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Vladimir Voevodsky has died

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Re: Vladimir Voevodsky has died

#91

Post by ynotyman »

monort wrote: post #68

Amusing anecdote from the life of Voevodsky ( https://lj.rossia.org/users/tiphareth/2097217.html ): Voevodsky was too lazy to search for an apartment, so he lived in his office (at Harvard each graduate student gets a personal office) and slept on the roof. Unfortunately, the windows of dean office (Willy Schmid) had direct view at that roof. Volodya didn't adhere to the usual day routine (and didn't adhere to anythi…

I was a grad student at Harvard... let me correct a few things. First, Wilfred Schmid would probably never be called Willy. It's a funny idea though. Like calling the Queen of England Lizzy. He wasn't the dean... he might have been the dept chair at the time. As for living/sleeping at the office -- it's not a "terrible taboo and social stigma in America". (I'm American). But it's not allowed due to problems with hygiene (no showers in most bathrooms), smell, clutter, disruption at odd hours, etc.. So it's not allowed in any workplace. When it happens, the response of most departments is sympathy and an effort to find the cause and find the person a place to live. And grad students at Harvard are financially supported well enough to afford a decent room in the area. I mean... I wasn't rich, but lived comfortably in apartments shared with a few other grad students.

Re: Vladimir Voevodsky has died

#92

Post by arkvet »

ynotyman wrote: post #91
monort wrote: post #68

Amusing anecdote from the life of Voevodsky ( https://lj.rossia.org/users/tiphareth/2097217.html ): Voevodsky was too lazy to search for an apartment, so he lived in his office (at Harvard each graduate student gets a personal office) and slept on the roof. Unfortunately, the windows of dean office (Willy Schmid) had direct view at that roof. Volodya didn't adhere to the usual day routine (and didn't adhere to anythi…

I was a grad student at Harvard... let me correct a few things. First, Wilfred Schmid would probably never be called Willy. It's a funny idea though. Like calling the Queen of England Lizzy. He wasn't the dean... he might have been the dept chair at the time. As for living/sleeping at the office -- it's not a "terrible taboo and social stigma in America". (I'm American). But it's not allowed due to problems with hygi…

I was a grad student at Harvard in the math department too. In my time there was a student who decided he was going to sleep in his office (I don't think sleeping outside is such a great option in the New England winter). These offices are small - there's a desk, then room for a chair, and shelves for books above the desk. They are essentially for solo work. Anyway, this student was handling it fine - showering in the university gym and doing laundry in the basement of the nearby graduate residence halls, and rolling his bed up in the morning so as not to be reported by the cleaning staff. Then his girlfriend visited from abroad and she was so appalled with the suggestion that they bed down together essentially under his desk, that he ended up having to pay for them to stay for a week in a decent hotel. After that he found himself an apartment-share pretty quick.

Re: Vladimir Voevodsky has died

#93

Post by dang »

cft wrote: post #23
andrewflnr wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're getting downvoted because putting forward suicide as an explanation without any evidence is, well, "bad taste" doesn't really cut it. If you're going to speculate about it, at the very least give some justification.

It's from a text from a friend who knew him, if that matters. We all got PhDs from the same school. I have been here for 6.8 years and in the last two I find myself going back to Slashdot more and more.

I wonder if you're running into the problem of mixed cultural standards on HN. People here come from very different backgrounds but we interpret each other's statements without knowing that—a hard problem. I'm not assuming anything about you but I can imagine different pairs of backgrounds that would react quite differently to the simple, blunt question "was it suicide". Some would think "what's the problem it's a simple factual question" while others would wince and almost feel pain. This isn't an issue of PCness, but of the lossiness of channels across multiple cultures.

Different cultures also have different standards around speech vs. writing for such a question, as well as around public vs. private. And a small private conversation and a large public internet forum are miles apart even before bringing culture into it.

On HN we're dealing with all that and more. Our way is to try to have a local culture in which people err on the side of posting thoughtful, substantive comments. These two factors—considerateness for others and solid information—compensate for packet loss in the channels, making it easier for real communication to occur, leading to more interesting conversations. But it comes at a cost: utterances can't be quite as sharp or colorful. We give up some expressive range. Things get more bland. It took me years to reconcile myself to this—I hate blandness and am a fan of the historical art of barbed wit—but eventually I realized that if you don't make this tradeoff then the smart people eventually leave, and that would be blander to say the least.

People do sometimes mistake this approach for political correctness—and then wonder how the author of "What You Can't Say" could have created both—but that's because they don't understand what HN is going for. (I feel annoyed sometimes when people accuse us of being champions of bourgeois politesse when they haven't the least idea, but what can you do.) We're trying to optimize the site for interestingness—intellectual curiosity. The HN guidelines are an engineering tradeoff to achieve a design goal: one we have to make to protect HN from the dynamics that make internet forums less interesting and then dead. This design decision goes back to the founding of the site: see https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html.

Re: Vladimir Voevodsky has died

#94

Post by doall »

What a huge loss :(

I have been dreaming that one day we will have a fully developed type system for programming languages based on HoTT and I can develop a new language based on that.

