
On the Weaknesses of the Mathematical Mind - brandonlc
https://uneasymoney.com/2019/10/04/jack-schwartz-on-the-weaknesses-of-the-mathematical-mind/https://uneasymoney.com/2019/10/04/jack-schwartz-on-the-weaknesses-of-the-mathematical-mind/
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defaultcompany
This reminds me of a great talk by Bartosz Milewski [1] about the motivation
and philosophy behind category theory. He makes the observation that our
"monkey brains" are not good at dealing with complexity at all and we only
really have one good strategy for dealing with it, that being to chop up
complex problems into smaller, simpler problems which we can solve in
isolation and then combine the results back together to approximate a solution
to the larger problem. His point is that we do this everywhere and therefore
it's no wonder that category theory is able to describe so many disparate
areas of mathematics - because it's really describing just this mechanism, not
some deep truth about the universe itself. Like - what if we as humans are so
"register bound" that we can't solve any problems which can't be chopped up
and put back together like this - such as those in the social sciences. His
presentation style is wonderful - i recommend the whole talk but this part
starts at 37:20.

[1]: [https://youtu.be/I8LbkfSSR58](https://youtu.be/I8LbkfSSR58)

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Josh379
This is a beautiful thought; however, it doesn’t prove that social problems
are unsolvable. Despite the political bitterness so prevalent today,
historically, we are on a good social trajectory with better understanding of
our biases and prejudices.

