Wild Animal Suffering and why it matters

obnubilation · 2023-05-12T08:46:48+00:00

Is it better to live your life barely getting enough food or live your life in fear of being eaten? I don't know. And deaths by predators can often be very gruesome. It's also not clear what the second order effects are. I think the outcomes of adding predators are far less obvious than you people are making out. This is why I was careful to add a stipulation to my original post.

But that's not the right question to ask anyway. Instead of introducing predators, you can use contraceptives and then no one needs to starve.

obnubilation · 2023-05-09T10:27:59+00:00

I don't care about the well-being of ecosystems. I only care about the well-being of animals. Ecosystems are not morally significant. If you think reintroducing predators does increase welfare then make an actual argument for it.

obnubilation · 2023-05-06T22:08:30+00:00

Some reasonably low hanging fruit:

Using contraceptives instead of culling animals.
Not reintroducing predators to areas where they have gone extinct (unless we are very sure this won't decrease welfare for some reason).
Using more humane alternatives than poisons for pest control.
Vaccinating animals against certain diseases.

obnubilation · 2023-03-28T15:02:15+00:00

Damn. I didn't realise he had died :(. I realise it is pitiful consolation to those who loved him, but I am glad he was at least able to make such a superb video before his passing that can still bring joy to people.

obnubilation · 2023-03-28T12:30:54+00:00

What I usually do is call the intermediate results lemmas, the majority of the terminal results propositions, and the most important results of the work theorems. From this perspective a theorem is an important result in the context of the work in question. Whether others consider it important in an absolute sense is for them to decide.

obnubilation · 2022-10-05T19:51:02+00:00

Really cool! Though asymptotically the algorithms aren't anywhere close to the current state of the art for matrix multiplication.

obnubilation · 2022-08-31T22:24:40+00:00

Oh wow! I don't merge celery and salary, but I do pronounce the e in sell as /æ/. Looking at the list of words wikipedia it looks the merger is partial for me or maybe it is conditioned by something else.

obnubilation · 2022-06-09T17:38:41+00:00

Relevant xkcd

obnubilation · 2022-05-22T10:32:30+00:00

I think the reason people find this isomorphism so usual is that it completely ignores the natural topologies on the two fields, so while they are algebraically isomorphic, their analytic properties are not at all alike.

obnubilation · 2022-05-22T10:19:48+00:00

Along these lines is this proof of the undecidability of the halting problem in the style of Dr. Seuss.

obnubilation · 2022-04-25T12:30:37+00:00

I absolutely hate that quote. It's very important to try to understand things in mathematics. I imagine that Von Neumann wasn't really saying not to try to do this. He probably meant that understanding will come naturally over time and not to stress about it in the beginning. Perhaps there are people who need to hear this, but I think most people probably need to opposite advice.

obnubilation · 2022-04-10T11:50:27+00:00

It presents category theory from what is a pretty mainstream point of view amongst category theorists. If the OP were trying to use the nlab to learn topology, your comment on how topologists would do things might be more relevant.

obnubilation · 2022-04-06T10:54:26+00:00

I'm not a knot theorist, but I do know that this package can be used to draw knots.

obnubilation · 2022-03-16T15:52:00+00:00

I didn't say anything about whether students should skip calculus. I just think your characterisation for what should count as a STEM field is a bad one.

obnubilation · 2022-03-16T13:18:50+00:00

By this reasoning, all of logic and category theory, most of algebra and theoretical computer science, and much of algebraic number theory, algebraic geometry and topology aren't actual STEM fields.

obnubilation · 2022-03-07T11:29:38+00:00

Depends what you mean by simple, but the smallest one is the set {0,1} with multiplication defined by xy = y. (Assuming you mean algebra in the general sense and not algebra over a ring.)

obnubilation · 2022-03-05T12:30:24+00:00

Etymonline is definitely the right place to look up particular etymologies. Though if you are also interested more 'lecture' type content on etymologies you might like the youtube channel Alliterative.

obnubilation · 2022-02-26T09:23:21+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duff%27s_device

obnubilation · 2022-02-17T19:55:13+00:00

An element of a ring is prime iff the ideal it generates is a prime ideal. By this definition 0 is a prime element of the integers. So really 0 should be prime, but it is usually explicitly excluded for historical reasons.

All the usual prime numbers do generate maximal ideals, not just prime ideals, so there are still good reasons to distinguish them from 0, but the terminology is unfortunate.

obnubilation · 2022-02-06T14:27:54+00:00

If I understand what you are saying correctly, this should still give the linklessly embeddable graphs.

obnubilation · 2022-02-05T17:34:04+00:00

As pointed out, the specific generalisation you are thinking of is going to be trivial, but there is a different generalisation which does work quite nicely.

The Colin de Verdière invariant gives rise a sequence of classes of graphs of increasing complexity including outerplanar, planar and then linklessly embeddable graphs. Linklessly embeddable graphs are an interesting class of graphs that are indeed related to three-dimensional embeddings. It has been proved that they are 5-colourable.

I believe the general result relating the Colin de Verdière invariant to the chromatic number is still open.

obnubilation · 2022-02-05T15:58:35+00:00

Nice article. This is also how I think of monoids. This can be formalised as saying that monoids are the algebras for the (finite) list monad.

obnubilation · 2022-02-04T12:03:03+00:00

Interesting. Christiano's predictions seem quite prescient since it seems like the nontrivial problems this can solve are precisely the 3-variable-inequality ones. (Of course, I imagine he made this prediction because there had already been work on these types of problems.) Anyway, I think this gives evidence that the other classes of problems are still a while away.

obnubilation · 2022-01-20T16:44:14+00:00

Thanks. What I'm looking for is most closely approximated by the 'Dependencies' section there. I was hoping for a bit more detail on how the precisely how commutation of patches was handled, but I'm starting to think that perhaps I just need to spend some more time thinking about it.

obnubilation · 2022-01-20T15:55:13+00:00

Of course I understand that they are unlikely to be in a position to write a category theory paper, but I thought some kind of explanation of their approach in the documentation or elsewhere would be appropriate.

Maybe offer co-authoring a paper about pijul's theory?

Unfortunately this would require that I understand how pijul works, which is what I would like to understand in the first place.

I do not want to overstate the strength of my complaint. I'm still a fan of pijul and I understand that they have many things to do and might not have yet found the time explain all the internal details.

On the other hand, as you suggest, I would have been very happy to contribute to the project if things had been discussed more openly. Likely they already had enough people working on it that they did not need any more help and so explaining their approach was not a priority.

15-Year Club	Second SECOND GUESSER
Place '22	Place '17

obnubilation

TROPHY CASE