Not really. For many years mathematics rested on traditional first order logic and traditional naive set theory. That was revisited at the begining of the twentieth century.
Other than direct calls for violence (which in a book, really doesn't work that way, since any call to violence would be indirect in a sense), yes, you can publish anything. Any viewpoint at least. You cannot publish certain pornographic pictures (children, bestiality), but you are allowed to publish a book embracing both. Similarly, you are allowed to advocate for the violent overthrow of the American government. It is certainly legal, and many books have been published doing exactly this. I can't imagine anyone wanting to stop it; that's dumb.
It is legal (and easily available in the United States), but not legal in many countries, which is dumb. While the FBI investigated the author and the book itself, they concluded that it falls well under the 1st amendment rights of Americans. Again, and I'm not sure how many times I need to point this out, America is really the only free country in the world.
What an insane statement given it has literally happened AND been a massive news story for quite a while now. For anyone still unaware of the massive extent of constitutional rights violations that dyauspitr mentioned, Legal Eagle has a several-part video series that I highly recommend.
People are being arrested with probable cause, sure. You can call it what you want, but when you go back a few days later when all the details are out, invariably you realize the initial story was incomplete.
I mean pls also attracts a TON of rad trad Catholics. It turns out being unable to follow social cues makes you more amenable to following niche fields as well as a bit esoteric in your philosophers and lifestyle. I count myself as one of these as well lol.
That being said, this is also problematic. Because if the field is dominated by queer people as you point out, then shouldn't you try to balance it out and add straight cis people? I mean, you will correctly point out that the average person wouldn't fit in.
> the Curtis Yarvin / dark enlightenment nexus is big enough and really weird, but also not a topic for HN (not because it's political but because it's stupidly gross and dark).
It has high overlap with the rad trad Catholic wing, believe me. I am a fairly traditional Catholic. I had heard of Yarvin via the Haskell world, and was floored when a parishioner at my parish brought him up. Such a strange crossing of worlds.
I imagine by LGBTQ colleagues must have the same feelings at whatever it is they do on Sundays
Honestly I sometimes think I'm the most normal person in the field, but we all probably think that. I think if my colleagues found out that I only go to a traditional Novus Ordo on Sundays where we use a lot of Latin and not a full-fledged Tridentine Mass, all of them would be angry at me. The LGBTQ crowd for being Catholic and the rad-trad crowd fro not being the right kind lol.
But anyway, I guess what I meant with my last point is: where are the diversity initiatives to get 'normal' people into this field? Everyone agrees it attracts the neuro-diverse? Then doesn't it stand to reason that we ought to encourage the neuro typical? Imagine how great PLs would be if they were actually eloquent haha.
All you have to do to encourage nuerotypical white males from elite schools is to have high remuneration. They see highly paid jobs as the best jobs. This is not discrimination. If a job is too hard for the pay offered then this class will choose something else.
They are also not excluded from working in sewers, even though they are underrepresented!
> where are the diversity initiatives to get 'normal' people into this field?
I won't say they are particularly effective, but the group behind the LIVE workshop is at least self-aware enough to try and build things that neurotypical people might use. There binding force in that group is best expressed by Jonathan Edwards (author of subtext) when he said something along the lines of "most programming languages are built by high functioning autists for high functioning autists", the upshot being if we want more people to be able to use programming languages they will probably have to pay more attention to usability and alternative representations.
I think Bret Victor does a good job with this "seeing spaces" in the form of Dynamics Land: https://dynamicland.org
Also the Logo programming language was a good example of designing a language for where the users are, where in that case the users were gradeschool children. Obviously children can't build programming languages for themselves, so they used cognitive development principles to design a language which was approachable given their cognitive abilities as 7 year olds.
Yes. The problem is that it's common in the industry. But it's ultimately up to the patient. Maybe alone. Pretty much guaranteed scared. Undereducated, worrying about their likely life threatening potential illness or injury. That's basically under duress.
