David McCarthy 🇺🇦
@totalutility.bsky.social
Philosopher, likes ethics, epistemology, uncertainty, welfare economics, category theory, climbing 🇺🇦
A Harvard English professor sums up Lolita as being about "a man whose life is stamped forever by his impression of a young girl"???
November 13, 2025 at 10:20 AM
A Harvard English professor sums up Lolita as being about "a man whose life is stamped forever by his impression of a young girl"???
This feels like Hamkins' view about the multiverse
November 9, 2025 at 10:32 PM
This feels like Hamkins' view about the multiverse
English of course has the proverb "time and tide wait for no man", but some argue that the proverb was originally "time and tide waits for no man", `time' and `tide' originally being synonyms. english.stackexchange.com/questions/95...
Time and tide wait for no man
In the old proverb:
Time and tide wait for no man.
Our first record of the proverb is from St Marher in 1225:
And te tide and te time þat tu iboren were, schal beon iblescet.
When it was already
english.stackexchange.com
November 9, 2025 at 10:28 PM
English of course has the proverb "time and tide wait for no man", but some argue that the proverb was originally "time and tide waits for no man", `time' and `tide' originally being synonyms. english.stackexchange.com/questions/95...
Most enjoyable article I've read for some time!
November 6, 2025 at 2:46 PM
Most enjoyable article I've read for some time!
I wonder what the direction of causation between is between the popularity of the idiom and Kant's usage. Kant's ethics is fairly straightforward, except that for English-non-German speakers, it's punctuated by idioms that are very hard to translate, so you always feel you might be missing something
November 4, 2025 at 1:04 PM
I wonder what the direction of causation between is between the popularity of the idiom and Kant's usage. Kant's ethics is fairly straightforward, except that for English-non-German speakers, it's punctuated by idioms that are very hard to translate, so you always feel you might be missing something
English translations of Kant typically use expressions like "No one can will that". A very uncommon expression in English, but it at least signals that "will / want" is being used in a technical sense
November 4, 2025 at 12:27 PM
English translations of Kant typically use expressions like "No one can will that". A very uncommon expression in English, but it at least signals that "will / want" is being used in a technical sense
There's a very old argument (due to Moschovakis I think) that just as Peano arithmetic can arithmetize syntax, a physical theory with fairly minimal expressive resources could geometrize syntax, leading to a true-but-unprovable-by-the-theory physical statement. Same basic argument?
November 3, 2025 at 4:32 PM
There's a very old argument (due to Moschovakis I think) that just as Peano arithmetic can arithmetize syntax, a physical theory with fairly minimal expressive resources could geometrize syntax, leading to a true-but-unprovable-by-the-theory physical statement. Same basic argument?
Didn't Scholze say that the whole paper preceding the corollary was a series of trivialities, and that the corollary itself was devoid of content?
October 29, 2025 at 3:48 PM
Didn't Scholze say that the whole paper preceding the corollary was a series of trivialities, and that the corollary itself was devoid of content?
Very interesting! Minor comment on the red flag issue. You know this vastly better than me, but I read people saying that it wasn't really that the whole theory was so hard to get into, but that a bunch of people fairly quickly and independently identified Corollary 3.12 (?) as a problem.
October 29, 2025 at 3:48 PM
Very interesting! Minor comment on the red flag issue. You know this vastly better than me, but I read people saying that it wasn't really that the whole theory was so hard to get into, but that a bunch of people fairly quickly and independently identified Corollary 3.12 (?) as a problem.
Would be curious to see this illustrated with the abc conjecture fiasco
October 29, 2025 at 2:59 PM
Would be curious to see this illustrated with the abc conjecture fiasco
wet cognition?
October 25, 2025 at 9:07 PM
wet cognition?
Do you think he actually believes it? I'm inclined to say this is just performative: deliberate, gross lying to seek attention and influence
October 25, 2025 at 10:23 AM
Do you think he actually believes it? I'm inclined to say this is just performative: deliberate, gross lying to seek attention and influence
Re Remark 10.17. You might wait till passing peer review before analogising your work to the development of Galois theory, quantum mechanics and algebraic geometry
October 24, 2025 at 9:35 AM
Re Remark 10.17. You might wait till passing peer review before analogising your work to the development of Galois theory, quantum mechanics and algebraic geometry
Thought it was Paris, but could be wrong. Did you see that he almost drove David Navara to the same end as Naroditsky? Shame on the elite players for not taking a stronger stand. Only Nakamura defended Naroditsky in public. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_N...
David Navara - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
October 21, 2025 at 10:12 AM
Thought it was Paris, but could be wrong. Did you see that he almost drove David Navara to the same end as Naroditsky? Shame on the elite players for not taking a stronger stand. Only Nakamura defended Naroditsky in public. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_N...
Would be nice if they revoked his eligibility to live in France, sent him back to Mordor
October 21, 2025 at 10:01 AM
Would be nice if they revoked his eligibility to live in France, sent him back to Mordor
I don't know, I never watch this kind of stuff. I know it's a financially successful stream. Hikaru was the only top level player to publicly stand up for Danya. He found out the news just as he was walking into the US championship and streaming about it is just his way of dealing with it
October 20, 2025 at 8:14 PM
I don't know, I never watch this kind of stuff. I know it's a financially successful stream. Hikaru was the only top level player to publicly stand up for Danya. He found out the news just as he was walking into the US championship and streaming about it is just his way of dealing with it
kick.com/gmhikaru Show had been going on for a while already
kick.com
October 20, 2025 at 7:46 PM
kick.com/gmhikaru Show had been going on for a while already
Hikaru is streaming about Danya now
October 20, 2025 at 7:39 PM
Hikaru is streaming about Danya now
Oh no!!! He was one of the great guys in chess, full of integrity, brilliant commentator, and a machine at bullet. What a loss. Also, Kramnik should rot
October 20, 2025 at 6:29 PM
Oh no!!! He was one of the great guys in chess, full of integrity, brilliant commentator, and a machine at bullet. What a loss. Also, Kramnik should rot
No, treating someone as a means in the Kantian sense has to do with a certain kind of exploitation of their rational agency. Classic example is supposed to be the deceitful promise
October 19, 2025 at 3:45 PM
No, treating someone as a means in the Kantian sense has to do with a certain kind of exploitation of their rational agency. Classic example is supposed to be the deceitful promise
It doesn’t treat its mother merely as a means in the Kantian sense
October 19, 2025 at 3:32 PM
It doesn’t treat its mother merely as a means in the Kantian sense
are you saying this is actually the underlying picture of matrix-heavy intro to linear algebra books, or that a common approach is to start with this fully explicit picture and proceed categorically?
October 11, 2025 at 9:33 AM
are you saying this is actually the underlying picture of matrix-heavy intro to linear algebra books, or that a common approach is to start with this fully explicit picture and proceed categorically?
so given a finite dim vector space we’re talking about a category in which the objects are frames (ordered bases?) and the morphisms are elements of GL(n,R) and that’s a groupoid and that’s how we should think about vector spaces?
October 11, 2025 at 9:33 AM
so given a finite dim vector space we’re talking about a category in which the objects are frames (ordered bases?) and the morphisms are elements of GL(n,R) and that’s a groupoid and that’s how we should think about vector spaces?