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#foundation course in mathematics
musical-chick-13 · 2 years
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WHY ARE YOU MAKING ME NOTATE LINEAR SYSTEMS LIKE THIS
I KNOW HOW TO SOLVE THEM
BUT HAVING TO DO THEM THIS WAY MESSES ME UP AND I GET THE WRONG ANSWER
LET ME LIVE
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vacuously-true · 10 months
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It's so funny to me when people reblog math posts on this site and say shit like "this is homophobic" "this is an attack on queer people" like hello this is tumblr. OP is queer. Like we've got a HANDFUL of cishets here on mathblr but most of us are queer. Because it's tumblr. And everyone is queer on tumblr. If you see math on this site, a queer person probably put it there. Stfu about "gays can't do math" if it's on tumblr, gays can do it, that's why it's on tumblr.
And of course there is also a large and brilliant and beloved queer math community off of tumblr but I just think it's extra funny when people don't notice it ON TUMBLR.
Alan Turing didn't kick the Nazis' collective ass laying foundations for the field of computing and then go on to also lay foundations for the field of biomathematics, Leonardo Da Vinci didn't give us fundamental physical and mathematical diagrams used in engineering well beyond his time, Moon Duchin doesn't study the math of fair redistricting, Chad Topaz and Jude Higdon don't analyze criminal sentencing disparities, et cetera et cetera, for y'all to call math homophobic and an attack on the queer community.
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janmisali · 1 year
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‖ː‖`what makes you call numbers "discovered" rather than "invented"`?‖ː‖
sure, let's get into the philosophy of math. we're on the final round, great time for it
my math philosophy is somewhat close to what's called "fictionalism". math isn't exactly "true" so much as it's "canon"; "negative one squared equals one" is "true" in the way that "Luigi is Mario's brother" is "true". math happens to be a very useful story, and the canon of math has developed over time to make it more useful, but the axioms of mathematics (the foundational base assumptions that everything else stems from) weren't formed in a vacuum, they were created in the way they were so that mathematics could be a useful story.
in this framework, of course, it would make more rational sense to describe new numbers as "invented" rather than "discovered", but this is the difference between my thoughts on math and typical fictionalism. I believe that even though mathematics is mostly artificial, it's still useful to treat it as though it's "objectively true", within reason. like, sure, something might be pretty obviously a hack that was thrown onto existing canon either to solve a weird problem or to just see what would happen, but once it's accepted as canon, part of that canon is that it's "always existed", so from a lore perspective, it was discovered, not invented.
so, I use both terms, but when I'm talking about things in a more "in-fiction" lens, discussing the canon information about numbers, I prefer "discover" over "invent".
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Some Personal Thoughts on Disability in Enstars
disclaimer: disability is a very broad term that covers many different experiences. i will be talking about physical disabilities since i feel most comfortable doing so/have experience with them. obviously that ignores a Huge part of what disability and chronical illness is and can be. but i think it is beyond my capabilities to talk about experiences i don't know much about.
alt caption: i think ritsu is a good character and im trying to explain to myself why
this is sort of a long post, sorry.
content warnings: i talk about ableism and touch on related topics such as dehumanization and objectification and such below. individual parts of this post have their own cw's.
Enstars Writing, Beloathed
to get this out of the way; it is bad sometimes. this is discussed very often. it doesnt depend on the authors either, in my opinion, some writers will hit you with something really troublesome only to (seemingly accidentally) invent human emotion and compassion in a different story. i dont want to repeat what others have said eloquently but there is a fair amount of imperialist worldviews, xenophobia, just racism really, transphobia, ableism, and copaganda to be found in enstars. this isnt about x character being x thing, but about how it is very noticable when the author of a story holds these worldviews and they bleed into their stories.
so that is not the greatest foundation if youre looking for well-written disabilities. but i wouldnt be reading enstars if i didnt think it genuinely is really really good sometimes. in my opinion, the way disabilities are portrayed is a mixed bag overall but there are some extremely worthwhile bits that touched me quite a lot.
What I personally understand as Well-Written Disability
the way disabled people suffer often goes unnoticed, and disabled people dont have a platform to talk about oppression. a lot of life-changing issues can go unnoticed to those unnaffected by them, even if they are in broad daylight: underfounded or entirely lacking healthcare, the way many healthcare systems are marketbased and ethics are prone to suffer bc of this (even under 'welfare' capitalism), a lack of equal marriage, the inaccessibility of the most basic and necessary facilities, financing care and the dependency on family/loved ones (both a logistical and psychological problem), the huge stigma against disabled people, etc, etc, you get me....
we need to write about people who need care, to keep them in mind at all times. disabled people are not a minority in a mathematical sense but in a hierarchical sense. it is naive to think of them as "a substancial percentage" of populations. as we age, we inevitably all enter the stage of needing care at some point. SO to an extend, i want to claim its a topic that affects every single person. yet disabled people are rarely a central topic anywhere. it is not enough to acknowledge them, we need to plan and think with them in mind. and Write with them in mind, i guess.
SO when i see fiction grapple the topic, i am usually really happy, even if the portrayal isnt ideal. (critical, maybe, but generally speaking very happy) pointing out "badly" written disabled characters is obviously not as easy as calling someone out for uncritically saying "i think eugenics are a good idea!!!" through fiction. people with that sort of facist mindset exist of course but ableism does not end there.
if i were to single out things i see often: i think the most disappointing thing a story can do is to - mention a disability without it ever having an impact on people in the story (-> the disability is basically nonexistent, has no impact or relevance, outside of a theoretical mention) OR - uncritically use a disabled character as a mere plot devise, without granting them the ability to speak (-> dehumanization, a lack of understanding that disabled people are, well, People. they do shit.)
and then of course there is fetishization, both in a literal sense and in an inspiration porn sense and the problem of turning disability into a caricature for jokes (either to other disabled people for their behaviour/body or to create a sense of satisfying superiority by laughing at them) but i feel like those problems explain themselves.
to apply these to very basic examples: i think often something like a robotic sci-fi prosthetic is not a good way to represent a disability because it fails to represent what people go through irl and provides a "magic fix" without repercussions. here is a really good post about it. about the plot device issue... i think it is similar to what people often criticise as "manpain". a disabled person will never appear or speak, they are demoted to being the reason an able-bodied character acts a certain way, like a lifeless accessory. this doesnt always have to be bad, esp if its just a sideplot! but it can get tiring if the audience never gets to learn about other aspects of the unseen character in question and we are only introduced to their suffering.
all of this to talk about gacha idol boys. it is how it is. anyway, this is roughly my mental state when i tackle enstars.
disclaimer 2: i am really just a kogaP. this influences which characters i encounter when reading. there are tons of stories i just never looked at and there is SO MUCh lore i just dont know about. please lemme know if you have additions to stuff i say/understand a character better/have related story recommendations! tl;dr the sakuma bit will be long.
disclaimer 3: i genuinely adore every single character mentioned below and am always excited to learn smth new about them. if i criticize writing, that has nothing to do with that character or their fans. it is about the writers.
the most obvious example. Eichi (content warning for brief mentions of self harm and suicidal ideation)
everything eichi does, he does with the knowledge he will most likely die young. that is a truly dramatic setup.
but before i get back to that thought. it always felt to me like eichis illness(/es) lack a certain sense of conciseness? i do not think you need to put a name and diagnosis on it for it to be relatable and real to readers, tbh!! though to achieve believability, there needs to be a good amount of consistency. what i can recall off the top of my head is the following:
he breaks down/straight up blacks out frequently due to weakness and dizzyness
measures were taken to secure his safety in those situations (the infamous Eichi-kun Gauge as seen in Element)
his stamina is seriously low
he coughs a lot
we saw him cough up blood (Daydream)
he relies on long hospital stays because his health needs to be monitored and/or supported this closely
he stays inside a lot (hinting towards problems with his immune system?)
being healthy enough to eat unhealthy food is a big deal to him, so there are dietary restrictions/it was necessary to precisely control what he eats
his grandfather, who died recently, is considered an outlier for how long he lived (so it IS hereditary)
which..... could be a lot of things...? or, more likely: a culmination of many things at once. if you have headcanons on eichis health, please lemme know!
but in addition to eichis terminal illness, there is a second quality to him that seperates him from most disabled people: he is extremely wealthy. and his wealth is fundamentally important to stories. usually illness and poverty go hand in hand, since incame is tied to the ability to work, which worsens an already bad situation. no matter how limited eichis actions are because of his body, the possibilties offered by his wealth make him a central figure in every overarching plot. in addition to this, his family is well aware of his consitution and he is a patriarchal leading figure to them, the head to their coporate hierachy. eichi is free of the things that usually rid the chronically ill of their safety and power: society (he is an idol and popular) and money (he is the richest boy in japan). if youd ask me, i think that while being chronically ill is of course physically taxing, the worse problem is the economic state it puts you in. eichi simply overcomes this? yes, he is terminally ill, his situation is terrifying. but he has an extraordinary amount of control while he lives. more than a poor yet able-bodied person may have.
his unique circumstances enable him to be incredibly active. this is so fun to read about in my opinion. its a fascinating setup to me. without casting any sort of moral judgement on his actions and the antagonistic role he plays; he is, excuse me for my phrasing here, a disabled power fantasy. (at least to me)
this is a double-edged sword to him. because of who he is as a person (ambitious, cunning, ruthless, diligent)
he lives in relative safety but his strong ambition and financial ability to fulfill his dreams tempt him to go past his limits. because his remaining lifetime is uncertain, the need to preserve the body he is given seems uneconomical (a mindset his upbringing and education as an heir to his family would have enforced imo) he is bound to break down sooner or later anyway. i think he begins to see himself and his body as a tool to achieve his goals and neglects spending time on anything BUT working towards them. so the moment he runs out of goals (like at the end of Element), his reason to "remain" becomes futile.
it really struck with me how he appears in Blackbird - emaciated, pathetic, purposefully neglected because he chose to be neglected and weak in an act of self harm bc denying medical attention (something that couldnt have happened otherwise) wataru has to remind him that no one died and the obvious connection to make is that the eccentrics are physically unharmed and starting over, that they should not be a source of guilt to eichi. but i think this is just as much about eichi himself. he might have expected to die since he left the hospital and overexhausted himself at school and as an idol. he didnt die though. it was a real possibility and seemed likely but he didnt. the neglect and indirect self harm here point out, to me, that he saw the "role" he gave himself as fulfilled at that point and waited to die.
eichi stands over economic or social factors that could ostracize and dehumanize him but funnily enough he manages to do so himself by treating his body as a tool and his happiness as an option that got overshadowed by a need to succeed.
this vulnerability makes him, despite how vague the descriptions of his illness are and despite how unrelatable his wealth is, a very satisfying character imo. it is engaging to me. certain limits are removed for him but he created new ones, specifically because he did not see himself as something worth sustaining once he becomes useless. imo, eichi applied the idea that a lifes worth can be measured in its ability to function in an industry to himself. and spiralled over it, entirely inverting his uncanny amount of bodily autonomy. it is clear how the situation he is in worsens his mental health like that. and how his mental health in turn worsens his physical health. it is inseperable.
i cant really get into !! era eichi because i genuinely just dont... know enough. the fine tradition of having a weekly H-Day stands out, though. after all, eichi has new bigger ambitions and is, once again, inviting his own ruin through overexhaustion. so his friends (the new addition of having friends is essential) had to forcefully make him stop for at least one day a week. that is pretty big. i think.
this is true for many marginalized existences so it of course applies to disabled people: if neither your surroundings nor yourself permit you to feel human and therefore assign your person an inherent worth and lovability... sometimes you need a friend to do so!!! social circles are the best support structure for your health.
