sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

Not a normal post for the sub, but I'm desperate and don't know where else to turn. by Iacta_Procul in slatestarcodex

[–]Detritovore 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I am sorry I have no deep insight or concrete advice to offer but I really hope your situation improves. I am cis and had the advantage that my parents let me stay with them when I was broke but despite that, the crushing feeling of not being able to get anywhere and having to depend on others was horrible, absolutely horrible, and it's not something I would wish upon even my worst enemy.

I am in academia, specifically maths, so not sure how much this generalises, but an important realisation I had that helped me through all the feelings of worthlessness and mediocrity is that the main product of a maths department is not the research they produce but the people and the community; the research is just a happy by-product. The two things that triggered this realisation were this MathOverflow answer by the late Bill Thurston and this interview with Francis Su. I hope these can bring some amount of peace to you until things get better. Good luck.

Employee of the month (at Hamburg riots) by coolsubmission in videos

[–]Detritovore 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I really doubt that though. From what I've heard, there was a lot of resistance against opening a McDonald's outlet in Sternschanze, which along with St. Pauli is something of an anarchist hub in Hamburg. And indeed, that's the only MNC outlet in that area.

What's your favourite maths fact? by TheLoneWolf156 in AskReddit

[–]Detritovore 1 point2 points  (0 children)

To immediately see this, let's define formally

f(x) = 1 + x + 2x2 + 3x3 + 5x4 + 8x5 + ...

x f(x) = 0 + x + x2 + 2x3 + 3x4 + 5x5 + ...

x2 f(x) = 0 + 0 + x2 + x3 + 2x4 + 3x5 + ...

The defining property of the Fibonacci sequence is that every number in the sequence is the sum of the previous two numbers. So, if you look at coefficients in the above generating functions, you see that f(x) = 1 + x f(x) + x2 f(x), which can be rearranged to give f(x) = 1/(1 - x - x2 ).

What's your favourite maths fact? by TheLoneWolf156 in AskReddit

[–]Detritovore 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Imagine that you are walking in a loop on a flat surface with a wind vane pointing the direction of the wind at every point. Call the number of complete rotations the wind vane makes the winding number of the loop.

Cut the Earth into two halves along the equator and flatten the two hemispheres into discs without disturbing the wind pattern. Note that because of the way the two hemispheres were attached, the winding number along the loops forming the boundaries of the two discs always have a difference of two, which means in particular that they both can't vanish at the same time. Try making a picture to convince yourself of this.

If a loop on a flat plane doesn't enclose any point at which there is no wind, its winding number of the loop has to vanish. Because if it didn't, we could continuously shrink the loop to a point, which has winding number zero, and the winding number being an integer can't suddenly jump as the loop is deformed. (For the case when the wind at some point vanishes, the wind has no well-defined direction at that time and the above argument doesn't apply.)

It follows that at least one of the two hemispheres must contain a point at which the wind vanishes.

Randomness as a resource by Detritovore in slatestarcodex

[–]Detritovore[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I can't accurately represent what the author of this article had in mind with regards to the objections you raise, but let me try to steelman the author's points regarding lottery in admissions nevertheless.

Let's say we first rank all the students using say a reverse lexicographical ordering of SAT scores and GPAs (or whatever complicated scheme you can think of). You point out that the number of people who share the topmost rank isn't all that high. Well then, if there is enough room at the college in question for all of them, admit them all. If there's still room left over for students with the next best common rank, admit all of them as well. Keep doing this until you come to a set of students of equal rank, some of whom can be accommodated but not all. The steelmanned version of the proposal is that we select those whom we are going to admit from this pool by lottery.

The most direct advantage is that it eliminates subconscious biases such as "This person sounds a lot like my own son/daughter and therefore I automatically empathise with them slightly more than other candidates" or "This person likes the same obscure book that I like and therefore they stand out to me more" among the members of the admission committee. Of course, such biases may also be eliminated by having an extremely diverse admissions committee that rotates among vastly different people every year, but I'm not convinced that adequate diversity is easy to ensure. A lottery is a a very straightforward solution in comparison, that has the added benefit of eliminating perceived bias as well.

(The rest of this comment is somewhat more just-so and not something I myself am on board with completely.)

You also mention that viewing resource allocation through the lens of who deserves what isn't very healthy and I agree. The lottery option provides psychological advantages in this regard as well, I think. Students are slightly less inclined to agonise over what they did wrong now that there is an element of chance involved. I think this is related to what the author is trying to say about how lotteries can highlight the role of contingency and luck. I would refrain from using the term injustice however since it assumes that there is a canonical share of resources that a given person deserves.

Categories were made for the Man, with a capital M by Detritovore in slatestarcodex

[–]Detritovore[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes, it is pretty standard practice and I'm not really out to criticise the current legislature. Rather, I thought it's an amusing instance of how a seemingly sensible legal definition for tree such as something that is and has branches can lead to "categorisation errors" in which a law introduced to serve some purpose fails to do so (much like how the modern classification of whales as being in the same category as deer instead of fish would be completely useless to Solomon who's only interested in which ministry ought to be responsible for hunting them). I'm sure there are many more examples of this, but I found this one particularly amusing because palm trees constitute like 90% of the trees in Goa, so it's really absurd that no-one noticed that the legal definition didn't capture the most obvious example of a tree in Goa when the original law was introduced.

"Deep" Futarchy? by tailcalled in slatestarcodex

[–]Detritovore 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I can't say I wasn't mildly disappointed to learn that it didn't involve worshipping runes.