#transientpetersen

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

is Wyoming real?

Oh man, how did you miss it, it's even on the ICONS cover:

Of course, they're the official Reasonable Libertarians, while the real Wyoming is dead center in the Disturbing Libertarians zone.

[m-tea]

transientpetersen replied to your post “I talked with Moon today about grad school admissions and she told me...”

Good luck! Looking at the people who made it through grad school, the people who dropped out, and the people who avoided it altogether, there's not much of a pattern. A slight boost from being able to endure the setbacks.

Thank you! I’m still very much at the ‘can I get in’ stage but *fingers crossed* Did you go to grad school yourself or just have a lot of peers who did?

[alexyar]

What do you think of Francis Su's thoughts on the mathematical community and ways the study of math serve humanist values? ("Mathematics of Human Flourishing" on mathyawp wordpress)

well this is of course a wonderfully written address

It makes a very good point of why we should be teaching mathematics better, and why we should be teaching better mathematics. It wonderfully describes the pleasures and challenges and necessity of learning new mathematics. It is absolutely correct about how we should approach and treat the students who are interested in mathematics.

it also does absolutely nothing to address professional mathematical research. This article is not about or for people who are at or beyond PhD level.

“Math is very important because iPhones and gravity”, we and the students are told. I highly doubt that chromatic homotopy theory has or will ever have any impact or importance for anyone outside a hundred people community of like-minded mathematicians. As much as I hate the “if you can’t explain to your grandmother argument…” it does have a certain merit, but the moral should not be “then you don’t understand what you’re doing” but “you are probably in a historically wrong field”. 

Of course math is wonderful and beautiful and important….Except that not all math is beautiful – and most “live-action” math is far from being so. Math is beautiful because we polished it over dozens of years. Not a single theorem that you prove in grad school or beyond will be beautiful. Maybe someone in 10 years will rediscover it, put it into a broader context, apply newly-established techniques, write a textbook, and two generations later some students will read your theorem and marvel at the beauty of math. You won’t. You will hate your theorem for not being beautiful – because at that time it won’t be.

Except that not all math is important. Do you think that all the math we learn is all the math there ever was? Do you think that every PhD thesis that has ever been written is a small part of a small proposition is one of your textbooks? 

I hear that argument often – yes what I’m doing is not immediately important, but it just means someone else will not have to do that, can build on that etc.. But do you really believe that? Do you really believe that there is a certain uniform progression in mathematics, and that every single brick laid down by every single PhD student is a foundation for something that will some time in the future be used by someone outside the narrow community of experts? If so, godspeed. I hope you have great time in grad school (but you probably won’t). 

We all know that a PhD dissertation is about some very narrow and specialized thing in your field. But I am also in a highly narrow and specialized field of mathematics. Probably second or third most specialized field currently. The level of narrowness and specialization achieved by my thesis is such that it would be silly and frankly irresponsible of me to believe it will ever be of benefit to anyone, even other mathematicians. And even if my field wasn’t so narrow: I am not a great mathematician. I know my own skill, and I know my own limitations. I am not Andrew Wiles – and few of you probably are. I will never have a result that will have have any impact on mathematical community, much less on community in general. The only purpose of my PhD is to satisfy me, my needs – that are so eloquently described in the article. 

[studyinglogic]

What piece of art (book, music, movie, etc.) most influenced the person you are today?

I. A long prologue on the preconditions of an answer

Thanks for the great question: it's also a hard question to answer! (I've answered a similar question here, but this answer is quite different.) Already at the start, I have to avoid three traps in answering.

The first is including works I've been puzzled and fascinated by, but do not fully understand and so have not been sufficiently influential in the way I'm thinking of. (Examples: Jung and koans. I can talk about them with some plausibility, but do I really understand them? Being honest with myself, I don't.)

