Surprised nobody is mentioning climate change. Young people are supposed to be contributing and centering their lives around a kind of societal structure which is increasingly seen as doomed. The constant acceleration of capital is bumping up against the material finitude of an increasingly depleted Earth.
Conservatives have a vision of the doomed future, built around walls and hoarding resources against impending scarcity. But liberals don't really have a good answer outside of "bring the super-rich to heel and use their resources to invest in mitigations," a view which is anathema to politicians who depend on the super-rich to continue holding power.
People are depressed because there doesn't seem to be a future.
Yeah I think this is a big part of the core thing. The author is trying to explain it away because a bunch of quantitative metrics are better or improving. But regardless, it feels more hopeless now. It feels like the world is going to end and we're powerless to affect it, it feels like our lives are grist for engine of wealth accumulation.
Surprise, people's feelings are based on how things feel and regardless of what numbers say the world feels worse than it used to. We've optimized the hopefulness out of our changes.
But he was harmed: he was allegedly fired for reporting religious discrimination.
He may not have been harmed by the cult members, but he was (again, allegedly) harmed by the culture created by this cult. "I learned of someone being discriminated due to their religious beliefs (or lack of), I reported it and the company fired me" makes a good case for the company supporting and/or engaging in religious discrimination.
I'm not saying the author will win - it is entirely possible, like you say, that he was fired for being disruptive or other hundred valid reasons. But I do think the author raises at least a good initial argument.
>But he was harmed: he was allegedly fired for reporting religious discrimination.
He was allegedly harmed. If, as the person you are replying to speculates, he was freaking out and being a bad employee after discovering the affiliation of his coworkers, then potentially that's a righteous firing and he wasn't harmed in a legal sense. If as he alleges, he was fired for having valid concerns, then yes, harm in a legal sense.
I think that identifying the ruliad with the "logos" makes sense - the idea that there's some underlying abstract shape to the universe that makes rationality possible in the first place.
Perhaps we can back-propagate physics through mathematics to discover physical proof of logos? Then we could substantiate the claim that reality is not illusion composed of ever fluctuating qualia.
That discovery would certainly fill this one with wonder.
> I never got the "emergent properties have special aesthetic and nearly spiritual significance" or "everything is just an <insert structure here>" cognitive confusion that so many mathematicians (especially formalists) seem to have.
People just like spiritual beliefs. There's a reason why a majority of human beings hold non-rational beliefs like religion or money having intrinsic value.
It's not complete bullshit, it just fails to engage with the already existing work on the subject. He's creating his own entire system instead of looking at similar work by others and fitting his theory in with those. If you don't play philosophy on their turf, philosophers won't engage with you.
> The particular thing that comes to mind repeatedly when reading this is the fact that more or less all of mathematics can be derived starting either from set theory or from logic theory.
I don't know if this is the actual foundation of mathematics though - we're seeing more advances in category theory, the Russell-Whitehead project of reducing mathematics to pure logic is generally considered a failure, and set theory's bogged down in issues of axioms in the wake of Cohen's proof of the indecidability of the continuum hypothesis. It's probably better to see these foundational projects as providing windows into the mathematical universe instead of being the actual substance of mathematics.
After all, we do mathematics without pure logic or sets all the time. Axioms are chosen for their elegance and ability to describe conceived mathematical concepts, not the other way around.
> The particular thing that comes to mind repeatedly when reading this is the fact that more or less all of mathematics can be derived starting either from set theory or from logic theory.
No, most of mathematics can be expressed in set theory. It's like saying every program can be written in C. It's more or less true, but the philosophical implications are overblown. That is, it's important that set theory and C are so powerful, but there's nothing[1] special about them in particular, we could just as well choose different foundations/Turing complete languages.
[1] Disclaimer: I am not a set theorist and I presume there's a reason set theorists study ZFC and its more powerful cousins so intensively.
> the Russell-Whitehead project of reducing mathematics to pure logic is generally considered a failure
sigh I find these discussions tedious, but oh well...
I've heard this before and it seems wrong and rooted in a misunderstanding. Can someone (not necessarily the person I'm replying to) explain why you believe this?
AFAICT among non-academics it's mostly rooted in pop sci story telling. Same genre as “Godel went insane because of his impossibility result” and nonsense like that.
Among academics (esp. mathematicians) this impression comes from the fact that if you look at almost any mathematics department, there aren't many people working in/on formal logic. But that's mostly because all of the mathematicians working on/in formal logic suffer the humiliation of sitting in the fancy new CS building with higher salaries and lower teaching loads ;)
I was skeptical until I saw the applications, especially representing groups. Not entirely sure how distinct these ideas are from studying power sets or how to really think about what "color" means here.
It's a pretty cool abstraction. No idea how to use it but worth thinking about.
It was interesting that you can represent groups, but what can you do with that representation? And the exponential growth in the number of states seems to make them unwieldy to work with.
