Discoursting

Cat Earth theory: the world is cat, and it's playing with Australia.

Jingyi Li - Lean on me

Probably a heart because lots of people need heart transplants and not too many are available and I could give it to someone.

Felice Gualtieri

thinking about when my friend found a book from the 70s in a church office with truly some of the most insane prayers I have ever heard

The professor was visibly shaken, and dropped his chalk and copy of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. He stormed out of the room, crying those unironic empirically verified crocodile tears. There is no doubt that at this point our professor, Noam Chomsky, wished he had pulled himself up by his bootstraps and become more than an outdated linguist and blindly analytic philosopher. He wished so much that he had an argument to save himself from embarrassment, but he himself had advocated for truth derived from empirical investigation! The students applauded and all dropped out to transfer into the Ecole Normale Superieure that day and accepted French philosophy as superior to both German Idealism and the Anglosphere’s Analytic traditions. An eagle named “Critical Theory” flew into the room and perched atop a burning American flag and shed a single tear on the dropped chalk. Sections of Lacan’s Seminars were read several times, and the Spirit of Hegel himself showed up and demonstrated the nature of dialectics so vividly that everybody in the room progressed to a trans-physical state, transcending conventional notions of time and space. The professor lost his tenure and was fired the next day and was forced to become a panelist on an MSNBC news show to make ends meet. The brave psycho-analytic philosopher’s name? Slavoj Zizek.

To me it's what animates a good talk. That the speaker has drowned themselves in that stream and come back with a parable. The best works of mathematics are emotional. They make an argument for what *should* be and *then* make an argument for why it *is*. It's a profoundly unscientific way to think, and it intersects an unfortunate amount with most LLMs' core capabilities. But it's what I love about maths, and it connects me to other people who love it.

Rather the (imo) best way to approach mathematics is to start very informal and then refine the informal reasoning down unil you have a formal proof. In some way that is also what many theorems are, a previous informal piece of reasoning that was made formal.