The second is including works which easily come to mind because I've enjoyed them, but which haven't been sufficiently influential either. (Lots of science fiction I've read fall under this category.) The third is making a list solely of classics, since I run the risk of making an uninformative list of what everyone already knows---or even worse, having classics simply because they are high-prestige. (Examples: the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Three Kingdoms.) Having said that, many classics have been genuinely influential in my life, and I'll mention some of them later. But I want to make sure that I include more than just classics.

Even while avoiding these traps, I find some difficulties in answering for two more reasons. First, because I haven't been influenced by any single piece of art in particular so much as I've been influenced by artistic works in general.

Second, because even more influential has been my general attitude towards art and culture (to go up a level) rather than any works of art in themselves.

To name some of these attitudes:

I think that the best way to experience artistic works is in their context, by seeing what they're reacting to and against; I think it's useful to see artistic works as part of a coherent tradition for that reason (and this is also why theory is useful).

I don't think you can get a pure experience of artworks, but that they're always shaped by (often invisible) interpretive lenses; I think the best art is transformative (a very Xunzian view); I think there are no compulsory works of art because of this. What transforms each person is different, just because each person is different.

One of my favourite quotes here is from Borges (quoted in the epilogue to Professor Borges; the original citation is to the 1979 interview Borges para millones):

I believe that the phrase “obligatory reading” is a contradiction in terms; reading should not be obligatory. Should we ever speak of “obligatory pleasure”? What for? Pleasure is not obligatory, pleasure is something we seek. Obligatory happiness! We seek happiness as well.

For twenty years, I have been a professor of English Literature in the School of Philosophy and Letters at the University of Buenos Aires, and I have always advised my students: If a book bores you, leave it; don’t read it because it is famous, don’t read it because it is modern, don’t read a book because it is old. If a book is tedious to you, leave it, even if that book is Paradise Lost—which is not tedious to me—or Don Quixote—which also is not tedious to me. But if a book is tedious to you, don’t read it; that book was not written for you.

Reading should be a form of happiness, so I would advise all possible readers of my last will and testament—which I do not plan to write—I would advise them to read a lot, and not to get intimidated by writers’ reputations, to continue to look for personal happiness, personal enjoyment. It is the only way to read.

II. Donald Richie's Japanese Portraits

Having given that very long disclaimer, if I had to select just one work which has been most influential to me and which isn't a well-known classic, it would be Donald Richie's Japanese Portraits. (If you'd like to read even more on this, @transientpetersen has reviewed it here and I've added some comments on its impact on me here.)

Richie's Japanese Portraits combines so much of what I like and has influenced my style (to the extent to which I have one) and taste: short vignettes with psychological insight, fragmentary pieces which add up to a greater whole even if there's never a unitary picture being painted. It led me to other similar authors (like Italo Calvino, Lydia Davis, Kurt Vonnegut, Sei Shōnagon and Yoshida Kenkō and the zuihitsu/xiaopin genre. . .)

And---most importantly---reading the book was one of the events in my life that taught me how to notice people, how to love them. (I can vividly remember a time when I was very bad at both, and it was only with great effort from those around me that I managed to learn to love. And, of course, the influence of the book pales in comparison to the influence of the people who loved me, loving people, lovely people. Love is both attention and action, and I'm still learning.)

Richie has a gift for encapsulating the universal in the particular. Reading the book made me a better person, and that's the highest compliment I can give any piece of art.

III. Other works

Having tried to pick a most influential work, I would be remiss not to mention the many others that have influenced me, often to the same extent. I'll name just a few which immediately come to mind rather than give a full list. Much like William H. Gass's list, I'd probably come up with a different list on a different day.

There isn't any visual art or music on the list---not because of their lack of worth (Philip Glass, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Nils Frahm, Ólafur Arnalds, Oasis, Mahler, and Shostakovich are all personally enjoyable and were influential at particular points!), but simply because I find it easier to cite, explain, and engage with texts, and so texts have been most influential for me. If you're interested, here's a bit on my musical tastes. Now, back to the list:

The Epic of Gilgamesh: Gilgamesh's faults are entirely human; it's a consoling book.

