Dubious Math in Infinite Jest (2009)
thehowlingfantods.com
thehowlingfantods.com
I'm not sure; clearly DFW had some math aptitude but these also could have been honest mistakes. Presumably it would have been harder for editors to check these things in the 90s.
The probability error seems harder to explain and likely just a mistake.
Edit - While searching a bit more about this, I found an interesting perspective on a message board:
> The main thing that I think argues for Pemulis not being as smart as he thinks he is, is that he is the analogue of Polonious from Hamlet. In Hamlet, the court jester (the "fool") is actually really wise and always speaks the truth (=Mario), while the King's supposedly "wise" counselor, Polonious, actually gets everything wrong.
I find that pretty compelling. I hadn't really thought about deeper correspondences with Hamlet beyond Hal and his parents.
I do like the idea of Mario as a court jester though.
(I'd also forgotten about the janitors, who are clearly a reference to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern)
> I am the machine gun ammo bearer, cause they figger I can carry a lot of shit on account of my size. Before we lef, a couple of other fellers axed if I would mind carryin some of their han grenades so’s they could carry more orations, an I agreed. It didn’t hurt me none. Also, Sergeant Kranz made me carry a ten-gallon water can that weighed about fifty pounds.
Unlike Forrest, the reader knows a gallon of water weighs roughly eight pounds and is not spared the extent of his burden.
Haha, you have to love those quaint, backwards Americans and their “freedom units”. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, we can peacefully enjoy the fact that 3.785 litres of water weighs exactly 3.785 kg.
Maybe at the time. Presumably that gets an explanatory footnote in modern editions?
Vast majority of character's are well explained and the answers are all in the novel, just need to look at their childhood and upbringing.
Rudy Rucker wrote a scathing review here: https://www.rudyrucker.com/oldhomepage/wallace_review.pdf
I actually read Everything and More and it's probably even worse than that. Though I'll admit that I'm a little bit biased; I'm a sort of Aristotelian Realist or even a Finitist when it comes to mathematics, and I view Cantor's hierarchy of infinities as... well... schizo at best.
The review-writer clearly hates the book before he even gets to the mathematics. The whole book is striking a middle ground between expressing every step of mathematical rigor, and describing in a more literary way how to feel about these concepts. All of these "errors" are just the author passing over a point in less detail than you would want from a text on set theory. I thought it was great, and for anyone who enjoys both set theory and Infinite Jest, I would strongly recommend the book.
I understand that some people don't like it, but it should be viewed as "controversial" rather than "everyone agrees that it's riddled with errors".
This alone is a pretty substantial, even foundational, error.
The author of the review, Rudy Rucker, is a sort of cult/underground author of math-heavy science fiction. I don't think he's opposed to framing things in a literary way, so long as it's not misleading or falsely dramatized. Like, e.g., Godel ending his days in some sort of forced confinement, as DFW seems to have suggested?
The core problem with this book is that it is a great book for people who love both math and Infinite Jest. But, that might be an audience of nobody. Or almost nobody, because it does include me.
I really hate this. If you don't care to understand something, why would you want to absorb the feelings that somebody else thinks you should have from understanding it? It reminds me of all the cringey posturing that undergrads engage in because their English professor mentioned a couple of philosophers during lectures and it totally changed their wardrobe.
Like... I hate journalism that profits off of xenophobic fear mongering. A book from a genuinely curious and interesting author who did some moonlighting in more formal subjects, though? That seems harmless and kind of cute at worst. Maybe a little misguided, maybe not.
It's a weird energy to bring to a relatively innoccuous corner of the world.
The review mentions some very unfortunate errors that are not "passing over a point in less detail": suggesting that Cantor's diagonal argument depends on the AC and that CH is equivalent to c = 2^ℵ₀.
I wasn't familiar with the book and had just read the review; I wouldn't blame the author, but the publisher should have contacted someone for proofreading.
Maybe Pemulis gave Hal an obviously wrong derivative, and when uncorrected, drove Pemulis to abruptly end the tutoring. Maybe Pemulis said it right but Hal heard it wrong. Or...
