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To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics

quantamagazine.org

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Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics

#231

Post by danbruc »

apocalypstyx wrote: post #222
danbruc wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has a 99% probability of being absolute nonsense. Looks more like 30 years of anecdotal evidence and hearsay. Try find a credible source with actual numbers.

I'd love to know where that 99% comes from. (Or maybe I wouldn't.) I'd say there's far more than anecdotal evidence, but not, obviously, not enough to draw necessarily firm conclusions. So I would say there's enough question to sustain further scientific inquiry. That, interestingly enough, puts us in a position at odds with one of a common traits noted among engineers, in psychological terms: 'need for closure'; whi…

I pulled the 99% out of thin air, I just wanted to emphasize how small I estimate the chances of this being true. I found one analysis [1] that found that creationist or only half as likely to be engineers as the general population, admittedly only using data from a preexisting survey as proxy for the question at hand.

Maybe it is a naive view on my side but I expect that additional education will make it less likely that one believes religious claims to be true in general and this extends to becoming an engineer and being a creationist.

But even if there was indeed a correlation of the form claimed by the Salem hypothesis, I would naturally want to look for traits that make it more likely for one to become an engineer and a creationist, not for something that causes engineers to become creationists.

You did not explicitly spell it out this way and I am inclined to think you do not think this causation exists, but your response to a comment suggesting that it might be a good choice to become an engineer at least allows the interpretation that becoming an engineer causes becoming a creationist.

And I obviously consider the idea of a causal relationship between being an engineer and being a creationist even more unlikely than that of certain traits increasing the likelihood of becoming an engineer as well as a creationist.

Not that it is unlikely in the general case that learning about X makes one more likely to also believe Y, that is actually certainly pretty common, but in the concrete case I am really unable to see which things one learns when becoming an engineer are suitable to turn one into a creationist.

Finally I am not sure what you wanted the express with the Evolution 2.0 article, but at least in the linked article the reasoning is heavily flawed.

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/talk.origins/Xunl5Sl...

Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics

#232

Post by dtornabene »

110011 wrote: post #63

As a counterpoint to the overly exuberant article let me chime in as a graduating theoretical computer scientist. Math is hard and despite its beauty and allure academic life doesn't take place in a vacuum- ergo there's a lot of politics and pettiness from your peers. You should expect to invest years of your life into making progress on some hard problem with little encouragement in the meantime, this takes a tremen…

The article is about math, not necessarily academic math. And it was far from "overly exuberant". Jesus. I have no degree, and do math all the time, precisely for the reasons listed in the article. There endless comments shitting on academic life are obnoxious and tedious, they are also becoming something of a plauge here.

Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics

#233

Post by 110011 »

dtornabene wrote: post #232
110011 wrote: post #63

As a counterpoint to the overly exuberant article let me chime in as a graduating theoretical computer scientist. Math is hard and despite its beauty and allure academic life doesn't take place in a vacuum- ergo there's a lot of politics and pettiness from your peers. You should expect to invest years of your life into making progress on some hard problem with little encouragement in the meantime, this takes a tremen…

The article is about math , not necessarily academic math. And it was far from "overly exuberant". Jesus. I have no degree, and do math all the time, precisely for the reasons listed in the article . There endless comments shitting on academic life are obnoxious and tedious, they are also becoming something of a plauge here.

Since I made this comment, I also had the chance to listen to his lecture in full. I couldn't agree more with him. What I wrote here was based on my understanding of what he meant by "doing mathematics", which as other commenters also pointed out earlier did not have anything to do with a career in math. I stand corrected.

Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics

#234

Post by EternalData »

posterboy wrote: post #204
EternalData wrote: post #149

I took this to be a general call to learn and practice mathematics, and not as a summons to a career in academia, so perhaps I'm seeing it a bit differently. I have to say as somebody who through attrition always feared math in university that it is meaningful to think about reasons why people fear embracing certain types of knowledge. It's only after the fact that I realize how useful and even how romantic applicati…

>how romantic applications of mathematics might be. like, in the dating market or do you mean a philosophical potential? The philosophical aspect is huge, eg. to tell once meant counting, or logic and language having a common Greek root.

I mean, I was thinking more of romance as "imbued with idealism", but if differential equations can help me find true love, even better.

Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics

#235

Post by fmoralesc »

conjectures wrote: post #214
fmoralesc wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are misunderstanding Kant. In PTAFM 13, Kant is arguing that neither space nor time are intrinsic properties of things in themselves, and basically making the point that properties like position and congruence are relational, not intrinsic. Spatial relations fit with the intuition of space, which is the form of external experience (and one should think of this as the abstract form of any space whatsoever…

This highlights why math generally trumps philosophy. Take any math that is similarly well known to Kant. You don't get two educated people having diverging opinions on a solution if they start with the same assumptions. Usually someone concedes; e.g. because the other side shows that the losing position implies something that everyone accepts is impossible. In philosophy you get this all the time because people refu…

> You don't get two educated people having diverging opinions on a solution if they start with the same assumptions.

No, in this case he was mistaken in some basic assumptions about what Kant is doing in that text. The paragraph he mentioned starts with: "Those who cannot yet rid themselves of the notion that space and time are actual qualities inherent in things in themselves, may exercise their acumen on the following paradox." So in this case it isn't even the case that he is proposing something about Kant one can reasonably disagree on (like my suggestion that Kant is not undermined by the development of non-euclidean geometry, something which I would be willing to concede given evidence against it).

On the other hand, in my experience, actual debates on philosophy usually revolve around conceding some initial assumptions and then debating on what follows from them. Of course, one can always move from the internal questions about what follows from those assumptions to external questions about what follows if we rejected those assumptions, but this move is usually well motivated by internal conflicts. One might, for example, find some dilemma for which no option is acceptable, and thus be forced to retreat to discussing the assumptions. And it is not a given from the outset whether no such conflicts will arise.

Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics

#236

Post by dtornabene »

110011 wrote: post #233
dtornabene wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is about math , not necessarily academic math. And it was far from "overly exuberant". Jesus. I have no degree, and do math all the time, precisely for the reasons listed in the article . There endless comments shitting on academic life are obnoxious and tedious, they are also becoming something of a plauge here.

Since I made this comment, I also had the chance to listen to his lecture in full. I couldn't agree more with him. What I wrote here was based on my understanding of what he meant by "doing mathematics", which as other commenters also pointed out earlier did not have anything to do with a career in math. I stand corrected.

Cool! Thanks for taking the time to circle back and add this. I was also responding to the wave of "academia sucks!!!", which, while perhaps true (for some) is getting really old to read in threads here. Appreciate you taking the time to add this comment.

Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics

#237

Post by Balgair »

FabHK wrote: post #223
Balgair wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition, you can just email the authors too. Most, if not all, are very happy to send you a copy and help explain things too. Most scientists do want to talk about their work!

Elsevier used to demand you sign over all copyright, which would make that illegal (think about it...!!) They've also sent takedown notices to academics that posted their own articles on their own website. Oh, and by the way, Elsevier also sued Sci-hub and LibGen... The Wikipedia article has a long section of criticism of Elsevier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Criticism_and_controv...

All true!

But that said, I don't know of any author that wouldn't give you a gratis copy, oh, ok, maybe an old 'draft' that is 'close' to the publication.

Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics

#238

Post by SZJX »

Well maths always sounds good with all its allure of "purity" and "intellect". However I think one should remember that maths is basically some very-high level abstractions on our analog, chaotic world. Just like rigid linguistics/grammatical rules fail miserably in representing actual human languages, abstract maths probably also cannot claim to represent the real essence of the world that well. Even a statistical/neural network-style approach does it so much better. So yeah, if you're so into constructing and deconstructing abstruse abstractions, maybe do maths very seriously. But does it really represent the "truth" of life? I think that might be a bit dubious.

Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics

#239

Post by Balgair »

jayajay wrote: post #168
Balgair wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chiming in from Bio: Yep, this is true here too. I can't find the citations right now, but there was a recent study done through Elsiver's website. The group got a hold of the servers for Elsiver and took a look at page views. They wanted to know what the rates of papers being read was. It was... disheartening. They found that ~46% (again, not sure here as I can't find the source) of papers will never be looked at ou…

> "lecturing the void" This seems, at first, to be a problem in academia, but, at further glance, is really a problem with education.

Yes, even ideas exist in a marketplace.

Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics

#240

Post by ThomPete »

Chris2048 wrote: post #224
ThomPete wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concepts you deal with in philosophy are vague, the challenge is to provide very precise analysis of these vague (fuzzy?) concepts. But yeah I don't think one is better than the other. Each provide value. I would actually claim that to live your best life, be an engineer. They seem to me at least to be living in that sweet-spot between the abstract, creative and the concrete.

> the challenge is to provide very precise analysis of these vague (fuzzy?) concepts Does common philosophical discourse generally attempt this though?

No which is why it's a challenge.

Most philosophers are not very careful thinkers. There is a lot of circular thinking a lot of apriori assumptions and so one. Mostly the designers who are worth listening to IMO are those who broke down previously held illusions.

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