I've seen a theory that the mistakes Pemulis makes are intentional, and signal that he isn't as smart as he thinks and that he doesn't really have everything in control.
I'm not sure; clearly DFW had some math aptitude but these also could have been honest mistakes. Presumably it would have been harder for editors to check these things in the 90s.
The probability error seems harder to explain and likely just a mistake.
Edit - While searching a bit more about this, I found an interesting perspective on a message board:
> The main thing that I think argues for Pemulis not being as smart as he thinks he is, is that he is the analogue of Polonious from Hamlet. In Hamlet, the court jester (the "fool") is actually really wise and always speaks the truth (=Mario), while the King's supposedly "wise" counselor, Polonious, actually gets everything wrong.
I find that pretty compelling. I hadn't really thought about deeper correspondences with Hamlet beyond Hal and his parents.
They are purposeful, I don't think Pemulis ever gets one thing right in the novel. His explanation of Annular Fusion is a good example, unless you also want to make the case that Wallace got the made up science wrong as well. Pemulis grew up in a place where he was generally the smartest person around and was able to bluff his way through life without much effort. Then he got a scholarship to somewhere with actual expectations and standards but Pemulis kept on with his lazy ways. Pemulis is probably smart but his laziness and arrogance keep him from ever achieving his own intelligence, he is forever lobbing but is a bit too slow to get to the net in time.
Vast majority of character's are well explained and the answers are all in the novel, just need to look at their childhood and upbringing.
ajkjk · 20h ago
No one of any level of math skill would mistake the the derivative of x^n as nx + x^n-1. There's no way DFW messed that up, but it's also a pretty bizarre mistake to have a character make if they're supposed to be making mistakes.
sdenton4 · 18h ago
In terms of 'meeting the reader where they are,' you would want to telegraph the math mistakes pretty hard, or they would fly past everyone. Making them obvious and dumb is the only way they'll get attributed to the character, rather than the author.
riwsky · 11h ago
Ah yes, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, a famously “meet the reader where they are” book
mercer · 2h ago
Eschaton was just slop for the masses!
RunSet · 1d ago
Perhaps my favorite deliberate error in arithmetic is from Winston Groom's Forrest Gump, during the protagonist's tour in Vietnam:
> I am the machine gun ammo bearer, cause they figger I can carry a lot of shit on account of my size. Before we lef, a couple of other fellers axed if I would mind carryin some of their han grenades so’s they could carry more orations, an I agreed. It didn’t hurt me none. Also, Sergeant Kranz made me carry a ten-gallon water can that weighed about fifty pounds.
Unlike Forrest, the reader knows a gallon of water weighs roughly eight pounds and is not spared the extent of his burden.
lmm · 11h ago
> Unlike Forrest, the reader knows a gallon of water weighs roughly eight pounds
Maybe at the time. Presumably that gets an explanatory footnote in modern editions?
gowld · 1d ago
Eighty pounds is "about fifty pounds", especially considering that a water can worth carrying at all is often not full, and insofar as nothing else in the paragraph is given a specific weight so the precise number doesn't really matter.
No comments yet
FearNotDaniel · 14h ago
> the reader knows a gallon of water weighs roughly eight pounds
Haha, you have to love those quaint, backwards Americans and their “freedom units”. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, we can peacefully enjoy the fact that 3.785 litres of water weighs exactly 3.785 kg.
spondylosaurus · 1d ago
Would Pemulis be Polonius though? If he were the advisor to the king, then the king would more likely be Tavis, not Hal.
I do like the idea of Mario as a court jester though.
eszed · 1d ago
I associated Pemulis with Polonius based on the phonemic similarity of the names. I don't have the maths background to evaluate the mistakes, but agree that if intentional they "match" with the character's presentation in Hamlet.
kolbe · 20h ago
Maybe a phonetic similarity with "pretentious" as well
npilk · 1d ago
Good point. Although the book isn't any sort of adaptation, so I could see including an allusion to the Polonius character even in a slightly different role.
