Discoursting

Maths and philosophy graduate, just here to have a terrible time

[dogpuppy]

[swarnpert]

[kikmessenger]

sits on my own blog like it’s the edge of a lake wistfully

[kikmessenger]

skips a stone over a few posts

[ferrettaur]

So like an hour ago I just lear🪨︵︵ned that— what the fuck was that. Someone just skipped a rock across my post did you see that

[a-book-of-creatures]

Is it socially acceptable to use opaque watercolors, or is that considered gouache?

[everyday-cutephoto]

[whatcoloristhatcat]

black mackerel tabby with high white spotting

[louceph]

smirking bastard with grievous grin

[hitmanagent47]

My disguise fucking sucks and i am going to get killed

[geologyin-blog]

Flat Earth theory: the world is flat.

Cat Earth theory: the world is cat, and it's playing with Australia.

[blankinyourhead]

Jingyi Li - Lean on me

[theproblematicblogger]

If you could grow an extra body part, what would it be and why?

Probably a heart because lots of people need heart transplants and not too many are available and I could give it to someone.

[spreadworldpeace]

fuck that id grow another arm so I can jerk off while playing Assassins Creed Brother Hood

[theproblematicblogger]

Is it too late to change my answer

[formlab]

Felice Gualtieri

[sailatina3]

Orgasm denial. Orgasm anger. Orgasm bargaining. Orgasm depression. Orgasm acceptance.

[currentlycryingaboutlancelot]

thinking about when my friend found a book from the 70s in a church office with truly some of the most insane prayers I have ever heard

[lasrina]

oh this was about someone specific

[afloweroutofstone]

An anarcho-syndicalist American analytic philosopher and linguistics professor was teaching a class on Bertrand Russell, known logician.

“Before the class begins, you must get on your knees and worship Russell as the most influential philosopher of the 20th century, even more influential than Jacques Derrida or any other continental philosopher!” At this moment, a brave, psycho-analytic, Hegelian Marxist philosopher and cultural theorist, who fully recognized the weaponisation and ideological basis of instrumental rationality, boldly stood up and tugged at his collar. “My god, pure ideology! How can you ignore the work of Lacan and the Frankfurt School and so on and so on, like that?” 

The arrogant professor smirked quite arrogantly and smugly replied, “Continental philosophy cloaks trivialities in fancy language and uses the scientific-sounding term ‘theory’ to describe propositions that could never be tested empirically.” 

“Wrong. If empiricism is so important, as you would say, then how come you were so empirically wrong on the nature of language, and so on and so on?” 

The professor was visibly shaken, and dropped his chalk and copy of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. He stormed out of the room, crying those unironic empirically verified crocodile tears. There is no doubt that at this point our professor, Noam Chomsky, wished he had pulled himself up by his bootstraps and become more than an outdated linguist and blindly analytic philosopher. He wished so much that he had an argument to save himself from embarrassment, but he himself had advocated for truth derived from empirical investigation! The students applauded and all dropped out to transfer into the Ecole Normale Superieure that day and accepted French philosophy as superior to both German Idealism and the Anglosphere’s Analytic traditions. An eagle named “Critical Theory” flew into the room and perched atop a burning American flag and shed a single tear on the dropped chalk. Sections of Lacan’s Seminars were read several times, and the Spirit of Hegel himself showed up and demonstrated the nature of dialectics so vividly that everybody in the room progressed to a trans-physical state, transcending conventional notions of time and space. The professor lost his tenure and was fired the next day and was forced to become a panelist on an MSNBC news show to make ends meet. The brave psycho-analytic philosopher’s name? Slavoj Zizek.

[waterandsilver]

if you have to rely on specific scripts or turns of phrase to socialise that's totally fine, but you must NOT reveal them to your friends while slightly drunk. it's like showing how the magic trick works, you can't do it in front of them afterwards

[waterandsilver]

i like dogs a lot but i can never remember the differences between breeds (apart from the few types i've actually owned/interacted with). but i know people looove their dogs and love talking about their dogs, so whenever im talking to a dog owner i'll ask what breed it is, and no matter what breed they say i'll say "oh! i've heard they have a really nice nature :D" and they always go YESSS THEY'RE GREAT and start gushing about their dog and we have a nice conversation and i build social credit with this person. anyway i told my friends about this script a few weeks ago when slightly drunk and now every time we're in public together and a dog goes past they turn to me and ask "does that one have a nice nature?" im in a hell of my own making

[yurimom]

i want pelmeni

[yurimom]

and i dont care who i have to hurt to get it

[ouroborussy]

I've a (possibly unfortunate) soft spot in my heart for informal reasoning in maths. Like don't get me wrong being correct and being demonstrably so is absolutely necessary. I'd never tell an undergrad to only show the vibes portion of a proof. But the so-called post-rigour mindset (don't like that word, also not a Terry Tao fan) has such a wonderful appeal.

Being one with the currents of reason as they take shape not merely within formulae and proofs but within groups of people, among hundreds and hundreds of proofs, within bodies of work. The stuff that takes you a year to learn to do in 5 mins. Dunking your head in the clear stream in which god fishes for theorems, oxygen be damned.

This is one of the things that bothers me so much about the use of LLMs for proofs (even Lean checked proofs). They output five hundred pages of stuff that no one has the time to read, is often subtly wrong (and Lean isn't the be-all end-all of proof correctness either but that's a separate can of worms), and takes from us (in the literal sense of prevents the author from doing themselves) the part of maths that I love most: the musing! The pontificating. The imagination! The imagination that comes from working through shit yourself and letting the waves take you somewhere you never saw coming! The informal reasoning that can only come out of a deep understanding of technicalities.

To me it's what animates a good talk. That the speaker has drowned themselves in that stream and come back with a parable. The best works of mathematics are emotional. They make an argument for what *should* be and *then* make an argument for why it *is*. It's a profoundly unscientific way to think, and it intersects an unfortunate amount with most LLMs' core capabilities. But it's what I love about maths, and it connects me to other people who love it.

[m---a---x]

It is one of the main things that i try to convey to undergrads in set thoery or logic classes, that pure symbol manipulation does not yield good results beyond the most basic problems. While every solvable problem may be sloved this way eventually, even for quite simple questions it takes pages upon pages of deductions with an exponential amount of brute force time.

Rather the (imo) best way to approach mathematics is to start very informal and then refine the informal reasoning down unil you have a formal proof. In some way that is also what many theorems are, a previous informal piece of reasoning that was made formal.

[transmechanicus]

6 hour workday maximum i’m not kidding, if it can’t be done in that timeframe it doesn’t need doing.

[vmprblood]

this doesn't apply to jobs like childcare

[transmechanicus]

If i worked in childcare and my 6 hours were up i would start putting babies in ziploc bags and shipping them to Turkmenistan listed as endangered fruits and vegetables