Object-oriented programming is a more efficient generalization of modular programming. The massive hype was appropriate because object-oriented programming solves real engineering problems. It continues to solve them. Whatever shininess has worn off is because the ideas have become so ubiquitous that they are beyond question, even for developers working in languages that pre-date OOP, and even for developers who purport to reject the idea. They aren’t exciting anymore. Nobody is advocating for them anymore because they aren’t controversial.

If you divide your code into logical groupings separated by interfaces, you are practicing OOP. There is no other way to manage the complexity of a software system. You’re doing this whether you’re using C or Haskell.

Vague and untrue.

“Pure” functional programming (functional programming without side-effects) is interesting for a particular model of concurrency (shared memory SMT), but not because it’s functional, because it’s pure. Shared memory is awfully easy to handle when it’s read only.

Imperative programming overwhelmingly dominates other kinds of concurrent execution. *IMD, stream processors, GPGPUs, asymmetric multiprocessing, and continues to dominate even for traditional networking/IPC/RPC stuff. A lot of this tech is new, though. The industry and academy didn’t simply defer to tradition, they choose imperative languages because they are the best choice for the particular application.

The take away shouldn’t be that functional programming is a “winner”, but that SMP is too hard to do unless you shackle developers to the wall first. Functional programming just happens to come with a shinier pair of shackles than most.

Grow up. This thread went down hill last time when you refused to acknowledge that I had a point and got angry at me for making it forcefully. I'm not trying to turn the world on its head, and I don't pretend to be an expert. But only to make it crystal clear why I might disagree with a point of view which I've read into something you've written, which you may or may not believe to the extent to which I've assumed. And while you are clearly more qualified than I to answer these questions, you tend to rest on your laurels while making sweeping general statements that dismiss other points of view in a way that frankly is infuriating.

I understand you have reasons for being unconvinced and I respect that. If I knew more about these topics I would have provided you with more concrete evidence for the point of view I am trying to impart. But barring that, it's probably better that I didn't try, since you don't seem to be enjoying this.

Thanks, this is interesting. I knew that OOP had been massively hyped, but didn't think enough about just how much its surge in popularity really came from genuine strengths (and ones that improve upon something as uncontroversially good as modular programming).

Your point about concurrency being solved by techniques far broader than what pure functional languages have to offer is interesting to me too, and upon reflection, I see that I probably absorbed some functional programming dogma in lieu of actual experience (so thank you for helping disabuse me of these myths). I knew that imperative approaches to concurrency were around, but I suppose that they had always been preferred simply because developers preferred not to be shackled by the sometimes awkward style of pure functional programming that tries to banish side effects from a world that is full of them. It always seemed prudent to write in a functional style when possible, but now I'm not so sure. I suppose I should try to write a game using monads in Haskell before I open my mouth on this and first see how much I like it.

Generally speaking I very much like the idea of mixing and matching programming paradigms as need be.

You can ammuse yourself by calling a research project that depends on a divergent philosophical motivation dogmatic, but unless you really think I'm trying to get you to give up classical mathematics, your equivocation of research in foundations with apologia for conservative technology is immature. Although I certainly erarned this response from you by stating my case in too strong language (and by latching onto statements that you wrote too literally, which you later acquiesced).

Your "point" is an assertion about the future of mathematics research, something nobody can possibly know, based on the views of a few fringe-y mathematicians. It's not really a point, and doesn't raise to the level of substantial commentary.

By the way, I'm not pretending to be a researcher in foundations myself. I admit that I did get drawn into advocacy for the work of others in the course of this discussion.

But I do want to mention that castigating new work in foundations as crackpot is a very, very common (and very often warranted) retort of conservatives who might not necessarily appreciate the edge cases that new research in foundations could possibly offer.

