I think this is more accurately vice signalling.

It might seem harmless, but the purpose of a joke is to draw a distinction between those who get it and those who don’t, fostering a sense of community. In this “joke”, the in-group is people who don’t know something; the community ideal fostered there is that knowledge is undesirable, that anything that seems unintuitive to the uninformed mind is inherently ridiculous. The “joke” has no effect if it doesn’t do this. Entertaining the idea without challenge is dangerous.

I only read one book, and it’s a Good Book, don’t you know!

Hah. Church tried to ban it because it was “associated with illegal money trading”, I remember that. What is it about maths that makes non-mathematicians think themselves qualified to judge matters they don’t understand?

I might not find a joke funny, or I might not have the necessary context to appreciate it; that’s “not getting” a joke. If it’s possible to have too much context to appreciate a “joke”, it’s at the expense of people who know more than the audience.

I think I almost understand what you’re getting at. If I do, it’s uncodifiable. You can’t draft an organisational system with a clause that no one is allowed to use logical fallacies to defend it.

Whoa there. I detest this post as much as you do, but there’s no need to start throwing out baseless accusations. @[email protected] isn’t funny at all.

Ok, so this is a “joke” which is only funny to people who do not understand the context, and moreover jump to insane, unsubstantiated conclusions rather than expending an infinitesimal measure of effort to understand something they haven’t seen before. It’s active mockery of the very concept of being open to new ideas.

If I’m not meant to think about it until understanding emerges, then that means it should be immediately understandable without thinking. It is not.

I think it is not. Certainly most projects aren’t solely personal utilities, but devs working for fun rather than profit will almost inevitably produce something skewed towards their own tastes and skills. See: the presentation of any FOSS graphical app vs a paid equivalent.

That’s a pretty weak definition. “Legitimate” especially is a vacuous term, and every form of democracy ever proposed is (theoretically) “accountable”.

The Hamiltonian using Hamilton’s numbers? Now I think about it it is a bit silly that two entirely separate yet highly propinquitous concepts have such similar names. Physics really went downhill once humans started writing it down.

I know this is a joke, but wrong about what, exactly? I don’t get it.

Also, and maybe this has something to do with the joke I’m not getting, the way complex numbers are motivated in school is a lie, and a stupid one. Mathematicians were perfectly comfortable with certain equations having no solutions; the problem was when their equations told them there were no solutions when they could see the solutions: the curve x³ - 15x + 4 crosses the x-axis, but Cardano’s cubic formula gives up due to negative square roots. Imaginary numbers were originally no more than an ephemeral reasoning tool, and were only reluctantly accepted as entities in their own right because of how damn useful they were.

Quaternions are not the basis for quantum mechanics. Biquaternions have some applications in quantum field theory, but there are many areas of quantum mechanics where there’s no need or space for anything above complex.