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Dubious Math in Infinite Jest (2009)

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Re: Dubious Math in Infinite Jest (2009)

#81

Post by spondylosaurus »

Boogie_Man wrote: post #78
neuroelectron wrote: post #52

Has anyone actually read Infinite Jest in its entirety? I got about 50 pages in and I'm pretty sure I got the jist of it from that. The constant slog into minutia and clunky grammar made it very slow reading for me. There were some funny parts but overall the effort didn't feel worth it. I tore through Gravity's Rainbow (mentioned in another thread).

Yes I have and I think I'm the only person not lying about that fact.

I am curious... what's up with your "What race is Hal?" questions throughout this thread? Unless I'm super unobservant I legitimately don't remember it being made explicit in the novel. Avril is obviously French-Canadian[1], so she's presumably white, which would also make Hal at least half white, but I don't remember any description of JOI's appearance (when he was alive lol) or ethnicity beyond him being very tall.

I feel like a more definitive question could be "Which ETA student is missing several fingers?" or "How did Bruce Green's mom die?" or "What's the call sign for Joelle's radio station?" or "What roams the Great Concavity?"[2]

[1] I can't remember if CT is a true Quebecker or not, but if he is, I could at least say that Mario is 100% French-Canadian, lol.

[2] Or I just thought of another... "Which ETA student has an ironically apt disease?"

Re: Dubious Math in Infinite Jest (2009)

#82

Post by ofalkaed »

Boogie_Man wrote: post #78
neuroelectron wrote: post #52

Has anyone actually read Infinite Jest in its entirety? I got about 50 pages in and I'm pretty sure I got the jist of it from that. The constant slog into minutia and clunky grammar made it very slow reading for me. There were some funny parts but overall the effort didn't feel worth it. I tore through Gravity's Rainbow (mentioned in another thread).

Yes I have and I think I'm the only person not lying about that fact.

So how about contributing something constructive?

Re: Dubious Math in Infinite Jest (2009)

#84

Post by dkarl »

jknoepfler wrote: post #45
dkarl wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The whole book is striking a middle ground between expressing every step of mathematical rigor, and describing in a more literary way how to feel about these concepts I really hate this. If you don't care to understand something, why would you want to absorb the feelings that somebody else thinks you should have from understanding it? It reminds me of all the cringey posturing that undergrads engage in because thei…

Why would you hate a book exploring mathematics and reflecting on your relationship with it? What a weird thing to hate. Wouldn't you rather celebrate intellectual curiosity? Like... I hate journalism that profits off of xenophobic fear mongering. A book from a genuinely curious and interesting author who did some moonlighting in more formal subjects, though? That seems harmless and kind of cute at worst. Maybe a lit…

It's like reading a review of a novel that tells you how to feel about it, and adopting that emotional response without reading the novel itself.

Re: Dubious Math in Infinite Jest (2009)

#85

Post by LegionMammal978 »

feoren wrote: post #66
LegionMammal978 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's what's so cool about math: it could not possibly be any different. Why not? There's not much tethering our axioms-on-paper to what is necessarily true, past what we can empirically observe. For instance, a universe that is "exactly like ours, except the truth of the continuum hypothesis is flipped" seems no less conceivable than our own universe, given that we don't even have any solid evidence for its truth…

> "exactly like ours, except the truth of the continuum hypothesis is flipped" We can and do create two alternate models of math with CH and ~CH as axioms, in this universe, right now. No need for alternate universes. There's no reason to think the CH is either true or false in the natural laws of our universe -- what would that even mean? I suppose it's distantly possible that models where CH is true happen to repre…

> what would that even mean?

Presumably something like "you can/cannot collect an uncountable group of points in physical space and still not have enough to fill a physical volume".

Anyway, the idea is that properties of 'ordinary' numbers and logical constructs could similarly just be models specifically useful for our own universe. E.g., propositional logic only works because our universe allows us to write truth tables that are causally valid, natural numbers only work because our universe allows us to count over discrete objects, etc.

There'd be no big gap between 'physics' and 'math': all 'math' that we can talk about would just be the 'physics' of things that work on paper in our universe. And in particular, 'the physics of math-on-paper' could conceivably work differently in an alternate universe, and our own ideas and discoveries would be inapplicable.