My feeling is that the general distaste for foundations is that it appears to be mostly of no consequence, yet it connects to everything in mathematics. I'll think this may be why people feel unnecessarily threatened by it, but I think this is a mistake: foundations research is not necessarily about invalidating existing results (though it might hope to clarify or refine it), nor is it about criticizing certain ways of doing mathematics as "good" or "bad". No, on the contrary: like most technical results on mathematics, work in foundations is merely another project to put better tools in the hands of people who need to formulate mathematical statements: which is potentially all mathematicians, even if it may be a long slog before such tools are sufficiently refined and then disseminated to become respectable among the conservative majority of potential users.

I'm not making commentary, and this work is most certainly not fringe. The mathematicians involved may not be as familiar to you because they are more closely aligned with the computer science research community. My only "point" was to highlight some of the research being carried out by a research community that ought to make you think twice about making such sweeping, general statements about the subject of foundations, which from my understanding of the situation (and I don't mean this harshly), mostly reflect your lack of interest in the topic. I don't expect you to be interested in the topic, since like most research programs, it doesn't bear the fruits it has still promised, but I think you are wrong to dismiss it so casually. Anyway, I'm not bitter about this, and I can tell you aren't too interested in the topic, but I think you are unnecessary peeved.

That's NOT NOT NOT what I said at any point, I feel I've made it very clear that I think this exploration is a good thing, should be done, and has the potential to be revolutionary.

At no point I feel have I expressed any anti-finitist dogmatism, nor any resistance towards reformulating mathematics on principle. What I've said is that I'm skeptical towards the arguments that axiomatic set theory is "on it's way out" in any way, especially when the arguments you've presented are similar to or are exactly the same fringe arguments finitists have been presenting for decades, and have been ignored for making for decades.

If finitists weren't so dogmatic, they probably wouldn't be treated this way, but they've been warning mathematicians of "revolutions" for decades. Guess what: so far none has happened.



Yes. Not all work on the foundations of math are against the current trends in mathematics. There are, however, a large collection of people who do oppose the current trends, and use the foundations of mathematics as a tool to spread their views.

It should be clarified why finitism is fringe. Finitism in itself isn't wrong or invalid in any way. It's not that, it's about how it's proponents tend to act in mathematical circles. They have a tendency to be preachy, to tell other people they're all wrong, to be smugly condescending of the "assumptions" of other mathematicians. All research-quality mathematicians understand the assumptions, they're just fine with them. They want to do their work, they don't want some arrogant jerkoff preaching to them. The foundational criticisms are literally as bad as mathematicians going to physicists and yelling at them for not proving things. Mathematicians generally just don't care about these foundational topics insofar as they don't matter to research. Foundations are a different study. Unless if some major problem is revealed with our current foundations, mathematicians aren't about to drop their work and spend years studying another foundational theory to reformulate what they do.

And I think it's really, really stupidly arrogant to think mathematicians are "wrong" and the future belongs to another paradigm because someone thinks there are advantages to doing things another way.

FWIW, from what I've read, mathematicians are as nasty (or far more nasty) toward one another on the Foundations of Mathematics mailing list, where much of this is discussed.

Seriously man, I know these discussions can get tiresome, and I can certainly overstate my case at times, but maybe you can take a step back and realize that I'm not here to argue with you about petty things like philosophy or which mathematical foundations is "better". In the interest of clarity, I may drive down on some point, but I think this hardly warrants the kind of insults I've been on the receiving end of that would seem to indicate I am trying to somehow compete with you. A simple "I'm not so interested in this minutiae", or "you don't know enough about this subject to convince me your thinking is clear" would suffice!

I think there's an important distinction that needs to be made here.

You seem to be under the impression that I am advocating for finitism. Whereas most of the research I've been advocating for in this thread is that of Paul Taylor, who simultaneously:

1. Castigated completed infinity as a "great swindle" of set theory, and
2. made the claim in the same MathOverflow answer that his point of view is far more than finitist dogma. His work is mostly technical, rather than hinging on some stupid philosophical hangup like you seem to presume when you throw around words like finitism, and his insights are applicable outside of "finitism".

You:



Also you:



Get a grip, you're clearly under the impression that axiomatic set theory is inferior, and are just acting weird for being called out.