(I'd also forgotten about the janitors, who are clearly a reference to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern)
evanjrowley · 20h ago
Wouldn't Pemulis' mathematical errors be consistent with how Infinite Jest begins? I.e., he has some sort of degenerative condition directly or indirectly associated with exposure to strange mold found in the basement of his childhood home?
iammjm · 19h ago
It's Hal who ate the mold and who's blasted at the "beginning" of Infinite Jest
evanjrowley · 5h ago
Thanks for correcting me on that. It's been years since I read this great book.
throwaway290 · 13h ago
Could you not spoil things?
dbtc · 1d ago
And the title
mathgradthrow · 22h ago
Maybe DFW wasn't as smart as he thought he was.
A_D_E_P_T · 1d ago
DFW also wrote Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity -- an uncritical review of Cantor's work, which was absolutely loaded with errors.
I actually read Everything and More and it's probably even worse than that. Though I'll admit that I'm a little bit biased; I'm a sort of Aristotelian Realist or even a Finitist when it comes to mathematics, and I view Cantor's hierarchy of infinities as... well... schizo at best.
lacker · 1d ago
Personally I don't agree with that review at all, and I loved Everything and More. I'm even somewhat of a "finitist" myself mathematically, but I think you can just view the whole hierarchy of infinities as a finite mode of description, and get utility from it without worrying about the "reality" of the whole thing. But that's a bit of an aside.
The review-writer clearly hates the book before he even gets to the mathematics. The whole book is striking a middle ground between expressing every step of mathematical rigor, and describing in a more literary way how to feel about these concepts. All of these "errors" are just the author passing over a point in less detail than you would want from a text on set theory. I thought it was great, and for anyone who enjoys both set theory and Infinite Jest, I would strongly recommend the book.
I understand that some people don't like it, but it should be viewed as "controversial" rather than "everyone agrees that it's riddled with errors".
A_D_E_P_T · 1d ago
> "He incorrectly suggests that the axiom of choice is used for Cantor's diagonal argument"
This alone is a pretty substantial, even foundational, error.
The author of the review, Rudy Rucker, is a sort of cult/underground author of math-heavy science fiction. I don't think he's opposed to framing things in a literary way, so long as it's not misleading or falsely dramatized. Like, e.g., Godel ending his days in some sort of forced confinement, as DFW seems to have suggested?
lacker · 1d ago
The DFW style is not just "literary", it's dense, full of self-referential hints, critical footnotes, invented acronyms, retellings of the same events from multiple perspectives. I like Rudy Rucker a lot but his work is nothing like it.
The core problem with this book is that it is a great book for people who love both math and Infinite Jest. But, that might be an audience of nobody. Or almost nobody, because it does include me.
seanhunter · 10h ago
And me. I loved the book.
dkarl · 1d ago
> The whole book is striking a middle ground between expressing every step of mathematical rigor, and describing in a more literary way how to feel about these concepts
I really hate this. If you don't care to understand something, why would you want to absorb the feelings that somebody else thinks you should have from understanding it? It reminds me of all the cringey posturing that undergrads engage in because their English professor mentioned a couple of philosophers during lectures and it totally changed their wardrobe.
lacker · 14h ago
I already do understand set theory and the construction of the real numbers. There are plenty of great books on that, or really nowadays you can simply ask ChatGPT. I am interested in learning about how Cantor, Weierstrass, the ancient Greeks, and others felt, as they grappled with the challenge of making rigorous mathematics handle the infinite. That's what this book is good at.
dkarl · 4h ago
That's fair, it makes sense for people who already understand the math and are reading for the other aspects. I don't think that was his target audience, though.
jknoepfler · 23h ago
Why would you hate a book exploring mathematics and reflecting on your relationship with it? What a weird thing to hate. Wouldn't you rather celebrate intellectual curiosity?
Like... I hate journalism that profits off of xenophobic fear mongering. A book from a genuinely curious and interesting author who did some moonlighting in more formal subjects, though? That seems harmless and kind of cute at worst. Maybe a little misguided, maybe not.
