New Podcast!

I started a Podcast with my friend, Will. It's all about Psychology and education and learning and improvement and happiness. Take a listen :)

https://soundcloud.com/the-brunch-podcast/hello

UPDATE: This podcast is discontinued until further notice :(

Typewriter 2

Typewriter 1

“_________ IS A STUPID IDIOT!”

Reminder: Donald Trump is a Tremendous Idiot

7 Reasons why Liberals are Incapable of Understanding the World

Whenever I see articles with titles like these, I get pretty upset. Before the piece has even begun, the author’s language has communicated that they (1) lack the basic decency required to have productive discussions, and (2) are probably too biased to understand the other side, if they’re even able to. 

Essentially, these articles serve mainly to ignite the passions behind the like-minded people who routinely read them. When our nation is the most polarized it has been in 20 years, what we need are avenues for discussion and debate that promote understanding rather than hoisting up a winning individual or ideology. 

Do you know one of the best ways to make someone close off their willingness to consider competing ideas? Insult them or someone they support. And not only is it a bad strategy for discussion, it’s just rude. I am liberal-leaning, yes, but the only reason I would ever flat-out dismiss someone is not if their ideology differs, but if they’re being a jerk and not even attempting to understand a different point of view. I simply don’t want to surround myself with people like that.

I don’t exactly know how we can begin to change this volatile climate, so I will instead leave you with a quote that is becoming more accurate every day:

To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil. — Charles Krauthammer

con·jec·ture | kənˈjekCHər

A while ago I was Googling "Conjecture" to see where my YouTube channel would come up in the results. The first thing anyone sees when Googling it is this:

Seeing that was…fun. I guess I knew the meaning of the word before I created my channel, but I had always interpreted conjecture as more of an educated guess, almost like a hypothesis. 

Later on, @Blackmak5 tweeted this photo at me:

A general conclusion based on facts and results? That’s way better than what Google said. But now I had these two pretty different meaning of conjecture, so I wanted to do some digging and find out what this word really means. 

Let’s start off with the etymological origins.

Here we see that the word “conjecture” comes originally from the combination of the Latin “con” (together) and “jacere” (to throw). So the word’s original verb form, conicere, literally meant “to throw together,” referring specifically to thoughts. The word's noun form, conjetura, represented the product of thrown-together thoughts: a conclusion. 

So the modern word “conjecture" should be what you get when you piece results or thoughts together. That’s how I had interpreted it, and it's the definition @Blackmak5 found in his math textbook. But that sounds very different from the current definition Google provides, "an opinion or conclusion formed on the basis of incomplete information." Somewhere along the line an additional connotation was added to the definition, that the information used to form it is inherently incomplete. That connotation may have been the Old French influence, or simply a result of the way language changes. I don’t know 

But wait, the definition @Blackmak5 found was from a math textbook…so is there a mathematical definition for “conjecture” different from Google’s general definition?


Let's take a look at Wikipedia's definition of mathematical conjecture:

"In mathematics, a conjecture is a conclusion or proposition based on incomplete information, but for which no proof has been found.” That doesn’t really bode well, either. But it goes on to say that conjectures "have shaped much of mathematical history as new areas of mathematics are developed in order to solve them.” 

So while the layman’s definition has "conjecture" as a conclusion formed by throwing together a bunch of incomplete information, mathematics interprets conjecture more like an idea that encourages the development of new science. That is the definition I want to get behind. 

Or, you know, I could just change my channel name to conjecturevlog since that’s my channel twitter and subreddit, and it’d make everything more unique, searchable and consistent. 

We’ll see.