N.B. I have the flu and have had it for a week and a half. I was getting better for a while and now I’ve gotten worse all of a sudden, which is frustrating.
I am not sure if this accounts for either the increased frequency or increased grumpiness of my recent tumblings, but it seems like something worth mentioning. Sorry if I’m been annoying you.
This post ended with with a proposed explanation of why artistic media involving words are the most interesting to me, and it occurs to me that the true explanation might not have anything to do with “dimensionality” and might just be that I just … experience and think very “verbally”? Cf. this blog, my psychometric test results, etc.
Or it could be the other way around: the reason I get on well with words, relative to say spatial stuff, is that I prefer things that don’t feel like linear spaces
(That would be ironic because as someone doing math research, guess what I spend all my time making mental pictures of)
I’m usually sort of anti-anti-elitist, in that I think there’s often a good reason to prefer the “finer” versions of any given art form or craft, and while people do often use these preferences for signaling, I don’t think anyone should be quick to assume that it’s “just signaling” in any given case
but
I just cannot understand alcohol snobbery
I think it’s a combination of “I don’t understand what interesting variation is there, beyond ‘the cheap kinds tend to taste bad’ – the non-cheap kinds are just a bunch of slightly different flavored drinks" and “I dislike the personal qualities that alcohol snobbery signals.” (TBH, without the latter I probably wouldn’t worry much over the former)
As weird as it sounds, I find it really relaxing to read blogs and articles by religious conservatives. I think it’s because most political commentary makes me worry “oh no, what if this is all wrong?” (if it’s from someone I generally agree with) or “oh no, what if this is actually correct?” (in the opposite case). This is unpleasant.
But with religious conservatives, it feels like there’s a giant, solid barrier between them and me: if I’m ever in danger of having anything like Rod Dreher’s worldview, then I’ll have much bigger things to worry about than “what if this Rod Dreher blog post is more right than I think?” (for instance, the condition of my soul).
You know, I actually used to love AL Daily (the website) back in late high school in college, to the point of buying a shirt with their logo which I wore a lot in college
Early on I really liked it just because it linked to a whole bunch of different sorts of articles, introducing me to many things I didn’t know about (even if most people did), and at the time I found it I was having this sort of “awakening to the world” due to going off a medication, so it fit very well. For many years I still enjoyed it for this reason, although the things it linked were less and less novel to me and I started noticing the patterns and groaning at the lower-quality articles.
(An odd feature it had was that because the editors were conservative, their standards for conservative articles were much lower, with the result that they linked to some really good left-wing stuff and also to a bunch of awful, Breitbart-tier right-wing stuff – creating a strange sort of unintentional “left-wing bias.” Early on, I would eat all this stuff up with equal reverence, which led to some weird stuff coexisting in my head)
Anyway, the blurbs used to be better, I’m pretty sure, although it might have been my lower standards. They used to be written by Denis Dutton, the site’s founder, who IIRC was really good at writing these oversimplified yet still enticing little blurbs that had their own sort of charm (I imagine this accounted for much of the original appeal of the site). Since his death in 2010, the blurbs have of course been written by others, and some of the awkwardness may come from people badly imitating his style. (I remember the quality of article selection also declining sharply after Dutton’s death, although by that point I had already lost most of my interest in the site, and was probably using that as a convenient excuse to stop reading entirely)
A thing I really need to get myself to do less is “treating people’s stances on controversial fiction or other art as reflective of deep psychological or even ‘spiritual’ traits which make them deeply similar to me or deeply different from me”
I don’t actually believe that the world works this way, but it’s so easy for me to slip into thinking like this without realizing that I’m doing this
(It’s probably obvious that I was thinking about this because of the particular case “people who like Homestuck but dislike Act 6 are My People,” but there are various other examples, many of them even less well-founded than that. For instance, despite not having watched enough Doctor Who to judge, I’ve picked up “people who like Moffat’s run on Doctor Who despite its flaws are My People” simply because of Esther and Andrew Rilstone)
More stuff bouncing around in my head after having dumb anxiety about “real math” last night:
Most of the math that interests me is so-called “applied math.” And that’s a strange term that can mean a lot of things, including some legitimately bad ones. At first glance it seems strange for there to be such a thing as “applied math” as distinct from “applications” and “math” – isn’t there simply “math,” which people sometimes “apply” to things?
