Yeah, it's definitely about "culture". What I've been trying to express with usage of "God" is how primitive societies, lacking law enforcing institutions etc, tried to instil order through fear of punishment from a power no-one can top, not even the most respected leader.
I don't really have the time to take anthropology classes, but yes, that's what I'm interested in. There's something called "theoretical anthropology" which is spot-on what I'm interested in. Have you heard about it?
The big interest comes from me being frozen out by all peers during most of my life (grew up in a very dysfunctional family, ADHD etc), and I have been interested in social dynamics ever since.
I do standup comedy, which to me feels related in a way I cannot explain.
OP here. I'm reworking the essay quite a bit, e.g. removing the vector space stuff, and the clumsy usage of the word "God".
I've been thinking about these things for so long while not really discussing it with anyone, so there's this soup of associations that doesn't make any sense to any outsider, nor even to me, now when I finally put it down into writing.
Anyway, the essay title will be updated to:
> Is there a canonical parametrization of all social groups that describes their culture?
which captures what I really want to talk about.
If anyone else is interested in this topic, feel free to email me.
As an aside, I think YouTube Music is superior to Spotify in terms of music catalog.
You get "everything on Spotify" (high quality audio) plus the YouTube videos (eg mixes that are put up) in a battery-friendy player (possibility to go audio only on these videos). Of course minimizable with YT Premium.
I believe that the discoverability algo is much better with YouTube Music as well, which is important to me...
I pay ~$15/month (in my local currency) for YouTube Premium which also gives me the ad-free experience on YouTube.
Ultimately, it comes down to the catalog. Anything even slightly more obscure (older house music, rare b-sides, unreleased tracks) just isn’t found on Spotify. Pretty much everything is on YouTube though.
I actually like YouTube itself for casual listening, it has everything. My only problem with it is that on autoplay will put 2 hour long albums as a single video instead of picking the most relevant next song.
> t acts like a mnemonic scribble for an intermediate step. It doesn't have any mathematical meaning.
That's about right. When you cover elementary solution methods for differential equations, you start with something like y = dy/dx. You're supposed to separate variables ("get the x's on one side and the y's on the other, then integrate"). So it's tempting to just write "dy/y = dx", even though as you say it doesn't have any mathematical meaning. But it's helpful in keeping track of the algebra. You then forget you wrote that meaningless but helpful step and write "∫ dy/y = ∫ dx" which is okay, and go from there.
Looking at one of my old diff eq books I see whole sections where this kind of casual algebra with differentials is the norm.
When anyone would ask me about this in class, I'd say something like this. Think of a solution curve for y = dy/dx as a parametrized curve, so x = f(t) and y = g(t). Then interpret the equation as y = (dy/dt)/(dx/dt), write dx/dt = (1/y) (dy/dt), then integrate both sides with respect to t:
∫ 1/y (dy/dt) dt = ∫ (dx/dt) dt
Change variables to get "∫ dy/y = ∫ dx". After a while we believe that this will always work, and we just suppress the stuff about parametric equations.
The derivative of 1 with respect to x is zero, since the derivative of any constant function is zero.
So you must be saying that the derivative of 1/f(x) with respect to x is zero for any f(x), where f is a differentiable function, with non-vanishing derivative near x (for it to be defined in the first place).
That doesn't make any sense.
Please don't respond to this. It's getting absurd.
What is the difference in inner dialogue in happy vs unhappy people?
I guess the inner voice is what one strives to just observe and let be while meditating. After a good meditation session I feel less mentally tense (eg not clinging on to superficially important todo items).
Seems like inner voice is related to mental state in a major way. I have pretty severe adhd and am unmedicated so my inner voice is more like an old radio inbetween stations (= chaotic).
Unhappy people with an inner voice have a grumpy crank personality as their inner voice. Taming and neutralizing that grumpy crank is the entire point of the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy school of Psychology. They have a process called an Inner Dialogue Audit where a list of 10-20 simple questions are given, and you ask yourself these questions. If you answer "yes" to any of them, then your inner voice has a bias, is effectively lying to you about your moment to moment observations and thoughts. And once this bias is identified, it evaporates because deception known no longer deceives.
Therapy helps in overcoming pretentiousness, no doubt. This is an emotional problem, feelings of worthlessness, attaching one's sense of identity to how smart one is etc.
It's a big problem, especially among people with no life (family, self-care habits), eg nerds with no purpose.
Making up a term just so you can continue jerking each other off intellectually wont help you with anything.
> Sometimes talking with my friends is like intellectual combat, which is great. I am glad I have such strong cognitive warriors on my side. But not all ideas are ready for intellectual combat. If I don’t get my friend on board with this, some of them will crush an idea before it gets a chance to develop, which feels awful and can kill off promising avenues of investigation.
That doesn't describe anything like what you've described in your comment.
That's a pretty harsh take. I think it's worth fleshing out an idea a bit more to see how much value it has before you try to destroy it. If the cons outweigh the pros too heavily at the onset you might not bother trying to overcome them when there might actually have been something valuable there or something that could have been realized in a different way.
L_R is decidable by a master algorithm running every y of x#y, e.g. 3.14#<y_pi> runs y_pi(|3.14|), so y runs up to 2 decimals.
The master algorithm runs y(|x|) and then compares the output to x.
It halts correctly for every x#y unless you can provide a counter-example?