Re: Dubious Math in Infinite Jest (2009)

#86

Post by LegionMammal978 »

mtizim wrote: post #59
LegionMammal978 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's what's so cool about math: it could not possibly be any different. Why not? There's not much tethering our axioms-on-paper to what is necessarily true, past what we can empirically observe. For instance, a universe that is "exactly like ours, except the truth of the continuum hypothesis is flipped" seems no less conceivable than our own universe, given that we don't even have any solid evidence for its truth…

Why not? Exactly because there is nothing tethering our axioms on paper to what is necessarily true. You could formulate something wildly different from ZF±C/Peano/whatever normal axiom system, but we wouldn't call it "math", and what we currently call "math" will work under any conditions

Our 'math' will work under any of our conditions (as far as we can observe), but who's to say they can't have 'math' in another universe that will work under any of their conditions, yet still be different from ours?

That's what GP was saying ("there are no conceivable alternate universes with different math", and none with a different derivative in particular), but I see no reason why math-as-we-know-it couldn't just be inapplicable to different 'conceivable' universes.

Re: Dubious Math in Infinite Jest (2009)

#87

Post by LegionMammal978 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #57
LegionMammal978 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's what's so cool about math: it could not possibly be any different. Why not? There's not much tethering our axioms-on-paper to what is necessarily true, past what we can empirically observe. For instance, a universe that is "exactly like ours, except the truth of the continuum hypothesis is flipped" seems no less conceivable than our own universe, given that we don't even have any solid evidence for its truth…

> For instance, a universe that is "exactly like ours, except the truth of the continuum hypothesis is flipped" seems no less conceivable than our own universe Really? For that to be possible, the continuum hypothesis would have to be either true or false in our universe, which does not appear to be the case.

That's fair, and perhaps my example wasn't the best, but my point is that just as the continuum hypothesis is an artifact of the models we use to describe our universe (we use continuum-sized sets to describe physical space), more basic properties like "how numbers ought to work" could also be artifacts of our models. In particular, it wouldn't be inconceivable for an alternate universe to be better described by entirely different models from the ground up, which could be fairly described as "different math".

Re: Dubious Math in Infinite Jest (2009)

#88

Post by FearNotDaniel »

RunSet wrote: post #35
npilk wrote: post #7

I've seen a theory that the mistakes Pemulis makes are intentional, and signal that he isn't as smart as he thinks and that he doesn't really have everything in control. I'm not sure; clearly DFW had some math aptitude but these also could have been honest mistakes. Presumably it would have been harder for editors to check these things in the 90s. The probability error seems harder to explain and likely just a mistak…

Perhaps my favorite deliberate error in arithmetic is from Winston Groom's Forrest Gump, during the protagonist's tour in Vietnam: > I am the machine gun ammo bearer, cause they figger I can carry a lot of shit on account of my size. Before we lef, a couple of other fellers axed if I would mind carryin some of their han grenades so’s they could carry more orations, an I agreed. It didn’t hurt me none. Also, Sergeant…

> the reader knows a gallon of water weighs roughly eight pounds

Haha, you have to love those quaint, backwards Americans and their “freedom units”. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, we can peacefully enjoy the fact that 3.785 litres of water weighs exactly 3.785 kg.

Re: Dubious Math in Infinite Jest (2009)

#89

Post by lacker »

dkarl wrote: post #36
lacker wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I don't agree with that review at all, and I loved Everything and More . I'm even somewhat of a "finitist" myself mathematically, but I think you can just view the whole hierarchy of infinities as a finite mode of description, and get utility from it without worrying about the "reality" of the whole thing. But that's a bit of an aside. The review-writer clearly hates the book before he even gets to the mat…

> The whole book is striking a middle ground between expressing every step of mathematical rigor, and describing in a more literary way how to feel about these concepts I really hate this. If you don't care to understand something, why would you want to absorb the feelings that somebody else thinks you should have from understanding it? It reminds me of all the cringey posturing that undergrads engage in because thei…

I already do understand set theory and the construction of the real numbers. There are plenty of great books on that, or really nowadays you can simply ask ChatGPT. I am interested in learning about how Cantor, Weierstrass, the ancient Greeks, and others felt, as they grappled with the challenge of making rigorous mathematics handle the infinite. That's what this book is good at.

Re: Dubious Math in Infinite Jest (2009)

#90

Post by monkeyelite »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #19

DFW also wrote Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity -- an uncritical review of Cantor's work, which was absolutely loaded with errors. Rudy Rucker wrote a scathing review here: https://www.rudyrucker.com/oldhomepage/wallace_review.pdf I actually read Everything and More and it's probably even worse than that. Though I'll admit that I'm a little bit biased; I'm a sort of Aristotelian Realist or even a Fi…

About half way through the book he tries to do an epsilon delta proof and completely gets the logic wrong. Ignoring any philosophical outlook, this is not a great math book.
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