the fact that they *canβt* is less their individual fault and more some kind of massive cultural failure, to me
Conversation
every time i discuss this with someone whoβs closer to being a mathematician than me, they get really upset that iβm trying to take their single-letter variables away or something. but itβs like, it seems fucked up that the Normals can read and write but canβt parse your notation
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yeah i think this matters for standard notation but i do maintain that for complex math stuff you really need concise, speed-readable notation and "math in papers should be legible to laypeople", which is an opinion i see often, is not tenable
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my counterargument is basically: βdonβt say there isnβt a better option when there havenβt really been serious attempts to create oneβ
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oh, sure, but i'm saying this in the context of people saying "why isn't the notation just X" in the context of papers and those ideas are not workable
i'm not denying the existence of a positive-sum solution, i'm denying that one *must* exist or that it is in any way obvious
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i definitely agree that itβs not as easy as βjust use words instead of letters lolβ, i think someone needs to design a cognitive architecture for mathematics from the ground up
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my one ray of hope on this topic is that computer-formalization communities like Lean mathlib are pulling in regular mathematicians and convincing them to formalize all mathematics in an unambiguous programming language with an explicit naming convention style guide
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i wholeheartedly believe this is like, the only occasion where computer people actually *do* get to come in and fix other peopleβs field of study
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there are like three entire subfields of computer science that are just βhow do we do symbolic representations of formal systems that are actually good?β. maybe we have earned the right to comment on this one.
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(*another* insane thing i also believe is that PLT people, linguists, and cognitive psychologists really need to get together and go start a new engineering field for this stuff)
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Also having some designers would be cool!
I mean, many designers these days want to teach design practices to more people so that they can help themselves, but it would be cool to have that perspective in this kind of work.
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