The problem is that because young people in places like London and New York normally live in abject shitholes, they are forced to go out to socialise, which implies drinking and expensive food.
I’ve temporarily moved away from London to somewhere a lot smaller, but I live in a much nicer and bigger place for less than half the price.
I invite people over and am invited over. We talk and things, or sometimes watch something and talk about that. I can make a cup of tea or maybe even coffee, and I don’t have to pay through the nose for it. I can cook for a group for less than the price of a single meal outside.
No one gives a fuck if you’re not drinking in your own home. I’ve been drinking a lot less. It’s a sobering experience.
I would say that ‘herbal tea’ is a valid term, but that whatever is a ‘herbal tea’ is generally not viewed as ‘a type of tea’, and rather, as ‘a type of herbal infusion’. ‘a type of tea’ is generally viewed as ‘type of tea plant and its dried leaves’.
Gödel’s Proof, by Nagel & Newman gives a good explanation for the semi-layman or undergrad coming across this for the first time.
Before picking up this book as an undergrad in pure maths, I still had romantic ideas about a separate platonic universe and the divine authority of mathematics to explain all human thought.
This book, along with studying the various geometries, each with a different choice of axioms not necessarily based in ‘reality’, destroyed the majority of that romance.
Godel was himself a Platonist and didn't view incompleteness as a refutation of Platonism, rather as a restriction on the avenues of human access to mathematical truth.
Exactly! The beauty of life is in its flaws and limitations. Perfection is boring. Gödel opened the door to a multiverse of mathematics, all flawed in some way, yet not unworthy of study.
Mathematicians of the past sought perfection for the glory of God. Now we have the opportunity to give credit where it’s due: to our fellow human beings, many of whom devoted their lives to the craft of mathematics.
Gödel's work actually echoes Christianity quite deeply. A key theme of Christianity is that humans are incapable of being good (much less of achieving perfection) on their own strength--no more than Hilbert could axiomatize all of mathematics with a consistent, computable set of axioms.
"Do not be overly righteous, and do not make yourself too wise." (Ecclesiastes 7:16)
"There is no distinction, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus." (Romans 3:22-23)
It would be interesting to see an analysis where the most fundamental results in mathematics are looked at under the light of their discoverers' ideological beliefs and psychologies.
I wonder whether Gödel would have pursued the Proof if he did not believe in an omnipotent god.
Is there anything similarly anonymous with a similar culture on the light or dark web? I guess there is/was Usenet, but that seems to have dried up somewhat. IRC is anonymous, but doesn't have the memory aspect.
For those who don't know, A New Kind of Science is when Stephen Wolfram of Mathematica fame wrote something like 1000 pages in layman's terms to convince you of his pet theory that the universe is a cellular automaton.
I didn't the hate the book but it was pretty weird and not super scientific.
I regret being so cynical about this post and the book I mentioned.
It's a really nice book. Lots of beautiful illustrations and interesting ideas with code snippets for generating those illustrations. I found it fascinating as a kid. The message wasn't too important for me, and I didn't really have the background to draw my own conclusions from it anyway.
Someone on IRC, who was a big fan, introduced it to me.
I actually started programming with this very book, copying the examples from it into Python and then Scheme (introduced to me by that same guy) and Common Lisp. I respect Wolfram's dedication. It's the type of dedication that brings us things like Mathematica and TempleOS.
The guy who introduced me to this book and then Scheme had contacts at Wolfram Research and later sorted me out with a free copy of Mathematica. I could never have afforded that with my pocket money, and I wasn't at university yet. He was a big underdog in the community and had his own problems too. What a great guy.
There's something to be taken even from book like this. It would be good to revisit and re-evaluate the book as someone who now has a semblance of an education in the area. I wish I didn't sell it.
What does it mean to scientifically validate Nietzsche's ideas? What invalidated the ideas in the first place? I'm assuming the association with Nazis and Mussolini.
Validating them in the sense of using the ideas as a model to understand our own psychology, and the origins of our moralities. Showing that certain ideas that Nietzsche held around free will and the nature/nurture debate hold up to scientific scrutiny.