The Sakuma Family
(i will get into ritsu and rei seperately later on. there are just a few concepts i want to get out of the way that apply to both of them.)
so... to get a little theoretical; the concept of "disability" relies on the concept of a "normative" human existence. "disability" is an otherness and can therefore easily be seen as a "monstrocity" in the eyes of ignorant people, something that instils fear. (there is a reason why a lot of horror exploits disabled bodies as a source of terror and uses mental hospitals as settings) from an able-bodied point of view it seems "desirable" to be a "normative human", yet the disabled person knows that is not a possibility and knows their worth and place as a human in human spaces. at least ideally. able-bodied people sometimes lack this understanding. there is nothing to be desired about an able body or fixed about a disabled body, beyond what medical care can do for ones quality of life.
if you have read operetta, this is all very familiar;
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operetta, chapter 17 and, well, here we are. vampires. a very basic truth about the sakuma family that i hate to see denied is that they are human. there is nothing supernatural about them. they are just disabled. or, to turn the idea around, if one was to assign them vampiristic traits and such... is vampirism not a disability and should be taken seriously as such? if you consider the limits a vampire has while coordinating through their life, is that not... strangely just a disabled experience? (MINUS THE KILLING PEOPLE OBVIOUSLY but much modern fiction is sympathetic towards vampires instead and does not display them as violent)
anyway, to hear it from the horses mouth (the horse is rei):
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operetta, chapter 19 the sakuma family is a curious case. their condition is hereditary though the severity varies from person to person. it comes up in many stories but for the most part i am thinking about operetta, resurrection sunday, and devils right now. how did this all start? what made an entire family turn to live as vampires, with blood ceremonies and all that? what bizarre kind of generational trauma is this?
(and, while it does not play a role as important as it did for eichi, they are rich. this is important to mention. many normal experiences just dont apply to them because wealth makes them immune. ... how did the sakumas become this influential anyway.)
for an unspecified but long time, an entire family managed to mentally entirely seperate themselves from the rest of humanity because of their chronical illness. personally, i have no doubt this is the result of a world that othered them first. whether the main motivator at play here is a defensiveness towards a society that cannot understand you or an internal need to turn hardships into an identity that can be carried with pride. it takes a considerable amount of emotional strength and planning for the "hey we are human actually" declaration in operetta to occur.
they are, weirdly, what people mean when they talk about a "toxic anti-recovery mindset". (an expression i struggle with because this sort of rhetoric is often used to discriminate against disabled people who speak up for themselves or ask for accomodations. but that aside) it is an amount of pride that leads to internal self destruction.
of course, as is the case with every single character i write about in this post, a lot of it has to do with aesthetics and being chuuni to sell gacha cards. so we know the reason behind the reason. but it makes for some bizarre in-universe implications.
but in any case, the fact that their identity as false vampires is something they have always carried, that modern society sees as "mystical and sexy" has a hilarious side effect: their disability becomes marketable under the guise of vampirism. it is hard to recover from that.
so again, we have a double-edged sword: to present ones medical condition as a "persona" declares it as a performative act, something that is done to bring joy to an audience. personal detriment is not considered here, since it stops being a part of ones being and starts to become "work". the time and place of ones symptoms has to overlap with the time and place of ones performances. or people will hate you for your uncontrollable illness. however, rei and ritsu are both also able to carry their condition with a sort of playfulness. it is almost something like the act of "reclaiming" when they purposefully choose to larp a little for fun. usually, when a scene mentions their disability in the context of comic relief, they have control over the situation that unfolds and even initiate it and invite others to laugh alongside them. this can be a slippery slope to getting harrassed of course.... but i am rather baffled by the amount of dominance they have in social interactions. so it just reads as a healthy amount of dark humour to me.
this, and the consistent writing of their symptoms, and the ability to easily compare it to real existing illnesses, easly make them my favourite instance of written disabled people in the series. their illness has an impact on their behaviour and it is detrimental! and they are both very human in the way they attempt to cope. there is a certain realism to it. idek.
many people seem to headcanon them with myalgic encephalomyelitis, which is a really good explanation, and i personally want to suggest narcolepsy. the point being, there is room to accurately assign them a realistic relatable and understandable condition, even if nothing is ever named in canon. and of course they are mentioned to have an iron deficiency.
bear with this slightly "out there" theory for a moment: have you or a friend ever tried to get a compensation for your disadvantage at school or uni? it can be really hard to do, if it is possible at all, even if it is something very simple (more time, a slightly different enviroment, the ability to drink or sit, etc) yumenosaki is a school for performance arts, mainly idols. bold statement: it might genuinely be easier to get/explain an accommondation for your "idol quirk" (something that would be actively fostered), than for your disability. not that yumenosaki is very strict or asks for a lot anyway, its just something that has been on my mind.
here is another funny thing i have been thinking about: both of them crave juice, soda, and fruit - sugary yet fresh stuff. i feel like this is not uncommon for people who suffer from excessive tiredness and fatigue, the body subconsciously wishes for some sugar intake to "wake up".
Inventing a Guy to Cope. Rei
funny title aside... he... did that... ? rei is a curious example of how different mostly unrelated traumas can overlap. he had no childhood, thanks to his family that considered him "mature" at a very young age and his early status as a child star. and his bad health is a miserable addition to this. it is quite scary to image how pressured to do right he felt growing up and how that resulted in the fragmented distanced way he views himself; reinventable, and ultimately unknowable. (to others AND himself)
despite his bad health he has always been working and performing "well". he was praised for his remarkable talents but rarely had the chance to stop and patch himself up. whether this was a result of a pushy enviroment or his personality as a people pleaser who cannot show weakness and imperfection is hard to tell. maybe both.
the state he is in in Crossroad is fascinating to me. he all but directly lists the criteria of depression to keito when he attempts to explain his sorrows. he is restless, rowdy, mentions later on that he enrolled in yumenosaki against his familys wishes. he is very much searching for joy and his own identity in the middle of a health emergency. this has to do with the way he was raised, only knowing how to exist for and serve others, how he was made to sell a made-up version of himself, but i also believe it has to do with the fact he has started to exclude himself from his familys traditions and values. he started to cast away the uncertain "monstrosity" existence of his family (as well as the false idolhood others assigned him) and instead embraces humanity as a chronically ill person.
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crossroad, i forgor which chapters
this of course marks a starting point of change that later results in him making up the wagahai pronouns persona - something he specifically created with the intention of looking vulnerable and weak. because he yearned to do less, to recover from years of exhaustion.
in a way, i want to say both, the ore pronouns persona and the wagahai pronouns persona, are attempts to cope with expectations he cannot handle physically or mentally. one relies on masking, on appearing stronger than he actually is and therefore invulnerable, and the other relies on exaggerating his weakness, in an attempt to finally let others recognize it. i think as a disabled person, both are performances one has to learn in order to "function" in everyday life, while remaining safe from serious harm (doing badly at ones job or classes, angering others that hold power over your life). since ones circumstances are often hard to grasp for someone who does not share the same illness, there is no choice but to simplify and exaggerate until symptoms become tangible concepts or to just brave through it, at the cost of ones health and future time.
rei in particular, for better or for worse, is incredibly capable when he needs to be and unfortunately that means others will often not take his health seriously because they saw him function just fine the other day. this is a general problem but an obvious offender in that regard is koga, who comments on reis fatigue constantly and loves to create a bit of a high expectations toxic work enviroment (and, to be fair, rei terrorizes him too. kogas hostility towards rei is sometimes ableist but not really rooted in ableism. after all koga is highly aware how performative the wagahai persona can be and is a huge motivational and inspirational factor in reis life. its a whole complex)
!! era holds some positive changes. his mental need to please other people remains a persistent source of trouble for him (and others) but he seems to really let his body recover and lives a more nocturnal life. both kuro and kaoru mention that he looks more healthy (in succession match???? i think??) since he finally stopped enforcing a normal day/night cycle on his body just to comply with social norms. you can indeed be very human even if you break human-made rules.
(additional comment: "becoming human" is of course a theme for each of the eccentrics and not uniquely tied to disability, it very much has to do with the objectification one goes through as a public figure. but this is a post about disability and it really fits in well. so here we go)
Literally Just a Realistic Teenager. Ritsu
ritsu, while not really being among my favourite characters, is my favourite instance of a disabled character in enstars. partly because of his writing and partly because my personal experiences overlap with his so much it sometimes is painful - but always extremely satisfying. just had to get that out.
ritsu is perhaps the most visibly ill. he blacks out and sleeps where he stands, everywhere, without control and often requires other peoples (well, mostly maos) assistance in order to remain safe when this happens. he also repeated a year of school, specifically because of his disability.
he is painfully aware of this. that he looks ill, that he behaves ill, that he is an underachiever compared to others of the same age, even to people younger than him.
ritsu developed unique behaviours to deal with this: he is very dependent and clingy and often asks others to do things for him, unapologetically. that does not mean asking for help doesnt hurt his pride, just that it is the most viable strategy for everyday survival that he ended up with. other than that, he clings more to the vampire identity than rei does. either to defy his older brother or, and this is important imo, because it is the one safety net he has to fall back on that makes him feel "normal" and like he is a regular being. albeit not human. no matter how much others might blame him for his shortcomings or how much he is a failure in the eyes of society, he is very regular for a "vampire". under the logic developed by his family, he is just a child, and the world at large is to blame. it is an easier truth to accept than facing systematic injustice and prejudice in a human world.
the stories i mentioned in another part above aside, i really love what ensemble band does for him; ritsu gets extremely irritated with mao in the prologue, seemingly out of nowhere. his character is allowed to express this sort of anger and to take it out on others, even if it is unjust and misguided. it is not pretty and it isnt good behaviour but it is a very heartfelt emotion to me.
its obvious that he cannot compete with others and that this will always been seen as his personal fault instead of a circumstance he cannot influence. and more than that: no one appreciates the real efforts he makes. for instance, getting himself out of bed in time for classes is difficult for regular teenagers and straight up hellish for ritsu. but he manages to do so a lot later on. instead of acknowledging that this is a real accomplishment on his part and possibly really exhausting and bad for his comfort in the long run, this is seen as doing the bare minimum.
while it is not correct, the malice ritsu sometimes treats others with comes from an comprehensible place. able-bodied ignorance can appear as purposeful slights made by those more privileged than him.
yet he learns to conform. his friends are important to him. knights success is important to him. (thought mental health probably played a role here too and made things even harder prior to his third year of high school) and yet;
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seven bridge, chapter 24, but its really just an example i had at hand
the remarks stay the same. his peers still cannot help but brand him as "just lazy", even if they are kind and understanding otherwise and habour no ill intent. so i would like to ask: how long can he keep this up? how hard is this on him?
i dont think i need to explain just how common and hurtful it is to be accused of "laziness". probably the single most irritating comment someone with fatigue will hear every single day.
however, on the flipside, ritsu has perhaps the most people who care for him in comparison with other characters, though they sometimes complain (communication is hard, care is hard, everyone in enstars is very young and i cannot bring myself to see those comments as malice. its a mixture of ignorance and ones own burdens) there is mao, obviously. tsumugi is a very funny example. knights, of course, in particular naru. (at least based on my humble knights readings)
quite interesting how he just decided mao is his caretaker, now and in the future. i shared a few of my thoughts on caretaking here. this is.... a huge responsibility to just put on someones shoulders, to say the least. he shouldnt be doing this but i think it speaks for itself that this is a problem that is on his mind. ITS IS A REALLY IMPORTANT TOPIC TO BRING UP, especially since, the younger you are, the harder it is to get insurance to pay for your care. yes, he is often just teasing mao, but ritsu is looking for ways to get through life. by learning to be as independent as possible, whenever possible. though often you really just find yourself at the mercy of friends and family.