Please read the bold faced parts (emphasis added) so that I can clarify what I am referring to here.


https://mathoverflow.net/a/9428
[Quote=Paul Taylor]
On the subject of categorical versus set-theoretic foundations there is too much complicated discussion about structure that misses the essential point about whether "collections" are necessary.

It doesn't matter exactly what your personal list of mathematical requirements may be -- rings, the category of them, fibrations, 2-categories or whatever -- developing the appropriate foundational system for it is just a matter of "programming", once you understand the general setting.

The crucial issue is whether you are taken in by the Great Set-Theoretic Swindle that mathematics depends on collections (completed infinities). (I am sorry that it is necessary to use strong language here in order to flag the fact that I reject a widely held but mistaken opinion.)

Set theory as a purported foundation for mathematics does not and cannot turn collections into objects. It just axiomatises some of the intuitions about how we would like to handle collections, based on the relationship called "inhabits" (eg "Paul inhabits London", "3 inhabits N"). This binary relation, written ϵ
, is formalised using first order predicate calculus, usually with just one sort, the universe of sets. The familiar axioms of (whichever) set theory are formulae in first order predicate calculus together with ϵ

.

(There are better and more modern ways of capturing the intuitions about collections, based on the whole of the 20th century's experience of algebra and other subjects, for example using pretoposes and arithmetic universes, but they would be a technical distraction from the main foundational issue.)

Lawvere's "Elementary Theory of the Category of Sets" axiomatises some of the intuitions about the category of sets, using the same methodology. Now there are two sorts (the members of one are called "objects" or "sets" and of the other "morphisms" or "functions"). The axioms of a category or of an elementary topos are formulae in first order predicate calculus together with domain, codomain, identity and composition.

Set theorists claim that this use of category theory for foundations depends on prior use of set theory, on the grounds that you need to start with "the collection of objects" and "the collection of morphisms". Curiously, they think that their own approach is immune to the same criticism.

I would like to make it clear that I do NOT share this view of Lawvere's.

Prior to 1870 completed infinities were considered to be nonsense.

When you learned arithmetic at primary school, you learned some rules that said that, when you had certain symbols on the page in front of you, such as "5+7", you could add certain other symbols, in this case "=12". If you followed the rules correctly, the teacher gave you a gold star, but if you broke them you were told off.

Maybe you learned another set of rules about how you could add lines and circles to a geometrical figure ("Euclidean geometry"). Or another one involving "integration by parts". And so on. NEVER was there a "completed infinity".

Whilst the mainstream of pure mathematics allowed itself to be seduced by completed infinities in set theory, symbolic logic continued and continues to formulate systems of rules that permit certain additions to be made to arrays of characters written on a page. There are many different systems -- the point of my opening paragraph is that you can design your own system to meet your own mathematical requirements -- but a certain degree of uniformity has been achieved in the way that they are presented.

We need an inexhaustible supply of VARIABLES for which we may substitute.

There are FUNCTION SYMBOLS that form terms from variables and other terms.

There are BASE TYPES such as 0 and N, and CONSTRUCTORS for forming new types, such as ×

, +, /, →

, ....

There are TRUTH VALUES (⊥
and ⊤), RELATION SYMBOLS (=

) and CONNECTIVES and QUANTIFIERS for forming new predicates.

Each variable has a type, formation of terms and predicates must respect certain typing rules, and each formation, equality or assertion of a predicate is made in the CONTEXT of certain type-assignments and assumptions.

There are RULES for asserting equations, predicates, etc.

We can, for example, formulate ZERMELO TYPE THEORY in this style. It has type-constructors called powerset and {x:X|p(x)} and a relation-symbol called ϵ

. Obviously I am not going to write out all of the details here, but it is not difficult to make this agree with what ordinary mathematicians call "set theory" and is adequate for most of their requirements

Alternatively, one can formulate the theory of an elementary topos is this style, or any other categorical structure that you require. Then a "ring" is a type together with some morphisms for which certain equations are provable.

