I just read the post about 0 and 1 being invalid probabilities. Here’s my best attempt at interpreting it as a joke: This is clearly yud’s attempt at creating a mathematical trollpost using only words.

But yeah as someone with a (honestly atrophied) degree in mathematics I am struggling to figure out the post. Whatever he’s doing, he’s not performing mathematics; at best it is sophistry. Honestly it makes me sad that he wrote it at all and that people read it and agreed with it.

Reading it is like going to a restaurant, seeing “bowl of plain rice” on the menu, ordering it, and getting served an old boot full of glitter and sawdust. Seeing the comment section and seeing people that think yud is smart or correct about anything is reading the yelp reviews later for the restaurant and seeing people talk about how they’ve never tried rice before having it at the restaurant, and that it was really good and that now when they go to other restaurants with rice it’s never the real thing and they shouldn’t be trusted.

For actually interesting contrarian maths, go watch some Norman Wildberger videos or something.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 1 points 10 months ago

Reading the article is like seeing a guy at a party pick up a guitar, announce he’s going to play wonderwall, but for whatever reason he starts holding the guitar like a trumpet, blowing on the headstock and everything. There’s no indication that this is a joke. A crowd forms and they love it, tunelessly and arrhythmically chanting “wonder wall! Wonder wall!” Over and over. It’s not even part of the song. You see him later making out in a puddle, people still chanting “wonder wall!” at the puddle. Your only recourse is to set the couch on fire and leave.

[–] YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM@awful.systems 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

and seeing people talk about how they’ve never tried rice before having it at the restaurant

And this is the fundamental, absolute, no-further-down essential appeal of rationalism. Fans have never encountered ideas before, or not in any way that they’ve been able to digest them (“what the author really meant: the curtains are fucking blue”). And it bubbles up throughout, in every environ of the culture. If you are ever as stupid and masochistic as I am and find yourself on TheMotte.org, it’s the key to everything they say: they literally have never encountered facts from beyond their own rabid whirlpool of hatred, and everything that they learned in the whirlpool was laced with contrarian ressentiment towards an enemy they literally haven’t seen.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 1 points 10 months ago

oh dear god, a literal refinery for raw rat ore