Sima Qian's Records of the Historian (read in the Yang and Yang translation): Ostensibly a book of history, but there's an entire ethos there of understanding the moments of rise and descent, of leaving when things are at their peak, of understanding the moment and waiting. I read it as a child and it was extremely influential in affecting how I behave up to now.

The Three Kingdoms (which I write about sometimes): I read this at around the same time as Sima Qian; the figure of Zhuge Liang exemplifies the tensions inherent when you try to combine the ethos of the Records with the actual prevailing situations.

Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art": There are so many times when I've reminded myself, "The art of losing isn't hard to master. . ."

Simon Leys's essay "The Chinese Attitude Towards the Past": It introduced an entirely new way of thinking about preserving history and memory to me.

Sociological theory, especially Weber, Durkheim, Goffman, and Foucault: They've all shaped my understanding of society and normality. I'm extremely sympathetic to the symbolic interactionists. Weber taught me to appreciate bureaucracy a little more, which has made me more patient while waiting on the telephone: now that's influential!

Key figures and texts within the various philosophical traditions: within the Chinese tradition, Xunzi and Dai Zhen; within the Indian tradition, the Dīgha Nikāya and Vasubandhu; within the Anglo-European tradition, Spinoza and Wittgenstein.

Gadamer's Truth and Method: I still don't fully understand it, but I was extremely influenced by his idea of the fusion of horizons. Some parts of it are pure poetry. When I read the passage where he says that nothing returns, I had a shiver down my spine.

Shen Fu's Six Records of a Floating Life: a depiction of love in a time very different from now, and all the more interesting and touching for that. My favourite passage is the part where Shen Fu and his wife Yün acknowledge the social pressures facing them, and talk about how they hope they can change positions in the next life to understand each other and to overcome these pressures:

Once I said to her, ‘It’s a pity that you are a woman and have to remain hidden away at home. If only you could become a man we could visit famous mountains and search out magnificent ruins. We could travel the whole world together. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?’ ‘What is so difficult about that?’ Yün replied. ‘After my hair begins to turn white, although we could not go so far as to visit the Five Sacred Mountains, we could still visit places nearer by. We could probably go together to Hufu and Lingyen, and south to the West Lake and north to Ping Mountain.’ ‘By the your hair begins to turn white, I’m afraid you will find it hard to walk,’ I told her. ‘Then if we can’t do it in this life, I hope we will do it in the next.’ ‘In our next life I hope you will be born a man,’ I said. ‘I will be a woman, and we can be together again.’ ‘That would be lovely,’ said Yün, ‘especially if we could still remember this life.’

There's so much encapsulated in this short passage: Shen Fu and Yün accept society's limitations while trying to transcend them within a framework they're familiar with, all while dwelling in the care and love and friendship between them. When I read this passage for the first time, I had to stop reading; I had started crying.

IV. On dealing with complexity

Most of the works which come to mind immediately are works of philosophy, theory, or nonfiction. This is no accident.

Life is complex, and there are at least two ways of dealing with the complexity of life. Philosophy tends to make it more explicit (although there are exceptions like Wittgenstein, where the very form of the Philosophical Investigations forces you to think in a particular way) and art tends to make it more implicit (although there are exceptions like programmatic music). In an interview, the philosopher David B. Wong recalls:

I remember taking a number of literature and mathematics courses, besides philosophy. Maybe philosophy combined the appeal of the other two fields for me—the clarity and systematic nature of mathematics and the focus on the human condition in literature.

I have a preference for the explicit, and so I prefer philosophy---but others with a different frame of mind may, for entirely valid reasons, prefer art.

For me, the one great advantage art has over philosophy is its greater pull on the emotions. Art helps build solidarity in a way philosophy doesn't (as Rorty points out). Philosophy does pull on the emotions: I've been happy or had shivers when reading philosophy, and sometimes I've been so excited that I had to get up and walk around before reading further. But I've never cried while reading philosophy, while I have cried before when reading literature.