If you want to talk about "the category of sets" or "the category of rings" WITHIN your tpe theory then this can be done by adding types known as "universes", terms that give names to objects in the internal category of sets and a dependent type that provides a way of externalising the internal sets.

So, although the methodology is the one that is practised by type theorists, it can equally well be used for category theory and the traditional purposes of pure mathematics. (In fact, it is better to formalise a type theory such as my "Zermelo type theory" and then use a uniform construction to turn it into a category such as a topos. This is easier because the associativity of composition is awkward to handle in a recursive setting. However, this is a technical footnote.)

A lot of these ideas are covered in my book "Practical Foundations of Mathematics" (CUP 1999), http://www.PaulTaylor.EU/Practical-Foundations Since writing the book I have written things in a more type-theoretic than categorical style, but they are equivalent. My programme called "Abstract Stone Duality", http://www.PaulTaylor.EU/ASD is an example of the methodology above, but far more radical than the context of this question in its rejection of set theory, ie I see toposes as being just as bad.[/Quote]

https://mathoverflow.net/a/10366
[Quote=Paul Taylor]
Since Tom Leinster queries my reference to actual/completed versus potential/incomplete infinities, maybe we should ask a philosopher whether I am using these terms in the standard way.

In any case, I am not doing metaphysics. I am just describing the way in which it appears to me that mathematicians actually work, in contrast to the way they say they work because they have been trained to say such things. When you compare my remarks with the others on this page, please note that they are based on thinking about these things for myself over 25 years, originally from a categorical perspective but increasingly influenced by symbolic logic, and not on reciting bits of textbooks.

To do ordinary arithmetic, you may need very (arbitrarily) large numbers, but you don't all of them together. So far as I can gather from history, mathematicians up to the mid-19th century managed very well to deal with things in this way, for example defining functions as expressions.

Post-Cantor, 20th century mathematicians got into the habit of introducing the completed infinity before the structure. For example, we say "a group is a set with...", relegating the essence of symmetry to second place. This is like saying that humanity is a collection of pieces of flesh, onto which faces are painted as an afterthought.

Categorists, being part of the pure mathematical culture, did the same thing, in the vast majority of cases with great profit. However, when it comes to foundations, treating the universe first as a completed infinity (and only afterwards containing products, function-spaces, powersets or whatever other structure you require) inevitably leads into the set-theoretic trap.

By contrast, type theoretic methods build up the universe by means of the actual operations that you actually want to consider, just as the symmetry group of the Rubik cube is built up from individual rotations. Moreover, despite the fact that type theory looks completely different from category theory or algebra, it is an accurate underpinning of the actual methods of reasoning of mathematics. See, for example, my discussion of the idiom "there exists" in my book.

This is not dogmatic Finitism or Logicism and is readily adaptable to considering the object N
along with individual natural numbers, an internal category Set

along with individual types, and so on.

Now let me consider the other approaches to this question.

First order logic. This was the first usable general technique in mathematical logic. Like other disciplines, it starts with the completed infinity and adds properties to it. Does it presuppose a set theory? Well, yes, in the same sense that a boot-loader presupposes a primitive operating system. I would be more convinced that first-order logic is independent of set theory if there were a branch of model theory that had examples of structures whose carriers were topological spaces or algebraic varieties.

In fact, first order logic can be set up in the type-theoretic way that I have described above. But if you're going to do that, you may as well set up the type theory that you actually want to use.

If we're looking for a metalanguage specificaly for categorical logic (say, in which to construct toposes) then first order logic is not the right structure. It is easy to describe an internal category in a category with all finite finits, and, by adding more diagrams, we can talk about internal toposes too. However, it's much more interesting to consider free internal structures, for which we need an arithmetic universe, although unfortunately there is next to zero literature on this topic.

