Comparisons / Matrix

[Colonel]

Inevitably people try to compare person X to person Y and assert that they are "better".

This is pretty stupid, at least for any non-trivial field of effort.  See, any complex field is
going to have many different components, at which people will differ.

Can you smell the vector space sneaking up behind you?

Inevitably, we end up constructing a matrix of N dimensions, and then people try to
take the RMS or the norm of the vector space, to try to reduce it to a single scalar value.

This is a pretty lossy process.  A lot of information is lost, creating the inevitable scalar
value that people will only consider, because that is all they are mentally capable of.

A little history lesson:

[quote]Matrices were discovered, or invented if you prefer to see it that way, by the British mathematician [u]Arthur Cayley[/u], who also did pioneering work in group theory and invariant theory.[/quote]

My first cousin (see Wiki-tree) a couple generations back.  He was Professor of Maths at Cambridge.

My family is pretty stupid, but we try anyways.

[quote]Cayley became professor of maths there in 1863. He supported the moves to allow women to study at Cambridge University. The first women came in 1869; the first woman to study maths, Sarah Woodhead, did her final exams in 1873. Despite Cayley’s efforts, though, Cambridge University would continue refusing to give degrees to women until 1948.[/quote]

We're not very "woke", though.

[Slick Goodlin]

Is caring about this stuff one of the burdens of intelligence?  I only ask because I’m pretty certain I’m getting quite a bit dumber but by and large I’m also happier than I used to be.

Anyways, that’s the basic data in my own matrix.

[Colonel]

Ignorance is bliss, they say.

I think it’s very important to be intelligent, because
you learn stuff that keeps you alive.

However it’s also extremely important to NOT be an
intellectual, who can be defined as a reasonably bright
person that spends far too much time thinking about
stuff that he can’t fix, like death and taxes, and he gets
depressed, and he gets everyone else around him depressed.

You know, a buzzkill.