countedblessings

In­tro­duc­tion to In­tro­duc­tion to Cat­e­gory Theory

What is cat­e­gory the­ory?

Cat­e­gories: mod­els of models

The sen­tence struc­ture of mathematics

Sets and Functions

Ex­am­ples of Categories

• countedblessings 2 Oct 2019 2:21 UTC

  19 points

  on: Open & Wel­come Thread—Oc­to­ber 2019

  Would people be interested in a series of posts about category theory? There’s a lot of great introductions to the subject out there, but I’d like to fill a particular niche—I don’t want to assume my audience knows topology yet. I think you can still get a lot of value out of category theory at the high school senior level.

• countedblessings 8 Oct 2019 1:11 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: The sen­tence struc­ture of mathematics

  Thank you very much for your reaction to this post. As it happens, I find myself in agreement with you. I leaned too hard in the direction of avoiding any discussion of mathematics. The next post is already written to clarify that sentences are all about nouns and verbs because we use sentences to model reality, and reality seems to consist of nouns and verbs. (Cats, drinking, milk, etc., are all part of reality. Even adjectives like “blue” are broken down by our physics into nouns and verbs.) We use various specific kinds of mathematics to model various specific parts of reality, and so various specific kinds of mathematics themselves boil down to nouns and verbs. So when you do a “mathematics of math” it ends up being a mathematics that is analogous to a mathematics of nouns and verbs, which get called objects and morphisms respectively. (We probably can’t carry this analogy forever—I don’t know that there’s a real-world language analogy to n-categories. But that won’t come up anyway.) I’ll very much look forward to your reaction to the next post, which motivates category theory as a general description of how you’d want to model pretty much anything in a universe of cause-and-effect, which correspondingly generalizes, almost as a byproduct, the mathematics any human is likely to invent.

  There are many options for being clearer about objects and morphisms in this post, and I will consider them...I will also take pains to ensure it is not necessary to reconsider future posts for this particular mistake, thanks to you.

• countedblessings 10 Oct 2019 1:38 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Cat­e­gories: mod­els of models

  Thank you for the positive feedback. (A very underrated thing in terms of encouraging free content production.) I can go back to each post and add a link to the next one. I am concerned that I may want to add, rearrange, or even delete individual posts at some point, but I suppose that’s no reason not to add in the links right now for convenience’s sake.

• countedblessings 7 Oct 2019 19:26 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: rsaarelm’s comment on: In­tro­duc­tion to In­tro­duc­tion to Cat­e­gory Theory

  When we get to adjunction, I’m hoping the utility of the series will start to become clear.

• countedblessings 12 Oct 2019 2:17 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Gurkenglas’s comment on: Sets and Functions

  Steam is run out of. This was poorly conceived to begin with, arrogant in its inherent design, and even I don’t have the patience for it anyway. I’ll do a series about adjunction directly and Yoneda as well.

• countedblessings 7 Oct 2019 19:27 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: jacobjacob’s comment on: In­tro­duc­tion to In­tro­duc­tion to Cat­e­gory Theory

  I’m motivated by the essays themselves. I believe this material should exist. It’s also good for my own understanding to write them.

• countedblessings 6 Oct 2019 18:17 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Dustin’s comment on: What is cat­e­gory the­ory?

  I’d think so, although I’ve heard mixed reports from programmers about this. But give https://​​bartoszmilewski.com/​​2014/​​10/​​28/​​category-theory-for-programmers-the-preface/​​ a shot. Why not?

• countedblessings 4 Oct 2019 19:01 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: philh’s comment on: Open & Wel­come Thread—Oc­to­ber 2019

  There are a bunch of really great introductions to category theory, and this is definitely one of them. There’s also Youtube videos of his lectures going over the same material.

  My plan is to go very slowly, and to assume everything needs to be explained in as much detail as possible. This will make for a tediously long but hopefully very readable series.

• countedblessings 7 Oct 2019 0:16 UTC

  3 points

  on: What do the baby eaters tell us about ethics?

  You’re playing chess. You’re white, so it’s your move first. It’s a big board, and there’s a lot of pieces, so you’re not quite sure what to do.

  Luckily for you, there definitely exists a rule that tells you the best possible move to play for every given configuration of pieces—the rule that tells you the move that maximizes the probability of victory (or since draws exist and may be acceptable, the move that minimizes the probability of defeat. Or maximizes the points you gain, 1 for a win and 0.5 for a draw, over an infinite number of games against the opponent in question—whatever.).

