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
Conversation
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
6
2
88
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*
3
4
89
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
Replying to
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
Quote Tweet
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
Show this thread
1
1
62
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
4
5
88
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
3
4
78
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
6
25
169
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
3
3
53
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???”
9
9
98
Replying to
this really hits for my whole math undergrad, esp algebra. i did all my homeworks, passed exams, got pretty good grades, without ever *really* understanding wtf we were talking about
1
6
yeah that's another part of it, algebra especially makes it too easy to write down proofs and stuff without ever really understanding at any point what you're doing and why
5