Inter-Sibling Violence
apologies, i will be done with the sakumas soon. i didnt know how to fit this in at the start.
the relationship between rei and ritsu, as people with the same disability who experiences different symptoms and challenges, is worth thinking about. infighting within people of the same disability is very common since experiences can be so different, there are no universal truths or opinions. with different lifestyles come different expectations for what is "normal" and sometimes pressure and social norms can cause someone to shift blame onto others who have no achieved the same things in life.
rei and ritsu are said to have been very close as small children and likely depended on each other a lot. i can see how reis fostering nature and ritsus needy nature developed alongside each other and enforced each other.
time and time again, rei says that he is a "less severe" case, that ritsu has it worse. he jets around the world because he feels forced to do so, when ritsu just wanted emotional support from him to begin with. ritsu stayed alone at home, sheltered and likely caged by their families convictions. but! i want to suggest the following: as much as it hurt him, it was important for reis health to be away from his family, too. i dont think staying there would have been good for him. his absence and the experiences he made away from home were an important catalyst for the positive family development we see in operetta.
of course, rei means well. he cares. he is trying to have a positive impact. yet from ritsus point of view, all of this must feel terribly condescending, especially with how much rei babies him. there is just one year between them. this is barely anything when it comes to sibling inferiority complexes the brain can make up. rei, who is successful and famous and beloved and, most importantly, proclaims to have it "easier than him", is trying to find a cure for him. from ritsus point of view this must be unbearable. their lives are so different when they basically started at the very same point of origin.
more than that, rei shoulders the sketchy blood rituals himself, out of love of course, but if one was more jaded, one could assume he doesnt think ritsu would be able to stomach the responsibility.
you will always compare yourself to your siblings in unhealthy ways but ritsu is just doing this on hard mode, i fear.
HHHRAGAHHHH GHHH ghgghrhgh. Niki
nikis writing is... driving me up a wall sometimes, to say the least. dont get me wrong, i love him. to an extend i understand that his single-mindedness and shallowless has purpose to it. in fact, i adore these character traits. he really seems to be behind four mental barriers at all times, unable to let deeper thoughts touch him, lest they make him succumb to despair. (yet nikis specific flavour of menhera cannot quite shine since... well, he has to stand next to himeru all the time)
the descriptions we get of nikis illness are nonsensical, at least to my knowledge. you could imagine he has something like hyperthyroidism. this never really gets explored though. at some point ENGstars mentions he has "gastroptosis or whatever" (the "or whatever" is part of his dialogue - niki really doesnt give a fuck), which makes no sense at all. weirdly enough, it would even be strangely in character if this was just a misconception.
so, can anyone take niki to a doctor? has this happened and i just wasnt there for it? there is no excuse why no one is considering medical care when it comes to him. except that he often is the butt monkey of jokes the writers want to make and has to stay available for it. more than that; his parents just left him alone like this? as a child? did he get an allowance at least? this cannot be legal, right? i wait for the day this comes up as a topic but i fear it is in vain. (please tell me if it actually did. i dont follow niki that closely) this is an unbelievable thing to do to a healthy child, yet alone one with a severe illness. we are basically looking at denial of assistance.
so many things surrounding nikis story are designed to make him as miserable as possible. i cannot help but feel that he exists purely as comic relief, for funny bickering, and superficial drama. i dont really like that at all, his misery just gets exploited.
EVEN SO... his self-image is actually really fascinating. as rinne likes to point out again and again, niki has no self-worth. he works two jobs, one of which he hates, he constantly gets into dangerous situations, and he will do anything just for some crumbs, and quickly forgets when others treat him badly. and of course, the worst bit:
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es!! main story, please dont make me go find it
to some degree, he just accepts this as something he deserves. there is no consideration for his own quality of life, somewhere along the lines it seems like he got conviced just surviving is all he gets. he internalized self-degredation to a dangerous degree and i never see anyone mention this mental affliction specifically as a comorbidity of his disability. to me, there is without a doubt a relation here. sure, maybe he would still fight with this otherwise, just because he had to witness his fathers fall from grace as a child and knows there is a stigma attached to his name now. but i think you can tell it is more than that, from the way he is ashamed to beg (even in a life or death scenario, as seen in hot limit), as if his condition was his own fault.
this circles back to the point i made earlier for eichi; how much nikis life is worth, is measured in his economical value.
of the characters i have spoken of so far, nikis is financially the most accurate to real life. there is no safety net for him, no convenient family wealth.
(at this point it feels important to mention that somehow rinne manages to be the only person entirely aware of the danger and desires to change nikis mindset, YET he is a huge strain on nikis health. i dont know how those two function.)
Just a Lamb. Tatsumi
tatsumis specific trauma is a unique one: while most other characters struggle with conditions they were born with or developed as they grew up, tatsumis injury is the result of strain and violence. those are two different pairs of shoes, though the outcome may be similar. whether it is worse to be born into circumstances you cannot escape or to have to live with having something thrust upon you unfairly is up to personal judgement. pain is not really quantifiable. its just important to keep in mind, i think. under the circumstances tatsumi grew up in, he has his own burdens. it is very easy in many ways to compare and contrast him with eichi. of course this applies to how they used their bodies too: as an expandable resource. they had ideals for their school life (and beyond) that just seemed far more important and they both ended up in hospital because of this. (+ we know tatsumis surroundings were purposefully manipulated to destroy him)
and, of course, tatsumi got attacked later on. he never really talks about it directly but his legs seem to talk for him, in ways.
the story does not quite make it clear whether his occasional weakness and pain are the result of old injuries or entirely psychosomantic, and i dont think there is a real need to know, as a reader. in fact, in a certain light, i think it can be considered good that we dont know for certain: it would be relevant for tatsumi himself, sure, since it would influence which kinds of treatments and help he can seek out. however, i think the ambiguity may foster a certain level of sympathy in readers.
often psychosomatic problems are not taken seriously enough in real life: they cannot be proven physically and they dont fit into the neat little boxes that the ICD wants you to believe exist, so they cannot be defined on paper or easily explained to doctors or insurance providers.
to foster empathy with his situation requires his character to be lovable and for the narrative to treat him with care as well. which is thankfully the case. alkaloid are dear with him and, despite the fact he cannot perform in his work enviroment all the time, he is very respected for his other skills. he is a well-rounded person.
all that aside. it is absolutely worth to mention tatsumi pre-injury, too. he came up with a form of small-scale universal income among a semi-union at school. without getting too much into all that. (obbligato really seems like required lecture in the realm of enstars stories) the entire concept strives for social equality and is extremely anti-discrimination. it fundamentally goes against the idea that someone needs to "deserve" care, and is the opposite of the mindset i described with eichi and niki above. he never had to make first-hand experiences with disability to be extremely compassionate. this seems really rare among people in real life, even those who preach altruism.
While we are Here. K.... Kaname
as mentioned, i spoke a little about kaname before. so i wont get into the complex of caregiving.
it is extremely satisfying we got to meet kaname, if only for one event story. he does not have to remain a faceless motivation behind himeru and tatsumis lives, he thankfully became humanized.
the entire conflict around kaname at the moment is a matter of bodily autonomy. how much of your person can be in anothers hand, ethically? there is no excuse for the theft of his (idol) identity through himeru but the damage is done now. ideally, you dont want any part of yourself to depend on others but the disabled reality is that this is very often impossible. especially for kaname. there simply is no one else who could be responsible for him right now and, to be fair, at least when it comes to medical care, himeru seems to behave very responsibly.
repeating what has been said in the other post but i am worried for kanames seemingly inevitable reintroduction to the story. he has been in a comatose state for a year. if he wakes (since this is fiction, it is possible to exchange 'if' for 'when', realistically it really would be an 'if' though) he would most likely be confronted with permanent neurological and physical damage and years of rehabilitation. at least logically. (not to mention the psychological shock) would this be written with compassion and a sense of realism? it makes for a compelling source of conflict and emotional hardships that could be extremely worthwhile to explore. i just cant entirely bring myself to trust the writers with this one but i would love to be convinced otherwise.
that is, of course, if they dont somehow just skip rehabilitation entirely and declare it a miracle healing.....
imo, the in-game discourse between characters is just as important as his future development. i just really hope autonomy and recovery will be large topics.
He doesnt go here, but. Adonis
so bringing him up just really feels necessary within the context of this post because of his interests. one of adonis hobbies is sign language and accessibility.
this is, i think, maybe the best thing they ever did with his "protector" persona. it just fits so well, it is a direct conversion of ideals to actions. knowing undead songs have been translated for a deaf audience in canon is extremely wholesome and uplifting, even if it is entirely inconsequential for the story and just something that gets mentioned.
(now that sandstorm is out on engstars, you can check that out too for further mentions of this! if i could wish for one thing, it would be for the stories to acknowledge that there are tons of independent sign languages and i would love to know which one adonis and rei speak... you ever think about how adonis speaks like four languages fluently. at least.)
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nightless city live, chapter 3
everyone in undead loved that and supported the vision. to see koga, who is usually against anything but musical performances and wishes to express art freely, praise the idea really puts deaf identity and accessibility in a great light. it is a very positively radical forwardthinking idea.
so, i just wanted to mention that. adonis is treated horribly by the narrative a lot, it entirely fails to grasp his identity and is insensitive towards foreign cultures, but i would die for him i think.
finishing thoughts
like mentioned, please absolutely let me know if you have different related ideas or recommendations. or corrections, or worries over something i wrote!!! learning and improving is always great. i am sorry i could not get into so many other characters, the ones i wrote about are those that i feel confident enough to comment on. in the future i would love to meet maguro!! i just havent really read any mama stories at all :'''3
i feel like i barely said anything at all and barely engaged with text enough since i didnt get into any character specifically. i would love to write another post about ritsu or rei or both. a draft for it has been sitting around for ages (as did the draft for this post, lol) but i hope someone will find an interesting thought in here somewhere.
all in all, enstars is actually... surprisingly nice to read for the disability in there??? even if it is disappointing in handling many other things. of course, the writings not always ideal (i read hidden beast just the other day and the ableism in there took years off my life) but often its really nice. nothing hits quite like seeing real emotions and experiences through some metaphorical stylized anime lense, you feel.
anyway thank you for listening. i am actually for real done now.
