Science goes up by refuting it. After a thesis is proposed, an antithesis will come up, and then they combine together in a dialectical process to produce a synthesis. When this synthesis is registered in the memory of an expert, it becomes a thesis, and the dialectical process is not worth to remember anymore. It is not completely forgotten, but […]
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Suppose you are a white who knows that your prejudice towards black people is unreasonable, but you don’t know how to solve it. Or you are a black who knows that your white boss is just harsh on you because of the work, not because they have prejudice on skin color. In any case, what would you do to solve […]
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Nomenclature: Clearness: a thing that you have no trouble in identifying, understanding and verbalizing it Fadedness: a connection that links two clearnesses in a movement, but they are subtle and you may be unable to pinpoint it, even though you know it’s there Movement: a complete line, or network, connects all the clearnesses in a perspective. A minimum movement has […]
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Once upon a time, there lived a blind man in a village. One day his friend told him, “Hey, there is an elephant in the village today.”
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Take-home message: Challenging assumption = meaning shifting = perspective changing
Learn More →Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things Henri Poincaré, in The future of Mathematics, 1908 Poetry is the art of giving different names to the same thing Unknown poet, in response to Poincaré This post is basically the article Making concrete analogies and big pictures, with just different title. For Vietnamese readers, you can read […]
Learn More →Red herring names are names not either red or a herring. That is, it is a misleading name in math. Take the red herring name noncommutative geometry as an example. Its correct form should be not necessarily commutative geometry (or possibly non-commutative geometry), but the adverbs are trimmed in a rush to explain an idea in which the speaker knows […]
Learn More →Here I discuss my observations between the four fields: linguistics, cognitive psychology, Buddhism and Daoism. Each section will be a topic that involve at least two of them. Note that my understanding on linguistics is not very strong. Misunderstanding in communication In the parable “The blind men and the elephant”, the concept “elephant” is defined as “snake”, “tree”, or “spear” […]
Learn More →Once upon a time, there lived a blind man in a village. One day his friend told him, “Hey, there is an elephant in the village today.” The elephant had always been a mystery for him. The first time he heard about it was when he heard children puzzling each other: “How do you put an elephant into a fridge?”. […]
Learn More →When a politician says that voting for independence “would be like leaving an ocean liner for a lifeboat, without paddles, on a stormy sea”, a researcher in the crowd will yell at the top of their lungs: Their skeptics is good and necessary, because with just a little carelessness the analogy will become a fallacy. Yet, analogical reasoning is one […]
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