Fibrations, 2-categories, etc. None of what I have said contradicts the use of these categorical techniques. I personally consider that fibrations, and especially hyperdoctrines, are obfuscation, but other people find them useful. However, they organise the world, but they do not bring it into existence, which was the thrust of the original question.[/quote]

I bolded two statements in those answers, because they show that a long-time researcher is simultaneously opposed to completed infinity (in his formalism), but also claims that his work is NOT finitist.

I don't presume to know too much about the term, but I imagine a finitist is someone who argues that infinite mathematics is necessarily flawed. This is hardly what Taylor does here. I think a much better interpretation would be that he (rightly, in my estimation) believes that infinite mathematics is A) possibly a source of bugs, and B) perhaps not the most ergonomic way to capture the crucial parts of a mathematical proof, making it unnecessarily difficult to encode in a form that an automated proof checker can understand.

If you are going to make this personal, I am going to end the conversation (and I imagine that this is the alterior motive at play when you make these kinds of remarks). I've said before that axiomatic set theory is in some ways superior (it is easier), and other ways inferior (it can lead to unpredictable results, and is unnecessarily difficult to verify with a computer assisted proof checker). I think the right answer is to use whichever formalism is convenient, but not to feel threatened by new ones that may eventually surpass even axiomatic set theory in ease of use, once it becomes commonplace to use computers to write and check proofs. If I were hell bent on making the value judgement that this were already the case, I'd be a dogmantic finitist. But as it stands, this is simply one possible line of research.

Ok, sure, I wrote that second statement. Sorry if it rubbed you the wrong way. I concede that it's subjective, but you do admit that there is a lot of pathological behavior in axiomatic set theory, no? I'm not against working around it, but I feel a long term project worthy of our attention is to move past it, and come up with more elegant and useful foundations that aren't so poorly behaved as infinite sets are (before you exclude the "bad").

I'm well aware which responses you're repeating, and I wouldn't attempt to claim more knowledge on this subject than Paul Taylor. Nor am I about to work through these when I'm as busy as I am.

My contention has been rooted in the claims you specifically made about the state of mathematics: calling people who use axiomatic set theory "dogmatists", claiming that the future belongs to other formulations which don't refer to "completed infinities", etc. I don't think you really understand Paul Taylor's criticisms, and are forcing this into a much more unnuanced, stupid discussion in order to try and have unique opinions on these topics.

I agree, axiomatic set theory has weird pathologies, and if the day comes where we can be rid of them, then I think that would be good. But I'm not holding my breath or making presumptuous claims about the future of mathematics on that premise. I'm really just trying to get you to tone it down a few notches.

You know what, **** it. You aren't even interested in using such proof checkers, so I don't know why I am wasting my time trying to explain some of the potential merits of recasting mathematical language in a formalism that lends itself to reasoning that leads to the statement of proofs in ways that such checkers can understand. You clearly don't care that this can help resolve some of the unpredictable nature of classical mathematics, so I am really wasting my time here.

I admit that I could have been less over the top, stated my point more clearly and with more concrete examples, been less lazy in deferring to the work of others, and gotten less hung up on statements that you wrote in passing that didn't ring true (since it only invited you to respond in kind).

Look, I'm interested in this stuff, and that's why I brought it up. If I had spent more time actually understanding it on a technical level I would have been able to provide you with my own concrete examples to support my point to have prevented the two of us from talking past one another and raging on what turned out to be moot philosophical points.

I've directly acknowledged that it has great potential, multiple times. It's not my fault you're incapable of reading.

Reid, I actually wasn't trying to put the blame on you. It's as much my fault for talking you to death about a subject which you are clearly only marginally interested in, and neither of us are knowledgeable about.

I like to state things that reflect my intuition in strong terms, even if my ultimate point is more pedestrian or subtle.

In real life this seems to work fine.

On the internet this seems to attract two kinds of responses, equally strong. One from people who are subject matter expert (Jon`C in this thread) who can disabuse me of some naivety revealed by my purposefully crude propositions. The other possibility is that you rub somebody the wrong way because they don't like what you said, even if they aren't subject matter experts. I think this second category describes both of us in this exchange (and it describes most interactions on the internet). I was wrong to lash out at you, because there was probably nothing you could have taught me on the subject in order to shut me up, and then the insults come out.