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butchgtow · 2 months
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Introduction to Armchair Activism
Fundamentals
"Yes, Everyone on the Internet Is a Loser." Luke Smith. Sep 3, 2022. YouTube.
An activist movement can be a place to build community with like-minded people, but action is its foremost purpose, not community. To allow yourself and other activists to remain effective, you are obliged to abandon your personal dislikes of other individual activists. Disagreements are worth discussion, but interpersonal toxicity is not.
Connect with in-person community and do not unhealthily over-prioritize online community. Over-prioritization of online community is self-harm.
Luke is a loser, but his channel is teeming with entry-level digital literacy information and advice pertaining to healthy use of technology for us cyborgs.
"Surveillance Self-Defense: Tips, Tools and How-Tos For Safer Online Communication." Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Hackblossom, outdated, is discontinued. The EFF project Surveillance Self-Defense is up-to-date, comprehensive, and follows personal educational principles of simplicity and concision.
To learn more about general (not focused solely on personal action) cybersecurity, visit Cybersecurity by Codecademy and Cyber Security Tutorial by W3Schools. Both contain further segueways into other important digital literacies.
Direct recommendation: Install and set up the linux distribution Tails on a cheap flash drive.
Direct recommendation: Develop your own home network security schema.
Direct recommendation: Always enable 2FA security for Tumblr, disable active / inactive status sharing, and learn to queue reblogs and posts to protect against others' interpretations of your time zone.
Direct recommendation: It's both possible and relatively simple to host your own instance of a search engine using SearXNG.
Zero-Knowledge Architecture.
As a remote activist (even if also a hybrid activist), none of your action should be taken on, using, or interfacing with non-zero-knowledge-architecture services. Tumblr is, of course, a risk in and of itself, but you should not be using services provided by companies such as Google, Microsoft, or any others based in or with servers hosted in 13-eyes agreement nations.
Search for services (email, word processor, cloud storage) which emphasize zero-knowledge architecture. Businesses whose services are structured as such cannot hand over your data and information, as they cannot access it in the first place. If they cannot access the majority of your metadata, either - all the better.
Communications for Armchair Activism
"Technical Writing." Google.
Contained within the linked page at Google Developers, the self-paced, online, pre-class material for courses Technical Writing One, Technical Writing Two, and Tech Writing for Accessibility teach activists to communicate technical concepts in plain English.
"Plain Language." U.S. General Services Administration.
Plain language is strictly defined by U.S. government agencies, which are required to communicate in it for simplicity and quick, thorough comprehension of information.
"Explore Business Law." Study.com.
Extensive courses are offered to quickly uptake principles of business law such as antitrust law, contract law, financial legislation, copyright law, etc. Legal literacy is often the difference between unethical action of a business and its inaction. Legal literacy is also often the difference between consideration and investment in your policy idea and lack thereof.
"Business Communication." Study.com.
Now that you're able to communicate your prioritized information, you may also initiate writing with bells and whistles. While other activists care most about the information itself, business communication allows you to communicate your ideas and needs to those who you must convince worthiness of investment to and win over.
Logic.
Learn it through and through. Start with fallacies if you're better at language and work your way backwards to discrete mathematics; start with discrete mathematics if you're better at maths and work your way forwards to fallacies, critical literacy, and media literacy. State that which you intend to state. Recognize empiricism and rationalism for what they are. Congratulations: you are both a mathematician and a law student.
Economic Literacy for Armchair Activism
"Microeconomics." Khan Academy.
"Macroeconomics." Khan Academy.
The globe operates on profitability. Women's unpaid labor is a massive slice of the profitability pie. While it's possible to enact change without understanding all that drives the events around you, it's impossible to direct or meaningfully manipulate the events around you beyond your scope of comprehension.
Understand economics or be a sheep to every movement you're active in and to every storm that rolls your way.
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At the FTC, a quiet, profound shift on antitrust
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Sometimes, a tiny change in the political process comes along that makes you realize just how far things have come — a change that’s both substantive and symbolic. Something like this terse, six-paragraph memo from the FTC, a deceptively anodyne wrapper for an explosive moment:
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/events/2022/05/ftc-justice-department-listening-forum-firsthand-effects-mergers-acquisitions-technology
Here’s the crux: “The FTC and DOJ will host a series of listening forums to hear from those who have experienced firsthand the effects of mergers and acquisitions beyond antitrust experts, including consumers, workers, entrepreneurs, start-ups, farmers, investors, and independent businesses.”
If you aren’t chest-deep in weird antitrust lore, this probably seems like it’s par for the course. But believe me, this is a hell of a moment — a moment of restoration, a return to a vital, long-dormant principle in American governance: the idea that corporations should not be allowed to ruin the lives of the people around them.
This was the idea behind antitrust in the first place. As Senator John Sherman said to Congress as he labored to pass his landmark antitrust law in 1890: “If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life.”
https://marker.medium.com/we-should-not-endure-a-king-dfef34628153
“If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade.”
This was the foundation of American antitrust: the idea that companies of a certain scale would, by dint of that size, be in a position to exercise the autocratic control of a monarch, and return America to a tyrannical monarchy cloaked in the pretense of industry.
For nearly a century, this was the bedrock of antitrust enforcement, the idea of “harmful dominance” — that companies could attain a scale that made them a danger to the very idea of democratic control and legitimacy.
Rich people seethed and chafed and schemed to overturn this. They wanted to rule as if they were kings, wanted to avoid the scourge of what Peter Thiel calls “wasteful competition” (“competition is for losers” — P. Thiel). They bankrolled and promoted a deranged conspiracist named Robert Bork — Nixon’s solicitor general — who advanced a truly bizarre theory of antitrust.
Bork was a conspiracist, whose book “The Antitrust Paradox” maintained the historically unsupportable nonsense that what Sherman, Clayton and the other legislators behind America’s antitrust laws really wanted was to block “harmful monopolies” and leave the “efficient monopolies” to grow and rule, as benign kings:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down
Now, this is untrue. It’s not just untrue, it is unhinged. No reading of either the laws in question or the debates preceding their passage supports this idea. It is a fantasy, alternate history. A lie. But it was a convenient lie, because if it were true, then all the rich people promoting Bork’s fringe theory could create monopolies and rule as kings.
Ronald Reagan bought it. After a failed bid to put Bork on the Supreme Court — he failed his confirmation hearing so spectacularly that anyone who self-immolates in DC is said to be “borked” — Reagan adopted his antitrust theories. They spread around the world thanks to other monsters of the era, Thatcher, Mulroney, Kohl, Pinochet.
The idea infected the judiciary: the cushy Manne seminars, held every summer at a luxury resort, flew in 40% of the Federal bench for indoctrination seminars on Bork’s theories. These judges learned that the only people who should be consulted on antitrust matters are economists, specifically the kind of economist who trades in the kinds of highly abstract, inscrutable mathematical models that Bork and his University of Chicago colleagues specialized in.
Whenever a merger was in question, the companies could pay a Chicago economist to build a model that proved that the merger was “efficient” and thus good for “consumer welfare.” If that merger resulted in prices skyrocketing — the one thing “consumer welfare” was supposed to concern itself with — those same economists could be paid to produce a new model to prove that the price increase wasn’t the result of a monopoly — it was due to oil prices, or labor prices, or the phase of the moon.
Pre-Bork, everyone who was harmed by a monopoly had standing to seek redress from a regulator. If monopolies resulted in pollution, or unsafe working conditions, or corruption, or the annihilation of a city’s character or a town’s way of life, the people affected could tell their stories to a regulator and expect that their experiences would be factors in the calculus as to whether to prosecute the monopoly.
But after Bork, the only people whose input mattered was Chicago-style economists whose mathematical models couldn’t be interrogated by laypeople. They became court sorcerers to the competition regulators, and when petitioners came before the regulator, they would slaughter a goat, read its steaming guts, and pronounce that “consumer welfare” was doing fine. If the petitioner had the temerity to say that they read something different in the offal, the sorcerer could smirk and dismiss them: “Look who thinks he can read the economy in the guts of a goat? He didn’t even get a economics degree from the University of Chicago!”
For 40 years, antitrust has been a coma, sleeping while monopolies formed in every sector, destroying our planet, our regulatory integrity, our national prosperity, our public safety and the confidence of people in their democracies.
But as Stein’s Law has it, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” Something has to give. A new crop of “neo-Brandeisians” — lawyers, economists, activists, workers — has sprouted, insisting that Bork’s ideas have failed us and that they need to be set aside.
One of the most prominent of these is Lina Khan. Today, Khan is the chair of the FTC. Five years ago, she was a third year law student (!), whose landmark law review article, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” was a scorching indictment of Bork that tore through legal circles and upended orthodoxy:
https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox
Khan hasn’t been shy about her plans to restore American antitrust to its roots as a doctrine of economic liberty, in which workers and small business-people do not have the course of their lives determined by Sherman’s “autocrats of trade.”
She and the other top Biden antitrust enforcers — Tim Wu in the White House, Jonathan Kanter at the DoJ — worked to produce the Biden executive order on antitrust, a genuine landmark document specifying dozens of specific actions that the admin would take to blunt corporate power. Less than a year on, they’ve hit every milestone in that document.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/07/09/executive-order-on-promoting-competition-in-the-american-economy/
In January, the FTC and DoJ announced that they would be reviewing the agencies’ merger guidelines — again, something that sounds like business as usual to a layperson but really marks an enormous shift in American politics. The new guidelines will make it much harder for big companies to grow by merging with each other or gobbling up little businesses before they can become competitors.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/01/federal-trade-commission-justice-department-seek-strengthen-enforcement-against-illegal-mergers
And now there’s this week’s hearings, in which the FTC and DoJ will hear from “who have experienced firsthand the effects of mergers and acquisitions beyond antitrust experts, including consumers, workers, entrepreneurs, start-ups, farmers, investors, and independent businesses.”
With the exception of “consumers,” these are the people who, for 40 years, have been laughed out of the room by antitrust enforcers. The people who have been told that they have nothing to say when it comes to the way that giant corporations undermine our quality of life, freedom of action, and economic chances.
This may sound like normal activity for a competition regulator (because it should be normal), but this is extraordinary. For the first time in a generation and a half — in ten presidential administrations — everyday people will get a say on whether corporate power should be blunted.
This is huge.
[Image ID: Norman Rockwell's WPA painting 'Freedom of Speech,' depicting a working-class speaker rising to speak in a white-collar crowd at a town meeting.]
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humormehorny · 9 months
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Why don’t they teach mathematical logic earlier? It’s present in literally all the books you have to read anyway. Some algebra author is going to be like for vs real numbers a,b ≠ 0 there exists a ratio a/b that is also a real number. And most people can’t even read that. Like half of the book is completely inaccessible because logic is fucking wild and requires actual practice with.
I’m not saying that this stuff is incredibly hard; it’s not. However logic just isn’t taught even though it is clearly foundational.
Sets especially seem to trigger me. Like I think a lot of people struggle with trig specifically because this aspect of functions is just not taught well. Like of course the arcsin(x) isn’t defined for -pi/2 > x < pi/2. It would be so much better if we actually taught this stuff.
