| ▲ | nathan_compton 4 days ago | |
> However there are large parts of math that are useless in the real world and we don't need to each at all. The way I see it is thus: life is objectively pointless. There is no god and time will erase everything anyone ever builds one way or another. Human life is predicated on doing work to survive, but that isn't the point of life. Instead of asking how we can only do what is useful, we should be asking how we can do more and more useless stuff while still providing for our bodily needs. Show me a mathematician working on pure math and I see a person at the absolute peak of human potential. I do not resent the mathematician. On the contrary, I aspire to their place. I guess you see one and you think they are useless and should be writing code for an ad company somewhere. What a dogshit world. | ||
| ▲ | bluGill 4 days ago | parent [-] | |
> I do not resent the mathematician. On the contrary, I aspire to their place Those two do not follow. I resent the mathematician because the world can only afford to pay a small number of them (we need to eat and that consumes far more people), not to mention shelter and such - I'm not one of those society has chosen to do math all day (for good reasons - I'm not that great at math - my math minor makes me a better choice than average, but still not anywhere near good enough). Even those who do math all day are mostly professors who do math between teaching classes and advising students. The time / taxes that are spent from my paycheck to pay someone to do math is time that I'm working for someone else to achieve a peak that I cannot and without them I could work less (we are talking a second per year or something, but still...) Yes I'm admitting to jealousy here. I aspire to their place. > . I guess you see one and you think they are useless and should be writing code for an ad company somewhere. You picked a bad example. I'd call most ad work useless too - they are not informing me of something new that I need but trying to get me to buy something either I already know about or worse things that would make my life worse. | ||