I’ll PM you about the math stuff when I have a chance. I would guess that the “devil” in Cantor diagonalization that you’re unearthing is closely related to the impossibility of semantic closure in a mathematical language. I’m not a set theorist but I also spent some time thinking about these things and getting partial answers that I was okay walking away with.
Do you have any sources you’d be willing to share for politics and economics?
I suspect this is all connected somehow: set theory, first-order logic, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, etc. I plan to read a textbook on logic next. Then model theory.
Sorry, my sources for politics are local, so unless you are interested in the political situation of Slovakia (short version: it sucks; slightly longer version: some people believe that voting for populists is relatively harmless because they are all talk no action, well this is mostly true until suddenly it’s not and then all competent people just scream helplessly) I don’t have anything to offer. And even here, the source were the people (the kind that does the boring stuff) I spend a lot of time talking to, not any written source.
One detail maybe: some people in politics may be easier to approach than they seem. (Then again, that’s my local experience, maybe not true in USA.) For example, once I successfully invited our member of parliament to our local Less Wrong meetup, to tell us about some then current cause. It was surprisingly simple: I just messaged her on Facebook like “hey, we have a meetup of some smart people who like to discuss various things, and we would be happy to hear your opinion on X”, and she was like “actually, I have a free evening that day, so unless something unexpected happens, I would be happy to meet you”.
I’ll PM you about the math stuff when I have a chance. I would guess that the “devil” in Cantor diagonalization that you’re unearthing is closely related to the impossibility of semantic closure in a mathematical language. I’m not a set theorist but I also spent some time thinking about these things and getting partial answers that I was okay walking away with.
Do you have any sources you’d be willing to share for politics and economics?
I suspect this is all connected somehow: set theory, first-order logic, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, etc. I plan to read a textbook on logic next. Then model theory.
Sorry, my sources for politics are local, so unless you are interested in the political situation of Slovakia (short version: it sucks; slightly longer version: some people believe that voting for populists is relatively harmless because they are all talk no action, well this is mostly true until suddenly it’s not and then all competent people just scream helplessly) I don’t have anything to offer. And even here, the source were the people (the kind that does the boring stuff) I spend a lot of time talking to, not any written source.
One detail maybe: some people in politics may be easier to approach than they seem. (Then again, that’s my local experience, maybe not true in USA.) For example, once I successfully invited our member of parliament to our local Less Wrong meetup, to tell us about some then current cause. It was surprisingly simple: I just messaged her on Facebook like “hey, we have a meetup of some smart people who like to discuss various things, and we would be happy to hear your opinion on X”, and she was like “actually, I have a free evening that day, so unless something unexpected happens, I would be happy to meet you”.