I’m a student at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, majoring in pure mathematics and computer science.
Roman Maksimovich
Karma: 12
On The Conservation of Rights
Thank you for your kind words! Unfortunately, Asymptote doesn’t really have much of a community development platform, but I’ll be trying to make
smoothmanifoldpart of the official project in some way or another. Right now the development is so fast that the README is actually out of date… gotta fix that. So far, though, my talents seem less to help others and more to serve as a pleasurable pastime :)I’m also glad that another person discovered Asymptote and liked it—it’s a language that I cannot stop to admire for the graphical functionality, ease of image creation (pdf’s, jpeg’s, svg’s, etc., all with the same interface), and at the same time amazing programming potential (you can redefine any builtin function, for example, and Asymptote will carry on with your definition)
Of course, “conditional love” is considered a vague term for a reason. We can try to wrap it in a logically strict definition, but it will never quite capture the entirety of the concept. However, with your particular example I might actually disagree. A person’s income is not really a quality, rather a consequence of internal factors such as persistence, intelligence, etc., as well as external factors such as luck. In the situation where Bob loses his job and can no longer find a new one, we may assume that he was just lucky to get it in the first place. In other words, Alice has been mistaking Bob for BOB while he was making a lot of money, falsely assuming it was because he is smart and hard-working. And when Bob lost his job, Alice saw his real internal qualities and left him, because she was loving BOB all along. In this case, Alice’s conditional love is quite well-explained by my definition.
This is in no way to claim that my definition is a precise representation of the real meaning of conditional love. In fact, I’m sure it possible to turn the story about Bob-losing-job to act against my definition as well. For example, if Alice knew all along that Bob was a sore loser from a rich family, and she loved him only for the money. At this point, however, I find it difficult to call this “love” at all… looks more like a cold play by Alice, which should be described by a different model altogether.
The point is, real-life situations have enough detail and nuance to fit them to almost any chosen formal frame. And this is good—it means that we can legitimately use many of our abstract theories, as long as they give us useful results. For example, I could model human relationships with topological spaces, or probability distributions, or with the Theory of Evolution, or with particle physics. All of these models will produce results whose significance will depend on the degree to which the models are appropriate. It’s okay that we are “moving away from the actual usage of that term”, as long as our abstraction holds a logical connection to the original idea. I think, my model of conditional love does have that connection.
In my mind, conditional love always had to do with acceptance. If you love someone unconditionally, you love them for who they are, you admire their existing qualities. By contrast, loving someone conditionally means that you will love them on condition that they acquire some additional qualities. This is why it is considered to be toxic—conditional love is not really about the person being ‘loved’, rather about an image of what that person could become.
We can quantify this concept in quite a neat way. Say that for any kind of love, there is a certain image of the loved person (Bob) in the head of the loving person (Alice), that represents the best, most lovable version of Bob. We will call this image BOB. Now, some qualities (or ‘conditions’) of BOB (say, N of them) may already be present in Bob (say, M out of N). Let’s define the conditionality of Alice’s love for Bob by the ratio (N-M)/N. That way, if this ratio is 0, that is, M = N, then all of BOB’s qualities are already in Bob, i.e. Alice loves him for who he is, unconditionally. If, on the other hand, this ratio is 1, that is, M = 0, then Bob is simply out of the equation—he doesn’t even intersect with his image. Quite amusingly, in this model, it is the perfectly conditional love that would make no distinction between people and worms, because the object really doesn’t matter. If a worm could smile and talk and walk like BOB, Alice would readily love this worm (with a conditionality of 0, by the way) like she never loved Bob.
We can see that my definition is actually roughly equivalent to yours. If Alice pulls Bob closer after a bad speech, it means that Alice is fine with who Bob is now, i.e. Bob’s qualities somewhat align with BOB’s.
Much like your notion of unconditional love, a conditionality of 0 is practically impossible. Bob needs to be a complete saint to perfectly align with BOB (or Alice needs to have really low standards). There will always be something we will want to change about our partners—bad habits, speech patterns, their attitude, etc. But a low conditionality shows that we are already with the right person, while a high conditionality indicates that we are trying to turn them into something they are not.
Hello everyone! My name is Roman Maksimovich, I am an immigrant from Russia, currently finishing high school in Serbia. My primary specialization is mathematics, and back in middle school I have had enough education in abstract mathematics (from calculus to category theory and topology) to call myself a mathematician.
My other strong interests include computer science and programming (specifically functional programming, theoretical CS, AI, and systems programming s.a. Linux) as well as languages (specifically Asian languages like Japanese).
I ended up here after reading HP:MOR, which I consider to be an all-time masterpiece. The Sequences are very good too, although not that gripping. Rationality is a very important principle in my life, and so far I found the forum to be very well-organized and the posts to be very informative and well-written, so I will definitely stick around and try to engage in the forum to the best of my ability.
I thought I might do a bit of self-advertising as well. Here’s my GitHub: https://github.com/thornoar
If any of you use this very niche mathematical graphics tool called Asymptote, you might be interested to know that I have been developing a cool 6000-line Asymptote library called ‘smoothmanifold’, which is sort of like a JavaScript framework (an analogy that I do not like) but for drawing abstract mathematical diagrams with Asymptote, whose main problem is the lack of abstraction. In plain Asymptote, you usually have to specify all the coordinates manually and draw objects line by line. In my library I make it so that the code resembles the logical structure of the picture more. You can draw a set as a blob on the plane, and then draw arrows that connect different sets, which would be a nightmare to do manually. And this is only the beginning—there is a lot more features. If any of this is what interests you, feel free to read the README.md.
I have also written some mathematical papers, the most recent one paired with a software program for strong password creation. If you are interested in cryptography and cybersecurity, and would like to create strong passwords using a hash algorithm, you can take a look at ‘pshash’, which contains both the algorithm source and binaries, as well as the paper/documentation.
I agree with that, it basically states that there cannot be rights that contradict each other, i.e. you having the right to live, and me having the right to take your life. As for my formulation, perhaps it’s a product of the culture I was raised in, but if one member of society claims to have some extra rights compared to others, I would expect them to justify these extra rights by taking on an obligation.
I suppose you mention basic human rights as examples of rights that are not balanced out by obligations. This is also perfectly fine, you can have a non-zero balance of rights and obligations, as long as any additional right is met by an additional obligation. Indeed, the right to simply be alive is not met by any obligation I can think of.
Still, even for some basic rights, we can find corresponding obligations. If you have the right to live your life freely, you become responsible for your actions, i.e. you have an obligation to answer for any harmful action you may perform. This right is absent in young children, and so is the obligation—their guardians are responsible for their actions.