danharaj

> One of the problems the two friends looked at was a version of a century-old unsolved question in geometry.

On every Quanta article there's always someone welching about some gotcha they think they've found that just demonstrates how trash Quanta's popularizations of mathematical topics is. But whenever I read the article in question it always turns out that the writers and editors over there somehow manage to thread the needle in making their material accessible without being mathematically inaccurate. Vague, yes, but that's why they link to the research in question because it's a pop article not a journal publication.

You edited your comment to add another objection. It is equally insubstantial unless you dug through the paper yourself and demonstrated that the transformation applied could not reasonably be called a rotation.

Emphasis mine.

The wealth of the world is covered in blood.

I did this on a computer I don't usually use in an incognito tab.

"brown dog" surely has some probabilistic content but it's hard to locate where it is because of the enormous complexity of the space of "possible situations in which a brain can perceive a brown dog".

People have been expressing the exact same sentiment you are for years and years.

Saying Black Lives Matter is not even the bare minimum. It is very easy for corporations and politicians to pay lip service to grievances without materially addressing them. In fact, that is usually what they do. There's a reason why the protesters are demanding to defund the police and a reason why the political machine is doing everything but negotiate on those terms. The protesters want concrete, radical reorganization of the police system so they have staked a bold position. Corporations want to protect their PR image and avoid losing profits. Politicians want anything but touching the police apparatus.

Just look at Joe Biden. His response to the protests was a proposal to increase police funding for "community policing" initiatives.

> but where is that "systematic racism" actually coming from, then?

Idk where you've been if you haven't seen the extensive documentation that the police are a big part of systemic racism. But it goes beyond them. It's also companies not investing in black neighborhoods, it's politicians pandering to Black voters in election years and then ignoring them for the rest. It's automated computer systems having bias baked into them [0]. It's a whole lot of stuff and I can't even know where you should begin.

[0] https://twitter.com/Chicken3gg/status/1274314622447820801

Well here's your problem buddy. You decided that racism is something that by definition can't be systemic. There's no way to argue a definition but one can evaluate what it's useful for. Your definition is really convenient for someone who doesn't want to reckon with systemic injustice against Black people, huh?

There's plenty of intellectual heavyweights who will explain in great detail what systemic racism looks like. Go read James Baldwin or Angela Davis or something.

Stop treating politics as a game of football and look at how power is distributed and who benefits from that distribution. Material analysis, not color coded appearances.

Would you find it ridiculous if I said that it serves an ideological purpose so deeply entrenched in our civilization at this point that we hardly notice its contingent nature?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_semigroup

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-29892-...

https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2013/08/the_nucleus_of_...

Tai-Danae Bradley works with these ideas applied to probability distributions on a product space. The same formal ideas developed in this linear algebraic context lead to a very rich theory.

https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2020/05/07/formal-conce...