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unabashedly-so · 9 months
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🌹SDV Elliott HC 💃
Content warning: Americanized contexts ahead. 😅 Not pigeonholing SDV as American but I'm using Americanized regionalisms because that's the language I have to communicate I'm trying to portray. 🤷‍♀️
************
It takes a high heart level and a moderate intoxication level to bring it out, BUT Elliott has had years of ballroom dance under his belt.
I'm imagining a southern old-money style upbringing for him (subject to change) and he started being trained in different dances bc he was involved in whatever the male version of debutantes is.
he wasn't big into it at the time but yknow mommy issues he was a diligent well-mannered young man so he learned enough to pass by.
enter university and Prince Slut (freshman year) is finding all kinds of ways to get the tender physical touch and affection he craved as a child make friends and finds the uni's ballroom dance club
his foundation of skill and reputation make him insanely popular within the club so it becomes a genuinely healthy outlet for him.
he never takes it seriously in terms of competition; he's just there to have fun and make his partner shine but you KNOW he's flaunting and flexing along the way, like executing daring moves with his partner, showboating, getting so overly sultry with it, etc.
he gets so many numbers and so much ass whenever he goes out, it's upsetting.
anyway tl;dr he spends so much time on that and other social activities in college that he barely passes most of his classes and it's actually a huge regret of his but that's a whole 'nother post
he stops dancing after uni for the most part as he has to reprioritize his life
but that doesn't mean that he lets it go, oh no.
get enough drinks in this man and enough room to move and he's 10years younger ready to sweep anyone off their feet.
He'll trot with the foxes, swing from one coast to another, cha-cha real smooth, give him tequila and he'll give you salsa, etc etc
of fucking course he can waltz but like 1) ya Basic, and 2) dinner and a movie first (and let's make it Viennese, for the love of Yoba)
he'd much rather rumba or tango tbh but only with someone he really cares about. poor boy'll catch feelings quick rocking hips like that.
which like. alternate ending to the 6heart scene has him inviting you to dance with him to blow off some steam. nothing too stilted or sensual, just an easy swing or something so he can move and move you and maybe even give you a twirl if you're so inclined 😉
(at 8hearts and above he's twirling you, dipping you, and rocking you on his hips during wrap-ins 🥴🥴 you've also unlocked private rumba, tango, and waltzes with him, and boy is it getting humid in this seaside cabin 🥵🥵)
it does take getting him at least buzzed to bring it out, but he has no shame once it's out, so it's like an open secret in Pelican town that he'll show anyone who's a good sport a good time
EXCEPT.
(and this is a big one)
he's so fucking judgey about what music people choose to dance to.
full on Big Sassy Gay energy.
"oh you want to slow dance to [Ed Sheeran]? yeah I remember being in middle school too."
"*Thinking Out Loud playing* is this the wedding song where people teeter back and forth like two rickety sideways rocking chairs with room for Yoba in between because your grandma's watching for three straight minutes? ...no yeah it's fine. I mean to their credit it probably functions as their run through for the consummation later too so good for them I guess"
*I Won't Give Up playing* "if you need to dance to a song where someone else declares how you're So Definitely going to be together forever, I'm sorry but I give it two years tops." "Elliott, this was Haley and Alex's song." "I said what I said. Next."
"*dramatic sigh* just because you can mathematically fit a 5 step into a 4/4 doesn't mean you can or should turn any bubblegum pop song about casual sex into a tango. It's NOT about sensuality, it's about THE CONFLICT THEREIN."
just take him home at this point. 😅 no one understands what he's saying but they know it's probably insulting.
anyway fast forward to domestic bliss and he's regularly pulling you in to show you how happy you make him
he's definitely singing any lines he thinks fit you under his breath while he dances with you. He'll bring you in close and murmur them into your ear or kiss them into your neck if he's got bedroom thoughts. 🌹
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girlactionfigure · 1 year
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For Engineers Week 2023, we're honoring Hedy Lamarr - the glamorous movie star from the black-and-white era of film who co-invented a device that helped make possible the development of GPS, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi technology!
Born in Austria in 1914, the mathematically talented Lamarr moved to the US in 1937 to start a Hollywood career. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, she was considered one of cinema's leading ladies and made numerous films; however, her passion for engineering is far less known today. Her interest in inventing was such that she set up an engineering room in her house complete with a drafting table and wall of engineering reference books. With the outbreak of World War II, Lamarr wanted to apply her skills to helping the war effort and, motivated by reports of German U-boats sinking ships in the Atlantic, she began investigating ways to improve torpedo technology.
After Lamar met composer George Antheil, who had been experimenting with automated control of musical instruments, together they hit on the idea of "frequency hopping." At the time, radio-controlled torpedoes could easily be detected and jammed by broadcasting interference at the frequency of the control signal, thereby causing the torpedo to go off course. Frequency hopping essentially served to encrypt the control signal because it was impossible for a target to scan and jam all of the frequencies.
Lamarr and Antheil were granted a patent for their invention on August 11, 1942, but the US Navy wasn't interested in applying their groundbreaking technology until twenty years later when it was used on military ships during a blockade of Cuba in 1962. Lamarr and Antheil's frequency-hopping concept serves as a basis for the spread-spectrum communication technology used in GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth devices. Unfortunately, Lamarr's part in its development has been largely overlooked and her efforts weren't recognized until 1997, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave her an award for her technological contributions. Hedy Lamarr passed away in 2000 at the age of 85 and, in 2014, she was as long last inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for her invention of a "Secret Communication System" many years ago.
A Mighty Girl
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loving-n0t-heyting · 7 months
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Here's a question that I think you might be uniquely well-positioned among those I know to answer: from the purview of philosophy, what do you think of the general focus within mathematics on first-order logic?
The context for this is as follows: my mathematical logic class in undergrad was taught by a model theorist, and thus had a generally model theoretic flair. Once we established the basics of propositional logic, FOL, deductive systems and so on, we spent the rest of the class focusing on the model theory of FOL, IIRC mostly stuff of relevance to algebra rather than things of relevance to philosophy or foundations of math or so on.
I remember remarking to a friend who was taking that class with me "this is not really what I thought logic would be like!" or something like that, and he said to me the following (paraphrased), which really stuck with me: "I feel like FOL, whatever it is, can't really be the foundation of math or of reasoning in any meaningful sense. Rather, it feels like what we're doing in this class is constructing an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine that behaves like the 'true' foundational logic of math, whatever that is, in important ways. It's very messy and unnatural, but it's useful because we've constructed it in a way that allows us to study it, and which lets us gain insight about axioms and provability and so on". And I remember thinking, yeah, that's totally on the money.
The word "foundation" in the above paragraph is used in a nontechnical sense; of course FOL can't literally be a foundational theory, because it is not in itself a theory. But it's the logic that most attempts at foundations are articulated in, etc.
Everything I've thought about logic since then has mostly served to confirm what my friend said to me. For instance, I remember reading a MathOverflow post a long time ago discussing why mathematicians so often use FOL, and the general consensus answer seemed to be "the model theory of FOL is much nicer than the model theory of higher-order logics". This lines up closely with what my friend said, and also the general vibe I got from taking that class (which was that the model theory of FOL is certainly very nice).
FOL, like most logical systems used in mathematics, is also built on a formal language made of strings of symbols. The syntax of FOL (although this is by no means unique to FOL) looks awfully inspired by the syntax of the Western European languages its creators spoke. I have to imagine that a system of formal logic designed in Japan or by the Incas or some such would be shaped completely differently. Now, I also think that this doesn't matter very much—it's easy to construct a "head-final" version of FOL, which I imagine Japanese mathematicians would probably have done, and show that it's perfectly equivalent to the FOL we have. And you can rebuild FOL on a language of abstract trees instead of strings of symbols if you so desire, and you don't have to give the symbols any order at all, and it's perfectly equivalent.
So this historical contingency in the syntax of FOL doesn't matter mathematically, but I've always found it philosophically bothersome. First on the principled grounds that math and science should be made as culturally neutral as possible. But also on the grounds that in some sense it is one more fact that confirms what my friend said to me: the whole construction of FOL, with sets of strings, terms and formulas and free variables, etc. etc., is further revealed to be a kind of historically contingent Rube Goldberg contraption. It bugs me, for better or worse (and maybe it's just inescapable) that we study logic by way of such a contraption!
The final fact that make me something of a FOL-disliker (I admit my bias now, deep into the message) is learning that the second-order Peano Axioms are categorical—they have a unique model—and this model has a large number of nice properties, like being the free object on one generator in a certain category and so on and so forth. But first-order Peano Arithmetic is not categorical, there are non-standard models of PA which do not accord with our intuitions about N. This makes me feel really uneasy about FOL: if the natural numbers, the most fundamental object in all of math, can't even be appropriately captured by FOL, why are we using it?
And the answer again seems to be half practical, half historical: 1) the model theory is very nice, so FOL is easy to work in, and 2) FOL is old and people have been using it for a long time, and it has reached consensus status as the default system in which to do mathematical logic things, unless you have some good reason to use a different system.
And honestly, I don't think those are bad reasons at all. But they are very practical reasons, down to earth and divorced from the lofty philosophical goal of Understanding The True Nature Of Reasoning.
But my knowledge on this is really entirely on the math side. I have not actually read any of the philosophy around this, and you seem pretty familiar with it. What do the philosophers think about FOL? Do they like it? Are they bothered by its historical contingency? I imagine that philosophers might be less concerned with the practical and mathematical matters that lead people to use FOL. In light of that, are their views different?
Obviously I know philosophy is huge and diverse, I just feel like you might have an interesting perspective on this.
Anyway, uh, yeah. Sorry if this is ridiculously long. No pressure to answer this if you don't feel like it.