That's fine, I'm certainly no expert in the topic, maybe someday I'll know more and we can discuss that further.

All I really want is to disabuse you of saying things that would embarrass you if said in the wrong context. Such bombastic phrases are appropriate questions for when you're first approaching a professor about a topic, but it's generally inadvisable to make bold proclamation about topics unless you're certain and have good reasoning. Maybe it's just becoming part of my nature to want to only speak on a topic where I'm certain I won't say something really wrong, and so I'm trying to push that mindset on you, and that may not even be the right methodology, but it's how I feel like speaking on these topics.

By the way: yes! This is absolutely what I had been doing here. Well, sort of. The sweeping statements I made in the beginning were always about trying to provoke a technical discussion that could have unfolded, had either of the two of us known more about the topic, and that could possibly confirm or deny my hunches (which I believe I ultimately did elucidate fairly clearly). I didn't want my statements to be interpreted in such a sweeping, definitive way that would need a whole lot of nuance to accept (nor was I trying to bluntly change your beliefs just by stating the direction I'd been driving down into in such strong terms).

Of course, what I got for this was a "you're ranting about something that doesn't matter and it sounds like you're promoting an -ism", which I confess is probably all I should have expected to get.

Yes! Absolutely. When I talk to strangers, I always speak in the strongest and most naive terms as possible, in order to test whether or not my intuition is correct. If I happen to do this to somebody like Jon`C, or a professor, if I am lucky, s/he rewards my boldness with an essay, explaining in exquisite, passionate detail exactly why I am wrong. If, on the other hand, I get an emotional response, well, then I was wasting my time in playing the role of student, and need to try to take the role of teacher for once. This would mean coming up with concrete examples that might convince or at least interest a less than sympathetic audience, which may not have the interest, knowledge, or time to humor seemingly off-the-wall ideas. Of course, if I could do those things, I probably wouldn't be on Massassi! So my only other options are to either soften my language (gross) or shut up (silver lining: I don't have to waste anybody's time or start more flamewars). Of course, over time I suppose one learns who the subject matter expert are, and then learns not to provoke anybody but them, since it will just waste everbody's time.

I think this is just evidence that you are transitioning from student to teacher. In fact as a TA you are probably terrorized by students who would forever judge you for the silliest of mistakes. At any rate, I think it's important to know how to play both roles, and perhaps how to make it socially acceptable to do so. For example, I was told that a luminary mathematician would make a point to sit in the front row, playing the role of the student, and ask the most annoying dumb questions, annoying the hell out of the lecturer. But the guy was just trying to get the lecturer to slow the hell down and explain things more simply, so that everybody could understand it.

By the way, though I won't pretend that this is definitive, there is at least one "law" with a name attached to it that says exactly the opposite is the case.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law

Thinking about this, I think the solution (that I would prefer) is to make written language modal. That is, to enter and exit different epistemologies of certainty as you write, and tag the region of text as such. Meaning: if I am going to be exploring an idea that I have yet to verify, but wish to communicate it in pure, unadulterated terms, then say so that I am doing this! Then, if a non-subject matter expert is rubbed the wrong way by the strong language, s/he can safely pass over it without getting angry at having her/his time wasted with half baked ideas.

Now, I don't want to give the false impression that you know less about mathematics than you deserve credit for (certainly, it's more than I do). With a little more patience, I could have taken the time to formulate my point in a way that would have better anticipated most of its shortcomings, and been more tactful in order to avoid playing my part in derailing the conversation. I am bad about this because inevitably this means slowing down and saying less, but OTOH you might all thank me for trying this for once!

(But I certainly agree that I would do well to get more used to playing the role of teacher rather than student now and then.)