  But many of these configurations of pieces will have more than one possible move to play, so it’s not like this rule is just a given. You have to figure it out.

  So what is a rule? It’s something that tells you what move to play in any and every given position. Two rules are equal when, for every possible position, they tell you to play the same move.

  When two rules are equal, we just merge them into one rule—they’re literally the same, after all. So let’s consider the list of all unequal rules—rules that differ in at least one move recommendation for at least one position from every other rule.

  How many of these rules are there? Mathematically speaking, the answer is “a super-huge amount that would literally cause your mind to explode if you tried to hold them all in your head.” After all, there is a universe-eating number of possible chess positions (remember, this is a rule that works for all possible chess positions, even ones that would never happen in a real game). And in every chess position, the number of possible ways that rules can be distinguished is equal to the number of possible moves in that position.

  So imagine each rule as a black ball, each attached to this really big wall in this vast infinite array. Out of this huge infinity of black balls, one of these balls gets a little pink dot placed on its backside, so you can’t see that it’s there.

  Now, out of this huge infinite array, you have to find the one ball with the little pink dot on it. That is the challenge of finding the rule that tells you the best chess move for each position.

  Is ethics just as hard? No! Ethics is insanely harder. Because ethics tells you a most ethical move possible for each chess position, which includes illegal moves and therefore there are more black balls corresponding to just the subset of ethical choices for chess positions!

  Now consider that also Go exists, and checkers, and, Fortnite, and situations that aren’t even games at all, like most of everything in the universe.

  There’s a ball for each way a rule can be distinguished from all other rules over the full list of all possible situations, including but hardly limited to chess situations.

  One of them has a little pink dot on its backside. Go find it.

  That is the challenge of ethics.

  Yes, people disagree about which ball has the little pink dot on it! Yes, you can search your heart and soul and still not know which ball has the little pink dot on it! That does not mean there is not a ball with a little pink dot on it!

  The pink-dotted ball exists!

  Alas, the Babyeaters were looking for the ball with the little red dot on it, and the Super Happy people looking for the ball with the little blue dot on it. Looking for different colored dots, or disagreeing about which ball has the pink/​red/​blue dot on it, is the stuff that wars and trade are made of.

• countedblessings 6 Oct 2019 15:04 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: gjm’s comment on: What is cat­e­gory the­ory?

  Category theory is useful for understanding lambda calculus—I feel like anyone who studies the latter will certainly encounter the former soon enough.

• countedblessings 6 Oct 2019 14:45 UTC

  3 points

  on: In­tro­duc­tion to In­tro­duc­tion to Cat­e­gory Theory

  I apologize for spamming with two posts on the same day about the same content, but I actually wrote this post first. It was waiting to be moderated for several days, so I wrote the other one and submitted it, and to my surprise it was immediately published. I guessed this one must have gotten stuck in a queue or something, so I rewrote it and published it. My bad, we’ll definitely go one at a time from now on.

  But in a way it’s fitting, as having two introductory posts should definitely indicate just how slow the pace of this series is going to be.

• countedblessings 8 Oct 2019 1:16 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Slider’s comment on: The sen­tence struc­ture of mathematics

  You have thought about the language analogy much harder than I did. I will think about how to avoid this issue better in the future, so thank you. In any case, don’t stress it too much—all that this post seeks to establish is that category theory is a mathematics of “stuff taking action on stuff”—moreover, it does so in a logical, intuitive way that you are already familiar with, even if you don’t know higher maths. Judging by Said’s comment, I also should have clarified that specific branches of mathematics fill in particular things for “stuff” and “taking action.” E.g., you get set theory when you fill in “sets” for stuff and “functions” for taking action.

• countedblessings 10 Nov 2019 2:54 UTC

  1 point

  on: Pric­ing ex­ter­nal­ities is not nec­es­sar­ily eco­nom­i­cally efficient

  Here’s a category-theoretic perspective. (Check out the rest of the lectures and the associated free textbook.)

• countedblessings 15 Oct 2019 17:44 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Slider’s comment on: Sets and Functions

  My next series of posts will be directly about the Yoneda lemma, which basically tells us that everything you could want to know about an object is contained in the morphisms going into/​out of the object. Moreover, we get this knowledge in a “natural” way that makes life really easy. It’s a pretty cool theorem.