What are you proposing instead? Should patients just die of their illness instead?
Medical procedures have risk, some are small risk some are higher risk. There are none that are 100% safe. Doctors are supposed to evaluate if the risk is worth the value the procedure would supply.
What is the alternative to the status quo that you would propose?
Well, there are manganese-based contrast agents under development. Maybe we should give those a little more funding.
Like Gd, Mn is toxic, but unlike Gd, Mn is naturally present in the body (and also in pineapples) which means that long-term accumulation is less likely. The main difficulty is the lack of strong enough complexing agents because of the tendency for zinc (naturally present at relatively high concentrations in the body) to steal the ligand from Mn, a problem currently being studied:
During COVID people were losing their minds about one in a million chance of complications caused by vaccination. I did some research (but actually), and found that that’s comparable to the rate of complications for any use of an injected drug or even saline. Just piercing the skin with a tiny needle is a “medical procedure” with a non-zero risk, especially in the elderly and the immunocompromised.
I had a couple of MRIs recently and got curious about gadolinium contrast. Again, there is a non-zero risk, but if you eliminate the cohort with reduced kidney function and those getting regular repeated MRIs, the risk is comparable to the use of an I/V, which is how it’s administered.
The only thing that upset me was that the staff didn’t ask me verbally about kidney issues to double-check. They also didn’t remind me to drink a bunch of water to flush it out of my system. (Some articles recommend administering a diuretic.)
For that matter they didn’t check me properly form metal fragments either!
Similarly, I’ve had vaccinations administered where I had to remind the doctor to clean the area with alcohol first and to tap the syringe to get rid of the bubbles.
Bad procedures are more dangerous than the drugs being administered!
The risk with gadolinium is that it is never fully removed from your system and if you are allergic to it, it means a PERMANENT whole body allergic reaction. Skin itching and incurable chronic pain. It has nothing to do with kidney function.
I got familliar with this condition by a random persons blog who go affected by this during normal MRI and also didn't expect to be part of 1-2%. Unfortunately the blog is now gone, and that post now only lives inside my RSS reader.
Well no one should get MRIs with contrast for fun. Moreover, doctors regularly use contrast off label.
My dad was in this industry when nsf first came out. We would be dragged along to after hours family things at conferences. Doctors openly said they gave contrast off label at dosages not approved by the FDA for organ systems not approved by the Fda. Even children. I'm sure they had their reasons, but I'm also sure they never disclosed the possibility of nsf and just told parents their kids needed it, because they admitted it.
There's a big difference between not getting the MRI and getting the MRI without gadolinium. My suggestion is to ensure that people know the risks outside of just the people who work in it. I'm not sure how that didn't get across in my original comment. With your comprehension skills, you are at an increased risk of falling victim to this exact scenario
My understanding was that gadolinium was already only used in cases where a normal MRI would be ineffective.
I don't know how the risk is actually communicated to patients. I imagine it varries by country. However, normal medical ethics would be to explain risks to the patients. Is there a reason to believe that isn't happening?
There’s really a risk vs benefit. If you have a brain tumour you need contrast to assess the type of tumour, its growth, if it’s a glioma whether it’s transformed and so on. If someone is being given contrast it is going to change their clinical management.
It seems an odd fixation of just MR contrast when the same could be said of all drugs. Does your doctor/surgeon go into the minutiae of all drugs and possible consequences? By this line of thinking, saline is not without risks, should they go into depth about that?
People already poorly retain information or even comprehend it at appointments or interventions, is there any point adding more burden onto their attendances?
Nobody explains shit like this. They will turn down the risks because if they were honest, most wouldn't accept that risk. Because the risk is PERMANENT life changing condition.
>>> Yes. The problem is that it's common in the industry. But it's ultimately up to the patient. Maybe alone. Pretty much guaranteed scared. Undereducated, worrying about their likely life threatening potential illness or injury. That's basically under duress.