Maybe it's "just" another sign they're in an alternate universe where even the math is different. That's pretty much how I feel about it
Unlike physics, there are no conceivable alternate universes with different math. That's what's so cool about math: it could not possibly be any different. There could be alternate universes where they've discovered different amounts of it, or named the discoveries different things, but everything that is "wrong" in math in our universe is universally (multiversally?) wrong.
Why not? There's not much tethering our axioms-on-paper to what is necessarily true, past what we can empirically observe. For instance, a universe that is "exactly like ours, except the truth of the continuum hypothesis is flipped" seems no less conceivable than our own universe, given that we don't even have any solid evidence for its truth or falsehood in the first place.
If we're willing to treat mathematical and logical ideas as physically contingent, then it's only a few further steps to "the concepts of identity and discreteness and measure in this universe are different than ours, so all our mathematical axioms are not applicable". Though it would be very difficult to translate any stories from such a universe into our own ideas.
Really? For that to be possible, the continuum hypothesis would have to be either true or false in our universe, which does not appear to be the case.
But... we don't. We use integers to describe physical space. We have real numbers as a mathematical construct, but we have never applied them to even a single physical problem. That's impossible to do, because specifying a real number takes an infinite amount of information.
That's what GP was saying ("there are no conceivable alternate universes with different math", and none with a different derivative in particular), but I see no reason why math-as-we-know-it couldn't just be inapplicable to different 'conceivable' universes.
We can and do create two alternate models of math with CH and ~CH as axioms, in this universe, right now. No need for alternate universes. There's no reason to think the CH is either true or false in the natural laws of our universe -- what would that even mean?
I suppose it's distantly possible that models where CH is true happen to represent our own universe much better than models where CH is false, and that there are other universes that are better represented by models where CH is false. Even if that were true, all the math is still the same, we're just preferring some models over others.
Presumably something like "you can/cannot collect an uncountable group of points in physical space and still not have enough to fill a physical volume".
Anyway, the idea is that properties of 'ordinary' numbers and logical constructs could similarly just be models specifically useful for our own universe. E.g., propositional logic only works because our universe allows us to write truth tables that are causally valid, natural numbers only work because our universe allows us to count over discrete objects, etc.
There'd be no big gap between 'physics' and 'math': all 'math' that we can talk about would just be the 'physics' of things that work on paper in our universe. And in particular, 'the physics of math-on-paper' could conceivably work differently in an alternate universe, and our own ideas and discoveries would be inapplicable.
> propositional logic only works because our universe allows us to write truth tables that are causally valid, natural numbers only work because our universe allows us to count over discrete objects, etc.
No, none of this is true. Our universe also allows us to write truth tables that are not valid. We do not dematerialize upon writing down a logical fallacy. Our universe does not seem to contain any infinities at all, and if it does, they're almost certainly countable; yet we can still reason about uncountable infinities without ever having observed them. Our universe seems to exist in only 4 dimensions, yet we can still reason about high dimensional spaces. Why should the constraints of our universe matter to our math at all, other than making some things more obvious than others?
> all 'math' that we can talk about would just be the 'physics' of things that work on paper in our universe
That is just patently obviously not what math is. We have tons of math that is not describing the physics of our universe as we know it.
Knowing the character, at least this one could be explained as yet another parlour trick from Michael Pemulis. God knows how he actually calculated those values.
Another possibility is that Pemulis is simply bad at math :D
So... we can't know for sure, but there's a strong case that any particular little weird error, DFW intended it to be this way. Especially for a "basic calculus" issue like this, for someone who wrote a whole book on the mathematical history of infinity. (Which arguably has its own errors, but those tend to fall more in the category of simplifications for the lay reader, IMO.)
They were more mis-simplifications by the lay writer.
> So... we can't know for sure, but there's a strong case that any particular little weird error, DFW intended it to be this way.
You'd have to assume that every time he got called out on an obvious error and insisted he'd meant it all along, he was telling the truth.
The probability that this “mistake” is intentional is related to how likely an informed reader would be to recognize this mistake.
His early book "The Crying of Lot 49" was also really good.
I read it again about a decade later after all those games were over for me, just for myself, and loved it even more that time.
For some people, it just really does hit a nerve!
