas -- there is no dispute that Einstein "invented" General Relativity. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity_priority_di...

pnin

3 năm trướcdiscuss

Since you provide a zoological metaphor, let me offer an alternative. Category theory is much more like Goethe's work on the /Urpflanze/ (primeval plant). Linné had developed a way of systematically naming species of plants, but Goethe was not satisfied by this approach.

Goethe wanted to find an underlying pattern common to all plants which would explain how plants grow and develop. Something like a "universal grammar" (to draw an anachronistic parallel to Chomsky) of plants. Goethe called this his "morphological" method and wrote about it in "On the metamorphosis of plants".

One caveat: this paints a slightly too esoteric picture of category theory. Goethe was very idiosyncratic as a scientist, whereas category theory, far from being esoteric, is a common language for all of modern mathematics.

pnin

4 năm trướcdiscuss

I think if you use gears, it would be well to know some Newtonian mechanics. The material structure might not be relevant, but in mathematics you also don't need to go down to the foundational level for every problem. You don't need to go deep into set theory to understand the proofs in calculus (though it is true that Cantor's investigations into set theory started from the question of convergence of certain infinite series, which is a calculus problem).

pnin

4 năm trướcdiscuss

I have some sympathy for this sentiment, and there is no doubt that the producers of mathematics could and probably should spend more time making life easier for the users and consumers of mathematics. This is true even /within/ the discipline, for very theoretical stuff. In the end this takes vastly more work than people expect. That's not an excuse, but it's true.

However, I also have a fundamental objection. I don't see how you can be an intelligent tool user without at least a little curiosity about how your tool functions. Maybe you can apply your tool, even be highly effective, in certain instances. But this is inherently brittle knowledge. When the parameters of your problem change and you don't understand your tool well enough to adapt, you're lost.

"Math for people who just want to use it" is very broad. What do you want to use it for? Physics, biology, chemistry, computer science? Sociology? Economics? There might be some shared stuff, but for all of these disciplines there is a vast space of mathematics that might be relevant.

I think Eliezer Yudkowsky's idea of a book (series) covering "The Simple Math of Everything" is fantastic. I would love to read that book.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HnPEpu5eQWkbyAJCT/the-simple...

pnin

5 năm trướcdiscuss

Hayek himself used the term "neo-liberal" to describe the "movement" of liberalism to which he belonged [0]. The historian Quinn Slobodian [1] advocates using the term "neoliberal" for the intellectual history surrounding the Mont Pelerin Society. In this context, it is sensible to distinguish between a Hayekian strand and, say, Wilhelm Röpke's version of neoliberalism.

[0] The Freeman, 1952. https://mises.org/library/freeman-july-1952-b

[1] Globalists. The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism.

pnin

6 năm trướcdiscuss

Henry Green, Graham Greene, Julian Maclaren-Ross, Anthony Powell.

But the review is from just a week after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, so Orwell is referring to wartime fiction rather than postwar fiction.

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