i spent a little time thinking about math again because of the lovecraft thread and made a little progress articulating my criticism of what i saw in my time in grad school. basically i think pure math has become almost entirely highly technical bullshit
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not in the sense of indifferent to its truth value but in the sense of indifferent to its *significance*. almost nobody in pure math has a compelling vision of what kind of math would *matter* to do. if you read writing by mathematicians from 100+ years ago it's not like this
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people used to do math because they were trying to understand the *world*. there just was not a pure / applied distinction, or even much of a math / physics distinction. modern pure math is an almost totally closed system, people do math to understand *other math*
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i left grad school among other things b/c it became clear to me that my thesis work did not matter in the slightest, that i had in large part only been drawn to doing math because i was good at it, so once i hit a real difficulty i no longer had any real motivation to continue
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there are enormously more different kinds of math to do now than there ever have been, this huge proliferation of different subjects of study, and almost none of it matters in the slightest. it's DLC for the biggest puzzle game ever
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but it's felt to me for awhile like at some point in the last ~30-100 years mathematicians stopped trying to understand *the world* and i think that was bad actually. mathematics disconnected from the world is just a complicated and engrossing puzzle game
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the standard line is "well you never know what will be useful in 50 years" - this is bullshit, it's not about knowing what will be useful in 50 years, it's about paying attention *at all* to one's internal sense of *significance*, as opposed to being endlessly nerdsniped
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professionalization has, i think, been very bad for pure math and probably every other part of academia too. math was never meant to be something people crank out to keep their jobs. that's a perfect recipe for producing highly technical bullshit
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the good shit comes from people who are *mystically compelled to understand the mind of god* and nobody learns how to do that in grad school
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there was one research agenda i was really compelled by in grad school and it was to rigorously establish mathematical foundations for quantum field theory. but honestly i was too intimidated to actually try doing this. it just seemed too hard so i gave up before i even started
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i remember when i studied abroad at cambridge coming across math people who told me “yeah i’m doing this to get a bank job in london later” and i was kind of appalled. not how i would’ve put it at the time but like… “you mean this isn’t sacred to you???”
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I hated mathematics with intense bitterness at the end of my masters degree. switched to biology and data analysis. its really surprising how relevant a lot of the maths from college is, and now it feels motivated
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maybe physics is too abstract nowadays so these areas are where you can find math being *applied*. in any case, i like math again again and can self-study
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Is this really true? I remember the inventor of number theory saying something like “finally, we have successfully made math that no one will be able to dirty with utility”…tensors were thought to be totally unreal until used by Einstein…but maybe it’s a myth!
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Hardy, quoted, invented key results about prime numbers that turn out to be important in cryptography…but no one, including him, realized they would have any practical application at the time
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