Interesting though, considering the popular meme among women, that men think reading IJ makes them look smart.
https://reductress.com/post/why-im-waiting-for-the-right-man...
https://www.reddit.com/r/davidfosterwallace/comments/evsylv/...
Whoever is reading it is eager to come of age, but is likely super obnoxious because they're not there yet. At least that's how I think of myself reading it at 25.
Though I dunno, this was a long time ago, much closer to the publication date of the book (like a decade and a half before either of these articles were published), and I'm not sure this cynicism had quite taken off yet.
Also, I'm a bit skeptical of the gender lens on this, at least at that time period. From reading these articles, I think the girls I was trying to impress were likely themselves "typical DFW asshole[s]" by the judgement of these authors. Men don't actually have a monopoly on "I am so smart" vanity (though I'd agree we seem more prone to it).
The only crowds I know of where IJ has truly become a mainstream piece of knowledge are /lit/, some specific subreddits, some specific twitter circles, a bunch of edgy hipsters, and HN. I bet there are more of those, ofc, but imo IJ absolutely isn’t something most people would recognize or be able to appreciate those memes about it that you shared (which I actually think are funny and hit the mark well).
Maybe I am just in the wrong circles irl, but I often enough get to hang out with people who read way more books than an average person (or me) does, and I am yet to encounter any who actually read IJ. And even those who are aware of it are relatively minor in numbers.
The proof is also similarly easy: it’s a straightforward application of Stirling’s approximation to the formula (2N!)/(N!*N!)/2^(2N).
I tore through Gravity's Rainbow (mentioned in another thread).
why the question, tho?
Enough people say they love the book that it's probably just a style thing that didn't click for me, but I regret how much time I spent slogging through the book and never bothered to finish it.
I think it's good book if you are someone who HAS to know all the details.
The book itself criticizes this way of thinking, while letting you in the all the details you could want. (the footnotes especially)
I get the sense that the writing style is a metaphor and part of it for sure.
I also really like many of the subtle ideas the book presents.
Though like many "post modern novels", it's not for everyone. If intentionally dull parts are not your thing, that's perfectly fine IMO.
(/s - I have read and enjoyed Infinite Jest. It's very reasonable for someone to not enjoy it though)
" It’ll be a slog, but around the point where it starts making sense, you will read these words:
'But you never know when the magic will descend on you. You never know when the grooves will open up. And once the magic descends you don’t want to change even the smallest detail. You don’t know what concordance of factors and variables yields that calibrated can’t-miss feeling, and you don’t want to soil the magic by trying to figure it out, but you don’t want to change your grip, your stick, your side of the court, your angle of incidence to the sun.' "
I feel like a more definitive question could be "Which ETA student is missing several fingers?" or "How did Bruce Green's mom die?" or "What's the call sign for Joelle's radio station?" or "What roams the Great Concavity?"[2]
[1] I can't remember if CT is a true Quebecker or not, but if he is, I could at least say that Mario is 100% French-Canadian, lol.
[2] Or I just thought of another... "Which ETA student has an ironically apt disease?"
> "I’m a privileged white seventeen-year-old U.S. male."
I think it has the air of a trick question though. Most readers will (correctly) assume that Hal is white, which the text does little to dispute or confirm barring a throwaway reference or two (and which is unlikely to stand out in their minds since it confirms what they already assumed), so encountering such a question makes it seem like the answer is more complicated than "Shockingly, the tennis heir protagonist written by a white American author is also a white American kid." And for many people it's somewhat gauche to admit that you assumed a character was white by default, so if you hazard a (correct) guess of "Well he's white, isn't he?" but it turns out there was a different throwaway reference to him being a quarter Puerto Rican or something, you might be a little embarrassed!
EDIT: I forgot there is actually a throwaway reference to Hal being (at most) 1/8th Native American, lol.
> ...a great-grandmother with Pima-tribe Indian S.W. blood, and Canadian cross-breeding...
You've also sniffed out my question's exploit, wherein people who haven't actually read the entire book, and who may have read the line about his dark skin near the beginning of the book, will reveal themselves because they assume the obvious answer can't be correct. They "tell on themselves" as the kids say. I smile at the idea that overthinking causes people to reveal they didn't read a book in which overthinking is a major theme. I highly suspect the majority of other commenters in this thread did not fully read the novel. This doesn't make them bad or "inferior", but lying does. They know they are wrong because my pointing it out caused them to become angry.
