david foster wallace: classic or dud

i still haven't read Signifying Rappers for the same reason that i don't want to deal with the disappointment of DFW mishandling a subject that is near and dear to my heart

oh shit i forgot about that one.

that book has a thesis which is pretty undergraduate but it is by no means entirely awful

yeah Georg Cantor was a set theorist, and set theory is way more far out than number theory, which tends to deal with integers which are things people are pretty conceptually ok with. In set theory you get ~far out~ things like the Banach-Tarski paradox, which says that you can take a ball, cut it into pieces, and reassemble the pieces into two balls that are each identical to the first ball.

This doesn't make any sense in terms of our physical reality but mathematically it is equivalent to something called the axiom of choice, which pretty much says that if you have a bunch of boxes with a bunch of balls in each box, you can select a ball from each box. That doesn't sound controversial, right? But it leads to things like Banach-Tarski which can make people very upset.

N.B. I don't know how the equivalence between the axiom of choice and Banach-Tarski works, or really anything about set theory beyond the commonplaces that one picks up while studying CS. Still though: wild!

ha i was hoping you could gloss this review for me - http://www.ams.org/notices/200406/rev-harris.pdf

Also I will recommend the recent graphic novel Logicomix as a fun and informative read for anyone interested in the foundations and philosophy of mathematics and the weirdness of infinity.

xp I'll take a look

mainly this:

Most mathematicians are aware that Cantor was led to develop set theory in the course of his work on pointwise convergence of trigonometric series. Cantor’s Uniqueness Theorem asserted that two trigonometric series that converge pointwise everywhere on the unit interval to the same function have the same coefficients. His subsequent generalizations of this theorem replaced the condition “everywhere” by the complements of certain kinds of subsets of the real numbers, and in order to state his theorems he therefore requires theories of the real numbers and the subsets thereof. Though pointwise convergence of trigonometric series is a topic of little obvious metaphysical interest and is no longer as central a preoccupation as it was in Cantor’s day, Wallace spends nearly half his book preparing for, stating, and concluding (on pp. 233–234) with an irrelevant argument purporting to be a proof of, the most general form of Cantor’s Uniqueness Theorem.

The New York Times reviewer may have had these sections in mind when he admitted, in the course of a generally positive review, that it contains “a smattering of technical infelicities.” A mathematician reading E&M is unlikely to be so forgiving of DFW’s blunders. Some examples: The Weierstrass approach to limits is illustrated by a solution to Zeno’s dichotomy paradox in which δ = 1 for any  (p. 190 ff). The Extreme Value Theorem is used to prove, Zeno be damned, that on any time interval (t1, t2) the “time function” (sic) has an absolute minimum tm which is “mathematically speaking, the very next instant after t1” (p. 190). Although the continuum hypothesis is a principal theme and although it is correctly stated several times, DFW also claims three times that the cont i n u um h y p o t h e s i s i s t h e a s s e r t i o n t h a t t h e continuum has the cardinality of the power set of the natural numbers. A spurious distinction is drawn between “point-set theory” and “abstract set theory”; a presentation of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory somehow fuses the Axiom Schema of Comprehension (which he calls the Limited Abstraction Principle) with the Axiom of Infinity; Kronecker is said to be most famous for his Delta Function (“which in some ways anticipates the binary math of modern digitation” (sic)); Dedekind is identified as a prototypical Platonist but also quoted to the effect that “Numbers are free creations of the human mind”; Cantor and Gödel are asserted to be respectively the most important mathematicians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

i am told the authors of logicomix are jerks

ij > oblivion > biwhm > gwch > tpk > bots

imo

lobster over fun thing, also imo

thomp: don't know dick about Cantor's Uniqueness Thm and have not heard of it, likely for the reasons the reviewer indicates: it's not metaphysically interesting or really mathematically relevant, but was a historical waypoint towards Cantor's innovations in set theory. quick googling reveals a treatment of this theorem in a real analysis textbook which is not a class I have taken--like I said I'm in CS not math.

Some of the "niggles" from the second paragraph:

- the delta-epsilon definition of limits (you forgot this after your shitty calculus class) basically states that a function F has a limit k at x if you can pick points w arbitrarily close to x and have F(x) continue getting arbitrarily closer to k. Wallace apparently screws up a technical detail here about what "for every epsilon there is a delta" means.
- there's no mathematical "next instant" in the real number line, that's part of the point of the whole book innit, what the density of the real number line entails. So yeah that's just nonsense about the EVT.