It's a weird energy to bring to a relatively innoccuous corner of the world.
dkarl · 15h ago
It's like reading a review of a novel that tells you how to feel about it, and adopting that emotional response without reading the novel itself.
a57721 · 19h ago
As a mathematician, I think it is very hard to write popular expositions of mathematics. It is acceptable and even necessary to skip the technical details and replace rigorous definitions with intuitive explanations, but it should be done with great care to avoid statements that are plainly wrong and only introduce more confusion. I think the majority of texts on complicated mathematics that target the general audience suffer from this issue.
The review mentions some very unfortunate errors that are not "passing over a point in less detail": suggesting that Cantor's diagonal argument depends on the AC and that CH is equivalent to c = 2^ℵ₀.
I wasn't familiar with the book and had just read the review; I wouldn't blame the author, but the publisher should have contacted someone for proofreading.
sfpotter · 21h ago
I read it and it made me pretty upset... Wallace clearly got way out over his skis and simply shouldn't have been writing about the topic. There were way too many moments interspersed throughout the book where it was obvious that he didn't understand what he was talking about or trying to prove. I think one of the key lessons to be learned from the study of mathematics is intellectual honestly and humility. It felt like Wallace hadn't learnt that lesson and had something to... ahem... prove?
monkeyelite · 13h ago
About half way through the book he tries to do an epsilon delta proof and completely gets the logic wrong. Ignoring any philosophical outlook, this is not a great math book.
ks2048 · 22h ago
Yeah, I like DFW (although mainly from essays and interviews) and thought this book was not good. Tangentially, I didn’t really like Rucker’s book on infinity either. I can’t remember why exactly, but it didn’t match up with other math popularizers (eg, Strogatz, Nahin).
gowld · 23h ago
The problem with Everything and More is not because it is "uncritical"; it's that DFW didn't understand it and was "not even wrong" when explaining it. Even if you choose not to engage with Cantor's hierarchy of infinities because you don't find it interesting or relevant to the (finite or smaller infinite) sets you care about, there's nothing wrong with it as mathematics.
arh68 · 1d ago
Maybe he "just" got it wrong. Maybe they're typos, and the manuscript was correct. Or...
Maybe Pemulis gave Hal an obviously wrong derivative, and when uncorrected, drove Pemulis to abruptly end the tutoring. Maybe Pemulis said it right but Hal heard it wrong. Or...
Maybe it's "just" another sign they're in an alternate universe where even the math is different. That's pretty much how I feel about it
feoren · 22h ago
> Maybe it's "just" another sign they're in an alternate universe where even the math is different
Unlike physics, there are no conceivable alternate universes with different math. That's what's so cool about math: it could not possibly be any different. There could be alternate universes where they've discovered different amounts of it, or named the discoveries different things, but everything that is "wrong" in math in our universe is universally (multiversally?) wrong.
LegionMammal978 · 21h ago
> That's what's so cool about math: it could not possibly be any different.
Why not? There's not much tethering our axioms-on-paper to what is necessarily true, past what we can empirically observe. For instance, a universe that is "exactly like ours, except the truth of the continuum hypothesis is flipped" seems no less conceivable than our own universe, given that we don't even have any solid evidence for its truth or falsehood in the first place.
If we're willing to treat mathematical and logical ideas as physically contingent, then it's only a few further steps to "the concepts of identity and discreteness and measure in this universe are different than ours, so all our mathematical axioms are not applicable". Though it would be very difficult to translate any stories from such a universe into our own ideas.
feoren · 20h ago
> "exactly like ours, except the truth of the continuum hypothesis is flipped"
We can and do create two alternate models of math with CH and ~CH as axioms, in this universe, right now. No need for alternate universes. There's no reason to think the CH is either true or false in the natural laws of our universe -- what would that even mean?
I suppose it's distantly possible that models where CH is true happen to represent our own universe much better than models where CH is false, and that there are other universes that are better represented by models where CH is false. Even if that were true, all the math is still the same, we're just preferring some models over others.
LegionMammal978 · 15h ago
> what would that even mean?
Presumably something like "you can/cannot collect an uncountable group of points in physical space and still not have enough to fill a physical volume".
Anyway, the idea is that properties of 'ordinary' numbers and logical constructs could similarly just be models specifically useful for our own universe. E.g., propositional logic only works because our universe allows us to write truth tables that are causally valid, natural numbers only work because our universe allows us to count over discrete objects, etc.
