[FRIAM] (no subject)

[Steve Smith]

Jon -

Thanks for sharing this bit.   I can't disagree that the dynamics of 
this list includes orbits into (gross) cynicism.  Sometimes I look away, 
sometimes i make popcorn and (cynically) watch (my riff on glen's riff 
on "gross"), and sometimes i. wax up my metaphors and throw down, 
shooting my own curls of cynicism.

I think your humble observation of that without contributing to it is of 
direct  help to me.  It rings with the resonances I'm feeling/hearing in 
the aftermath of this Charlie Kirk shooting. Cynicism is like a horned 
callous, grown there for a purpose under chronic insult, but in the way 
an impediment to most all other purposes?  And occasionally acutely 
interferes with everything good.

In my personal life, I'm more prone to the practical than the 
theoretical (by a few intervals) than you I think, but I am also prone 
to abstraction over grounded concretation.

Sometimes it serves me in the pursuit of noodling out the tangled web we 
(I) keep weaving around ourselves as we scramble forward into the 
unknown (minimizing surprisal while pushing the knot of circumstances in 
it's bow wave?), but as you might be alluding to (or pointing directly 
at?) decoupling from *some* honest attempt at a utility function is 
perhaps the ultimate fools strategy.

As you know from our visits here, I surround myself with a world which 
presents regular puzzles for me to solve just to keep going in a 
practical sense... how to stay warm/cool, what to eat (beyond the eggs 
myu chickens and the spinach my garden patch gives me, and whether a 
given branch on a given tree might serve us all better as next winters 
firewood, this summer's shade or a lesson in humility when it cracks and 
falls on something else I find utility in.

To many, these puzzles might be a burden, but to me they are my saving 
grace, something to tether the bouyant balloon of my mind from floating 
off into the stratosphere well above the clouds it thought it was rising 
to dance among.

I just spent a week with two active 9 year olds in Wisconsin, a few 
hours with a 13 year old and planning a loooong drive with a 7 year 
old.   I'm envious of those of you who have that kind of innocence in 
your lives daily... it has been decades for me and only now do I 
appreciate how much it shaped me for the better.

- Steve

On 9/11/25 9:40 am, Jon Zingale wrote:
> """
> Well, IDK Lawvere (other than from that category book). But it would be interesting to, while young, formulate the predicates you'd like to satisfy when you're old. Renee' and I regularly marvel that we're still alive. When we were young, we couldn't even imagine we'd live this long, much less imagine what properties we might have. I suppose it's that ugly diachronic/narrativity thing again. Like ChatGPT, we can tell ourselves stories about anything. And we'll even believe them. When I was a kid, "story" was synonymous with "lying". "You're not telling us stories, are you?" - a regular question coming from my parents. My response was literally irrelevant. They already had their narrative of whatever I might or might not have done. Whose telling the stories, here?!?! >8^D
> """
> He had a great impact on my mathematical life and thought. I 
> considered him a spiritual father and I regret not writing to him 
> before he passed. He was wonderfully generous with his time and his 
> stories were poignant, keeping a target in mind. I suppose I am 
> sharing because it is one of my happiest memories and because I 
> believe the list could use a little less cynicism. There is so much 
> cynicism everywhere.
> As to who I wish to be? I am already so completely different from my 
> earliest imaginings; I wouldn't know where to start. Even as of late, 
> my perspectives and thoughts are radically different from what they 
> were months ago. In some ways, this seems catalyzed by a shift away 
> from pure mathematics and toward developing tools for doing 
> science—catalyzed by the overwhelm I feel when confronted by anything 
> I attempt to build that might stand. The specificity and idiosyncratic 
> nature of the phenomena I am studying does a lot to eat through my 
> theorist leanings. I am not an academic; what I am hoping to build 
> must work. The whole exercise is altering my stance. The past appears 
> as a prelude to much less than I imagined. The toy models I and others 
> seem to carry remind me of the useless idols and charms that died in 
> the hands, or around the necks, of the early Christian settlers to 
> this new world. A child's baseball glove in a box of belongings, 
> carried by a woman on her first day of college.
>
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