…more coming

Oh the thing about the continuum hypothesis is just him misstating what the continuum hypothesis is.

CH is basically: you can have sets that are as big as the natural numbers (0,1,2,3,…) and sets as big as the real number line, and there are no sets that are any size in between.

This remains a hypothesis, and it has in fact been proven to be independent of the usual axioms of set theory: it can't be proved or disproved using those axioms. What this ~means~ is up in the air ofc.

Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory is a set of axioms for sets that mathematicians sort of generally agree on as the right ones, since they give us the right answers. If you add the axiom of choice to those, you get ZFC. The reviewer's complaint is that DFW somehow combines a couple of the axioms of ZFC, to wit:

- The axiom of infinity, which states that a set with infinitely many elements exists.
- The axiom of comprehension (or of Separation or of Subsets), which states that if you have some property (i.e. a true-false proposition) P and a set of candidates X, there's a subset Y containing all the candidates x in X where P(x) is true. (This exists in its form in part because of Russel's paradox which you may know something about!)

Anyway yeah somehow conflating those two things would be strange, since I don't think one follows from the other directly or anything.

- Kronecker is probably most famous for having allegedly said "God made the integers; all else is the work of man" but I honestly don't know anything about him

- Platonism in mathematics is the metaphysical view that numbers and other abstract objects have a reality that is prior to our mathematical fiddling with them, and that facts we discover about mathematical objects are in fact facts about the world. The sentiment that "Numbers are the free creation of the human mind" is decidedly anti-Platonic. Hence the contradiction.

- The most important mathematician of the 19th century was Lewis Carroll, the most important of the 20th was Alan Turing, everyone knows that, duh.

as for the authors of logicomix being jerks, who cares, I think it's a pretty good book, which is pretty up front about the historical/biographical liberties it takes. It's probably in Your Local Library and takes like a few hours to read, your time won't be wasted.

Any errors or omissions in the above are of course my own and I defer to real mathematicians on all points.

oh wow amazing, thank you! i am too tired to process/respond, but more in the morning, maybe

i probably will actually read logicomix -- does it have any scenes of russell and wittgenstein being politely baffled by each other

yes!

well maybe not super-polite but they do chill out together

and definite bafflement ensues

logicomix is good, recommended to read. from a comix/graphic novel standpoint it's execution leaves a lot to be desired, but the subject matter is so interesting on its own (if you're into intro to set theory, i guess) that it's worth a look.

IT IS EXECUTION

no, you're execution

the first google result for kronecker is his delta so eh. i don't know -- i wonder how many of the errors are outcomes of the book's conversational tone, & how many are ill-considered elisions, & how many are genuine boners. really i should just buy another copy, my friend who stole it has almost certainly lost it by now.

it's a weird thing about him how popular he is amongst people who don't read, really

the infinity book review in the notices of the ams was the first time i ever heard of DFW!

ij > oblivion > biwhm > gwch > tpk > bots

imo

lobster over fun thing, also imo

― strongo hulkington's ghost dad, Tuesday, August 23, 2011 10:20 PM (Yesterday)

i agree with this exactly, except i'd take fun thing over lobster

actually i'm not sure where i'd place TPK... parts of it are just as good as anything else, its just obviously very unfinished.

"i am told the authors of logicomix are jerks"

I don't know about jerks, but papa-D once wrote a softcore novel about alan turing with nirvana and rage against the machine lyrics spruced throughout.

I'm glad someone wrote a response: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/omer-rosen/david-foster-wallace_b_968257.html

Although I don't know if Newton would dispute that the DFW tropes/tics/tricks in question were both intentional and effective. Seemed like she was more concerned with DFW's pervasive influence, and I don't think the issues she's concerned with (bad blogging etc) can really be laid at his feet.

The idea that a particular author, however widely read and admired, could be responsible for the stylistic ugliness of thousands of bloggers is nonsense. DFW's style was not hatched up parthenogenically, it's a style that pre-existed him in a million mouths and thousands of writings, but it was never so well-honed or controlled for artistic purposes before he made it so. It is no surprise that a gaggle of semi-talented bloggers would fail to rise to his level, but he bears no blame for that.

