When I started my Ph.D. program, there was a weekly seminar that I started going to. At first, I instinctively left each week immediately after the talk was over. But I noticed that a lot of people would hang around afterwards and chat. Even though I found it a bit awkward, I started following their lead -- a habit I'm very glad I developed!

This has several advantages: exercise is obviously good for you, and you can meet people while you're there. But more subtly, once you show up, someone is constantly telling you what to do. For me, this has meant much less of a drain on my mental energy and discipline than if I tried to work out on my own.

Good luck!

Academia, at least in math, has a tradition of being public. Conferences will advertise at least the list of speakers, and sometimes the full list of attendees. This is widely considered a good thing; people trying to decide whether to go to a conference will want to know who else will be there.

Moreover, the conference organizers have sent out multiple emails to the attendees warning that scammers were targeting them, and emphasizing that there were no third parties legitimately involved.

So I can't and don't fault them.

The request was made via a document signing service which is apparently legitimate. The email came from the signing service's domain.

I got in touch with their customer service, and they refused to claim any responsibility: "We do not take responsibility for the actions or communications of companies that choose to use our service. If the email you received originated from an external organization, any concerns about its content or legitimacy should be addressed directly with that organization, as the document's sender and owner."

Obviously I am not going to correspond with a scammer for any reason.

Is this legal?? Do I just need to accept that this is the world we live in?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47183837

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

I understand that, if you have a current and active polo club running, then you either have to keep it going or run the risk of pissing people off.

But, if I can ask you to speculate, why might Harvard have revived its club in 2006?

Indeed, Tao himself has written criticism of the "cult of genius":

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-t...

Picture him as the star player on a basketball team. He may be the strongest player on the court, but he's still playing the same game as everyone around him.

If your 74 traps solve your problem and in a month you have no more mice, then congratulations.

But it sounds like rather than buying more and more mouse traps, you should find and fix the underlying cause.

Also, how much of this communication is actually necessary? If someone doesn't care about an issue enough to write their own email, then why are they sending an email about it in the first place?

https://www.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/j1vm8j/gold...

You said it yourself, these are overwhelmingly people who've never built or maintained anything complex in their lives. If you're going to listen to what people on the Internet say, why not seek out people who can earn your respect?

This is a very interesting question, and a great motivator for Galois theory, kind of like a Zen koan. (e.g. "What is the sound of one hand clapping?")

But the question is inherently imprecise. As soon as you make a precise question out of it, that question can be answered trivially.

I couldn't find any way to actually turn off notifications in MacOS. But you can set "quiet hours" to be from 2:00 AM until 1:59 AM.

There is a wonderful book, Japanese Pilgrimage by Oliver Statler. He goes into the history of the pilgrimage and of Kobo Daishi, the monk whose path the trail follows. He also discusses his own personal experience walking the trail.

Personally, in between jobs a long time ago, I chose to walk the Henro Trail, an approximately 800-mile Buddhist pilgrimage trail in Shikoku, Japan. To make a long story short, it was the experience of a lifetime.

I can't speak for ndriscoll, but I am a university math professor with extensive experience teaching these sorts of topics, and I agree with their comment in full.

You are right that some (other) statements are harder to formalize than they look. The Four Color Theorem from graph theory is an example. Generally speaking, discrete math, inequalities, for all/there exists, etc. are all easy to formalize. Anything involving geometry or topology is liable to be harder. For example, the Jordan curve theorem states that "any plane simple closed curve divides the plane into two regions, the interior and the exterior". As anyone who has slogged through an intro topology book knows, statements like this take more work to make precise (and still more to prove).

In other words, if I learn enough about nutrition to be able to critically evaluate the government's guidance, then is that guidance adding any additional signal? At that point, I should just rely on my sources about nutrition.

I've never been one to rely on official guidance blindly. For example I don't show up to the airport two hours early, and cheerfully laugh at advice that I should. But I'd like to believe that this guidance is better than total nonsense.

The point of guidance like this is to be trustworthy and authoritative. If I have the ability to independently evaluate it myself, then I didn't really need it in the first place.

Of course, I might be mistaken to have ever trusted the government's nutrition guidance. It's not like undue influence from industry lobbying is unique to this administration.

Sort of like the infamous GameStop short squeeze of 2021:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameStop_short_squeeze