Thanks for your question again!

[countingnothings]

This is a really important addition! I really like the idea of Maggot as paradigm of Hobbit kindness and courage, both things we will see all our four protagonists display many times before the end. It’s a great way to set up the idea that Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin are exceptional by circumstance rather than by character.

1.4 A Short Cut to Mushrooms

Our friend JRR is not hiding the fact that he idealises the English countryside and her agriculturalist inhabitants, but beyond this rather banal explanation for the focus on a fairly minor character who is mentioned only one or two more times in the whole trilogy and whose big re-appearance (spoilers!) comes when we are wondering whether the Shire can be saved, I think there’s a narrative-logic reason to focus on Farmer Maggot.

We’re still tarrying in the Shire because Frodo-the-narrator is, of course, still unsure he wants to follow Frodo-the-character onto the dark roads that he knows are coming, and Maggot certainly serves that purpose admirably. Until Maggot, though, we have yet to meet a hobbit for more than a few passing moments; even our Sam and Pippin are mere caricatures of themselves at this point. We have been told and shown that Frodo loves the Shire, but we ourselves have not been made to love it - certainly, by now, we think it quaint and perhaps amusing, we are lured by the promise of A Simpler Life and the echoes of A Simpler Time, but as we leave the Shire behind Frodo knows that we need an anchor. 

In many ways, Frodo himself needed an anchor, when he set out, and perhaps we focus on Maggot in this chapter because he was the anchor Frodo chose. Bag End is gone to the Sackville-Bagginses, and Hobbiton is tainted by the spectre of fear. Buckland was home too long ago, and besides is coloured with the painful memories of being orphaned as a child, and so Frodo, heading out into the Wild with a Ring in his pocket and dread lodged already in his heart (so different than Bilbo’s setting out!), has no touchstone. The purpose of Farmer Maggot’s inclusion in this chapter is, in part, I want to argue, because Frodo is trying to tell us a story with more knowledge than he had while he was living it, and Maggot is the closest he got to having a touchstone, a piece of the Shire to tie him to it.

And I think Maggot gets to be the touchstone not because of his history with Frodo, although that certainly doesn’t hurt, but because he represents everything that Frodo has come to love and appreciate about the inhabitants of the Shire by the time he is writing. Maggot is clever but humble, loyal and practical, takes no nonsense and gives no ground, but is still able to be generous and tender and even have a sense of humour. He is the embodiment of not simply Tolkien’s idealised countryside, but also Frodo’s idealised Hobbit-hood. Maggot stands in for everything about the Shire that Frodo believes needs saving no matter the cost, and so when Sam, quite a ways from now in time and page-space, thinks of a little bit of garden to call his own and the flush on Rosie Cotton’s cheeks, I’m willing to bet that the image Frodo calls to mind is that mushroom-filled covered basket swinging out of Maggot’s wagon.

[digging-holes-in-the-river]

@transientpetersen replied to your post “Tried to read Tumblr on my phone, but the posts are in a different...”

This hit my phone a few hours ago - am glad I could turn it off as it was incredibly disorienting

Aha, thanks for this reply! After you sent it, I was able to find the toggle in my app settings. If you hadn’t said this, I would have never looked, because I didn’t expect it to be turn-off-able.

Tagging @coolyourdools so you will know about this too!

[isaacsapphire]

It's easier to do it this way

@transientpetersen in response to this http://transientpetersen.tumblr.com/post/161549127320/isaacsapphire-tsutsifrutsi-people-bemoan-low "How much influence does Microsoft and Boeing exert in Washington?" Very different kinds of influence. Boeing is an aircraft company, which means they are a munitions company. Their fortunes rise and fall based on their ability to get and keep enormous military contracts. Washington DC exerts a HUGE influence on Boeing. Vise versa? Obviously Boeing tries to influence Washington so it can get those contracts, and it probably isn't adverse to contacts being issued in general or military spending, because they might be able to get a piece. But as potentially troubling as that is from an outside perspective, it's very legible and classic: Company makes​ a product​, wants to sell it to the government. Microsoft, on the other hand, seems to primarily want to be left alone by the government, with a touch of intellectual property defense and a few contracts that are important but not the lifeblood of the company. Antitrust regulations that threatened to force Microsoft to break up seem to be much more concerning to the company. Idk, anybody else want to chime in?

