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Dubious Math in Infinite Jest (2009)

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Re: Dubious Math in Infinite Jest (2009)

#91

Post by throwaway290 »

evanjrowley wrote: post #64
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…

Wouldn't Pemulis' mathematical errors be consistent with how Infinite Jest begins? I.e., he has some sort of degenerative condition directly or indirectly associated with exposure to strange mold found in the basement of his childhood home?

Could you not spoil things?

Re: Dubious Math in Infinite Jest (2009)

#92

Post by ball_of_lint »

dpig_ wrote: post #70
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).

At about page 300 it starts to pay off hard and you fly through the rest. I definitely recommend giving it another go.

"Once you've read this book, then you can read a good book"

(/s - I have read and enjoyed Infinite Jest. It's very reasonable for someone to not enjoy it though)

Re: Dubious Math in Infinite Jest (2009)

#93

Post by nneonneo »

Mathematically, the odds of getting exactly N heads after flipping a fair coin 2N times is surprisingly high - it asymptotically approaches 1/sqrt(pi * N) as N becomes large. For the problem in IJ, this comes out to 1/(3.14 * 54) which is 0.076776 - not far from the exact value of 0.076599. As another example, if you flip a fair coin 1000 times, you’ll get exactly 500 heads about 2.5% of the time.

The proof is also similarly easy: it’s a straightforward application of Stirling’s approximation to the formula (2N!)/(N!*N!)/2^(2N).

Re: Dubious Math in Infinite Jest (2009)

#94

Post by neuroelectron »

Boogie_Man wrote: post #80
kimfc wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a very easy/boring job and where during last few month I spent most of my time reading infinite jest after finishing the days work. I really loved it but I probably won't read it again anytime soon, there's a pretty substantial upfront time investment you have to make before it starts getting enjoyable to read. Though once you lock in with the world and flow of infinite jest it gets pretty amazing, I wish I had…

What race is Hal?

He's white.

Re: Dubious Math in Infinite Jest (2009)

#96

Post by lmm »

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…

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

Maybe at the time. Presumably that gets an explanatory footnote in modern editions?

Re: Dubious Math in Infinite Jest (2009)

#97

Post by thaumasiotes »

lacker wrote: post #14
andy_xor_andrew wrote: post #10

> Again, Mike Pemulis is lecturing Hal, but this time he is helping Hal prepare for the college board exams. Pemulis states that for the function x^n, the derivative is nx + x^(n-1). In fact, the correct expression is nx^(n-1). This, too, may be a typographical error. Another possibility is that Pemulis is simply bad at math :D

Reading the DFW biography, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, it said that there were hundreds of cases where the editor claimed something was a typographical error, and DFW insisted that actually it was precisely how he meant it to be. They went back and forth for months, with the publisher eventually charging DFW a fee for all the extra labor involved. So... we can't know for sure, but there's a strong case that an…

> there were hundreds of cases where the editor claimed something was a typographical error, and DFW insisted that actually it was precisely how he meant it to be. They went back and forth for months, with the publisher eventually charging DFW a fee for all the extra labor involved.

> So... we can't know for sure, but there's a strong case that any particular little weird error, DFW intended it to be this way.

You'd have to assume that every time he got called out on an obvious error and insisted he'd meant it all along, he was telling the truth.

Re: Dubious Math in Infinite Jest (2009)

#98

Post by riwsky »

sdenton4 wrote: post #75
ajkjk wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one of any level of math skill would mistake the the derivative of x^n as nx + x^n-1. There's no way DFW messed that up, but it's also a pretty bizarre mistake to have a character make if they're supposed to be making mistakes.

In terms of 'meeting the reader where they are,' you would want to telegraph the math mistakes pretty hard, or they would fly past everyone. Making them obvious and dumb is the only way they'll get attributed to the character, rather than the author.

Ah yes, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, a famously “meet the reader where they are” book

Re: Dubious Math in Infinite Jest (2009)

#99

Post by seanhunter »

lacker wrote: post #31
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "He incorrectly suggests that the axiom of choice is used for Cantor's diagonal argument" This alone is a pretty substantial, even foundational, error. The author of the review, Rudy Rucker, is a sort of cult/underground author of math-heavy science fiction. I don't think he's opposed to framing things in a literary way, so long as it's not misleading or falsely dramatized. Like, e.g., Godel ending his days in some…

The DFW style is not just "literary", it's dense, full of self-referential hints, critical footnotes, invented acronyms, retellings of the same events from multiple perspectives. I like Rudy Rucker a lot but his work is nothing like it. The core problem with this book is that it is a great book for people who love both math and Infinite Jest. But, that might be an audience of nobody. Or almost nobody, because it does…

And me. I loved the book.

Re: Dubious Math in Infinite Jest (2009)

#100

Post by thaumasiotes »

LegionMammal978 wrote: post #87
thaumasiotes wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 enti…

> we use continuum-sized sets to describe physical space

But... we don't. We use integers to describe physical space. We have real numbers as a mathematical construct, but we have never applied them to even a single physical problem. That's impossible to do, because specifying a real number takes an infinite amount of information.

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