nilaykumar

There is obviously nothing wrong with charity per se; GP is simply pointing out the obvious inefficiency in using charity to improve the lives of the poor (for example). Why not just pay them more to begin with (say through a democratic organization of the workplace in which no worker would ever choose to pay themselves below-subsistence wages)? Instead, we let money accumulate at the top, and then charity sometimes trickles a tiny bit of it back down.

> Contrast this voluntary charity with state mandated coercion. Violence is implicit. By state-mandated coercion do you mean taxes to fund welfare programs? Violence is already implicit in the creation and perpetuation of the working poor. Welfare is a necessary tool to make sure that the poor are not so starved that they might rise up against the ruling class, "having nothing to lose but their chains". Again the inefficiency here is clear -- welfare would be unnecessary if our basic needs were met. Welfare would be unnecessary if workers had democratic control of their own workplaces. Instead, we have a "voluntary" market in which the worker is coerced to participate at risk of starvation and rewarded by wages that have not kept up with increases in productivity for 40 years. The market thus violently creates the _need_ for charity.

Does that mean we should never again root for radical change? Because Stalin effectively murdered millions of people? If that's what you're implying, then I would have to disagree completely.

The activism of socialists and communists that you're labelling as "utopian" involves working on community problems, fighting for local progressive legislation, practicing mutual aid, showing up in solidarity with unions, and so on. And that's how it's been for a very long time. Where is the utopianism in that? And how on earth do you look to that and see a specter of genocide?

For example: if my basic necessities were covered by something like a UBI, I could spend my time teaching math/art/code/whatever. If I were a medieval peasant, to take another example, I'd be subsisting on my own farm and after the harvest (and after paying the lord a hefty amount of it) I might have some time to help neighboring villagers repair their tools. That is to say: the need for survival does not necessarily imply the need to have a society organized around profit-seeking.

That we _do_ live in such a society today is a matter of history, not logic. The structuring of human society around profit-seeking (or capitalism more generally) is a relatively recent historical phase (what, about 600 years, maybe?) -- it was not inevitable and there's no logical reason to assume that it will go on forever.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev4gwxGkReQ

- the length and regulation of the working day for factory workers

- the division of labor

- the economic impacts of increasing automation/mechanization

- wages (the factor payments for labor)

These are all topics that I think reasonably fall under the umbrella of economics. Certainly Capital is not a book on positive economics. It is, throughout, quite normative, and expressly interested in the combination of politics and economy.

Reading Capital may not help you understand how modern mainstream economists think, but it will definitely get you thinking about the same kinds of problems that they deal with. For example: how regulations might be used to enforce a 40 hour work week. Of course, capitalism has quite outgrown Marx's mid-19th century conception of it. It's an old book. But I find it difficult to understand how a book critiquing the work of the first economists is not a text about economics.

The beginning of Capital is quite dense (establishing the basic definitions of a study often is, and Marx's dialectical approach takes some getting used to if, like me, you never could understand Hegel) so I would recommend reading it along with David Harvey's lectures available on Youtube. However, the book does open up from there and becomes very much more concrete: working day lengths in the factory, increasing automation of industry, transition from feudalism by expropriation of land from farmers, ...

It is of course important to understand the works that Marx was critiquing or building on. Smith's Wealth of Nations, for example, is available for free from Standard Ebooks (https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/adam-smith/the-wealth-of-n...). This translation is very readable so I encourage you to take a look.

I recently redid mine to use org-babel with org-publish. I'm pretty happy with how it came out, though it's still slightly under construction. Maybe a little too much going on to be called 'minimalist' though.

Any criticisms or suggestions appreciated!

Remote: Yes (preferable)

Willing to relocate: No (with exceptions, e.g. NYC, Philly, ...)

Technologies: Java, LaTeX, python

Resume/CV: on request

Email: nilaykumar[at]tutanota.com

Website: nilaykumar.github.io/about

I am a mathematician looking for a collaborative environment in which to build tools and techniques for solving challenging problems.