[lord-arlen]

@transientpetersen said: I don’t trust my mind to generate reminders to talk with those people I care about when I don’t see them day to day. But it doesn’t have to! Fortunately for it, I maintain a calendar where I can include notes like “Call cross-continent buddy (2M)” and when it comes up, I just think of something from the last two months to talk about and make the time (true story - doing just that this afternoon). No one has complained yet, they always seem pleased that someone is thinking of them.

That’s a good idea! Of course---just use a calendar :) I may start doing that.

[suspected-spinozist]

Can I ask why vote yes on 55? The argument that the original measure was agreed to be temporary (and in a worse economic environment) is a compelling reason to vote against.

Our budget is definitely in better shape than it was when the original measure was proposed, but a lot of that is superficial. We derive a disproportionate amount of funding from taxes on the ultra-rich, which are extremely volatile as a source of income, and have something like $300 billion in underfunded debt and bonds. So, if there isn’t a budget crisis now, there will be at some point in the relatively near future, and most of the tax proposals I’ve seen proposed to alleviate it look worse than 55.  We should have a rainy day fund, but we don’t, and that’s not on the ballot. A caveat: I’m not particularly knowledgeable about economics, but most of the argument was relayed to me by a friend who is a) a professional tax policy researcher, and b) conservative and generally against raising taxes, so I’m fairly confident. 

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

Frank, what do you hate most?

I'm sad and upset!

[m-tea]

@transientpetersen replied:

Hope you find someone, sorry it won't be me - chatting is not my thing.

Thanks 😊

And not at all, good luck with your own search!

classifieds: unemployed looking for unemployed

Would anyone be interested in doing job search stuff together? Chatting about it to commiserate/vent, scheduling some hours to be accountability buddies and generally making it a more appealing prospect to think about jobs were the sort of things I had in mind but we can figure it out as we go. I’m looking for programming/”data science” jobs myself so if anyone else is, it would be good to chat about resumes, interview prep, job opportunities and all that terribly exciting stuff but even if not, just the company would be great. :)  Let me know if that sounds like it would be helpful. 

[studyinglogic]

Thoughts on love (largely borrowed from Kurt Vonnegut)

My thoughts on love (in general, not in the romantic sense) are that it’s something I can give, but should not hope to receive. Instead, I should better myself - which for me leads to helping others and interacting with them without expecting anything in return. “Don’t try to find the right people; instead be the right person.” People can sense sincerity and genuine interest. Most of the time, people reciprocate when I sincerely try to understand them. They often respond well - if they do, it’s a bonus, because I never expected any reciprocation. If they don’t, that’s alright. People are busy.

Some relevant quotes from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slapstick (not that I agree with all of them):

. . . I find it natural to discuss life without ever mentioning love.

It does not seem important to me.

What does seem important? Bargaining in good faith with destiny.

I have had some experiences with love, or think I have, anyway, although the ones I have liked best could easily be described as “common decency.” I treated somebody well for a little while, or maybe even for a tremendously long time, and that person treated me well in turn. Love need not have had anything to do with it.

Also: I cannot distinguish between the love I have for people and the love I have for dogs. . .

Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go looking for it, and I think it can often be poisonous.

I think it can often be poisonous. And then, later:

“Eliza—” I said, “so many of the books I’ve read to you said that love was the most important thing of all. Maybe I should tell you that I love you now.”

“Go ahead,” she said.

“I love you, Eliza,” I said.

She thought about it. “No,” she said at last, “I don’t like it.”

“Why not?” I said.

