David McCarthy 🇺🇦

Given how vengeful he’ll be, I’m just worried

dunno but the tabs before me refute strict finitism

UK maga's explanation of a feedback loop:

anything that looks like A -> B -> C

True, but even the pictures are wrong! A feedback loop is a bunch of arrows that circle!

Look who got an AI to knock out their poster and couldn’t even edit it to make sense

What was striking was he thought this was a very big deal philosophically, and ended up writing a book in which it was a central theme, *Reference and Consciousness*

So the suppressed premises, making the inference an enthymeme, was some kind of identity like `A = A'. But when that is made explicit, there's an obvious regress. I'm messing it up a bit (I think you need predicate logic to express it as it's a story about singular terms), but something like this.

I really can't remember the details, but I think the issue he was concerned about was something to do with sense and reference (huge philosophical preoccupation back then). Something to do with the `A' in the premise having the same sense as the `A' in the conclusion.

Decades ago i heard John Campbell (philosopher at Oxford then Berkeley) give a talk about this, he worried that the inference was enthymematic. My main memory is of grad students asking questions involving `enthymematic' w/o knowing what it meant or how to pronounce it

pops briefly regained consciousness there, don't mock

Stunning insight from Badenoch: there is “no need for lawyers” as people “should simply tell the truth about their circumstances”.

What has the rule of law ever done for us anyway, save some money and get rid of it

The doctor will assuredly be the guest of honour at an event that will not end well for him

“overwhelming and punishing violence”, slides hand into pocket, remembers where he is

glad for the author, but really?

surely a group chat with a password of TopSecret would do?

interesting q is when constructions that succeed shed light beyond existence. for example, i read some discussion (on MO?) that proofs of the uncountability of the reals always seem to boil down to cauchy's construction, not dedekind's.

yeah and thanks to that i now understand Z/2Z too

Am currently reading an intro book in which every example so far is arrived at by posing a (very natural) universal problem. Haven't so far found anything meaningless!

If you first learn CT just after you've done some basic algebra you probably learn that it was motivated by problems in algebraic topology, which is already beyond your paygrade. Why would finding the language of CT helpful for organizing algebraic concepts make you think you were doing deep stuff?

Exactly! That understanding avoids what seems to happen a lot when people meet the tensor product and freak out when they are taught that it is a weird looking quotient of a gigantic vector space

Otoh, some basic stuff (e.g. tensor products, free objects) is much easier to understand the first time around from a categorical perspective. In my day, we learned basic proof / model / set theory after the standard courses on algebra & analysis. Would have helped had category theory been included

What is it with people who think category theory shouldn't be introduced until year 12 of a phd? Here are tons of constructions that look very very very similar, but telling you why will only confuse you

I did that when I wrote “everything else is downstream”

in professional philosophy, "consider an analogy" is almost always a confession that you lack the capacity to make your arguments directly and are about to engage in sophistry. time to stop reading

In philosophy the idea is known as welfarism, it has loads of critics.

As for equality before the law, I doubt that any country comes near having it in a substantive sense, and also doubt that the existence of a few privileged royals will much affect the extent of it

to be a bit more precise, i should have prefaced with the idea that if two states of affairs involve identical distributions of welfare, then they are equally good. tons of people deny that for example.

are identical up to a permutation of individuals, they are equally good

Of course I wasn't suggesting that monarchic societies accept the invariance principle! I was just suggesting that if one is in search of a basic democratic principle, the idea that everyone is equal, then the sensible way of cashing it out is more or less that if two distributions of welfare

I find the frequency of "it got stuff wrong, so it failed" quite odd. I often use them to look up math definitions. It's common for 10% of the answer to be nonsense ("it failed!!"). But the nonsense is easy to spot and ignore, and with some common sense, the remainder is often just what you need

What isn't?