phorkyas82

When due to lockdown I was doing some homeschooling and giving some exercises to my 7yo, I was also anxious to introduce variables; the magic "x" that scares so many.

I ended up drawing squares or triangles instead. Maybe they scared me less, but he really seemed to grok it. When I asked and what's the value of "this", he'd just give the answer without knowing something about equivalent transformations and the stuff.

Made me wonder if math should maybe be taught more intuitively, not so much about the formal stuff, which in the end is pretty useless for our minds if we don't have any intuitive grasp of it.

Still love that guy and his writing.

Went with my current company mostly because they dropped his name in the job description.

(Also: Went so heavily into table tennis that it always seems to me he's holding that table tennis racket a bit awkwardly or like a hobby player in that picture. But great hobby.)

Maybe the whole mastery of storytelling is overrated per se. They were talking about how they build on their own experience, an epiphany - which is the essence of what they try to express. When I think of the great books and movies that I love I hardly remember the whole stories, but more a certain idea, scene or mood.

And thus doesn't that mean that the stories are merely vehicles, like mechanical means to transport.

I'm generally also one of the git sceptics - Though I loved staging for a while as for the fine grained control. `git add --all` just might not do the right thing - for paranoids like me. Just recently got to know you can skip the staging by appending the paths of the changed files you want to commit after `git commit -m "awesome commit"` - neat.

That even partly fits to something the article alludes to, and maybe should have been stated more explicitly: that it's about communication: so getting the people talk to each other and be motivated and try to solve a problem in a specific, commonly agreed way - that is more important than the used technology (which can be overhyped crap)

..or if we take serious the "social construct" thing then it'll be limited by all the vices and pitfalls of human nature, ain't gonna get far in that swamp of narcissism, arrogance, ignorance and bad listening.

Reminds me of my first analysis professor. He managed to explain the proofs while writing them with chalk on the blackboard, all equations nice an clean like the Latex in our scripts - while we struggled to keep up with his pace, was impossible for us to copy it all. He came across a bit dry, overstructured, exact, but also kind and humble - maybe like you imagine a German mathematician.

An "interface" like Descartes' pineal gland? Or would you prefer something RESTful? While technical metaphors applied to the good ol' philosophical mind body problem look so modern they are also totally inept. There is no archticture or VM to port your consciousness to, nor can you upload it to AWS.

To get more accurate metaphors on consciousness, maybe it's better to start with the biologic basis like Plessner did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmuth_Plessner

Every human action and interaction is inherently social. So is coding.

thanks, will do.

It ceased to be a public place long ago. - We fucked it up, when we wanted it all for free and shoved all our data up Google/Facebook/Apple/Amazon/Whatever's asses. When financial interest and gains are high enough, how do you want to stop it? Opensource all the infrastructure, let it be owned by some supranational, "communist" organization? How would you guarantee that this be any better than those quasi monopolies?

Similarly I always feel little stitches from rhetoric use of the perceived degree of organicity a thing possesses in contrast to another. It's such a vague metaphor. I guess what usually counts as more organic is: - stuff that decomposes, is not ignored by destruents and stinks - stuff that is complex and semi-random, no central, overall plan

So maybe it's the last point. For an animal you need a thorough layout, like for a cathedral (but, well there are also Gaudí's which aimed to be more "organic" - all these metaphors are so messy, maybe natural language is too organic)

This is really about 'modality', I'd say. If you have statements in the past that were about the future which now is already past, these statements can usually be verified with certainty. Like a weather forecast. This 100% certainty however breaks down, if you move the forecast far enough that it touches the "real" future from our current present. E.g. you have to observe the weather to see if the forecast was true. So this "paradox" is just about how the modality of the statement changes discontinuously once it is really uncertain.

That's not complexity but entropy. In terms of entropy you could better Shakespeare by using only one sentence, word or letter for the whole play. As a boy I inhaled the spirit of Mitchell M. Waldrop "Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos" that for some time it was my life dream, maybe still is, to perform some work connected to said institute. I'd say it like that: The amount of features you need to sufficiently (in your metric) model a given system defines its complexity. - Something for which a rigid body is enough: probably not so interesting. Autocatalytical reactions?... Something biochemical maybe more.