“It’s as though you were pointing a gun at my head,” she said. “It’s just a way of getting somebody to say something they probably don’t mean. What else can I say, or anybody say, but, ‘I love you, too’?”

Some people think romantic love is an illusion designed to continue the human race. W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer’s Notebook, 1949:

Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve the continuation of the species.

Some people go from accepting this to believing that love isn’t real. I don’t think that follows. Even accepting Maugham’s maxim as true, love can be real in the same way that money or the social contract is; very roughly, we make things real by social consensus and agreement. (Here I’m highly influenced by work in social ontology and Robert Sugden.)

This originated as part of an answer to two prompts, given to me separately by @transientpetersen and @hardlocke. I tried to replace questions I wasn’t too interested in with questions I was interested in. In one prompt, there was a question about relationships; I decided to write up my thoughts on love instead. 

Needless to say, I don’t take these views of mine as robust, certain, universal, or valid for everyone. In particular, I have unread books by Irving Singer, Tallis, and Erich Fromm on love; reading these would almost certainly change my mind. While I read Slapstick, I cannot recommend it to others. Vonnegut himself rated it the worst of all his fiction works.

I think @transientpetersen once put it that all advice is either trivial or autobiographical; this non-advice segment definitely falls into the autobiographical.

[studyinglogic]

Comments on Lindenbaum’s Lemma and Completeness

These comments are not from me: they are tentative, and I welcome feedback and input.

Does Lindenbaum’s Lemma require the Axiom of Choice?

I’m not sure, but my intuition says yes. Quick recap: Lindebaum’s Lemma states that very consistent set of formulas can be extended into a maximally consistent set of formulas. There are two ways to prove it. The first goes by Zorn’s Lemma - equivalent to the Axiom of Choice. The second requires an enumeration of formulas, which implies a kind of well-ordering on the set of formulas - also sounds like Choice could be involved here.

Why isn’t completeness for logic suspicious? It seems like we have a syntax and proof system which are intuitive, but then we conjure up the semantics out of nowhere.

This tripped me up as well. I once argued with a lecturer for two hours about it until a lightbulb tripped on in my mind. The key is that the construction is set-theoretic, and the language is set-theoretic as well: we prove equiconsistency between the two. And our logical system is implicitly consistent if our set theory is consistent.

Note the huge amount of handwaving going on: “my intuition says yes,” “implies a kind of,” “sounds like Choice could be involved,” “implicitly consistent.” If anyone else could help clarify things or correct me, that would be great!

[ @superclassical @bowtochris @transientpetersen @thousandmaths ]

[digging-holes-in-the-river]

@transientpetersen replied to your photoset: In other news, I’ve been learning to knit!

nice even rows and I like your cable work :)

Aw, thanks! :) I was expecting cabling to be much harder than it actually is.

[studyinglogic]

You don't have to answer this. As a university student, I just wanted to let you know how much your original posts and musings on various subjects help keep me grounded. I really appreciate reading them. Thank you.

Thank you as well; this kind of feedback means quite a bit to me. I consciously don’t try to seek popularity: for example, my internal guideline is to post whenever the work is complete, rather than to wait for peak times. But even with that, I’m (fortunately, I think) still rather human: it’s always good to know that my thoughts resonate with someone else, and that someone else finds value in my work. The work is the reward on its own, but it warms the heart to know that others appreciate it as well.In @transientpetersen’s post on Donald Richie’s Japanese Portraits, they comment: “It’s profoundly satisfying in its determination not to cheaply satisfy.” As I admire Richie’s book, it’s no surprise that I also admire that ideal and try to emulate it.I’m curious to know how what I’ve written helps you as a university student, and what you mean when you say it keeps you grounded. If you’d like to chat further, you can contact me at studyinglogic at gmail.com - I don’t reply quickly, but I should reply eventually. If you enjoy my stuff, it’s likely that you’ll also enjoy @transientpetersen‘s work: they’re interesting, make incisive comments, and are insightful in ways I can’t predict; it’s a joy to read what they write.