[FRIAM] FW: Math emojis

Wed Jan 30 22:00:24 EST 2019

Thanks, Lee.

See larding below. 

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of
lrudolph at meganet.net
Sent: Wednesday, January 30, 2019 6:53 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] FW: Math emojis

Nick:

> Well, Ok.  I can see that it's sort of like Carl Tollander's

> 

> "Let there be a spherical cow," which always makes me smile.

> 

> Or

> 

> Even the micro economists',

> 

> "Let there be a fully informed consumer."

I don't claim to be a native speaker of PhysicsEng, much less of EconoEng,
but I've frequently hung out with some of the former, and I've always seen
it stated "Assume a spherical cow".

  Further, if either of those one-liners were to be expanded to a longer
joke-about-jargon-and/or-idealization, my strong intuition suggests that
they would have to be expanded to something along the lines of "Let X be a
spherical cow", "Let C be a fully informed consumer", followed by some
fanciful bloviation (or bovination) about X and C, using fancy jargon (or
pseudojargon; for instance, somewhere around here I have a very old
photocopy of a parody astrophysics article, typeset in the style of--I
believe--the Astrophysical Review, purporting to be "On the Imperturbability
of Elevator Operators" by Chandrasekharan: the joke in the title rests on
the facts that "operators" and "perturbation" are standard jargon in
mathematical physics, and could quite reasonably appear near each other in
MathPhysEng, but "elevator operators" is just a bit of slapstick).  Just
plain "Let there be", without providing a place-holding name for the assumed
cow or consumer, rings very false.  But (as before) this is empirical stuff,
and if you've really heard them that way (and can prove it...), then they
can occur that way and my skepticism is unwarranted.  On the other hand, if
you're *recreating* the material in quotation marks *as a representation of
what you understood to be the joke*, then I think you're in the position of
the (typically) British man who, in a meta-joke, tries to re-tell an
American joke and gets it hilariously wrong.

[NST==>Oh, well.  I tried.  In my defrocked English-Majory sort of way, I
find it hard to see the difference between "Assume a." and "Let there be."
I guess perhaps the latter has more of an order of Bible-speak, as we would
say in Lee-Speak.  <==nst] 

> But how do we tell the jokes from the foundational insights:

> 

> Like: "Let there be a number which when multiplied by itself equals -1.

> 

> Or that howler of mathematical howlers: "Think of a number greater 

> than any number you can think of."

> 

> Or Knewton's  Knee-slapper: "Calculate the acceleration at an instant."

Well, we do have the proverb "Many a true word is spoken in jest", and
"kidding on the square" is an old and honorable idiom, whereas "kidding on
the square of the hypotenuse" is just a quip, and "kidding on the
hypothesis" might be a translation of "Hypothesis non fingo" but not a very
good one. From your point of view as a pragmatist (Jamesian or Pierceian,
take your pick), what should it *matter* whether we can or can't "tell the
jokes from the foundational insights"?  J: an insight that sees no
inwardness is no insight. P:

If something (a discourse fragment; a stone; a dream--well, not one of
those, in your case) is a "foundational insight", that will (eventually) be
found to be the case *because it became a foundation of something* in the
long run.  If something is a "joke", *that* will (eventually) be found to be
the case because it made you laugh, most often--but not always--in the short
run (and, yes, I have at least several times in my life suddenly "gotten" a
joke decades after hearing or seeing or reading it, as I bet you have, too;
conversely, I've more than several times realized that something an earlier
"I" found to be a real side-splitter wasn't funny at all).

[NST==> Well, you absolutely correct about all of the above.  In the Knewton
Kneeslapper case, I have built my career on criticizing category errors in
biology and psychology, and if "acceleration at an instant" isn't a category
error, I don't know wtf a category error is.  Seems like all of higher math
is based on category errors.  So we calculate the acceleration at a point,
and then we do all sorts of operations with it, and then we build a bridge
with those calculations and the damned bridge stands up, no matter what Nick
Thompson says about its logical provenance.  You are also correct that, as a
pragmat[ci]st, I ought to be completely happy with that.  So, whatever the
joke is, it's on me.   <==nst] 

How's the poetry going?  

Nick 

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