danharaj

escape your hodge duals fam

My mind was in between whinging and kvetching.

Oh my god here, is the same qualification near the top of the article.

One of the problems the two friends looked at was a version of a century-old unsolved question in geometry.

On every Quanta article there's always someone welching about some gotcha they think they've found that just demonstrates how trash Quanta's popularizations of mathematical topics is. But whenever I read the article in question it always turns out that the writers and editors over there somehow manage to thread the needle in making their material accessible without being mathematically inaccurate. Vague, yes, but that's why they link to the research in question because it's a pop article not a journal publication.

You edited your comment to add another objection. It is equally insubstantial unless you dug through the paper yourself and demonstrated that the transformation applied could not reasonably be called a rotation.

While locked down due to COVID-19, Joshua Greene and Andrew Lobb figured out how to prove a version of the “rectangular peg problem.”

Emphasis mine.

I'm currently reading The Black Jacobins which is about Toussaint L'Ouverture and the revolution in Haiti. Even after having read accounts of the brutality of slavery multiple times before, it always seems to recede into an abstraction after a long time and the descriptions are as gruesome and horrifying as they ever were. And this is a book that spares the details, relatively speaking.

The wealth of the world is covered in blood.

Unfortunately the rationalist community basically engages in sophistry centered around a naive and outdated positivism with Bayes' rule slapped on top.

https://imgur.com/a/NwwBiIo

I did this on a computer I don't usually use in an incognito tab.

If one were to examine that subreddit at this moment it would appear that the mods are very strongly against Scott Alexander being doxxed by a reporter and are also handing out bans for anyone gloating about this.

It's not a good look to compare people to a virus.

No, because they're countries. Who deals with an international incident caused by the NYPD?

The NYPD has a budget for spying on people in other countries. State power is weird.

When the NYPD did a work slowdown, rates of crime according to their own data went down.

You are engaging in circular reasoning.

I can't prove a negative. Show me something JBP has said that is challenging and novel.

His technical papers are fun to read and based on solid mathematics. He's collecting that work into a book which is about as poorly edited as you would expect but the math is solid. There is no sense in which Taleb is as vapid as JBP.

I think there are unresolved philosophical issues around probabilistic interpretations where it's not clear a priori what the space of possibilities is. Even if we could pin it down in an instant, that space is constantly reshaped in the brain as it adapts to its environment.

"brown dog" surely has some probabilistic content but it's hard to locate where it is because of the enormous complexity of the space of "possible situations in which a brain can perceive a brown dog".

Only a few months ago

People have been expressing the exact same sentiment you are for years and years.

Diversifying police forces does not fix the problem. It's what the police do not who does it. Black individuals can participate in Black oppression. I will not elaborate on the point because it's not my place. I will just refer you to great thinkers like James Baldwin as I mentioned elsewhere in the thread.

Right now you have the two political parties and virtually all the S&P 500 corporations, all the universities, and most of the media (including social media) actively supporting BLM and being against "systemic racism".

Saying Black Lives Matter is not even the bare minimum. It is very easy for corporations and politicians to pay lip service to grievances without materially addressing them. In fact, that is usually what they do. There's a reason why the protesters are demanding to defund the police and a reason why the political machine is doing everything but negotiate on those terms. The protesters want concrete, radical reorganization of the police system so they have staked a bold position. Corporations want to protect their PR image and avoid losing profits. Politicians want anything but touching the police apparatus.

Just look at Joe Biden. His response to the protests was a proposal to increase police funding for "community policing" initiatives.

but where is that "systematic racism" actually coming from, then?

Idk where you've been if you haven't seen the extensive documentation that the police are a big part of systemic racism. But it goes beyond them. It's also companies not investing in black neighborhoods, it's politicians pandering to Black voters in election years and then ignoring them for the rest. It's automated computer systems having bias baked into them [0]. It's a whole lot of stuff and I can't even know where you should begin.

[0] https://twitter.com/Chicken3gg/status/1274314622447820801

By definition, racism is something only individuals can do and so racist laws are the product of racist people.

Well here's your problem buddy. You decided that racism is something that by definition can't be systemic. There's no way to argue a definition but one can evaluate what it's useful for. Your definition is really convenient for someone who doesn't want to reckon with systemic injustice against Black people, huh?

There's plenty of intellectual heavyweights who will explain in great detail what systemic racism looks like. Go read James Baldwin or Angela Davis or something.

Let me try to clear something up for you. The people protesting on the streets right now don't give a shit what color the boot on their neck is. Systemic racism doesn't just mean the system is full of racist individuals. It means that processes that make up the system lead to racist outcomes. And, yes, Black individuals can participate in racist power structures that hurt Black populations, and of course racism doesn't have a particular political party.

Stop treating politics as a game of football and look at how power is distributed and who benefits from that distribution. Material analysis, not color coded appearances.

Oral traditions record, among other things, historical events.

Truly I find the mechanistic view of nature so grim and pointless.

Would you find it ridiculous if I said that it serves an ideological purpose so deeply entrenched in our civilization at this point that we hardly notice its contingent nature?

Maybe not for Americans :) The eruption was hypothesized to have occurred in North America but did the team try to cross reference with native accounts of that time period?

The common generalization of semilattices and groups are inverse semigroups which are one way of capturing the idea of partial, or local, symmetries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_semigroup

The rabbit hole goes deep here. Formal concept analysis is essentially the study of certain galois connections on lattices derived from relations on sets. You can generalize relations to profunctors on categories and galois connections to adjunctions.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-29892-...

https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2013/08/the_nucleus_of_...

Tai-Danae Bradley works with these ideas applied to probability distributions on a product space. The same formal ideas developed in this linear algebraic context lead to a very rich theory.

https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2020/05/07/formal-conce...

You're sorely mistaken.

You can do more shit at night without a fire source when the full moon is out. It can be uncomfortably bright if unaccustomed to perpetual artificial light

Could you elaborate?

Ah but did you know how brave you are for existing? Imagine... I couldn't exist like that... but you? So brave... your courage... to just stand there and exist. Wow. I'm so inspired. I tell my wine tasting friends how brave all my lgbt coworkers are and i honestly feel like an honorary lgbt and i just tear up. sniff