gibberish

[paulhope]

I have this growing problem in my life which is that the more I feel like I am getting close to the answers to important questions I care about, the less I'm able to explain to anybody else what I'm thinking about. It's like I've gone down a long path to some mythical fountain of youth, and am almost there, but then, when somebody stops and asks

Comments

[jeffrock]

I bet a lot of professional mathematicians in this day and age have that problem. The subject has become so specialized that, for many branches, only a small handful of people in the world really understand it. It would be quite strange to spend your entire life immersed in something that you would be at pains to give most people even the dimmest understanding what it's all about.

[paulhope]

And yet...that work makes a permanent contribution which may well one day be taken up as the cornerstone of a entirely new kind of engineering that substantially promotes human wellbeing.

Cloistered mathematicians deserve a lot of credit, IMHO.

[unnamed525]

Maybe it's just a matter of not having trained oneself in giving the reasoned response to the cogent question.

[paulhope]

Oh, that's totally it. It gives me a new respect for people who manage to double as both researchers and popularizers of a particular field--retracing those steps takes some talent.

I think I managed to stumble into a passing explanation eventually, but yeah; I should practice the presentation more. I'll just do that in my...spare...

time.

hmm.

[unnamed525]

For me, non-classical logic is important if we want to discuss a probablistic framework for the relation of the past and future to the present, as well as the nature of first-order truth (second-order truth may very well be classical, but that doesn't entail that first-order truth is, I don't think, especially given the interesting differences between first- and second-order logic).

[paulhope]

I'm not sure that will help sell it to the layman :)

[paulhope]

Thanks, Heather.

Yo--I'm sorry I didn't make it to your house last night. Work never stopped. But I definitely owe you an evening. Be prepared.

Towers of Babel, Falling Down

[pooperman]

Are you abstracting away from the problem, or abstracting away from the abstraction (of the abstraction)N of the problem? Or, at this point, has the abstraction become the problem, and the territory is all but forgotten because of a fascination with the map, a map that is still not really all-that-drawn? And what of my metaphor of the abstraction (of the abstraction)N of the problem--does it help a whit?

That's one heap of abstractions!

;-)

I'm not sure what those mythical archetypical fellows expected to find once their ziggurat reached the Divine Doorstep, but I'm sure their efforts were interrupted in much the same way as your Mr. Darmstadter befuzzled yourself: someone asked them, after many years of extremely interesting architectural (arche-textual?) progress towards "something", what it was that they would find when they were done, and they spent their remaining years on earth trying to explain it.

Out came a heap of gibberish!

[j3eej]

I want to say "I know exactly what you're talking about".

Does this problem also manifest itself in your ability to understand other people? Either I'm getting dumber, or more scrutinizing, but I find that, in the same way that I can't articulate what I mean, I often can't decipher what other people are trying to articulate (regarding "those questions") because, frankly, they are speaking a different language. They use (or abuse) words which you would think have very specific definitions, but m-w/wiki them all I want, I'm never convinced that I understand the meaning of the word in the context that it was used. And by context, I want to mean more than just the context of the sentence, or the conversation... more like the sum of all experiences that a given speaker has ever had with the word.

Anyway, it makes listening to npr extremely frustrating.

And now that I'm thinking about it... "random" is a horrible, horrible word.

[doclabyrinth]

Is "random" really such a horrible word? At least when I use it, I'm very precise. But then again I use it in the context of probability theory.

Some horrible words you've used in your post:
* problem
* understand
* mean
* different
* horrible

[j3eej]

I "believe" many people use the word "random" outside the realm of probability theory, and in those cases I "think" they "mean" something closer to "arbitrary". But the word "arbitrary" is not really any "better". I have a real "philosophical" "problem" with speaking "logically" about anything that's being described as "illogical".

True enough, if you asked me to give "good" colloquial definitions for those words, I would suffer for a few hours then give up.

[paulhope]

I think I've come to expect people coming in with different vocabularies, and so spend a lot of time trying to find a translation from their terms to mine.

This rarely works.

But the inability to get somebody's else's thoughts to fit into my own ontology leaves me feeling incredulous. I've been criticized for this in the past.