According to him it's only ever biased if it's critical of his actions or policies. That injects more noise into claims of bias and can lead people to take them less seriously than they realistically should. Bit of a boy who cried wolf situation.
Public opposition to any institution by the President of the United States is a political threat. Or rather anyone person who holds so much influence publicly attacking something is a threat.
I wholeheartedly disagree. The president doesn't lose his right to free speech because of his job or how much influence he has. There is a clear distinction between criticizing the practices of an institution versus criticizing its existence categorically.
A lot of people are purposefully blurring the lines here and it's really dangerous. The same argument could be used to say that the press has undue influence, and should therefore be regulated in what it is able to say or how it is able to report.
The press in America has the same freedom of speech as individuals do: near unlimited. They come together. If you start picking and choosing, free speech is no longer a right.
This argument make no sense. Rights don’t exist in vacuum. The person occupying the Presidency swears an oath to the country and in the process he assumes both the power endowed by the State and the responsibility to use it wisely. Yes of course he can’t say any damn thing he wants to say publicly if it engenders the institution of the presidency he has sworn to protect. The right to free speech is not absolute.
Similarly, the press give up the right to say any foolish claims without substantiation when they assume their official roles as journalists. They promise to back what they say with evidence and facts; that stops them from making baseless claims. Is that restricting their free speech? Free speech does not exist in a vacuum.
It does make sense. There is obviously a question of where the boundary lies and that's what we're exploring.
I think you do have a point. But consider what you're trying to apply it to here. The president is not saying "I think we should nuke Korea" or "the press should be abolished." He says "CNN? That's fake news." It's a criticism leveled at an organization that has had a rampant hyperbolic partisan slant and has printed fake news, making the criticism accurate.
Calling the media out for this behavior could be seen as holding it accountable. These types of criticisms mean nothing in terms of any meaningful action that could restrict the press.
I think more people need to question from where they have gotten the perspective that these attacks are particularly threatening towards a free press in the US. Was it from the press?? Go figure.
Sorry, don’t buy it. There are legitimate criticisms of CNN. But his criticism isn’t restricted to just CNN, but to literally any media outlet that will umflattre him including NYT, WaPo and Fox News. Fox News in fact chided him quite frequently during the Republican primary until he beat them down into submission. He tried to do something similar with other media outlets and has been quite enraged that they haven’t changed their tune as drastically as Fox News did.
I think you need to question from where you have gotten the perspective that getting one or two things right in a rant somehow legitimizes everything in a rant.
Again, what you're describing is a personal vendetta between the press and the president. They cover him and he responds, and they attack each other. It's normal. Ask any celebrity. You are not describing a situation that is indicative of a threat to the press.
> I think you need to question from where you have gotten the perspective that getting one or two things right in a rant somehow legitimizes everything in a rant.
His "criticisms" are not limited to specific outlets. He has publicly called the press "truly the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!"[0] which feels like a broader attack on the press as an institution.
I think this is an error of taking literally what is figurative. It's common parlance to call the mainstream pop press "the press." That's how generalizations work and anybody reading that knows it without needing it explained.
If you were one of the Central Park Five, wrongly accused of rape, or if you were a climate change activist, facing climate-denying articles, and said "the press has got it all wrong and are the enemy of the people" how would you interpret that? As anger, representing a valid critique that should be explored? Or that this person is literally calling for the end or restriction of journalism as a practice? It seems obvious. The only way to interpret it as the latter is to interpret it in such bad faith that it borders on malevolence.
I think of this statement as less of one that the author considers likely or not and more a way to illustrate the dependencies present in tech salaries.
I don't believe so. Just the phrase I use to make a distinction between that and applied math. I guess "pure math" would be another way of saying the same thing.
I don't think the author makes any claims that this is anything other than a positive feedback loop. He's mainly saying that it makes sense for Uber to prioritize the user experience over anything else in order to further accelerate growth.
The book based on this paper is one of the best text books I've read. I highly recommend reading it if you're looking for a solid understanding of linear algebra.
As someone who worked their way through Strang (we did a little study group and did the homework assigned to some class at Rutgers), I'd love it if someone could take a moment to explain what they like so much about Axler. I've tried a couple times to slog my way through Axler and had not much success.
I’m not in the target audience and have neither learned nor taught from Axler’s book, so I can’t tell you precisely what people like about it, but it is aimed at pure math undergraduates who are interested in using linear algebra in much more abstract contexts, and focuses more on proofs than many introductory linear algebra textbooks.
Not a contradiction. Their first exposure would have been something like multivariable Calculus. So students have seen matrices, but they were magic, unmotivated, and probably didn't make much sense except in a "here is the formula to memorize" kind of way.
Axler tries to teach students how to understand linear algebra.
If all that you want to do is use it, the prospect of that understanding may not be very motivating.
I was commenting about what Axler is, and not comparing it to anything else.
My point is that the comment that you quoted from the preface in no way changes the fact that the book's point is to convey an understanding of linear algebra that is primarily of interest to people going on in math.
Now I happen to think it is the right way to understand linear algebra and is how people in other fields should think about it. Because it is easier to figure out again if you've not done it in a while. But this point of view is primarily going to motivate would be mathematicians.
You don’t think this book is aimed at pure mathematics students?
It’s certainly not aimed at numerical analysis students, or engineering students, or physics students. (Which isn’t to say that those students can’t take pure math courses if they want.)
I mean in the context of Strang. I don't think Strang is aimed strictly at, say, engineering students. To me, the difference is the starting point, more than anything else.
As far as I can tell Strang’s target audience is something like: most undergraduates at MIT who didn’t already learn the subject before arrival, except the pure math students who are likely to substitute a more theoretical course (18.700 or 18.701 vs. 18.06).
Right. Each is aimed at somewhat different audiences. We're undoubtedly getting into some pretty fine hairsplitting, the thing I was whining about is 'pure maths students' and 'everyone else' is not an accurate way to describe them.
I have both Axler and Strang. I learned from Axler but occasionally use Strang as a reference. I find that Axler emphasizes the algebra part of linear algebra while Strang emphasizes the linear part. One isn't better than the other but one might make more sense to different people.
Axler avoids determinants with a passion. For good reason, too, because they are not helpful in understanding how spaces interact. I forget how Strang proves the spectral theorem but compared to Lax the pedagogy could not be more different. Determinants are really nice tools for short proofs, but not helpful in understanding. But Axler is the way you want to think about linear algebra as a practitioner.
Axler is easier to digest if you have some familiarity with the tools and the jargon but hated/forgot everything in your college linear algebra course.
A (very imperfect) analogy might be something like the GoF book vs Peter Norvig's essay on design patterns.
It is probably logically unnecessary but I think it's best to have experience with the "computational" aspects of linear algebra before diving into Axler's book.