> There's a big difference between not getting the MRI and getting the MRI without gadolinium. My suggestion is to ensure that people know the risks outside of just the people who work in it. I'm not sure how that didn't get across in my original comment. With your comprehension skills, you are at an increased risk of falling victim to this exact scenario
I don't see anything wrong with the GP's comprehension skills.
Anyway, every procedure has risk - and no procedure is recommended if there is not an offsetting clinical benefit. There are clear guidelines for when gadolinium is to be used for an MRI and the guidelines factor in risk for 'NSF'.
When I had mine I got the form with warnings about side effects. When I saw the allergic reaction I was a bit concerned, I asked the tech and was told it wasn't a big deal. Since I was in the basement I didn't have service and I decided to trust them given the large number of my friends who've had MRIs. It was fine, but it seemed like a major thing to toss in the patients lap right before they get strapped down in a tube.
But there’s a potential risk of an allergic reaction to any drug you take, any food or drink you consume, even environmental substances - perfumes; hayfever is an allergic reaction to pollens. You don’t know you have one until you have the reaction. I didn’t know I was allergic to penicillins until I needed them for an infection and it turns out I am.
Good point, I wasn't clear. The warning was about the systemic reaction inside the veins and arteries. Or something along those lines. Whatever it was the warning struck me as much more drastic than the usual allergic reaction warning.
> Undereducated, worrying about their likely life threatening potential illness or injury. That's basically under duress
I was never communicated about gadolinium pollution. Not once.
And yes, on my recent MRI, I explicitly asked why there was metal particulate in my joint. "I dont know, sometimes it happens'... No you fucking tool of a doctor. Its gadolinium.
Are you certain it is gadolinium? As I recall from a family member's health issues you can get particulates in joints from arthroscopic surgery or from the metal implants. Not saying that is what happened in your case, but I'm just curious because I remember reading about metal in joints as a potential side effect of the surgery.
People getting MRIs frequently have bigger fish to fry.
When my wife was under cancer treatment she had them frequently. Risking some minor reaction, which in her case was disclosed many times, was well worth the value in managing the acute and long term treatment plan.
I find it odd that when I happen across an article talking about some negative links between x and y being discovered, there's always someone in the comments saying this was known for some decades.
Because population grows exponentially, either up or down, and money is a means of quantifying work and labor at the end of the day. Thus its value rises in the same way
Put another way, there is no number of children per couple C such that a population initially composed of N individuals will always add X>1 number of children per year in perpetuity.
If every person has one kid (or alternately, every couple two), then the growth rate is zero and the population constant. Constant population is exponential (exponent = 0).
If the number per couple is below two, then population declines exponentially. Fewer and fewer people die each year but also fewer are added. Eventually the population hits zero
If the number is more than two, then more and more are added each year
A 'cost' paid for by a private service directly translates into prices and salaries. Whereas a government wealth transfer program appears as taxation and handouts. Everyone likes the former. No one likes the latter. Why this is still confusing in 2025 is beyond me
The same underlying service is being done. It hasn't been cut. It's been shifted from a government service, to a private industry. The government pays roughly the same amount they were previously paying (or in a lot of cases slightly more, with the promise of paying less in the future), the private company provides the service as cheaply as they can, and takes a cut of the cost for profit, benefiting a small number of people, while providing a worse service level for tax payers.
This isn't a capitalism vs socialism thing. My issue with it is that privatization is blatant corruption sold as "capitalism". There's no capitalism here, because there's no competition, outside of the bidding on the contract. Competing on who can provide the cheapest service doesn't improve the service; in fact, it reduces the service quality to maximize profit. Reducing service quality to maximize profit would be fine, from a capitalism point of view, if others were offering the same service to the customer.
It really depends on the industry, but 'bidding for a contract' does not entail a lack of competition. Yes, for certain industries, like utilities, there is no competition based on the way things are set up (and really based on the foreseeable way in which things could be set up). For things such as requisitions of commodity items, then competition is not only possible but preferable. So I disagree with your blanket characterization of things. People really need to have more nuance when discussing these things. Privatizing railroads is different than privatizing food processing.