In fact, my big problem is that I let my enthusiasm for a topic bleed into my interactions with others: while in some ways I am playing the role of a student in the sense that I would certainly appreciate it if you would be able to step up and play the role of teacher, in fact I would also be just as happy to have a mutual student for a counterpart. I acquired this habit in my undergraduate days, in which friends would share links of mutual interest.

Talking to somebody in a broader context is totally different, especially when I try to make the topic about something I am interested in, and merely am using passing remarks of others that don't ring true for some obscure and subtle reason as a springboard for launching into a linkfest of research leads and hunches wrapped in bold language. Of course this is a recipe for a disaster.

What I should have done is used the opportunity to create a new discussion by stopping you for a moment to ask a clarifying question about whether or not you really do feel strongly about the thing that seemed to contradict my intuition for the topic. And only then, be ready to follow up with whatever diatribe I had in mind, but cloaked in a well engineered example that stands a chance of catching the attention of an unsympathetic audience. Then, if my counterpart still wants to resist the point of view I can offer, we can continue, but because I gave them the opportunity to initiate the splinter discussion when I tossed a question their way, they have the right to shrug their shoulders at any point and say that they've heard enough to make up their opinion and go about their business. And if I've done a very good job of explaining myself, then I may have changed their point of view. Of course, one of my problems I suppose is that I never thought it necessary to try to change people's points of view just to get them to listen to another perspective, but I suppose that being opinionated about things we don't completely understand is a pretty effective filter for blocking out crazy variations of things we presume to know and would be a waste of time to entertain.

In some ways, your only fault in this matter is being far too polite in the beginning, and being so kind as to take the time to respond to virtually any inquery, no matter how little you may ultimately be interested in it. "Intellectually histrionic" types such as myself tend to latch onto that to the point of pivoting such politeness into something ugly.

In fact, it's a rookie mistake to confuse politeness for sympathy, so I probably ought to get off the internet and out interacting with more unsympathetic polite people until I better appreciate this point.

Finally, if you haven't noticed by now, I am utterly immune to being embarrassed about anything (unless I detect someone is trying to embarrass me in front of a group over something petty, because they've presumed that I ought to somehow be embarrassed over believing something that contradicts their opinion!).

Aspergers or confidence? We will likely never know.

I've mentioned the possibility before, but this is slipshod territory, because the internet tends to amplify existing tendencies in that direction, however minute. That, and, well, any purely intellectual academic discussion which aims to be fully dispassionate is going to resemble "autism", since the entire point is to make social cues and emphatic statements more or less out of the picture.

The other thing to consider is that 23andme tells me that I lack genes for empathy, so it could be that I really don't care what people think of me. That, and, holy **** do I need to make some more real friends.

Also, a socially isolated failed academic who fights with unsympathetic strangers on the internet because he apparently has nothing better to do is going to strongly resemble an autistic person.

Yeah I would never have said that if you hadn't before.

This is actually quite interesting, though. I am a very socially confident person in real life, despite some awkward introversion that I had to grow out of through practice. But what you mention is interesting, because people with more obvious signs of AS than those of myself may well lack confidence in social situations, but ought to be completely at home on the internet.

Perhaps, then, the bigger question is: does the internet merely attract AS types (or socially isolated types with similarly underdeveloped social skills), or does using the internet make you begin to resemble someone with AS, simply because nothing about the medium requires you to make use of the kind of social skills that people with AS have so much trouble with?

Finally, FWIW, I only become "autistic" when interacting with Reid. So it could simply be that we don't get along, and that any argument on the internet is going to resemble autism, for reasons similar to my remarks about the medium above. If so, then all this diagnostic stuff is merely an artifact of the medium. So then it wouldn't be me that has AS, but the internet itself! (How's that for mental gymnastics for avoiding an unpleasant conclusion?)

I mean, in a way, the web is a sort of "autism simulator": I can't see you guys, or hear the tone of your voice, or pick up on any other emphatic cues that autistic people have trouble with.

(It's also impossible to tell me to shut up before you know I've been typing.)

This thread has been highly useful to me in deciding to make some important changes in my life.

Sorry for the spam.