A Mathematician's Blind Date Turns Philosophical

[@nil3493]

This was a great video! Appreciate the humour in the the dialogues of the characters too

[@academyofuselessideas]

The characters are happy to be entertaining =D

[@musabzaman3191]

To me maths is God telling us about this world in a way that only the ones who put in time to wonder how the world works. Great video, subscribed

[@academyofuselessideas]

Thanks Musab! Your perspective is similar to Andrius' perspective from the @math4wisdom channel. You might find his views interesting. Feel free to check his channel out, and if you feel like talking to him, you can either subscribe to his mail list, or get on my discord server (he is also there).

[@musabzaman3191]

@@academyofuselessideas thank you for the kind reply slim, in the case of the discord I click on the link and It opens the discord app but I can't seem to join the server.

[@academyofuselessideas]

@@musabzaman3191 i am not sure why the link was not working... i created another one... so, I hope it works now... otherwise, you can find the server as The academy of useless ideas... The server uses the same logo I use here!

[@musabzaman3191]

@@academyofuselessideasit worked when I put it in the server browser, I have joined :)

[@cornqq]

this is really interesting! i love the characters too hahaha

[@academyofuselessideas]

I am glad you like them... Most of my videos get a little too technical but I am trying to make them more about ideas and about telling stories that would inspire people to look deeper into some topics. In this video, I attempt to introduce some philosophical problems in mathematics, and some basic perspectives about the existence of mathematical objects. For this philosophy series, I might do another similar one on the foundations of mathematics (talk about formalism, logicism, and intuitionism)

[@nil3493]

@academyofuselessideas I'm looking forward to it!

[@academyofuselessideas]

Thanks! that's encouraging... I felt that perhaps the story was a little too disorganized and that people wouldn't care too much about the philosophy of mathematics!

[@pratikbehera4770]

this is a pretty great video.

[@academyofuselessideas]

I am glad you enjoyed the video! I wanted to introduce some questions and possible answers in mathematical philosophy in a friendly way... The ideas are a little disorganized but hopefully they are enough to pose some interesting questions to the viewers

[@pratikbehera4770]

@@academyofuselessideas if possible can you make a video on the monty hall problem I try a lot to understand it but some how I don't really get the intuition about it. I can solve it using bayes theorem but the fact it somehow goes against the intuition is kinda frustrating.

[@academyofuselessideas]

@@pratikbehera4770 Thanks for your comment... unexpectedly, the monty hall problem relates to the video I am working on next! I am working on a video about the difference between verifying a mathematical statement and understand it, and the monty hall problem is a great example of the difference between those two things! The bayesian proof of the monty hall problem is "easy" to verify... if you read it step by step, you'll probably be able to verify that the best decision is to switch doors... but that verification does not imply that you understand why... In my experience, the monty hall problem is one of those problems that 'clicks' to different people in different ways... If you don't understand it quite yet, you are in good company! Paul Erdos didn't believe it when he first heard the problem... The thing that made it click for Erdos was to run simulations of the problem (indeed, if you just take an excel spreadsheet and simulate the problem, you might see why changing doors is a better strategy (when you write the simulation you kind of see why)).. However, for me, the most intuitive explanation is the following.... Imagine that you have 100 doors, 99 of them have goats behind while one has a car... You choose one of the doors... now, the host of the show opens 98 doors different than the one you picked and all of them have goats behind (the host can always do that since there are 99 goats total)... now, there are only two closed doors: the one one you chose and the other one that the host did not open... The host asks you if you want to switch doors... would you switch doors in that case? would your answer be different if there were 50 doors? what about 4 doors? and what about 3 doors? This explanation was the one that made it click for me... but I have explained it in this way to some people and it didn't click for them... Does that explanation click to you? Let us know! If the explanation does not work for you, join the discord server for the channel and I'll try to explain it to you in some other way!

[@pratikbehera4770]

@academyofuselessideas sounds like a good video to me.....i do get your point on ' verifying ' something and ' understanding it '. I think its a nice coincidence I was just reading that there are countably infinite turning machine I do get how you get a correspondence between 'N' and number of turning machine but that fact the no of languages being countable infinite. Thats seems a bit counter-intuitive because it seems like you can model a turning machine for any language. That is where I was wrong. You cant make a turning machine for 'any' language. BTW that was the whole point proving that there are languages which cant be recognized by turning machine. That seems to be in this case of Monty hall problem too. The whole intuition I get that the probabilities must be equal is the fact that opening and closing the door don't really matter we can just ignore that door ever exist. Now this intuition is wrong. There is something much more going on than just opening and closing. The fact that the host did not open a specific door conveys some information to me . its conveys the possibility of being a prize behind it . I do hope I am on the right path. Somehow everything fits together in my mind right now you have like a 2/3 chance of being wrong the host won't open the prize door so you get the correct door if you switch.i think this is a somewhat close to a 'good' understanding

[@academyofuselessideas]

@@pratikbehera4770 That sounds like a pretty good understanding to me. The calculations with the bayes theorem are kind of symbol pushing (though, that symbol pushing is saying something... if you draw the graph of possibilities, you will also see where the symbol pushing comes from)... but to get the intuition you need to think about it more... It seems like you are getting a better grasp of the monty hall problem!

[@MasterGxt]

Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. -- Wikipedia By the way I have no idea what any of that means.

[@academyofuselessideas]

@MasterGxt Defining mathematics is pretty hard... Perhaps, it is best that you have no idea of what any of that means, since I don't think that the definition captures what mathematics is. If I use similar definitions is because it is really hard to put in words what mathematics really is and sometimes for narrative purposes we need some dirty/incomplete definition... Perhaps, it is worth to find your own definition of mathematics and share it with others! that could be an interesting conversation!