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Oscar Zariski was one of the founders of modern algebraic geometry

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Re: Oscar Zariski was one of the founders of modern algebraic geometry

#21

Post by simpaticoder »

mpalmer wrote: post #19
simpaticoder wrote: post #11

Those who spend their time flying through imaginary worlds do well to "remember where the off switch is" to quote Ian Banks' "Excession". It's also helpful to characterize a person not just by their character, tenacity or energy, or age, but also a number between 0 and 1 that indicates how much of their time they've spent in the real world, vs in their happy fun space. Call it the "imagination factor". A bright, capa…

You take a strange lesson from an anecdote about artificial super-intelligences. In the book, the AIs can spend time in a limitless virtual universe, better than reality. Time spent in "infinite fun" (as they call it) has no value because it has no impact on what happens in the real world, hence the importance of remembering where the off-switch is. It's about having an effect on the world, not the world having an ef…

Where did you see a value judgment? The imagination factor is a trade-off, neither good nor bad in itself. It's normally distributed, and selection pressure will push the median up or down. The utility of the concept comes in personal interaction - those with high IF speaking with low IF people should respect the value of (perhaps multiples) of real-world experience that they have. In effect, the concept of IF is a tool of both humility and empathy.

Re: Oscar Zariski was one of the founders of modern algebraic geometry

#22

Post by thih9 »

The story about the wedding is one short paragraph at the end - with almost no extra information and not referenced elsewhere in the article. Very anticlimactic.

> But the story in the book that I liked the most is this one: Zariski was, of course, very much obsessed with mathematics. On the day he and his fiancée Yole were getting married, with Yole already dressed in white and veiled and the rabbi standing by, the bridegroom was nowhere to be found. It turned out he was working on a mathematical problem. Luckily, Yole was neither angry nor surprised; she was amused. Ha! I need to tell this to my wife.

Re: Oscar Zariski was one of the founders of modern algebraic geometry

#23

Post by mpalmer »

simpaticoder wrote: post #21
mpalmer wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You take a strange lesson from an anecdote about artificial super-intelligences. In the book, the AIs can spend time in a limitless virtual universe, better than reality. Time spent in "infinite fun" (as they call it) has no value because it has no impact on what happens in the real world, hence the importance of remembering where the off-switch is. It's about having an effect on the world, not the world having an ef…

Where did you see a value judgment? The imagination factor is a trade-off, neither good nor bad in itself. It's normally distributed, and selection pressure will push the median up or down. The utility of the concept comes in personal interaction - those with high IF speaking with low IF people should respect the value of (perhaps multiples) of real-world experience that they have. In effect, the concept of IF is a t…

"Those who spend their time flying through imaginary worlds do well to remember where the off switch is."

And you didn't say anything about "real-worlders" having humility and respect for the other party.

I think a reasonable person infers a value judgment from those two things together.

Re: Oscar Zariski was one of the founders of modern algebraic geometry

#24

Post by thih9 »

blendergeek wrote: post #5

Headline should be "Oscar Zariski - forgot about his own wedding" in accordance with HN headline guidelines.

Could you cite the guideline? I couldn't find it; I thought the idea is to use the original title where possible.

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

Re: Oscar Zariski was one of the founders of modern algebraic geometry

#25

Post by datameta »

waynecochran wrote: post #13
ben_w wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now I'm curious: most of us are familiar with what the USSR did wrong, were they better or worse than the Tsars before them?

One metric would be body count. 20th century Marxists are somewhere between 60 and 148 million dead. Hard to top that.

One thing that puzzles me is those people who shudder at comparing Stalin's murderous spree with what Hitler's effects were. Is it the cognitive dissonance of not wanting to believe that we not only allied with a genocidal dictatorship but heavily supplied them with industrial output during the war? My family lived in the USSR and I can say for a fact - knowing it was the NKVD rather than Gestapo that might knock on the door in the middle of the night to disappear your father or uncle was of little consolation.

Re: Oscar Zariski was one of the founders of modern algebraic geometry

#26

Post by bonoboTP »

thih9 wrote: post #24
blendergeek wrote: post #5

Headline should be "Oscar Zariski - forgot about his own wedding" in accordance with HN headline guidelines.

