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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 16h

Meanwhile russians enjoy nice holidays and exclusive education for their children in Europe

David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Why wouldn't it matter mathematically? The role of trust and instilling confidence in communicating research is huge. If someone is being sloppy about stuff that can be done and checked easily, shouldn't that reduce one's confidence that they've done the harder stuff properly?

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Perhaps a variant of this scam? See especially the replies to the post bsky.app/profile/john...

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

That's how it was pre AI, and now they may just be using AI to help them with English. When I worked in Hong Kong and got a lot of such emails I used to make a point of replying and telling them that's not how to approach a Western prof, and they were typically very grateful.

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

If the emails are from students in mainland China, flattering details about one's research are just par for the course, and not per se indicative of a scam. It's how they would be expected to approach a prof in China, and they assume that's how they should approach a Western prof.

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

True, but the charmless GOP presidents-in-waiting like Vance and Rubio don't have that peculiar charisma that enables Trump himself to brush such things off. One of these scandals should stick in the next presidential election.

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I wonder if it also illustrates something about self-reference in the context of oracles?

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

In the version I heard, the audience is led to think the person asking has done something quite clever in eventually arriving at the ordered-pair question, only then to be defeated by more cleverness. Long-winded, but it works.

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

The self-reference literature is so vast I'd be slightly surprised if it hadn't been discussed, but I'm not aware of anything. Offhand, it reminds me of the Berry paradox.

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I've told it to university administrators, and if they can understand it...

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Haven't you asked two questions? The version I heard long ago arrives at: "What is the ordered pair whose first member is the wisest question and whose second member is its answer"? To which, of course: "The ordered pair whose first member is what you just said and whose second is what I just said."

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Challenging to enforce the bijection between seats and people

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

The Tractatus is said to have been refuted by the Neapolitan chin flick, hard to top that

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Why is it that I am still constantly taken aback when I already believe we live in the most corrupt of all timelines?

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Don't they play a massive role in condensed mathematics?

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

What the article describes as 100s of painful bites to the face is an agonizing level of pain and a life threatening medical emergency likely to result in scarring for life. Those cops belong in prison.

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Very interesting! I liked the array of possible answers to a bunch of different questions (*). At this highly uncertain stage, that seems more useful than premature position papers. (*) Would be better though if the list of possible answers wasn't so heavily sourced from math's rich and famous.

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

What a great project to assign: how might we multiply vectors, and what algebraic or geometric notion does each conception capture?

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

My knowledge gives out here, but I was under the impression that if one instead one treats Cat instead as a 2-category, so that natural transformations are no longer invisible, one can a parallel Yoneda-style argument that this time leads to equivalence, but without an appeal to "identity is evil".

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

One might wonder why this argument can't just be applied to e.g. Cat. I'm familiar with the argument you mention that this seems to be too strong as it leads to identity between objects. But can one formalize this intuition, and get a more concrete justification for focussing on equivalence?

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I take it that the Yoneda framework provides a concrete interpretation of sameness of objects in a category, and that the Yoneda lemma provides a formal justification for saying that this interpretation can be charaterized in terms of the existence of an isomorphism.

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Thanks for taking the time to reply. What motivates my question is this. It's often said that for objects, sameness amounts to existence of an isomorphism between them. But it's not so obvious in what sense this makes them the same, or what is special about a morphism with a left and right inverse.

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

A minute's research would have taught you that for any Ukrainian to leave Russian occupied areas of Ukraine is extremely difficult, dangerous, and expensive. That's before you add a baby to the equation.

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

The solution to the Reform inbreeding problem? That ship has sailed

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

FWIW, I agree that the agenda (i.e. who or what you can actually vote for) is super important, and probably much more important than how you should vote given an impoverished agenda. Also explains why the US has never been much of a democracy.

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

No, I'm politely engaging with a common argument. If you sincerely want so see whether I'm making things up, submit the whole discussion to an AI for assessment, but I doubt you will.

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

"If you vote for the candidate who is 5% evil over the candidate who is 10% evil, then next time the choice will be between a candidate who is 15% evil". Seems to propose a reason for not voting for the 5% evil candidate, hence for not voting at all, making it more likely the more evil one will win.

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

That may well be, but that's very different from arguing that given a less than optimal choice, you should effectively choose the worse of the two.

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

That's not a possibility in the scenario you proposed

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

If you allow the greater evil candidate to win, do you expect that your next choice will be between an angel and a saint?

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Newbie question: is this material a natural home for a Yoneda-style explanation of why equivalence, not isomorphism, is the right notion of "sameness" for categories?

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Humans: our world is --> burning down <-- Also humans: I cannot endorse subsection J, para 7, clause iv. LLMs: increase weight between "human organization" and "risible"

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Or if the idea needs to be a community project, are you going to devote years to it just to develop the ideas to sufficient maturity that all that remains is for openAI to claim the prize with 10 mil of compute?

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Or if you have an idea for one of the unsolved problems that would require years to develop, are you really going to throw yourself at it Perelman or Wiles-style while wondering if one of the AI companies will think, well, we only threw ten million at it last year, let's try 100.

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

"There will be no war, but in the struggle for peace not a stone will be left standing".

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

How to project power: "Can we please have your autograph daddy?"

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

As a former professional philosopher, thank goodness for the “former”. One of the top journals just published a publication whose sole attributed author was a human who openly did nothing more than a little bit of AI supervision

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Sure, but it would be crazy for virtually anyone to tie their self-worth to a Fields or similar. It's a bad approach to life in general to need that kind of validation, but a Fields? There's like 100,000 professional mathematicians, and less than one Fields a year.

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Though when it gets there, it will still reply more quickly than tech customer support

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Maryam Mirzakhani? I know she's only one example, but the way she talked about doing mathematics might appeal to you if you're not already familiar with her.

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Perhaps someone could explain the “fiction” part of “science fiction” to our friend.

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

It's an easy-to-read and enjoyable public lecture from 1975; perhaps the OP was not presenting it as the latest and the best?

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David McCarthy 🇺🇦 @totalutility.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Economically, Russia is now a client-state of China, and China has told the Kremlin very strongly not to even consider nuclear. Fools like this are just telling everyone they are nowhere near the real levers of influence. Still, good target practice for SBU.

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