maze-le

This is very beautiful. I always found group theory to be one of the most fascinating subjects in mathematics. Symmetry -- a seemingly simple concept -- can lead to so much complexity...

I'd still call it hostile though...

This effect also happens with continuous models, as there is only a finite number of quantum states in any finite subset of space. In fact, any notion of infinite space will virtually guarantee that there are exact copies (infinite copies) of you and me doing what we do now. But it's basically only a philosophical question since we only have access to our observable universe.

It's possible that they didn't knew what they were doing ( approving of this project) -- not sure if this is better or worse.

Does this actually improve our understanding of the visual cortex or is it just a technological curiosity?

Not every fuzzy proposition is necessarily a social construct. Your example of a tall object is as good as your definition of "tall" is, but once that is defined any object can be measured objectively.

A good way of determining if something is a social construct is to ask yourself if the proposition would still hold if one were to remove all social lifeforms from the universe. A "tall" object would still be tall (to the degree that we can define tall) and it could still be measured somehow. In my example talking about a currency or an exchange rate wouldn't even make sense if we don't have a society that exchanges money or goods.

Currency XYZ is stable.

This sentence reflects a socially constructed truth (or falsehood) insofar as we have to agree on what the symbol XYZ stands for, what a currency is (is bitcoin a currency, are apples -- depends on the context) and what criteria of stability we have.

We can measure the exchange rate of a currency compared to others and we can define criteria for what we call stability in this context -- and we can make propositions based on that model, but only if we agree on the model. But all of that comes down to our socially constructed definitions. We cannot objectively measure the value of a currency like we measure the wavelength of a photon.

Other examples: "A Tough stance on crime works" (or has a lower crime rate other possible explanations). "Tomorrow there will be a traffic jam on intersection XYZ" (or won't there be a traffic jam because people assume that there will be and avoid that intersection).

Zizek has made a joke once, that he has essentially written one book, but that about 60 times. If you want to seriously engage in his philosphical thought: "The Sublime Object of Ideology" is a good pick.

Yep, also totally reminded me of that: http://ikeaordeath.com/

No?

> BioNTech to Receive up to €375M in Funding from German Federal Ministry of Education and Research to Support COVID-19 Vaccine Program BNT162

https://www.wallstreet-online.de/nachricht/12930907-biontech...

> US government and Pfizer reach $1.95 billion deal to produce millions of Covid-19 vaccine doses

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/22/health/pfizer-covid-19-va...

> It remains a badge of honor for many who like to describe themselves as highly cultured or artistic to describe themselves as mathematically challenged, or to say that their brains aren’t wired for mathematics. Because many of those they hold in high esteem have made similar claims, there is no real social penalty to them for doing so.

For many scientific illiteracy is in the same category as mathematical illiteracy -- but the problem starts there already. Everybody should at least know what a Fourier transformation does -- it's not necessary to exercise it rigorously, but at least an idea... I think this video is enough to give even laymans an idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6sGWTCMz2k

Whatever projection you choose, Russia will always be incredible huge.

You do realize that militant Basque nationalist paramilitary groups are disarmed and disbanded since more than 10 years, yes?

It's like saying Irish is controversial because the Provisional IRA existed as an organization in the past...

How is Basque "politically controversial"? It is an official language in the Basque Autonomous Community of Spain. Turkish is also a minority language in Greece. It doesn't have official status, but they have their own government mandated Turkish-language schools.

This somehow reminds me of this (Suicide Linux): https://qntm.org/suicide

> Any time - any time - you type any remotely incorrect command, the interpreter creatively resolves it into `rm -rf /`

How many users subscribe to those subreddits you've mentioned? I have made a similar the observation, I have a few subreddits that are very niche with only a few subscribers -- discussions are very much on point and civil. Usually, the quality and decency of discourse on a subreddit seems to be inversely related to the number of people engaging in it.

This incredibly disturbing. I grew up with family members telling me horror stories about state abuse like this, from more than 30 years past in a country that doesn't exist anymore: The German Democratic Republic. If this isn't classic Stasi Zersetzungstaktik, I don't know what it is. Aren't there any laws against abuse like this? How the hell is this legal?

> It really describes things well.

It definitely does, and he is scarily accurate in his analysis. I just re-read it myself, and stumbled over this part, which I certainly not anticipated in this form a few years back:

> For the hospital system: the new medicine "without doctor or patient" that singles out potentially sick people and subjects at risk, which in no way attests to individuation -- as they say -- but substitutes for the individual or numerical body the code of a "dividual" material to be controlled.

This is certainly an accurate description of the control mechanisms various states have put into place in the form of apps that enforce selective quarantine restrictions.

The socialcooling website really a great project! Important content presented concise and on-point, thank you for doing this!

Yes but that's just the thing: OP wants to create their "real" self, just not the authentic self. It becomes real, by association with the name of the person, yet it stays a simulated expression, a simulacrum[0].