so ill say to begin that you are right that the centrality of first-order theories in mathematical foundations is as much as anything an accident of history and a matter of pragmatics as much as deep truths about the nature of logic and reason. at the advent of modern logic, frege was not wedded in this way to 1st order languages in foundations, and his exposition of his begriffschrift remains a classic in the study of the meaningfulness of higher order languages. first order theories came to prominence as the foundational crisis unfolded in large part bc they were the first to receive a rigorous metalogic, and much exciting work in contemporary mathematics has looked to type theoretic alternatives, as in the "univalent foundations" programme. there was no deep inner necessity reflected in this historical progression
that said, i think at least some of the complaints you are making dont really stand up to scrutiny. to begin, i think the qualms about eurocentrism are smth of a red herring: not only is it simply untrue that those responsible in the period of the foundational crisis for our contemporary understanding of the fundamentals of mathematical logic were overwhelmingly native speakers of "western european" languages (this ignores the many vital contributions of polish logicians at the time), like you say the level at which that would have any significance is purely notational. if mathematicians interested in foundations have a "canonical" "official" logical notation it woulkd be łukasiewicz (or "polish") notation, which in syntax resembles no extant human natural language but is useful for certain bookkeeping purposes. i dont think anyone treats the sort of PM-like infix notation you presumably have in mind with anything like the reverence that would give you any reason to worry
second, i think you are much more impressed than you should be by the "categoricity" of 2nd order PA. the models for classical first order theories have a special significance precisely bc of the model theoretic results you are alluding to: 1st and foremost, focl is sound and complete with respect to that class of models, which directly links model existence results to consistency results. its not as tho there are these very independently interesting mathematical objects called "models of classical fol", about which we then were lucky enough to learn the additional fact that they are complete wrt focl. we care about this class bc we care about the logic to which these results connect it. things are otherwise wrt the class of models you have in mind for 2nd order languages: there are no such completeness results to be had, making their connection to and significance for sol much weaker than those with first order models and first order logic. you could, if you wanted, cook up some definition of a "model" for fol on which the peano axioms would fix some unique such "model", but this gives us no particular reason to find this pseudo-categoricity very interesting. it would be as much as anything an artefact of yr definitions. now this is not to suggest that the full models of classical second order logic are a wholly artificial construction of no intrinsic interest, that is going too far, but counting it as a "virtue" of 2nd order PA over 1st order PA that the former unlike the latter is "categorical" is to some degree a fallacy of equivocation: the existence of such a model does not mean the same thing as the existence of a unique such fom, in particular bc the latter would require as the former does not the syntactic completeness of the relevant theory
on that note: it is misleading to describe the failure of first order peanpo arithmetic to pin down a unique model as a defect of fol or 1st order PA. the reason for the existence of nonstandard models is the profound matter of the incompleteness results, which hold for any (humanly articulable) axiomatic theory of the natural numbers of sufficient strength, 1st order 2nd order ith order no order. and ofc, for classes of models (like the appropriately defined general/henkin models) of 2nd order logic for which soundness and completeness results are forthcoming, second order PA accordingly admits of nonstandard models itself. if theres a perversion anywhere in the existence of nonstandard models, its in the nature of arithmetic itself, not in first order logic with its standard model theory specifically
more generally, im not entirely clear what you mean by finding fol wanting as "the 'true' foundational logic of math, whatever that is"? dym you dont think its whats going on deep in the thoughts of the working mathematician? no doubt, tho idt anyone serious has ever claimed as much. that it is not, relatedly, a perspicuous presentation of the underlying Architecture of Reason, if there is such a thing? that certainly is implausible, and ig a lot of undergrad profs start out classes with bold pronouncements of that sort, but i think these are best understood as a combination of a hook to entice students to keep up their attendance in pursuit of deep wisdom and a self-directed pep talk for the instructor to motivate another semester spent on one of the drier topics of theirs on which to educate college sophomores. but perhaps im missing yr real meaning
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anyway tho you asked about the place of fol in philosophy, which ig ive been avoiding. and again yr right, theres a really considerable breadth of literature on this topic, which i can only really gesture at here and of which my knowledge is only partial. but in broad and highly selective strokes:
at the inception of what would come to be called "analytic philosophy", the vienna positivists (following the lead of their colleagues working in mathematical foundations, and of ludwig wittgenstein, who in the tractatus which exercised such foundational influence upon the circle accorded the classical first order predicate calculus a kind of mystical, quasi-religious significance) by and large took up a very enthusiastic attitude towards first order theories. this was ofc a departure from their august forebear, frege, whose high order outlook i have already commented on. much of this enthusiasm also lacked the model theoretic flavour that would dominate among many of their successors, likely in no small part bc the relevant lines of mathematical inquiry had yet to fully percolate. this would eventually shift among philosophers of science in the tradition, as syntactic approaches to the most current physical theories began to prove less tractable than model theoretic alternatives
this privileged position for first order theories was, alas, to be inherited by the great american bete noir of the logical positivists, quine, who more than anyone else in the anglophone philosophical community contributed to the discredit of the movement and served to more generally set the agenda for midcentury analytic philosophy. quine seems to have taken there to be smth more "scientific" about such first order approaches to various domains, and in this he was followed by many in his so largely regrettable wake; one can see this prejudice on display, as a particularly vivid and historically significant example, in the prefatory comments in david lewis' "counterpart theory and quantified modal logic". second order logic in particular was the subject of some influential potshots of quines, to the effect that second order quantification over properties was nothing more than a needlessly roundabout facon de parler for (fundamentally 1st order) quantification over a particular sort of object, viz. sets. and smths that should not have been forgotten were lost
what is perhaps most shocking, even during the reemergence (much to quines chagrin) of modal thinking among analytic philosophers, this sea change was carried out largely under the auspices of an austerely first-order worldview. i have already mentioned lewis' deference in his writings on modality to the quinean appetite for first orderism, and lewis was second in the revival of modal thought only to kripke, whose principal contribution was precisely a means of reducing many modal logics to first-order extensional theories. Even as suspicion of modal operators as primitive has dissipated, the view of first order quantification as somehow more perspicuous and aboveboard has largely lingered
even in the midcentury, however, there were still philosophers of a logical bent disinclined to this privileging of first order quantification. arthur prior is my prime example, and his openness to theorising in overtly and non-reductionistically higher order terms has had significant influence on the renaissance in the past decade to such higher order treatment of various philosophical topics and problems. leading the way has been timothy williamson at oxford, and many of his students, who have tried to present such framings as intelligible and philosophically illuminating in their own right. this is a nice example. this is a project to which i am very sympathetic
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as-if-and-only-if · 5 months
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So, I think I'm finally going to apply to grad school for math!
But there are a few issues!
One issue is that I've got pretty severe ADHD. I think that means I ought to look for a professor first, and a school second. I think I need to find a particularly accommodating professor who's willing to take on unorthodox Ph.D. students.
Then there's the issue of: well, what do you want to do research in? And honestly, I kind of want to spend some time learning a lot of things in multiple areas of math. I already have a lot of exposure from taking mostly grad courses in undergrad, but I want to understand things more deeply. I don't want to be tied down to a specific area; generally, I'm interested in: understanding complex systems; connections between different fields of math; the foundations of "abstract nonsense"; fundamental theoretical physics; the places where group & representation & number theory come together; computer realizations of mathematical practice (UX for actually doing math research, knowledge organization, and formalization); and some more "philosophically-oriented" things which tend not to be part of any named fields. I've also got interdisciplinary inclinations and have some budding interest in nanotechnology; and I'd like to be in a place that mixes everything together, and exposes me to even more things to be interested in.
So really, I'm looking for either a professor or two who are also interested in all sorts of things, or a department that allows you the freedom to do all of this stuff at once! A lot of Ph.D. programs seem to signal that they prize specialization, but that's just not an option for me. Sure, I'll do a thesis about a particular thing, but ideally it'll involve a lot of things!
And that's another crucial desideratum: I want a vibrant culture. Far too often I hear about grad experiences in which the grad students are working away in isolation without much community or energy. I want to be around people who are excited about all of the things I'm excited about!
So, three things: accommodations for unorthodox working style; encouragement of interdisciplinary/wide-ranging interests; and a vibrant, exciting culture.
This is really a diary/processing post, but feel free to consider it a request-for-info post—if you happen to have any helpful ideas or connections, pls don't hesitate to share! :D
(I could also use some advice on how to find what I'm looking for, including pointers to groups of like-minded people or places to ask questions. Right now my strategy is "read the faculty bios on university websites, see if anything jumps out, and cold-email the professors", which, you know. We'll see how that goes.)
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oliviabutsmart · 6 months
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Physics Friday #10: The Philosophy and Ethics of Science
Preamble: Some Important Information/Disclaimers
Education Level: High School (Y8/9)
Topic: Scientific Philosophy and Ethics (Philosophy)
An important disclaimer to the Philosophers: This post is discussing philosophy and ethics from the perspective of a scientist, meaning that I'm purposefully going to brush over and ignore entire fields or subjects within philosophy.
You may read this post the same way a pure mathematician may read a physics or astronomy paper. It's generally okay but it's full of abuses of notation, physical numbers and values, and hand-wavy approximations. So don't worry too much if I brush over and oversimplify a lot.
This is a rather big post. Full of different foundational topics to the way we do science. But it's important, for all areas of science, to have this information in the background as it comes to the forefront. In our discussions, our conclusions, and when presenting information to the public we use these tools constantly and subconsciously.
It's obviously going to get a teeny bit political, but not in a way that you'd like hate me or something. As we will be talking more about science's interaction with the political and public worlds (but not completely).
What does it mean to know things?
It's important to seperate the idea of truth and knowledge.
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A prehistoric Soyjack.
Of course, the main difference is that what is true is not necessarily what you know. But is what you know necessarily true?
If I knew that the sky was green and I lived underground ... would I really know that the sky is green. I'd be incorrect, how can I know something if that something is wrong?
Often, for simplicity we remove the colloquial definition of knowledge and say, generally, knowledge = belief + truth. You have to both believe it's true and be correct at the same time.
But that isn't the full picture. I could stay in my underground cave for a day and then believe that it's raining, and it just so happens to be that it is raining. But I wouldn't actually know it's raining. I just made a guess and got it right.
Okay so obviously in order to know something you've had to have seen it yourself. Knowledge = belief + truth + evidence.
But what if I was in my cave and could hear the sounds of thunder, or could hear the sound of rain falling? I never actually saw the rain itself, just it's effects. What I actually had to do was deduce that it was raining:
There is the sound of thunder
There's a storm nearby
There are sounds of water falling outside the cave
Water is falling outside the cave
There can be no other sources of the falling water.
Therefore it must be a rainstorm
Okay ... so Knowledge = belief + truth + evidence + reason. This is generally where most people stop. Because it's kinda hard to come up with more details afterwards. And sometimes we often wrap evidence and reason into just "justification" generally.
But what's clear is that we haven't really proportioned our sum correctly. We don't always need reason if we can see it in-front of us, for example.
Epistemology - the study of Knowledge
From the scientific perspective, there are three guiding "ways of knowing":
Empiricism "Knowledge comes from evidence"
Rationalism "Knowledge comes from reason"
Skepticism "Knowledge can go fuck itself"
All three aspects of these philosophies inform how we do science.
Generally, we found our scientific knowledge off observation, experimentation. In order to demonstrate it practically. This is a foundational component to the scientific method. Which is why science could be termed as "Methodical Empiricism"
Reason, while not the foundation of our work in science, is still important. Some things we cannot see. We cannot look at an electron, we cannot see evolution. But what we can see is it's effects, and we can connect previous bits of information together in order to deduce more complex outcomes.
Mathematics is an example of something that is much less Empiricist and much more Rationalist. Everything in mathematics stems from a set of 'truths' (axioms) from which we derive all of the subject using reason.
Skepticism is a bit broad but it is generally about questioning our ability to know things, sometimes stating that true knowledge is impossible.
While it doesn't sound immediately helpful, can be appreciated in the aspects of assuredness. Are we really sure X is true? Skepticism allows us to constantly question what truths are truths and allows us to re-examine our world around us.
It is thanks to skepticism that we often require the ability for experiments to be repeated, or that consensus is necessary to "knowledge". Because experimentation and measurement conducted by one human, can never be enough for everyone to know.
The power of logic
As I said before, reason forms an important sub-component to the scientific method, appearing in-between the foundational aspects of observational knowledge. It appears in the details, the statistics, the mathematics, and the deductions we make.
But there are different ways in which we use logic, some of which doesn't behave as rigorously as you may think.
We can generally split logic into two camps:
Deductive logic is absolute. If our premises are true then so are our conclusions. Deductive logic is best used with mathematical proofs, or generating a conclusion from the evidence.