The only point of this idiotic controversy is to stir up a fuss and beg for attention. As criticism of DFW it is valueless.

i was skimming that and i misread "free indirect discourse" as "free internet discourse"

wonder if i can use that somewhere

Free internet discourse always seems to have popup ads.

i was skimming this and then i saw this

Omer Rosen

Former derivatives banker, Freelance writer

and thought, wow they had to get some dude off the street to respond.

Reaching back, the psycho-kinetic redemption of rape victimhood in Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men became the grad-school Gossip Girl of John Krasinski's adaptation.

huh?

For example, to present Wallace as a 'stoned slacker' (to use Bill O'Reilly's terminology), at even the linguistic level, is a misreading.

why are we using Bill O'Reilly as an example of a dude who understands DFW?

or maybe i forgot all of Bill O'Reilly's contributions to the New York Review of Books--does someone have a link?

The overall point missing is how Wallace mastered the art of bridging academic sophistry with the innately human: e.g. combining a Wittgensteinian notion of addiction not existing beyond an addict's ability to articulate it with the more immediate philosophy of gotta-have-nonpresent-drugz-in-an-ever-fuckuppable-intensity.

huh?

He was, as appears to be the too-obvious definition that seems to cow reviewers by its obviousness, the true crafter of a postmodern 'sincerity' -- a seemingly impossible task in the wake of Pynchon and the psychosexual slapstick of characters like "Oedipa Maas" and "Tyrone Slothrop."

oh okay, so Pynchon wrote a bunch of psychosexual slapstick using characters with funny names and this caused every writer afterward to not be able to write sincere. Gotcha.

Granted, Rosen writes like crap and is not very cogent or incisive. (shrugs) The whole argument Newton started is stupid, so I suppose it acted a clarion call to others of the same quality of mind.

and yet her stupid argument was published in the New York Times and it took two dudes to write this for the Huffington Post.

The NYT is no pinnacle of intellectual excellence. For example, they also publish David Brooks and Tom Friedman.

i agree, both those dudes are odious, but that's guilt by association

I was under the impression you were casting a reflected glory on Newton's piece, by her association with the NYT. I was merely pointing out that the NYT's glory, such as it is, is not especially luminous.

I am willing to say her essay is not odious because of any association it may have with Brooks and Friedman, but it may be deemed so purely on merit.

I went to his office hours the next afternoon. When I apologized for the typos, he pointed at me and said, “Never fail to proofread something you turn in to me,” to which I nodded as convincingly as I could. He worried that he hadn’t gotten through to me, and, confused, he asked, “I mean, did you cry?” “Yes.” “Good. I would’ve cried.”

http://nplusonemag.com/king-of-the-ghosts

i am still reading this but:
it is hard to read one of these things, being at least a little conscious that it might be trampling into 'DFW STUDENT SPILLS BEANS' territory, without feeling a kneejerk probably unearned sensation of wanting to disagree with whatever the author's suggesting, on account of the article's poor etiquette.

the book/speech parts seem maybe ill-advised

tbf compared to what j. franzen got up to this week that's not really a thing

the book/speech parts seem maybe ill-advised

this feels unfairly brief, actually, because the guy is really engaging -- just that both in speculating on alternative courses of the guy's life & alternative endings for his novel he's obviously in a pretty weird area. some of the christian-stuff is interesting.

it does remind you of that idea of tutor-wallace raised by the student's marked-up essay paper, though, just a deeply responsible & engaged resource for young people.

& sure, xp, that seemed a weird thing to have been raised sorta unqualified

tbf compared to what j. franzen got up to this week that's not really a thing

― thomp, Sunday, October 9, 2011 12:20 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

??

he made a fairly forced segue from something he was asked about at the new yorker festival to imply that wallace's non-fiction pieces were dubious, ethically, in that they fudged the lines between 'non-fiction': specific assertion being made-up dialogue in the cruise ship piece

it's not a big deal anywhere outside of tumblr, really; it's just another annoying public development in franzen's continuing relationship with his friend's corpse

ah ok

man i just read "this is water" again and maybe i am just a big ol baby but it sorta felt like church

^ just read that this afternoon too (maybe to the end for the first time?). I miss DFW.

http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/jeffrey-eugenides-2011-10/index3.html

cool article

Franzen's still a dick

http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/a-supposedly-true-thing-jonathan-franzen-said-about-david-foster-wallace#more