Consider that the loan- or job-"machines" are collecting intelligence from social networks to evaluate the person -- in addition to loan history and previous job performance. Now if you can present "yourself" to this machines in a conformal way, you don't need to fear negative repercussions on shitposts you did. While you can still be authentic in private or under pseudonyms.

Of course, you will still get categorized by the bank transactions you make in your real name. Same goes for your performance reviews on previous jobs. It is just a matter of tricking these other forms of automated social control into a higher rating bound to your name.

-----

I find it fascinating that philosophers like Baudrillard and Deleuze were able to think and warn about these issues more than 40 years ago when none of this was even remotely on the horizon:

See also Deleuzes "Societies of Control":

https://cidadeinseguranca.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/deleuz...

and:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337844512_Societies...

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacrum

Its not even obscurity: nmap --script ssh2-enum-algos target.ip -p 22-65535 -v

Sure it takes a while longer, but the interesting attackers -- the ones that target a specific organization, not the ones enumerating whole ip ranges over and over again -- do have this time.

To be fair, even in Germany there is a substantial amount of whitewashing the past. Be it the founding of the BND predecessor "Organization Gehlen" or the Nazi sympathizers that worked as judges and prosecutors in the federal Republic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gehlen_Organization

I guess you are right, it is important to differentiate a pure number (one, five, ten thousand) from a fuzzy category of numbers (a bunch, a pack of wolves, some dozen eggs). But, apparently, some animals have the ability to count exact numbers, such as apes:

* https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/cgi/viewconte...

or bees (OK, only to 5, but still):

* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258900421...

In these cases I would say -- even if they don't have the ability to tell us that they can reason with exact numbers -- we can observe experimentally that they do. And I don't see any reason to assume that the abstraction that is represented in the animal mind is fundamentally different from our notion of it.

EDIT: That could also be an indication for mathematical Platonism, when I think about it. But alas, as long as we don't observe a species that develops mathematics from the basic forms of countability that would be a stretch too far... Or to put it differently -- if there is a species that could reasons about numbers beyond the basics of counting, given enough time they would also be able to axiomatize mathematics under an equivalent of ZFC Set theory.

Yes, a number is pureley abstract. It is even more abstract than the form of representation in a theory of mind. It doesn't really matter if it is communicated via hard wired instinct, hormone signalling or language / reason -- both can encode the same concept: If it quacks like mastering countability and swims like mastering countability than it is probable to assume the ability to count.

The ontological question if both representations of the concept of a number are truly equal is not really important if we can show equivalent outcomes.

Nothing, he is stating a historical fact, that's all. I found it interesting, because we sometime tend to think we kind of know how roman society worked -- a lot of our own institutions in the west are modeled on roman equivalents: courts, marriage, civil assemblies and we do live in democracies with a strong oligarchy. This example shows how strangely different the ancient society was compared to our own.

I sadly can very much imagine this happening here in Germany... Almost exactly the same story happened to me too -- and it was not a "very dark area on a bad time of the day", it was one of the nicest cities around here at lunchtime. I assume it can happen everywhere, it is even more likely the more people are around: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect

But be sure to put all your brilliant thoughts into writing and send it to a friend, you just might get a whole area of mathematics named after you...

The sentence you object to was not thought of as a teleological dogma of what humanity is meant to do or not, but an evolutionary perspective of why our brains are not very well equipped to handle some questions and/or scales of such dimensions (maybe it wasn't the most apt expression -- I am not a native English speaker). The sensory and processing equipment that has evolved by giving early hominids the advantage to use tools and language stumbles somehow when it is confronted with the vastness of the universe -- it loses track of the local reference frame...

It is called existential anxiety, it shows that you are able to contemplate about your own insignificance in contrast to the grand scheme of things (universe, all of existence, etc.). We all have it on one level or another, I used to have it when looking into a dark cloudless night, realizing that all of the little dots I can see out there could technically be orbited by another planet that bears life, inhabited by millions or billions of other lifeforms that could be able to feel and think.

Usually it is nothing to worry about, except when you get obsessed by it and it starts to control aspects of your life because you build a worldview around it or try hard to avoid it or explain it away: then it is called an existential crisis. But what it really means is that the mind gets overwhelmed by the fact that the universe is orders of magnitudes more complex than what the self has ever encountered in our daily lifes. Our brains have evolved so that bipedal apes that migrated from forests into the steppes can survive and cooperate in groups. It was never meant to be confronted by questions of this dimension, but yet here we are.

You can make your peace with it, and embrace it. It can also be a source of endless curiosity, spirituality and creativity.

It isn't even clear if a long lasting immunity in individuals builds up -- first studies indicate the contrary. Without long-term individual immunity no herd immunity can be reached...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2020/06/19/imm...

The port of Rotterdam: https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse/#v=51.9137,4.1106,1...

It was already impressive in 1984. Also interesting is the slow migration of sand banks on the Haringvilet estuary.