There'd be no big gap between 'physics' and 'math': all 'math' that we can talk about would just be the 'physics' of things that work on paper in our universe. And in particular, 'the physics of math-on-paper' could conceivably work differently in an alternate universe, and our own ideas and discoveries would be inapplicable.
feoren · 9h ago
It's pretty hard to imagine what an "uncountable group of points" could possibly be, or how anyone could ever test for the existence of such a thing, but we're talking about any possible universe so I can't exactly refute what you're saying here. The very fact that we can even ask questions like "what is the cardinality of a 'set of points' that occupies physical volume?" shows that our math is not at all bound by the constraints of our own universe.
> propositional logic only works because our universe allows us to write truth tables that are causally valid, natural numbers only work because our universe allows us to count over discrete objects, etc.
No, none of this is true. Our universe also allows us to write truth tables that are not valid. We do not dematerialize upon writing down a logical fallacy. Our universe does not seem to contain any infinities at all, and if it does, they're almost certainly countable; yet we can still reason about uncountable infinities without ever having observed them. Our universe seems to exist in only 4 dimensions, yet we can still reason about high dimensional spaces. Why should the constraints of our universe matter to our math at all, other than making some things more obvious than others?
> all 'math' that we can talk about would just be the 'physics' of things that work on paper in our universe
That is just patently obviously not what math is. We have tons of math that is not describing the physics of our universe as we know it.
mtizim · 20h ago
Why not? Exactly because there is nothing tethering our axioms on paper to what is necessarily true. You could formulate something wildly different from ZF±C/Peano/whatever normal axiom system, but we wouldn't call it "math", and what we currently call "math" will work under any conditions
LegionMammal978 · 15h ago
Our 'math' will work under any of our conditions (as far as we can observe), but who's to say they can't have 'math' in another universe that will work under any of their conditions, yet still be different from ours?
That's what GP was saying ("there are no conceivable alternate universes with different math", and none with a different derivative in particular), but I see no reason why math-as-we-know-it couldn't just be inapplicable to different 'conceivable' universes.
thaumasiotes · 21h ago
> For instance, a universe that is "exactly like ours, except the truth of the continuum hypothesis is flipped" seems no less conceivable than our own universe
Really? For that to be possible, the continuum hypothesis would have to be either true or false in our universe, which does not appear to be the case.
LegionMammal978 · 15h ago
That's fair, and perhaps my example wasn't the best, but my point is that just as the continuum hypothesis is an artifact of the models we use to describe our universe (we use continuum-sized sets to describe physical space), more basic properties like "how numbers ought to work" could also be artifacts of our models. In particular, it wouldn't be inconceivable for an alternate universe to be better described by entirely different models from the ground up, which could be fairly described as "different math".
thaumasiotes · 10h ago
> we use continuum-sized sets to describe physical space
But... we don't. We use integers to describe physical space. We have real numbers as a mathematical construct, but we have never applied them to even a single physical problem. That's impossible to do, because specifying a real number takes an infinite amount of information.
nneonneo · 12h ago
Mathematically, the odds of getting exactly N heads after flipping a fair coin 2N times is surprisingly high - it asymptotically approaches 1/sqrt(pi * N) as N becomes large. For the problem in IJ, this comes out to 1/(3.14 * 54) which is 0.076776 - not far from the exact value of 0.076599. As another example, if you flip a fair coin 1000 times, you’ll get exactly 500 heads about 2.5% of the time.
The proof is also similarly easy: it’s a straightforward application of Stirling’s approximation to the formula (2N!)/(N!*N!)/2^(2N).
andy_xor_andrew · 1d ago
> Again, Mike Pemulis is lecturing Hal, but this time he is helping Hal prepare for the college board exams. Pemulis states that for the function x^n, the derivative is nx + x^(n-1). In fact, the correct expression is nx^(n-1). This, too, may be a typographical error.