Could you cite the guideline? I couldn't find it; I thought the idea is to use the original title where possible. > Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

It's literal clickbait as you're moved to click to figure out who that man is.

Re: Oscar Zariski was one of the founders of modern algebraic geometry

#27

Post by cjbgkagh »

GnarfGnarf wrote: post #16
ben_w wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now I'm curious: most of us are familiar with what the USSR did wrong, were they better or worse than the Tsars before them?

Historians describe that Russian peasants pre-1917 were basically living in Medieval conditions. Russia didn't adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1918! As flawed as Communism is, it did lurch Russians into the 20th century. The Tsar and the aristocracy failed at their job. They deserved their fate, to be fired. Maybe Communism was the only way to drag Russian society, kicking and screaming, into the modern era that o…

A NASA saying; “there is no situation so bad that it cannot possibly be made worse”

Which I think applies to people who think communism will somehow save them from their predicaments.

Communism has that special something that destroys the soul. It’s hard to describe if you haven’t seen it or talked to those who have lived it. The attempt at the impossible in creating the ‘new man’ free of greed in combination with a secret police that pits friends against friends, family member against family member such that all personal relationships are voided.

I get that our current system of ‘capitalism’ is more of an oligarchical corporatism than ‘true capitalism’ and is really failing people. But communism is not the answer because it’ll be the same oligarchs in charge and there will be far fewer ways to escape them. I understand that ‘true communism’ would obviate the need for greed and corruption but in trying to get there from here by crossing a river of blood in an continuous revolution it’s far more likely to get stuck in the corrupt communism state which is far worse than our current corrupt capitalism state.

Re: Oscar Zariski was one of the founders of modern algebraic geometry

#28

Post by simpaticoder »

delichon wrote: post #18
simpaticoder wrote: post #11

Those who spend their time flying through imaginary worlds do well to "remember where the off switch is" to quote Ian Banks' "Excession". It's also helpful to characterize a person not just by their character, tenacity or energy, or age, but also a number between 0 and 1 that indicates how much of their time they've spent in the real world, vs in their happy fun space. Call it the "imagination factor". A bright, capa…

> Those who spend their time flying through imaginary worlds do well to "remember where the off switch is" If this world is a simulation, and someone among us is the player-character, forgetting that there is an off switch is a feature for them that increases immersion by making any failure to suspend disbelief (which I as a probable NPC suffer from regulary) a moot issue. As long as we think that this is reality, it…

"If this world is a simulation" then anything can follow, which makes it an uninteresting hypothetical.

Re: Oscar Zariski was one of the founders of modern algebraic geometry

#29

Post by codingdave »

simpaticoder wrote: post #20
lrobinovitch wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unclear to me what you're defining as real. Coal mining? Childcare? Community centers? Through hiking? Interesting theoretical realms can have enormous consequences in the physical/tangible world, as I'm sure you know :). Maybe it's more of a "presence factor" in relation to this story: a measure of how aware you are of the roles and responsibilities you have and how engaged with them you are.

I make no value judgement here. I thought the OP's post was interesting as an example of how humans can mediate their own "VR" experience, and have done so for all of human history. The "absent-minded professor" is a stereotype for a reason. It can be disconcerting for someone with high imagination factor to interact with someone with an imagination factor of 0, even if all other qualities (age, culture, language, et…

The path everyone has walked is different from everyone else. You seem to be trying to reduce it to a formula, coin new terms, and literally apply numeric values to people. I don't think anyone is that simple in reality.

If you have struggled to interact with people who are different than you, that is also part of the human experience, not something we need to devise measurements for.

Re: Oscar Zariski was one of the founders of modern algebraic geometry

#30

Post by nikolajan »

bonoboTP wrote: post #26
thih9 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you cite the guideline? I couldn't find it; I thought the idea is to use the original title where possible. > Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

It's literal clickbait as you're moved to click to figure out who that man is.

This isn't clickbait in the slightest, this low level obsession with labeling anything that isn't entirely descriptive as clickbait is obnoxious.

Not every article title has to be "A 500 word blog post on Oscar Zariski, covering years 1899-1960, published May 26th 3PM EST, by Boogie Math"

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