lying4fun

> In normal times people just want research that has life enhancing practical outputs

what about people who study birds, or say, olms? people want that kind of research? the people who are doing it surely do. astronomy and eg star watching in deep space? i could go on for days

people like doing mathematics, similarly to studying endemic organisms or other stuff of no direct utilitarian value

how many parents are happy to pay the fraction of taxes that go into something that their children might want to choose as a calling and fall in love with?

it’s okay to discuss whether something should be publicly funded, using “people want x kind of research” as a supposedly obvious or common sense argument is fallacious in the sense that it implies an idealised steelman model of the general public. that model is divorced from reality

my response is not to the post, but to the parent comment i replied to. the internal structure of mathematicians is their thing, if someone should step in, who? do you think that discrepancy matters?

mathematicians are primarily paid for teaching, and that's their primary function from the pov of the general society. i don't think anybody is debating that part of their profession? i read somewhere that the annual nsf grant budget for mathematics is 57 million, in total. even if it was just spiritual elegance, that's a reasonable number no?

different fields have different communication cultures, that’s not inherently bad. sacrificing inward focus is expensive from the pov of the insider; i see your points but not everything can be written for a general/wide audience. after all, the audience of the author are the specialists, since only specialists spent the effort to be able to engage with the work in depth. perhaps we disagree that mathematics is not a product that mathematicians are making?

what the work was meant to achieve in the first place is what the work was achieving in the first place. it was developing mathematics. if someone wants to use it, they are free to do so, or to write a blog article how it can be used by non experts. mathematicians do that themselves sometimes, but it’s not their job. myb there should be more incentives for them to do more of such work

i keep seeing this myth that mathematics has some purpose to do this or that, but somehow its purpose is least known to mathematicians, everyone else seems to know better

I’m sorry I can’t read past the first paragraph

pretty sure it’s the manim library 3b1b uses (unable to check for certain right now)

oof same here brother. chess is killing me. i go cold turkey but i come back eventually. one idea is to replace it with something and then ditch the replacement. or just capitalise next time there’s enough momentum built up for wanting to get rid off of it. i did do it before though, went not playing for months. but when it’s it’s back for good

didn’t open the video, but you can also set double or triple tap on back of your iphone shortcut for this. i have a red filter set up for late night doom scrolling

great article. the information debt and budget seem like very useful things to have in mind