incorporeal

I think about this stuff a lot. It's crazy how I, like, water plants with clean water that's literally on tap. Warm showers on-demand are a daily miracle.

Immediate illumination for why people don't quite feel like royalty despite all this would be achieved by replacing the aesthetic of this presentation with mis-matched uncomfortable and ugly furniture picked up off the side of the road, in a cheap split-level or ratty single wide with carpet that should have been replaced a decade ago and fucked-up window blinds et c., a kitchen table piled with a mess of homework and a pile of 20 medical bills and "EOB" letters and crap generated by a single brief visit to a hospital some of which are almost certainly in error and will take hours on the phone to correct, and so on. The presentation is upper-middle-class and comfy as hell. It's an aesthetic that my family is only slowly and haltingly and with much bargain-hunting (even Ikea is kinda spendy, IMO) struggling toward even with top-10% (for the US, let alone globally!) household income, and will never quite achieve because reality doesn't look like that. I know it's not the main point of the site, but the way they've elected to illustrate this notion is interesting in that it suggests a critique of, or elaboration on, the actual main point.

Like, I'm scrolling through this and my thoughts are on how expensive this environment is. I don't have my spices in cute well-sealing matching jars that look nice on a shelf... because that shit's expensive. Mine are mostly stale... because non-stale spices are expensive and take effort and education to track down. Hell some of mine are probably contaminated with heavy metals and I don't know it. Behind all of this is price-anxiety and ambient stress.

The core idea is sound and worth highlighting, but the reality of "so much is available extremely cheap in nearly unlimited quantity and variety! Isn't that fantastically amazing!" is exhausted parents doom-scrolling the Netflix catalog for an hour before going to bed having watched nothing, as they stress about whether their kids' dental appointment tomorrow is going to turn up anything so expensive they have to defer it and scrimp and save to pay for it.

The Annotated Turing is great. Thanks for mentioning the others, I'll check them out. I've read a little of Einstein's original work (in longish excerpts) and it was a nice enough read I'd welcome more of it, especially with expert guidance.

I think their deal is taking seriously the "college is about learning how to learn" thing, and direct engagement with the output of people regarded as greats in their fields on the assumption that, when possible, that's a good idea for obvious reasons (whether that's true or not in some rigorously-provable way, I can't say, but the reasons one might suspect that it is seem clear enough)

Some report it's pretty damn effective at that and leads to an impressive breadth of intellectual confidence in tackling material of almost any sort, but IDK. Anecdotes.

IIRC (it's been a while since I looked into their programs) they do a lot of supplemental reading of newer papers, articles, and book excerpts, and tend to used updated notation when it makes sense. Plus all their classes are heavily discussion-oriented so the reading is potentially enhanced and brought "forward" by whatever their instructors and peers bring to class in their heads.

> Take one of the easier problems from Rudin. Prove that a continuous function from the unit interval [0,1] to itself has a fixed point. I wonder how a student immersed in the 'classics' would even begin to tackle this.

I don't think they tend to train mathematicians, and I think for most students (graduating from any college or university) they never, ever, ever touch the specifics of their more-advanced e.g. math classes (I think this is true even for most programmers or engineers or what have you) any time in the entire rest of their lives, to the point that entirely forgetting most of that stuff by a decade or so later and suffering for that not at all is utterly typical. How much does it matter for students who aren't going into extremely narrow vocations that they come out of them unable to perform this specific task, without first needing to study further?

The usual defense of this fact is "well it's about learning how to learn, expecting the actual content to ever matter for any but a teensy tiny proportion of the students is unreasonable" in which case... see the rest of the post.

Seconding that that one stood out to me. Actually studying at-least large portions of it is typical at a handful of liberal arts colleges that favor the "great books" approach, at least a couple of which have pretty good reputations and are likely to have turned out some folks who work in tech (maybe the programmer next to you... maybe your manager's manager), plus it's pushed in great books home learning programs that surely at least a fair number of people have credibly attempted, even if the overwhelming majority of those who start such programs don't complete them (and it's usually very early in those programs, so even those who gave it a real shot but abandoned it before getting far were likely exposed to quite a bit of Euclid, though maybe they dropped off before On Conic Sections or other texts common in those reading sequences).

... plus it's relatively approachable as such things go, and short enough that closely reading most or all of it isn't a crazy idea, and it was recently-enough widely used as an actual textbook that between that and ongoing modern interest in its use in that capacity, there are tons of study-oriented editions of it floating around and still being published. I mean hell "recreational mathematics" is a thing and lightly-annotated-and-updated Euclid's a pretty solid text for people with that kind of interest to noodle on, with bonus historical appeal since it's super-old and also is assumed background for all educated people into at least the early 20th century, so pops up all the time in historical writing and literature.

Now, Newton? That's more like it. Nobody reads a large amount of his mathematics unless they're some variety of mathematical historian.

It’s impossible to “rigidly” define words like “chair” when faced with someone who’s committed to demonstrating ways you’ve failed to do it.

Luckily we never need to do that with words for them to be useful, even in legal contexts.