Blog/2025-02-07/A Confused Kolmogorov
There's a classic blog post about Kolmogorov called The Kolmogorov Option about how, if you want to do Mathematics, it's better to shut up and not pick fights you cannot win. Fair enough, fair enough. I, personally, sympathize with this position. In India, it would have been unlikely for me to have stood up against ethnoreligious violence of any sort. I'd rather just hide from the Eye of Sauron. Fighting back was for braver men than me.
Unfortunately for me, though, I didn't always understand what the 'right' option was. One of the unfortunate issues this popped up on was when I was a teenager. When asked whether I believed "being gay was just a choice", I said "Yes!" enthusiastically. I thought the intended meaning was that it being simply a personal choice, it wasn't worth litigating. As we all know, that's not what that means[1]. I don't think this went down very well, but fortunately mistakes like this weren't framed for all time back then.
Another amusing misunderstanding comes for the word 'pussy' as in "Don't be a pussy!". I think I was about 30 years old when I was informed (to my great mortification) of what it's truly referencing[2]. As far as I knew, it was a reference to a pussycat - notoriously skittish and prone to avoiding fights!
I am frequently reminded of this when I encounter some obscure fight between various groups who've staked their claim on some topic and have been going at it for years[3] and I don't even get why someone would care about one or the other. For scientific argumentation, it makes sense that people think there's more evidence for one idea or the other. But usually these are claims of near-religious adherence on either side. And those are confusing because there's a lot of backing context that I'm usually missing when one or the other side fires another salvo.
What would be nice, I think, would be for everyone to be nice and open about "What Views Are Acceptable To Express" and then I'll go along with most of those so that I can actually get around to talking about and doing the things that I'm interested in. They can then update those every time administrations change and I can faithfully give them their salutes and loyalty oaths and they can let me go about my day.
Footnotes[edit]
- ↑ As far as I can understand it, it is in contrast to being gay being an innate characteristic of man and therefore worthy of protection in the same way that sex would be.
- ↑ Everywhere I see now has a statement that pusillanimous is a false etymology, that cat references are not the real ones either and it's just the other side of "don't be a dick!" which honestly I should have seen.
- ↑ Like WH40k, it's always the year 39,999 and all the factions are in the same war they've been in for millennia.