I'm saying it's not competitive because they're not competing to provide a better service, they're competing to provide the same service at a lower cost, but the quality of the service is effectively always worse than the original government provided service. That isn't capitalism.
Capitalism would be to provide multiple options to the users of the service, and have the providers compete against each other in a proper market.
I used to work for the government (Naval Oceanographic Office), and I worked with the contracting agencies on areas that had been privatized and it was a nightmare. Every few years you'd have multiple companies bid to run the service, but for the most part the same contractor would win the bid because they wrote the software in such a way that only they could run. It had relatively no documentation, had piss poor processes wrapping it, and the subject matter experts worked for the contracting agency. When the contract did change, everything would grind to a halt. For sure, that was more expensive than the original government provided service, but once something is privatized, it can never go back.
I agree we need to have more nuance here. You for some reason think I'm suggesting that "things such as requisitions of commodity items" shouldn't be private, which is not at all what I'm saying. I'm saying that existing government provided services, like the post office, for example, are run cheaper and more effectively by the government, and turning services like these private is for the sake of corruption.
As a a hobbyist mathematician / type theorist, chatgpt et al are great at 'looking up' theorems that you want to exist but that you may not have read about yet. It's also good at connecting disparate areas of math. I don't think lean subsumes AI. Rather, lean allows you to check the AI proof. ChatGPT genuinely does have a knack for certain lines of thought.
LLMs and Lean are orthogonal, neither subsumes either.
They both can be useful or harmful, do to their respective strengths and trade offs.
PAC/statistical learning is good at needles in the haystack problems assuming that the tail losses, simplicity bias, and corpus representation issues are acceptable and you understand that it is fundamentally existential quantification and control for automation bias etc…
Lean is a wonderful collection of concepts and heuristics but due to Rice and Gödel etc… will not solve all problems with software development.
How Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem shows that you can prove anything, without that proof being meaningful is a lens into that.
It is horses for courses, and remember that even in sub-TC total functional programming, proving and arbitrary functions is very hard, while constructing one is far more tractable.
Even those proofs don’t demonstrate semantic correctness. History is riddled with examples of people using powerful tools that elegantly explain flawed beliefs.
The 2009 crash and gaussian copula as an example.
Get all the value you can out of these tools, but use caution, especially in math, where superficially similar similarities often have conflicting conventions, constraints, and assumptions.
Obviously if you problem is ergotic with the Markov property, both will help, but Automated theorem proving and PAC learning will never be a meta theory of the other IMHO.
> How Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem shows that you can prove anything,
That is not at all what it says.
> They both can be useful or harmful,
If a proof is admitted into lean, there is no doubt as to its truth. There is no way in which lean can be construed as harmful.
> The 2009 crash and gaussian copula as an example.
There is nothing mathematical about the economics behind the 2009 crash. Such things are statistical measurements, which admit the possibility of failure, not mathematical conclusions that are demonstrably true.
Gödel's incompleteness theorems demonstrate that any computable system that is sufficiently powerful, cannot be both consistent and syntactically complete.
Godel's second proved, a formula Con_κ associated with the consistency of κ is unprovable if κ is consistent.
If it is not consistent, Ex falso quodlibet (principle of explosion) applies and finding that contradiction allows any proposition or the negation of that proposition to be proven.
> They both can be useful or harmful
It is not lean that is harmful, mistaking finding a proof as being the same as truth. A proof that verifies a theorem does not have to explain why it
holds, and the mathematical assumptions that may have been statistical is exactly why that failed.
Probability theory is just as much of a mathematical branch as λ-calculus. But we probably do differ in opinion on how "demonstrably true" much of mathematics is.
But here is a fairly accessible document related to the crash.
I mean, if you understand leans system then you understand the formal manipulation needed for precise and accurate proofs. Most mathematical papers are rather handwavy about things and expect people to fill in the formalism, which is not always true, as we have seen
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