Inductive logic acts as a means of generalising. If something is true in specific, then it might be true generally. We use inductive reasoning when generating a hypothesis from prior knowledge
Each of these types of logic are important. When we have already observed something we want sound and valid reason to produce a conclusion that is also always true.
But we also like induction. The scientific method is an ongoing process and often a conclusion will come with it's own package of questions that need answering.
Induction is not always correct, however. When you generalise something you may end up finding exceptions to the rule. Take this popular example:
All swans I see are white, therefore, all swans are white.
This in the would be true for your medieval peasant living in England, until we go to Australia and find a species of black swans.
You may look at this example of logic and see it's flaws. But it's important that a hypothesis is only an educated guess. When constructing a hypothesis we must have a method of making sure it can be proven wrong.
Induction guarantees this, because we know it can be disproven using a counter example. Other forms of reasoning and idea generation also must follow this same style of induction if it wants to survive the falsifiability test.
What actually is science?
I remember one time in the past one of my friends said the following:
Astrology is a science
Now, of course, this is not exactly the most correct. Her two arguments were "the ancient peoples (whoever they were) treated it the same way as we treated science" and "It follows from a tradition of science going back to ancient times".
The problem obviously, is that you cannot use a modern definition of something to the ancient world, "science" didn't really mean anything to ancient scholars (it was either logic or astronomy), and it's kinda disrespectful to group the thousands of years of "ancient peoples" all into one culture and category.
But this brings up an interesting question - what actually is our modern definition of science, and where did it come from?
Our modern understanding of science has evolved over time, from the Classical Greeks to the Islamic/Hindu Golden Ages, from the Enlightenment to the Information Age.
While Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were forming their ideas on logic and knowledge, our understanding of the "scientific method" comes from Ibn al-Haytham, and was developed over the years by European scholars who "borrowed" the credit for their method:
Research previous sources of knowledge
Generate a Hypothesis, based in justification from what we know
Develop a Method to investigate the validity of our hypothesis
Perform an Experiment to derive observations of our claims
Discuss the ability for our results to provide meaningful insight
Deduce a Conclusion from the observations and what we know
Well, that's great and all. But you've probably already seen this. What's important is how we jump from each component to the next.
We use induction to get from research to hypothesis by making a series of educated guesses
We develop a method to determine if our guess is correct
We use the method and setup to perform a repeatable experiment
We discuss the efficacy of our experiment i.e. assess our data and method. A backwards analysis of the methodology and the observational evidence
We use deductive logic to generate a sound conclusion based on what we got as a result, and what we can/can't say about it given our known limitations of the method
We publish our conclusions to build a portfolio of researchable knowledge on the topic
It's a cyclic process that repeats endlessly, like an uroboros!
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Pictured: Science, to an accuracy of 1 significant figure Image Credit: The Spectator
This gives us a baseline of understanding for science: it's about the method. But there are different ways we can conduct our method and process in general.
Three extra ways in which we conduct Science
Pseudoscience vs. Science: Falsification
One of the most influential ideas to science is falsification. And Karl Popper's idea science is based on this idea fully.
A theory in science is just a hypothesis backed up by evidence, or in other terms, it's a collective series of conclusions and ideas given structure due to what we know.
Popper believes that for a theory or hypothesis to be scientific, it needs to be disprovable. i.e. I can set up some experiment that can demonstrate it wrong, given that it is wrong.
Pseudoscience is the opposite; it's when you try to seek to prove something true rather than prove it false. The reason why this is dangerous is that methods "attempting to prove something right" is going to be riddled in confirmation bias, and will never be held up to full scrutiny.
Science can only progress when we are constantly vigilant to disprove our conclusions and hypotheses.
We do rely heavily on this in the realm of science. Many scientists attempt constantly to disprove certain theorems that may be true, or to re-examine old bits of evidence with new equipment.
Where Popper Goes Wrong
There are several criticisms of Popper's ideas:
It may be difficult to prove a single hypothesis on it's own, as it could rely on several bits of logic pulling on other strings. Meaning that you cannot individually verify one theory with a simple test.
Falsifying can be done naively; you may falsify a true statement on accident because of an unknown correlation or due to errors in experimental data
Social and psychological sciences often cannot rely on the falsifiability of hypotheses, because experiments are much more complicated than simple deductions and hyper-precise measurements. Generally when you have a complex system, your methods are more focused on probing than predicting.
We may be a little too over-eager to disprove theories, especially for ones that are well-established. This can lead to genuine conspiracy theories being masked in science-like rhetoric. We need to direct our attention to theories which are still uncertain as to how "well-established" they are
His use of "Scientific Marxism" as an example of pseudoscience; as for some Marxists use a different definition of science to mean "the analysis of material information instead of pure ethical reason" - that and some Marxists rejected the ultimate predictions made by Marx, an example of more scientific thought
The idea that progress in science is purely defined by falsifying theorems, something we'll get into much more
Scientific Revolutions
Thomas Khun emphasised a different idea of how science progresses, instead of it being the falsification of already-established models, science comes from noticing contradictions that present themselves in well-established theories.
If a theory or model is incorrect or at least not the full picture, we will inevitably stumble on anomalies in our data. Anomalies that cannot be explained by other information.
This is where the idea of a "scientific revolution" comes along. We have an established paradigm - a paradigm that is regularly proven via experimental evidence - but slowly over time, more holes begin to appear in this paradigm.
As further research builds the holes outnumber the proofs of efficacy, resulting in a crisis. This crisis gets resolved when some new theory comes along, completely upending the old and begging in a series of steps to cement this as the new paradigm.
Miasma vs. Germ theory and Newtonian Mechanics vs. General Relativity are the best examples of these revolutions. Whereas the many acid and base theories work as more minor examples.
Scientific Anarchism
This is another response to Popper - it follows the idea that there is no specific way in which we progress science or focus on methods of experimentation.
While there still is an empirical process of Guess - Test - Present, there is no clear or necessary way to conduct this process. And that any further attempts at structure cause us to land into a series of exceptions.
Tools for getting rid of bad information - Razors
There are other parts of the scientific method that are important. These are often known as 'Razors'.
Razors act to shave the flack and crap off an argument, and also help shorten discussions by pointing out the limitations of certain arguments.
Occam's Razor
Occam's Razor is often very misused. It goes like this:
If there are two or more explanations to a phenomenon, the simpler explanation is likely more correct.
You can see, and probably already know why this is problematic. It's not always true that the simplest explanation is correct. And sometimes, multiple explanations can be more valid.
It's important to examine what we mean by "simpler". Because if we just mean "less words", well, then the "simpler" argument becomes a question of semantic specificity.
Is it really simple if we can describe something in a few words? If all of those words require individual definitions?
Often, physicists take simplicity to mean "less equations". Which makes sense. If I can describe all of the universe, in one equation, and it works fairly well. Then it's probably better than two. It's part of the reason why we so often try to compress our equations into as little as possible.
Hundreds of equations describing electromagnetic phenomena -> 4 Maxwell's Equations -> 1 Tensor Maxwell-Einstein Equation -> Standard Model Lagrangian.
This forms what is closer to Einstein's Razor:
The goal of any theory is to make the irreducible elements as simple and as few as possible without having to remove it's explanatory power.
Newton's Flaming Laser Sword
Yes, this is an actual name, also known as Alder's razor goes like this:
If something cannot be settled by experiment or observation, then it is not worthy of debate.
This is effectively a restatement of falsifiability. You cannot have a theory that cannot be proven true or false.
This razor is very powerful, as it basically can cut out any and all supernatural explanation to a theory.
It's also why our current paradigm in physics is so hard to break through. Primarily because we cannot find a theory that is falsifiable, or a theory that can make a testable prediction. It's also why so many people are slowly beginning to loose enthusiasm for string theory.
Of course, that doesn't mean "physics bad", it means that we can't find an explanation for anomalous or unexplainable phenomena. Many physical theories attempting to unify QFT and GR require extremely complex mathematics, and just may require a lot of theoretical development before coming up with a testable hypothesis.
Where does ethics come into this?
Now there's a lot of ways I can tackle ethics. Ethics around how we present science to the public, ethics about corruption and inclusion (i.e. human scientists doing bad things to other human scientists), or the legality of conducting science (less ethics and more politics). But to keep on track we'll focus on methodological ethics.
Methodological ethics concerns ourselves with the ethics of conducting our experiments specifically.
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It's a pyramid scheme! ... or the next splatoon splatfest idea. Image Credit: technicalandcomputerissues.wordpress.com
Now, this triangle of ethics is generally useful, but I'll put it in terms that concern a scientist in specific:
Consequence (what effect/outcome will this experiment have?)
Intent (what intentions do I have going in?)
Natural Law/Principle (Am I playing god? Should I play god? Should I step beyond a certain taboo?)
When making decisions about how to hold and conduct experiments, it's important to consider all aspects of the triangle. Not just for the safety of any test subjects, but also the safety of the examiners.
Of course things change depending on the field of study. In Physics and Astronomy, our discoveries often are never in violation of any "natural law" or at least "natural law" that is taken seriously.
But I include natural law for several reasons. As the reader, you might be left-leaning - and that probably means when you hear "we have to care about principle or natural law" you may scoff.
Natural law and principle comes into effect when we think of several different cases:
In conservative and religious societies, natural law may be more than just a philosophy. To "violate" this societies' natural law could harbour very bad consequences to YOU and your colleagues but not really to the progress of science. Take Galileo or Copernicus
Societal taboos exist in general, and sometimes, researchers themselves might have personal objections to your methods. Some taboos are in place for a reason; like "don't use women's egg cells in cloning research, especially if it's not consensual"
Forgoing principle and procedure also means ignoring an ethics board. Even if what you're doing may be free of consequence and of good intent, the next researcher to ignore the Ethics board might not be
Note that in these three examples, we have mixtures of both intent and consequence. "Violating" natural law could result in consequences, or forgoing principle may be a sign of bad intent.
Of course, any person prioritises their own view of ethics, which is why I must add that I am generally more consequentialist-leaning. To state my biases clearly.
But from a general point of view, all three aspects need to be accounted for, as different people will weigh each aspect more.
Back to the subject of Physics, our application of experiments has a lot less ethical weight, and our methods can only be unethical if the methods are unsafe. Which is why we focus much more on risk and harm reduction in the physical sciences.
In the psychological, natural, and medical sciences, however, ethics is very important. Primarily because you are now bringing the subject of study to animals and humans.
Weirdly, when you get to social and economical sciences, the emphasis of ethics returns to a bit of a similar state to Physics, where the bulk of ethical decisions comes in the way you present your findings to the public, and how you interact with the political world.
Conclusion
Long post? Long post. Fortunately I had the time to do so because I did not have much else to do today. I wanted to do a more 'bigger picture' post as well, as you can see.
The importance of knowing the reason as to why we do things in science and the importance of knowledge, ethics, and logic, is something sorely missed in today's education system. It specifically becomes evident in how these methods of science often come accessory to a subject itself.
The problem obviously is that different subjects in science need to prioritise different parts of the ethical and reasoning process. And so the lack of cohesive information can result in the creation of pseudo-intellectualism i.e. "people pretending that they are being rational or scientific".
Anyways, you know the drill. Follow this account or my silly shitposting account for more of these posts. Feedback and criticism is also heavily appreciated.
