it's bad for the person, obviously. The point of society-wide policies is not to maximize economic efficiency; they're supposed to making society a good place to live. Of course if you only look at them under an economic lens they're going to seem bad. Economically the best policy would be to kill all the sick people.
strong agree, I feel like it poisons the fabric of society somehow when everything you interact with is fake or even just has a good chance of being fake, regardless of the also-shitty fact that it is also often trying to influence you.
Also how the being fake doesn't even have to be malicious. now every tom, dick, and harry wants to create content. All the world's a stage, follower count go up.
I held a hope that it would create an evolutionary pressure that would weed out people who fall for foolish arguments i.e. arguments without any sort of structure that should be capable of convincing anyone of anything. But that's just wishful thinking. People fall for anything as long as it's flattering and it allows them to do what they want to do when they want to do it.
Every propagandistic argument is going to be like that for 80% of people, and 40% of people are going to be within that 80% about 99% of the time. They think the biggest issue of our time is how much people complain.
the dot/cross product are the same operation but expanded into coordinates. Maybe the quaternion (/geometric algebra) version is more compact but it's not like it's a different set of computations. Whereas their removal of the trig functions actually does skip a bunch of unnecessary steps.
personal theory: I think there's going to turn out to be a parallel development of math that is basically strictly finitist and never contends with the concept of an infinite set, much less the axiom of choice or any of its ilk. Which would require the foundation being something other than set theory. You basically do away with referring to the real numbers or the set of all natural numbers or anything like that, and skip all the parts of math that require them. I suspect that for any real-world purpose you basically don't lose anything. (This is a stance that I keep finding reinforced as a learn more math, but I don't really feel like I can defend it... it's a hunch I guess.)
any particular reference to what you're thinking of? I am aware of some writings on finitist or constructivist mathematics but they have not quite seemed to get at what I want (in particular doing away with explicit infinities does not require doing away with excluded middle at all, which is what most of that literature seems to be concerned with).
I think it's just a perspective shift. The main idea is that you can't ever measure a real number, only an approximation to one, so if two values differ by less than the resolution of your measurement they are effectively the same. For example consider the derivative f(x+dx) = f(x) + f'(x) dx + O(dx^2). The analysis version of the derivative says that in the limit dx -> 0 the O(dx^2) part vanishes and so the limit [f(x+dx)-f(x)]/dx = f'(x). The 'finitist' version would be something like: for a sufficiently small dx, the third term is of order dx^2, so pick a value of dx small enough that dx^2 is below your 'resolution', and then the derivative f'(x) is indistinguishable from [f(x+dx)-f(x)]/dx, without a reference to the concept of a limit.
Yes but like I was thinking more how you'd do any kind of "and it vanishes" or even "becomes sufficiently small" with a gappy number system as it would have to pass through gaps where "undefined" non-rationals exist.
I guess my stance (which is not very well-developed or anything) is that you try to learn to live with the gaps: define everything in terms of only what you can measure and it no longer matters whether a number is rational or irrational, or infinitesimal vs small-but-finite, because you can't tell. Instead of saying "it vanishes" as an absolute statement you say "it appears to vanish from my perspective".
It's more like, good things happen to be harder while bad things are more often easy. So being able and eager to do hard things lets you actually choose (and then hopefully you choose the good stuff).
That's absurd. First because nobody uses the word 'sociopath' to mean 'mentally ill', they are using it as a moral judgment / to describe a type of amoral person. Second because the reason one negatively characterized the mechanisms of capitalism is because they are not, like, immutable laws of the universe, but rather things that society has quite a bit of control over (whether or not it currently knows how to exercise that control).
(incidentally I disagree with the sociopath characterization anyway; I'm just contesting the weird use of the word ableist)
This happens to non-native English speakers a lot (like me). My style of writing is heavily influenced by everything I read. And since I also do research using LLMs, I'll probably sound more and more as an AI as well, just by reading its responses constantly.
I just don't know what's supposed to be natural writing anymore. It's not in the books, disappears from the internet, what's left? Some old blogs for now maybe.
The wave of LLM-style writing taking over the internet is definitely a bit scary. Feels like a similar problem to GenAI code/style eventually dominating the data that LLMs are trained on.
But luckily there's a large body of well written books/blogs/talks/speeches out there. Also anecdotally, I feel like a lot of the "bad writing" I see online these days is usually in the tech sphere.
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