Yeah I'm a Platonist

I'm studying modal logic atm.

it's gonna be the next hot thing i swear

>doesn't know about knowledge

wat

this is all retarded

It is disappointingly bad. I say that as a massive DFW fan otherwise. I have a math PhD and I cringed as I read it. I mean, it was an interesting experiment to try to say more than is covered in the usual pop math book, but there are so many clunkers that it's obvious to a trained reader that he hadn't properly understood the things he was writing about. A real shame.

When he refers to the "unnamed book" is he talking about Godel, Escher, Bach?

What would be a good place to start, if I wanted to pursue math as a sort of interest, or a hobby?

I can do a proof (such as Cantor's proof of higher infinity) both classically and constructively. Therefore, mathematical Platonism is retarded.

>it's obvious to a trained reader that he hadn't properly understood the things he was writing about
That's kinda part of his aesthetic, and not just regarding maths. I developed mild subclinical PTSD from the lack of trigger warnings when I watched his Charlie Rose interview

>"David Lynch is the first art film director to ever gain mainstream popularity, I think"
>"like Gen X directors are doing right now"
>implying meme Gen X directors are on a similar artistic level
>tops it off by saying "I'm not an expert on film, though, so I could possibly be very, very wrong about all of this".
why fucking say it in the first place then, pseud?
>goes on to condescendingly attack anyone who's ever wrong about any smallest thing regarding philosophy or literature

As for Wallace’s book, the less said, the better. It’s a sloppy production, including neither an index nor a table of contents, and after a while his breezy style grates. No one who is unfamiliar with the ideas behind his dense, user-unfriendly mathematical expositions could work their way through them to gain any insight into what he is talking about. Worse, anyone who is already familiar with these ideas will see that his expositions are often riddled with mistakes. The sections on set theory, in particular, are a disaster. When he lists the standard axioms of set theory from which mathematicians derive theorems about the iterative conception of a set, he gets the very first one wrong. (It is not, as Wallace says, that if two sets have the same members, then they are the same size. It is that two sets never do have the same members.) From there it is pretty much downhill. He goes on to discuss Cantor’s unsolved problem, which I mentioned at the end of the previous paragraph. There are many different, equivalent ways of formulating the problem; Wallace gives four. The first and fourth are fine. The second, about whether the real numbers ‘constitute’ the set of sets of rational numbers, does not, as it stands, make sense. And the third, about whether the cardinal that measures the size of the set of real numbers can be obtained by raising 2 to the power of the smallest infinite cardinal, is simply wrong: we know it can....

lrb.co.uk/v25/n24/aw-moore/how-to-catch-a-tortoise

>guys, look, I know big words too!

Counting numbers

WHAT THE FUCK I HAVEN'T SEEN THIS INTERVIEW. FUUUUUUUCK

Wasn't Cantor a Platonist?

holy shit, would you be willing to write a critique on it? I would love to read it, unless that would make you feel uncomfortable

Pseuds who think they know math are the worst pseuds. Every math class I've ever taken, there they are telling everyone else how smart they are.

It shows how fucked up DFW was psychologically, that he tried to bluff his way through a subject he had no clue about.

Yeah, it's a huge leap to "x necessarily exists". He doesn't even try to prove it, he just assumes.

and whatever "God-like" is seems like a monstrosity of a language-game, maybe i'm not smart enough to be this stupid

This is all you could ask for
ams.org/notices/200406/rev-harris.pdf

I have a professor in analytic philosophy and we talked about this book privately. She used to be in mathematics before switching to philosophy and apparently when this book was published she and her department had a laugh over it.

Fucking pseuds ruin everything.

It amuses me that for Wallace's fans his work relies so much on his portrayal of himself as the middle class messiah. Like Celine and Pound can be fascists and Heidegger can be Nazi, but Wallace's legacy rests on the image of sainthood. How fucking pathetic.

Does that mean Math Rock's objectively the greatest genre?

Amazing takedown of a Wikipedia summary of an argument.

Do people actually like him, or is they memein?

"That's not something I can defend, it's just something I felt in my tummy since I was a little kid."

>any job I want
>$300k starting