I've started a re read, and I'm taking notes this time. Perhaps we should start a HN bookclub.
I do need a new proof if this thread makes this one Googabale.
so Hal could potentially be 1/4 "near-eastern"
I think there are some less blink-and-you'll-miss-it type questions that are too broad to Google but that most people who read it would remember...
- Which location in ETA got its name from an infamous player?
- What fictional cartoon character is popular during Subsidized Time?
- What mortifying experience does Gately have in the hospital?
- What's Lyle's second-favorite beverage?
Or one that requires a longer reply and doesn't have a "correct" answer, but props to anyone who takes a stab at it, because I still don't have a satisfying explanation:
- What the fuck is wrong with Orin? Like in general?
Shooting from the hip with no evidence: Straight up I think Orin got molested.
That said, I've found that most online conversations about IJ seem to be held by people who really seem like they haven't read the book. I don't understand the phenomenon and haven't offered an explanation. I got on this kick 28 days ago when a commenter here said (about a different novel) "for what it's worth, up to now, you're the only other person in this entire thread I'm convinced has actually read the book.". I reviewed the rest of the comments in the thread, and he had a point. I think that implying you've read a novel you haven't is a frequent occurrence, and it is common with IJ because of the length and the popular intellectual status appeal it had in the 90s. This is a somewhat known phenomenon, as I recall reading a quote from a musician who stated something along the lines of "everyone owns a half read copy of infinite Jest in rehab".
It seems to me like people who've read the book could just answer the question. One person in this thread actually did. They certainly read the book. Everyone else? Well, they (and you, in fact) didn't answer a fairly simple question, and then got pissed off. You can draw your own conclusions.
I did see the question you spammed around the thread. Most people likely didn't respond as they don't have any motivation to prove anything to a random user, which is what you are to them. Also, I couldn't have refused to answer the question you spammed, like you seem to be implying, as I was never asked. Unless you are confusing me with someone else, you seem to be reaching the inane conclusion that every single user who glances at your questions and doesn't respond is implicitly refusing, which is absurd.
Besides this, the premise of your question is flawed, as you would have recognized had you thought through it. The detail, besides his being white, that you seem to be looking for is of hardly any relevance to the novel. A reader could skip the pages those details are mentioned and it would have virtually no bearing on their ability to understand any context, as anyone who has read the book would know. It's about as relevant as remembering the exact number of days till Hal's urine test. Similarly, you could pick any given book that a group of people have read cover-to-cover, and ask a question about a minute detail, and likely most of the readers would not be able to accurately answer, unless they either just finished reading the work, or are currently reading or re-reading it, which you admitted to be doing.
Really though I think I'm right but I don't care at this point and I'm probably being an ass so sorry about that. I did start the re read after the comments but that doesn't really matter. I apologize for being rude to peeps sometimes I get obstinate.
Why not contribute something of worth and demonstrate that you have read it by engaging in discussion about it instead of playing games?
Though once you lock in with the world and flow of infinite jest it gets pretty amazing, I wish I had more people to talk to about it without coming off as a pretentious jackass. Also it's far more enjoyable to read it as an ebook where you can jump instantly from the text to footnotes and look up unfamiliar words. Reading the physical copy seems torturous to me.
I hope you read and enjoy too.
I'm sorry to everyone if I've been an ass in this thread. I think I was feeling obstinate but I apologize.
[1] https://ask.metafilter.com/116066/French-language-in-Infinit...
The actual title of this piece is "Dubious Math in Infinite Jest". There is no suggestion, in the title or the contents, that the errors are intentional. In the author's words:
> As I have said, I have no theories to explain the existence of these errors.
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edited titles (without a reason, like abbreviating them to fit or removing elements suggested by the guidelines for elimination) just get reverted, you're creating work for the mods by not submitting the original title.
I've only read Infinite Jest once, and would have edited it differently myself — but the scenes on addiction are powerful, stressful, and accurate (as somebody over a decade california clean). Pale King is better prose, but in both cases DFW isn't a "complete" author — he expects too much from his readers.
At least in Sedaris' case, he keeps his prose brief =D