Re: Vladimir Voevodsky has died

#96

Post by madez »

andrewflnr wrote: post #72
madez wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is a great explanation. It makes the reactions understandable to me. Now it seems like an example of shooting the messenger of a disliked message (where the message here is not a fact, but a thought). There is a certain emotional dryness to scientific curiosity, at least to me, social norms do not have a say. The boundary for me are ethics. I did not see unethical behaviour, so I do not sympethize with the…

The way you treat others' emotions is an ethical matter. For the rest, I agree. There are important discussions to be had about suicide. I'm mostly just saying cft's post was the wrong way to bring it up.

> The way you treat others' emotions is an ethical matter.

This is a fundamental conflict in ethics. Where does freedom end in the face of the freedom of others?

Now, in this case, there is framing going on. One could say that group A were playing with the emotions of group B and hurt them that way. I think, on the other hand, group A wanted to have a conversation about a topic, group B did not tolerate that discussion and tried to shut it up. I think group B acted unethical. If you don't like a topic of a debate, do not take part in it. After all, that is trivially easy here on HN. To me this seems to be an example of aggressive political correctness; a topic is identified as unwanted, and attacked with the aim to shut it down.

This critique is not against you. Others that have also commented here show this behaviour blatantly. You on the other hand gave constructive critique and insight, even though I disagree with the judgement. What is a "right" way to bring up a topic? The way it was brought up was literally a single word with a question mark. I don't think this is the optimal way to constructively bring a discussion forward, but it certainly does not deserve the reaction it got.

Re: Vladimir Voevodsky has died

#97

Post by opportune »

wolfgke wrote: post #88
School-Cotton wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no stigma against homeless people in your country?

When I see the description that monort gave, I would think that in Germany this would be seen as somewhat bizarre (as in mathematician ;-) ), but not as "terrible taboo and social stigma" or something to be outraged about (as dean Schmid was in monort's description). Quite the opposite: If you keep in mind that in many large German cities (such as Munich, Stuttgart and Berlin) it is hard to find an apartment, in part…

I (American) have the same reaction you do. I think this is an incident where something is not properly explained so non-Americans think this is just some weird American thing.

The text " living and sleeping in the office is a terrible taboo and social stigma" is not phrased well. The issue with living at your office is much more due to liability reasons. If someone is allowed to live at their office, then the organization might be liable for anything that person does, or anything that happens to that person, even when not working. Also, as an organization it looks bad to have your graduate students / researchers be homeless, not to other grad students or researchers on an individual level, but in the sense that outsiders will react "I do not want to work at Harvard because they work their researchers so hard / pay their researchers so little that they have to live at their office."

This also happened about 25 years ago, when there was more of a stigma in the US for living an untraditional lifestyle. It's much, much more common these days for people in their 20s to live semi-homeless (e.g. in a car) and housing usually costs a lot more know, adjusted for inflation.

Re: Vladimir Voevodsky has died

#98

Post by cft »

dang wrote: post #93
cft wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's from a text from a friend who knew him, if that matters. We all got PhDs from the same school. I have been here for 6.8 years and in the last two I find myself going back to Slashdot more and more.

I wonder if you're running into the problem of mixed cultural standards on HN. People here come from very different backgrounds but we interpret each other's statements without knowing that—a hard problem. I'm not assuming anything about you but I can imagine different pairs of backgrounds that would react quite differently to the simple, blunt question "was it suicide". Some would think "what's the problem it's a si…

Thanks. You are doing the "manual" community maintenance, things that don't scale as pg put it. I certainly appreciate it.

Re: Vladimir Voevodsky has died

#99

Post by anticodon »

ynotyman wrote: post #91
monort wrote: post #68

Amusing anecdote from the life of Voevodsky ( https://lj.rossia.org/users/tiphareth/2097217.html ): Voevodsky was too lazy to search for an apartment, so he lived in his office (at Harvard each graduate student gets a personal office) and slept on the roof. Unfortunately, the windows of dean office (Willy Schmid) had direct view at that roof. Volodya didn't adhere to the usual day routine (and didn't adhere to anythi…

I was a grad student at Harvard... let me correct a few things. First, Wilfred Schmid would probably never be called Willy. It's a funny idea though. Like calling the Queen of England Lizzy. He wasn't the dean... he might have been the dept chair at the time. As for living/sleeping at the office -- it's not a "terrible taboo and social stigma in America". (I'm American). But it's not allowed due to problems with hygi…

His own words in this interview: http://www.polit.ru/article/2006/08/22/voevod/ (in Russian)

Re: Vladimir Voevodsky has died

#100

Post by int_19h »

avenoir wrote: post #62
pandaman wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The word is voevoda (воевода) and, indeed, originally meant "a general". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voivode

It seems like the word "Voevoda", at least in Ancient Rus, was the highest military rank given to someone who exceled in very specific areas of warfare. For instance, the Voevoda of Defense (modern minister of defense?) would figure out how to fortify and defend a city from assault. Similarly, a Reconnaissance Voevoda would be sent to figure out the position and the size of an enemy. So it's not necessarily the gener…

The description by your link is from the Tsardom period, by the time when the title already acquired a different meaning (more along generic administrative lines).

In Ancient Rus, it was strictly a military rank, and simply meant "general" (or something roughly equivalent - a commander of a large military force, at the level where large-scale strategic considerations are as important as battlefield tactics).

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