Michaelfonzolo

3년 전discuss

In theory sure, but in practice the internal complexity of organizations leave plenty of room for obfuscating that ideal. Throw in nepotism, favoritism, corruption, and an inflated valuation of upper management roles and you've got plenty of jobs that pay well past what they "bring in", which is itself nebulously defined at best, especially in white collar industries. Hell I know some companies that would've been better off just axing some of their c-level suite.

Michaelfonzolo

5년 전discuss

I've always adhered to the idea that "infinity" encodes "allness". For instance, to say that the sum of 1/2^n for all natural numbers n converges to 1 is not to say that we're actually adding up infinitely many numbers, but rather that I can always win a certain game: you give me an arbitrarily small epsilon > 0, I can give you enough terms in the sequence such that their sum (a finite sum) is within epsilon of 1. No, I can't actually add up infinitely many numbers, but you can never win my game, so certainly "infinity" exists in that sense.

So, while I can't "point" to an infinite number of things like I can point to 9 things or 3.62 things, I still think it exists.

I'm not sure how well this generalizes to all infinite cardinals, ordinals, or to transfinite induction/construction. It is certainly strange that Cantor's theorem (the cardinality of a set is strictly smaller than that of its power set) implies there are different sizes of "all" implicit in my usage of the word.

Michaelfonzolo

5년 전discuss

Never encountered this idea before, does it have a formal name? Most fractional-dimension spaces encountered refer to either the Minkowski or Hausdorff Dimension.

Michaelfonzolo

5년 전discuss

Pardon my ignorance, but when was it ever about technology? Seems technological progress has done nothing to alleviate the starve-if-you-don't-work condition. Higher industrial efficiency in the 19th/early 20th centuries came with the promise of less work and more leisure, but that never arrived. I'm not sure why, but I'm guessing it's an economic/sociological problem, not a technological one. Curious to hear what ideas you have enough.

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