Disappointed Categoricien
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Member for 6 years, 11 months
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Last seen more than 6 years ago
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The "derived drift" is pretty unsatisfying and dangerous to category theory (or at least, to me)
I'm still thinking, from time to time, to this line: "History shows that the 'australian way' (whatever this might mean) is not the way to go". Can you explain why? The argument that category theory was born to explain [insert part of mathematics] seems quite weak in order to delegitimate the study of category theory per se. Wasn't set theory born because Cantor wanted to count algebraic VS transcendental numbers?
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The "derived drift" is pretty unsatisfying and dangerous to category theory (or at least, to me)
But I am reluctant to make this parallel: this is the motivation that guides me. It's a good idea to make it public only to the extent it serves the purpose to clarify my technical need.
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The "derived drift" is pretty unsatisfying and dangerous to category theory (or at least, to me)
Or if you like to be more literate, there's a chapter in Zhuangzi about a butcher. The butcher was a category theorist even though his tool was a knife, and not a lemma.
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The "derived drift" is pretty unsatisfying and dangerous to category theory (or at least, to me)
I have the feeling that many of these answers take "category theory" as a synonym of "the body of statements that can be built using the words [category], [functor], etc." It is not the sense in which I say, and ultimately not the sense in which I care to do it: instead, I think that you only need a needle and a good idea to be a category theorist.
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The "derived drift" is pretty unsatisfying and dangerous to category theory (or at least, to me)
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The "derived drift" is pretty unsatisfying and dangerous to category theory (or at least, to me)
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The "derived drift" is pretty unsatisfying and dangerous to category theory (or at least, to me)
@DavidRoberts I am interested in your opinion on the general topic here.
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The "derived drift" is pretty unsatisfying and dangerous to category theory (or at least, to me)
And yet mathematics exhibits, at least to my eye, this curious behaviour for which form is substance. You cannot separate the thing you define from the way in which you define it; every encoding loses/gains something over the others, and thus is a different thing. (I'm waiting for someone to comment "but why care about homotopic encodings?")
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The "derived drift" is pretty unsatisfying and dangerous to category theory (or at least, to me)
That's precisely why I wanted to learn mathematics; I suspect we're losing the point, and it's also my fault, but I want to keep clear that I don't want to abandon mathematics; I want to avoid my mathematics to turn into an arid gloss
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The "derived drift" is pretty unsatisfying and dangerous to category theory (or at least, to me)
"History shows that the 'australian way' (whatever this might mean) is not the way to go" please, expand this interpretation of history. "I don't know whether you are joking" of course I am, in the specific; but overall, I'm damn serious. Several people engaged in philosophy of science do not know the definition of a function, and they claim to dig the very foundation of things. It's a nonsense, and not ofthe abstract kind.