Emotivism: The argument from self-consistency

I like thought which preserves a whiff of flesh and blood, and I prefer a thousand times an idea rising from sexual tension or nervous depression to an empty abstraction. Haven't people learned yet that the time of superficial intellectual games is over, that agony is infinitely more important than syllogism, that a cry of despair is more revealing than the most subtle thought, and that tears always have deeper roots than smiles?

The problem with some nihilisms, especially epistemological nihilism, is a kind of inconsistency. This kind of inconsistency is not logical inconsistency, but a kind of "personal inconsistency".

Let's see one example: epistemological nihilism.

Epistemological nihilism states that there is no way to know truths. There are various kinds of epistemological nihilism:

• Ontological: truths don't exist;
• Skeptical: there are no methods for us to know the truth;
• Meta skeptical: there are, but we can't know which methods actually work;

The common rejection is this: If you believe in epistemological nihilism, then you believe in something, but that's not justifiable, by epistemological nihilism.

Experimental result of taking notes without passing through the brains

College is a place where a professor’s lecture notes go straight to the students’ lecture notes, without passing through the brains of either.

So today I tried again going to a lecture and managed to take the entire notes, and somehow indeed, the notes did not pass through my brain at all. It's the last lecture of the whole course, which is why I went there hoping for a bit more interesting things than just a mass of technical details presented uglily through use of verbal speech, I was wrong.

Well, too bad. At least I felt kinda happy that my LaTeX skills are enough for note taking.

Let's Read: In Praise of Lectures by T. W. Körner

Alright, let's read! I'm on a roll of venting against lectures.

In Praise of Lectures (2004), Thomas William Körner

The essay is off to a strong start that lifted my mood.

For these students attendance at lectures has a magical rather than a real significance. They attend lectures regularly (religiously, as one might say) taking care to sit as far from the lecturer as possible (it is not good to attract the attention of little understood but powerful forces) and take complete notes. Some lecturers give out the notes at such speed (often aided by the technological equivalent of the Tibetan prayer wheel — an overhead projector) that the congregation is fully occupied but most fail in this task... 

The notes of the lecture are then kept untouched until the holidays or, more usually, the week before the exams when they are carefully highlighted with day-glow yellow pens (a process known as revision). When more than 50% of the notes have been highlighted, revision is said to be complete, the magical power of the notes is exhausted and they are carefully placed in a file never to be consulted again.

The invention of the Xerox machine [or Internet] means that only one student need attend each lecture, the remainder being freed ... Nor would this student need to take very extensive notes since everything done in the lecture is better done in the textbooks.

Stop math lecturing

There are many bad things and few good things about teaching math by lectures.

Personally I have not learned anything from math lectures since the end of high school. As I said before, lectures are bad for higher math. It's either too fast, then it's not understandable, or too slow, then it's boring. If it's written in a book, it's much better presented, than if it's written on a board live with a human hand. Using slides is mildly better, but slides are ugly, and why even use slides when you have a book?

And what's the point of taking notes? If the lecturer has prepared a lot about the lecture, to the point that the lecture notes are already done and so they could just refer to it during the lecture, why not print it out and give to the students so that they don't have to waste their time writing down their own lecture notes? To allow some idiosyncrasy for the notes, large margins can be put into the printed out notes so that the students can put in their own stuff there.

My LaTeX template

Today I tried going to a lecture and as expected still learned nothing. Seriously, how the heck do people learn at lectures? I mean, I can kind of understand how people learn during history or psychology lectures since those are heavy on story-telling, but there are no stories in real mathematics and so the college tradition of learning through oral instruction seems a bizarre oral-fixation, in grave need of therapy.

Anyway, I tried to at least try live-LaTeX-transcription of what's written on the board, and almost managed to do that, until I tried compiling and the thing does not compile since the tikz-cd package for drawing commutative diagrams doesn't work, and debugging spent so much time that I completely lost hope of keeping up, not that I originally had any hope of keeping up even without note-taking.

Because really, either it's too easy or it's too hard, it's never at the right speed. If it's too slow I get bored, and lose concentration. If it's too fast I can't understand and lose hope. Books never frustrate me like lectures.

Anyway, here's what I ended up using as a latex template. Might be useful for you.