tag: Epistemology

Epistemic status: low. I wrote this in an airport, in a fury, straight after YTM 2026 (the Young Topologists Meeting), most of which I spent nodding along to things I didn’t understand and suspect nobody else did either. Mostly it’s me rambling about a bad week, with maybe one real idea buried in it. The setup Imagine you’re a musician at a music festival. Everyone’s supposed to share their own composition, so that the others can appreciate it. ...

Epistemic status: High confidence from pattern recognition across many conversations. Both math-phobia (“I’m just not a math person”) and math-smugness (“I’m naturally gifted”) are illusions—–opposite reactions to dumb teaching procedures. During my university years I had this piece of conversation over and over, in many different flavours: Nice to meet you. What are you studying? < Mathematics. > Ugh, I hate math. immediate change of topic ...