But there really is a distinct category that is usefully called “applied math.” Because there are things people often do in “applications” – numerical simulations, say, or statistical analysis – and the people applying these techniques can’t be expected to spend all day thinking about the techniques themselves as well as their actual field. They only have 24 hours in a day like anyone else. So there are people who are theorists of how to do those things.
The stuff these people think about tends to be (1) quite complicated, tricky and (arguably) fascinating in itself, (2) actually, honest-to-god useful for the people doing the applications, and (3) extremely “unsexy” as mathematics, typically involving nothing more than one-variable calculus and linear algebra, with some intermittent stretches of functional analysis. In the ordinary, contemporary sense of the word it is hard to even call it “mathematics.” Nonetheless, it’s awesome!!
“Numerical methods” / “numerical analysis” is my prototype case here. Nick Trefethen and John P. Boyd are fascinating, serious, and prolific scientists. But what exactly do they study? Is it “mathematics”? I mean, a senior physics undergrad could read and understand most of their papers. A lot of it could described very misleadingly as “theoretical physics” or “theoretical fluid mechanics.” Whatever it is, it is really cool and really important.
My other prototype case is statistical inference, i.e. the kind of stuff this book (big PDF) is about. Super important, lots of nuances and complexities, math content is all linear algebra and basic probability.
I guess my point here is that there is a lot of nontrivial and interesting stuff out there being done with what are “trivial” concepts from a mathematician’s POV. Maybe everyone knows this already? In any case, to say it explicitly: this is a niche that exists, and it’s my niche, and to me it is a very cool niche
I mean, to be fair. I hardly know any real math. I majored in physics in undergrad and my Ph.D program has “Mathematics” in the name but the very, uh, “applied” research I do would not be recognized as “mathematics research” by a mathematician. I enjoy reading “math tumblr” but it’s mostly over my head
That said, uh, I’ve been in a stretch, for a recent while, of basically doing nothing but research except basic life tasks, and somehow my anxious tired irrational (lol) brain is getting itself worked up trying to figure out if all of that work “didn’t count as work” because it wasn’t “real math” enough and, if so, whether working hard on my dissertation is actually, despite all appearances, a bad irresponsible thing
Sorry, I’m being crazy. I should really take tomorrow off
Evidently there is some “math versus the rationalists” conflict brewing up, and I for one could not be more pleased. This promises one metric fuckton of grade A Tumblr drama.
Bring it nerds!
this conflict makes me anxious because what if, after another day of working on my applied math ph.d dissertation for 10+ hours, i open up tumblr and it turns out i agree with The Rationalists and therefore am Not A Math
The repetitiousness is probably not unrelated to the fact that a lot of what is said and done in “the wider world” makes no sense to me, in a way that is unavoidably unpleasant to deal with
This isn’t “I don’t understand the social scripts people are following” so much as “I don’t understand why those scripts are the way they are.” I’m not (I think? hope?) unusually bad at predicting behavior, I’m just bad at imagining what it’s like to behave that way. It feels like I’m missing a lot of the standard repertoire of emotions or motivations or something
So you have this whole human world playing out, in a way I can model in my head, but it seems like the actors involved are aliens. Oh look, Zzarghl-3′s gas sacs have crossed the temperature threshold and now Zzarghl-3 is systematically killing every non-octopod in the area. “Well, that’s just how it is,” I say, “when your sacs are hot you just can’t help but want to kill some hexapods,” and Zzarko, listening beside me, sends a positive social signal by extruding an irregularly spaced tooth mesh, as though they think I really understand
This was actually easier to tolerate when I was younger and understood even less, because then I could convince myself that it would all make sense one day when I was mature enough to understand it, and that was nice and clear-cut, although it had its obvious pitfalls. But now I swing back and forth between “this thing I don’t understand is commonly done because it serves a need I don’t have” and “this thing I don’t understand is commonly done because I’ve figured out that it’s a bad idea and not everyone has,” and just about anything can send me oscillate between these two poles. A friend shared an article on Facebook, I don’t understand why this sort of article appeals to people enough to share it, it is because they have a richer palette of experience (am I inferior?) or because they don’t know these articles aren’t actually good (am I arrogant?)
Anyway, it is useful to me to have an area, and specifically a … discourse (lol), where I can say, yes, I am one of the people who is aware of this and aware of the standard repertoire of conversations, and sees why other people have those conversations, and even if there are parts I don’t understand, I’ve seen them before and have cached my evaluations of them so I don’t have to start oscillating again every time I see them
I keep wondering how many other people have this constant feeling – not the feeling that other people are unpredictable, but that other people are alien