woopwoop

26 ms·

301.
by woopwoop 9y ago
Why do you make this analogy at the level of a country? Why not at the level of a street, or a town, or a county, or a state? Would you be okay with, say, Massachusetts limiting immigration from Michigan? Would you be okay with people on 51
302.
by woopwoop 10y ago
From Paul Graham's "How to Do Philosophy": "Most philosophical debates are not merely afflicted by but driven by confusions over words. Do we have free will? Depends what you mean by 'free.' Do abstract ideas e
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by woopwoop 10y ago
Part of the reason could be the tipping system. It is impossible to raise the price of the food in your restaurant without giving a raise to your waitstaff, since almost everyone tips a fixed percentage. So if you want to give a raise to yo
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by woopwoop 10y ago
I remember an interesting theory about golden parachutes in Steven Landsburg's "The Armchair Economist". In a typical publicly traded company, the CEO is actually much more heavily invested in the company than the shareholder
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by woopwoop 10y ago
In fact, there is a negative correlation between a proof being elementary and a proof being trivial. The reason people like abstraction is that it makes difficult proofs trivial. The reason people don't like abstraction is that it make
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by woopwoop 10y ago
Also, you see lots of crazy drivers: if you drive with the flow of traffic, you only see a few other cars, but if you drive 30 miles an hour faster than the flow of traffic, you see tons of cars.
307.
by woopwoop 10y ago
There is an interesting Math Overflow thread called "Mathematical habits of thought and action which would be useful to non-mathematicians". The answers there all interesting (and sometimes conflicting), but my favorite (part of a
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by woopwoop 10y ago
Unless I'm mistaken, The totality of vector spaces is not even a set.
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by woopwoop 10y ago
There is a compelling argument that liberty, or at least efficient markets, inhibits technological innovation. The reason is that there is no incentive to innovate when there is robust competition, since the advantage gained by an innovatio
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by woopwoop 11y ago
The following is purely psychological armchair theorizing. I think that homework is part of a larger problem where the modern education system slams into children's brains that their time is worthless. Most elementary, middle, and high
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by woopwoop 11y ago
Concerns about people using their basic income to secure credit strike me as awfully similar to the old "What if they use it to buy drugs?"
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by woopwoop 11y ago
The two hallmarks of modern blockbusters, the sanitized but intense violence and the simplistic morality, are actually joined at the hip. On the one hand, if your idea of a rollicking good climax is lots of people being killed, you need to
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by woopwoop 11y ago
I agree, I was just pointing out that it is possible to define both the Riemann and Lebesgue integrals by "partitioning the range". The real difference lies in the choice to allow countable rather than finite covers by intervals.
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by woopwoop 11y ago
This is a nice summary, but I've always found the characterization of Riemann integrals as "partitioning the domain" and Lebesgue integrals as "partitioning the range" unsatisfying. This is mainly an artifice of the