I recently completed my PhD in mathematical physics: my thesis focused on supergeometric aspects of the Batalin-Vilkovisky formalism (used to quantize gauge theories such as string theories, etc.). Recently I have been interested in applications of mathematics to computing and data, such as topological data analysis and learning.

I have fairly broad interests, and although I do not have experience with software in a professional (non-academic) environment, I've been coding since I was a kid.

Please feel free to get in touch with me if you'd like to chat about an opportunity.

As for the math: the key point is that the metric is globally defined on the spacetime manifold M. I agree that the A_\mu transform as the coefficients of a differential form (A is a connection after all), but the notation elides the fact that the A_\mu are defined only on U. They depend, in particular, on the choice of local gauge s:U \to P. So the question about covariance (or globalization or coordinate-independence or whatever you want to call it) of both sides of the equation g_{\mu\nu}=A_\mu A\nu very much involves the question of local gauge transformations.

Either the principal bundle is assumed to be trivial, in which case there exists a global gauge and the connection A can be identified with a global 1-form on M (connections form an affine space modeled on such 1-forms; a gauge effectively converts this affine space to a vector space by choosing an origin), or we need to check that the right-hand side A_\mu A_\nu is indeed a symmetric two-tensor on M. The latter is not clear to me.

I admit I haven't looked at the paper carefully, and physicists typically don't approach things in such an explicitly mathematical way. So perhaps there's some (physical?) justification for why that equation typechecks. I don't quite see it though.

"Hence that remarkable phenomenon in the history of modern industry, that machinery sweeps away every moral and natural restriction on the length of the working day. Hence too the economic paradox that the most powerful instrument for reducing labour-time suffers a dialectical inversion and becomes the most unfailing means for turning the whole lifetime of the worker and his family into labour-time at capital’s disposal for its own valorization."

Marx (1867), Capital Volume I, Chapter 15 ("Machinery and Large-Scale Industry")

The MSC is of course quite useful for catalog and reference purposes.

In this sense, programming is much more algorithmic, and hence I would argue, not particularly like math (the content) at all.

Now science education, that's different.

Trip-hop.

But keep in mind, the content is not all there is to it; the historical context and influence on society is also an integral part of the humanities. Or at least, that's what I think -- I try to take a historico-contextual approach to it, especially when I know, say, Aquinas' arguments don't hold water.

This is precisely what I often found irritating. One of my friends once asked me, "You seem to like philosophy -- why don't you do any?" My response was essentially that certain parts of philosophy are simply TOO HARD for me in the sense that it is often all to easy lose objectivity, logically reason about ethics, etc.

"I'll just stick to math, thanks, where I at least know how to systematically approach and think about problems under the framework of accepted mathematical logic."

I guess my intellectual is anyone who has built up a strong foundation of techniques for analytical thinking, whether it be from the sciences or the arts. In some sense, I think that any such intellectual should be aware of this huge background of literature/philosophy that has come to shape Western civilization; it is important for scientists and engineers, who make a significant practical impact on the world in all sorts of ways, to understand the basic ideas and assumptions of Western civilization, especially in today's increasingly cross-cultural world.

I couldn't have put it better myself. I came into my required undergraduate philosophy course doubting that I'd get anything out of it (having mostly finish the undergrad physics+math majors)... and I was pleasantly surprised.

As a math+physics student with a bunch of friends in my university's engineering school, I hear all too often engineers disparaging the humanities as "useless", "bullshit", etc. and it's really quite disappointing and close-minded. They simply miss out on an incredibly important and fundamental part of the human experience. It is almost impossible to overstate the significance (historical or otherwise) of philosophy and literature, to the point where I would expect anyone who considers himself an "intellectual" to have had at least brief experiences with the humanities (or at least thought about difficult philosophical questions or whatnot on his own time).