Crooks are more convincing when they lie than when they say the truth.
via Crooks are more convincing when they lie than… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Crooks are more convincing when they lie than when they say the truth.
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Monthly Archives: November 2014
Groethendieck was not motivated by the challenge of hard problems…
“Groethendieck was not motivated by the challenge of hard problems. What interested him were problems that seemed to point to larger, hidden structures.”
“Groethendieck was not motivated by the… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Alexander Grothendieck, RIP. The interest isn’t just in the mathematics, so much as in his character…
Alexander Grothendieck, RIP.
The interest isn’t just in the mathematics, so much as in his character: he was a maximally intolerant of BS. He was also intense.
Coincidentally, after yesterday’s post announcing it, I had dinner with someone who grew up knowing him and broke the news to him. Both he and his wife grew up with (coincidentally) G as a friend of their respective families. There are plenty of G stories. One of the stories, he said G once opened one of his high shool math books, looked at it with horror, then ran to show it to Dieudonné (another giant), shouting: “look at the garbage they teach students”.
G was self taught; he believed that school couldn’t teach anyone anything except junk, and that academia was the refuge of the corrupt, the uninspired, and the incompetent.
Alexander Grothendieck, RIP. The interest isn’t… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Alexandre Grothendieck RIP
Alexandre Grothendieck RIP.
“A pound of algebra is worth a ton of verbal commentary”
On GMOs: “A pound of algebra is worth a ton of verbal commentary”. I managed to fit the Precautionary Principle into a few lines. The GMO paid propagandists are pounding tons of verbalistic statements (even an incompetent smear campaign), but this simple summary should cancel about everything they are trying to say. In a single column. They need to refute my representation or show that f(breeding) has the same maximum as f(GMOs).
