seeing more math on the TL recently. i haven't mathposted in a long time but i'm still happy to field math questions from twitter peeps, just reply here or tag me or w/e. big meaty philosophical questions like "wtf are real numbers anyway" would be particularly fun for me rn
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QT thread in response to "what is a set"
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this requires a long enough response that i'm gonna QT and do a separate thread. so it's tricky b/c there are two concepts here that should be given different names and we use "set" for both of them twitter.com/randomname1728…
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QT thread in response to "wtf are real numbers anyway"
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glad you asked! so there's a certain kind of person who will respond to this by describing one of the standard constructions of the real numbers. this is completely beside the point, and you can tell because there's more than one standard construction twitter.com/Jakob__B/statu…
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ultrafinitism is dope. it's really not obvious that numbers as large as 10^100 exist in any real sense, whatever that means
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i wrote this for a popular audience to highlight problems arising from discretizing continuous state spaces wdyt
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the only math question I've ever wanted answered is this one:
What is the nature of the correspondence between what we see in math and actual reality?
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"theory" in math doesn't mean "stuff we think is true but we're not sure" it just means "stuff that's true." or like a bit more specifically, "X theory" is kinda like "the standard library of true facts about X, that you import to do stuff with X"
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