petty things that I feel strongly about, and try to be proactive about

[gusl]

Inefficient queueing.
If someone is standing in the way of the food that you want, you should jump ahead of them. In this case, maximizing global utility requires you to be locally rude. But close to 100% of people choose to be locally polite and globally rude. Just now, we were having a lunchtime seminar, but the Chinese food came in late, and we were very pressed for time and the organizers told us this. I started spreading out the food, which probably saved a minute or two for our room of 50 people.

Stupid classroom design
(see my cartoon) How hard would it be to raise the floor a bit in the back rows? Usually the easiest thing to do is to raise the speaker and/or height where the overhead projector is mounted.

Mathematical notation
Every mathematician I've met forgets/neglects quantifiers sometimes. Also, the word "any" can mean "for all" or "there exists", so please don't use it when going for precision! I'm down with convenient mathematical metonymy, i.e. slight abuses of notation, if one translates this to the formal meaning at least once, but people rarely do. It would also be helpful to keep around a symbol denoting the formal context ("language") under which variables are to be interpreted. I have made some formalization efforts in my wiki.

Silly little things that won't get done unless you do them yourself, e.g. the PUSH/PULL signs I installed on the unintuitive doors to the department, prevent people wasting time being confused / fixing the door, and saves the doors from some damage.

People who have spoken conversations during talks. I'm ok with conversations online or on paper, but if you pollute my acoustic environment, I will resent it.

Comments

[toorsdenote.livejournal.com]

I think about this queuing problem all the time, since as a vegetarian I frequently end up standing at a buffet behind someone who stops at all the meat dishes. I could just pass them and head up to the vegetables without inconveniencing them at all, but it seems rude. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

there should be a standard protocol for excusing yourself and jumping ahead.

[psifenix.livejournal.com]

In what context exactly does "any" mean "there exists"? This seems more of a problem with English than with mathematics, which has fine notation for these sorts of things... but people are not robots and do not want to read (and are incapable of comprehending quickly) logical notation all day without prose. Also: we seem to get by.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

"If any even number above 2 cannot be written as a sum of two primes, then we have falsified the Goldbach conjecture"

I made this up, but it sounds like completely standard discourse.

In this case, it's easy to see double negative context and thus interpret the "any" as "exists"... but sometimes negations become prefixes, e.g. "If any even number above 2 is 'undecomposable', then we have falsified the Goldbach conjecture".

[psifenix.livejournal.com]

I really don't see how there is any(!) semantic ambiguity here. Meaning, I don't think any native English speaker (conversant also in first-order logic) would confuse "If any even number above 2 is indecomposable..." with "If every even number above 2 is indecomposable..."

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

I suspect that your knowledge of mathematics is automatically ruling out other interpretations.

The problem is that in a teaching context, some students will be struggling to understand, and will have nothing to hold on to but the literal meaning of the words, whereas the expert is completely blind to the ambiguities.

Are you proposing the following rule:

So: "if any" = "if there exists"
But: "for any" = "for all"
?


A possibly more important set of ambiguities is the order of quantifiers.

[psifenix.livejournal.com]

Yup! Natural language is bad for expressing these things infallibly, but it's enough to get by. Some care must be taken, but anybody doing math with proofs should already be aware of this difference (whether or not they've ever thought about it or discussed it explicitly as we are doing).

Quantifier order is definitely more delicate. Just yesterday I was in a lecture where "for all" and "for each" meant different things in context seemingly because there was a quantifier order issue.

[hykue.livejournal.com]

I have nothing to add to this, I just really, really enjoyed the phrase "inefficient queueing" and had to express my enjoyment.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

:-)