See ya next week!
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zeldahime · 1 month
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Highway to Pail Day 17
[Day 1] [Prev] [Next] @do-it-with-style-events
February 17: Acute Angel
Warlock Dowling actually liked maths a lot, as a matter of fact. Everything about his life was weird or unpredictable, but maths had a soothing sameness about it. No matter how many ways you sliced it, whatever method you used, 104 times 986 would always come to 102,544. It would never end up being 17, or a sudden flight to a different continent, or an argument about whether or not Alexander the Great was burning in Hell. It would just be one hundred and two thousand, five hundred and forty-four.
The Earth was round, the sky was blue, and maths was his favorite subject.
He just didn't understand why everyone in his life seemed so upset about it.
His father thought it was some "sissy nerd shit, Harriet" and his mother was worried it meant he might not go into politics and she wouldn't be mother of a president; he'd heard them arguing about it when he was meant to be asleep. His tutors didn't like it either, even though they were supposed to be teaching him: Mr Cortese simply didn't understand maths at all and seemed desperate to escape any conversation where it came up, and Mr Harrison kept giving him harder problem sets and teaching him new things about it, but seemed worried whenever Warlock mastered a new theory, like he thought something bad would happen if Warlock thought too hard about it. Or, given Mr Harrison's gleeful obsession with evil warlords and pits of lava, like he was afraid something good would happen. And, of course, if any of the other kids found out, he'd never hear the end of it; he'd be teased until the end of time (or until they found something else to focus on, which is the same thing when you're ten-nearly-eleven). It was bad enough being named Warlock without inviting teasing for anything else.
Mr Harrison had taught him geometry, and how the Babylonians had divided circles up into 360 degrees like the number of days there were in a year, and how to calculate angles. He said earlier that day that once Warlock got the hang of circles and degrees, he'd get to do trigonometry next. He'd spent the rest of the day thinking of nothing but triangles.
Mr Cortese was trying to explain the lessons of the Founding Fathers to him—probably pretty badly, since he was English and kept backtracking over himself, though Warlock wasn't really listening—as Warlock drew pages and pages of angles in his workbook, trying to fit eight together into a circle made of 45° angles, or 12 30° ones. As he was absorbed in his angles, Mr Cortese's words washing over and past him, he remembered how Mr Harrison sometimes called him "angel" when they thought nobody was listening, and honestly Mr Cortese kind of looked like one, or as much as a grown-up could anyway without wearing a white dress and fake wings, and angel and angle kind of sounded the same....
Before he knew it, a lot of Warlocks angles had wings attached, including some of the ones he'd made into circles; it looked pretty wicked, actually. Maybe if he drew flames around them too, or maybe gave them swords?
Before he could decide, Mr Cortese had slid the notebook away from him.
"Fascinating perspective on the foundations of republicanism in the modern era," Mr Cortese said dryly, and Warlock's cheeks burned. "Your attention please, Mr Dowling? Where did you drift, and we can start again."
Warlock mumbled an "I dunno," and Mr Cortese sighed. "Well, we can hardly start the entire lesson over today," he said, and Warlock slouched down in his chair. "Well, perhaps it would be better to switch places, don't you think? Why don't you try teaching me about your maths? Mr Harrison has tried but between the two of us," Mr Cortese's voice dropped to a whisper as he took a seat, "he's simply not a very good maths teacher, at least not for me. I don't understand a word he says about mathematics."
Warlock perked up, though he quickly buried it. "I won't be a better teacher than Mr Harrison," he protested, but under the encouragement of Mr Cortese's smile, he tried anyway.
Mr Cortese didn't get it after he tried to teach it either. He just wasn't very good at maths, Warlock thought. Which was fair enough: Warlock wasn't very good at history or literature, and that wasn't Mr Cortese's fault.
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great-and-small · 8 months
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Hey there ! Hope you're well . To get into vet 'school' what subjects were a must to study ? I'm currently in high school and curious
Most veterinary schools will provide a list of prerequisite courses to potential students. So once you’re in college you’ll work with your advisor to finish all this required coursework- usually a good bit of science and mathematics. There is some variation between schools but most require completion of upper level biology, chemistry, and statistics or algebra to name a few.
In high school your course schedule doesn’t matter quite as much. You can sometimes take college level classes in HS in order to get ahead but not everyone does this. If your school offers any animal or medicine focused classes I would definitely pursue those! Try to soak up as much biology as you can and really get a feel for if you like anatomy and physiology as these are a big part of vet med (also don’t forget it’s very important to get practical experience by working or volunteering with animals). One thing I did was enroll in a medical terminology course at a local community college prior to application and I found this class gave me a great foundation for the language of medicine, which was really helpful in vet school. I wish you luck on your journey! If you have any questions you can always feel free to ask me here
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I was a brilliant kid from the age of 8, 9, 10 years old. I was doing slide rules. I was doing logarithms, tables, and stuff like that. I was doing solid geometry when I was in 7th, 8th grade. I was always a super-smart kid, a little bit like the Matt Damon character in Good Will Hunting. I was a working class kid. I didn't have a lot of polish, but I had real sharp smarts.
My life took a various turn. I was a father at 18 and at 19 and at 21, and dropped out of college. I bounced around community college, got discovered—like Matt Damon in the movie—ended up at Northwestern University where I was a wizard. I got all As in everything: math and economics and philosophy and German. And I was taking graduate-level courses in mathematics and in economics when I was an undergraduate at the college. I was taking the PhD level courses in these technical subjects and acing them. I went to MIT, where I was at the top of my class again.
Forgive this, but I want you to try to understand the point. My genius—yes, I said it—my gift, my extraordinary abilities were what carried me forward, notwithstanding the vicissitudes of racism and discrimination in America. To have that minimized by somebody presuming that, “Oh, you didn't get to MIT without affirmative action” ... and it's actually true. I didn't get to MIT without affirmative action, because every black person is going to be the beneficiary of affirmative action whether they ask for it, need it, or not.
I had a fellowship. Pretty much everybody in the first year PhD class at MIT had a fellowship of one kind or another. Mine came from the Ford Foundation Doctoral Program for Minority Students in Economics. So it was an affirmative action fellowship. MIT had three positions set aside in its entering class. They usually would have 25, but for a few years they had 28. And those three were to be black students of the greatest promise. I was one of them in the year that I came in, even though I didn't need to be in that box in order to get in because I had As in everything. In the PhD level courses I was taking at Northwestern, my professors were writing letters saying that I was the best student they'd ever seen. Because I was.
Again, I ask for your forbearance as I toot my own horn here. Goddammit, don't dishonor my amazing achievement by chalking it up to favoritism! I resent it. I don't like it. I don't need it. I don't want it. That's not a political position. I'm defending my own dignity here. So you gonna call me a sellout because I'm defending my dignity? Fuck you! That's my position
John McWhorter: Glenn, they're gonna use that.
It was not a performance. It was honest. Please, will you get your hands off of my dignity? Let me succeed or fail based upon my abilities. Don't patronize me, goddamnit!
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hehosts · 6 months
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the academy / "that place" — run by that man, currently known as watanabe goro, that place or the academy is an academy for students between ages 6-18, with further educational opportunies for ages 18-24. from there, many students become employed either here (due to debts or desires), other academies, or individual pursuits. that man is always available to his students, current or alumni. many alumni eventually come back, even after going "their own way."
the academy exists, similarly to goro's office in main canon, in a pocket dimension. it can be located anywhere, and currently exists somewhere in japan. students of all origins are encouraged to attend, so long as they possess a gift.
aesthetically, it fits both a classic and gothic aesthetic, much like a castle, and is always shifting / changing, while remaining "the same." there is a sense that you know where you are, but something is different. the staircases, the art, the statues, the doors...there are gardens. quite a few, in fact. courtyards, dorms for staff and students, lounging areas, and expansive corridors.
have their been non-gifted students? yes. they are rare, but there have been exceptions. non-gifted students are typically indebted to goro, or someone in their life is (usually a parent or sibling), or their family has a history with the academy. many non-gifted students become gifted. not many students without "gifts" go without making deals to fit in with their peers.
what about non-gifted staff? same as the above, mostly. non-gifted staff members are typically indebted to goro, or have family that went to the academy. they might have gone themselves, they might not have. meeting goro outside of the academy is not unusual, especially for those that are non-gifted. sometimes those that have made deals or have taken loans from the traditional realm will "work off their debt" (meaning they get room and board, that's it). rarely — although it has happened — will goro just "give someone a job." they are typically staffed in traditional studies, if they are able to teach, as well as groundskeepers, working in the nurse's stations as assistants and front desk staff, TAs, housing, the cafeteria, and other positions best suited for those without gifts / non-supernatural individuals.
do students have to start at age 6? no, they transfer in at any age. transfers usually come from other academies, so there isn't much to catch up on other than how things operate at this place, as well as the traditional coming of age / fitting in with their peers. students who transfer in late from the traditional realm have a lot more work cut out for them, but it has been done. students that start at age 6 are typically well engrained in the non-traditional realm, or their parents and family went to the academy, thus having knowledge to enroll early.
how long has the academy been active? — seemingly as far back as formative studies have been a concept, if not longer.
what do students study?
— traditional studies. these are "core classes" that fall into the "traditional realm." many students have lived lives in "both worlds" or will have some experience with the traditional realm (the human world, as we know it). these classes not only go over the main foundations (mathematics, science, history, literature), but also cultural classes (as many students are from varying cultures that exist outside of their species/subspecies).
— formative studies. these are classes that are "core," "elective," or "specified" courses that are explicitly supernatural, as well as the bulk of the curriculum. for example, if your character is a shapeshifter, there are courses for shapeshifters. those would technically be specified courses. an elective can be anything that doesn't apply directly to their species / their gift / their power. caring for your familiar can be an elective. an example of a "core class" in formative studies would be a non-traditional history course.
taken positions of staff:
headmaster — the great man / that man / "watanabe goro"
security — currently headed by ji-hun, a former student. it is hard to remember a time that the academy has not been guarded by the cobra. he works closely with deng.
guidance counselor — yong-sun. he assists students in finding their paths, as well as listening to their problems and squabbles.
regarding ji-hun, deng, and yong-sun:
ji-hun's abilities: similar to what he can do in canon, but with the ability to transform into a cobra.
deng's abilities: similar to what he can do in canon, but with the ability to transform into a hyena.
yong-sun's abilities: similar to what he can do in canon, but also has the ability to tell the future. he is known as the dragon.
open positions of staff*:
* otherwise staffed by NPCs for most threads
nurses, teachers, teacher's assistants, groundskeepers, janitors, security guards, etc. any position that are a typical academy would have is likely necessary here.
goro's office — the same as it always is. there is still one window that functions the same way it does in canon. it primarily exists, and is always accessible, at the academy. however, it still "can be found" anywhere. just because he's running the academy doesn't mean he's not still running business as usual. a major difference would be that his business outside of the academy is handled primarily by him, not by extensions as usual (ji-hun, deng, yong-sun, etc).
what about ren? — what about him? he's not in this story. he's likely living his normal life, indebted to goro with no knowledge of the academy. however, there will be an AU where ren is attending as a student, given that he does (technically) have the sight.
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