Another possibility is that Pemulis is simply bad at math :D
crystal_revenge · 1d ago
What’s interesting about this is that it used to be far more common for most technical people to be pretty well versed in basic calculus. A frightening number of software engineers don’t really understand calculus. But back in the 90s most engineers, even software folks who may likely have come from an EE background, would have had the basics down pretty well. DFW was writing for an audience with a potentially much higher mathematical literacy than today.
The probability that this “mistake” is intentional is related to how likely an informed reader would be to recognize this mistake.
lacker · 1d ago
Reading the DFW biography, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, it said that there were hundreds of cases where the editor claimed something was a typographical error, and DFW insisted that actually it was precisely how he meant it to be. They went back and forth for months, with the publisher eventually charging DFW a fee for all the extra labor involved.
So... we can't know for sure, but there's a strong case that any particular little weird error, DFW intended it to be this way. Especially for a "basic calculus" issue like this, for someone who wrote a whole book on the mathematical history of infinity. (Which arguably has its own errors, but those tend to fall more in the category of simplifications for the lay reader, IMO.)
thaumasiotes · 11h ago
> there were hundreds of cases where the editor claimed something was a typographical error, and DFW insisted that actually it was precisely how he meant it to be. They went back and forth for months, with the publisher eventually charging DFW a fee for all the extra labor involved.
> So... we can't know for sure, but there's a strong case that any particular little weird error, DFW intended it to be this way.
You'd have to assume that every time he got called out on an obvious error and insisted he'd meant it all along, he was telling the truth.
spondylosaurus · 1d ago
I've definitely noticed some of those odd one-off typos, like misspelling the NIKKEI stock exchange as NIKEI, but I had always just assumed some of those were bound to slip through in such a long, dense novel, even with an astute editor :P It sounds like that may not be the case after all...
gowld · 23h ago
> (Which arguably has its own errors, but those tend to fall more in the category of simplifications for the lay reader, IMO.)
They were more mis-simplifications by the lay writer.
griffzhowl · 23h ago
Yeah, that looks to me far more likely to be deliberate. The obvious comedy of the situation is someone taking himself to be well-versed enough to be giving a lecture while in fact being an incompetent buffoon.
FL33TW00D · 1d ago
I look forward to the day another book makes me feel like IJ - even with the mathematical flaws :)
sanderjd · 1d ago
Agreed. It was really a revelation to me. Looking back now, it's clear that I started reading it as a status seeking thing. I thought my intellectual friends (and especially girlfriends) would think it was cool that I actually read the whole thing (which nobody else in our circle had actually managed yet). But then it turned out to really affect me deeply.
I read it again about a decade later after all those games were over for me, just for myself, and loved it even more that time.
For some people, it just really does hit a nerve!
gowld · 23h ago
> I thought my intellectual friends (and especially girlfriends) would think it was cool that I actually read the whole thing
Interesting though, considering the popular meme among women, that men think reading IJ makes them look smart.
Realistically, I feel like most women (and men) have never even heard about IJ, even those who read books on a regular basis and would call themselves readers.
The only crowds I know of where IJ has truly become a mainstream piece of knowledge are /lit/, some specific subreddits, some specific twitter circles, a bunch of edgy hipsters, and HN. I bet there are more of those, ofc, but imo IJ absolutely isn’t something most people would recognize or be able to appreciate those memes about it that you shared (which I actually think are funny and hit the mark well).
Maybe I am just in the wrong circles irl, but I often enough get to hang out with people who read way more books than an average person (or me) does, and I am yet to encounter any who actually read IJ. And even those who are aware of it are relatively minor in numbers.
scyzoryk_xyz · 22h ago
It's a Bildungsroman for the 90's Americana age.
Whoever is reading it is eager to come of age, but is likely super obnoxious because they're not there yet. At least that's how I think of myself reading it at 25.
sanderjd · 21h ago
ha, well put!
sanderjd · 21h ago
I hoped it was clear from my comment that this was a youthful indiscretion and should not be used as any indication that I was right about any of my motivations for this at the time :)
Though I dunno, this was a long time ago, much closer to the publication date of the book (like a decade and a half before either of these articles were published), and I'm not sure this cynicism had quite taken off yet.
Also, I'm a bit skeptical of the gender lens on this, at least at that time period. From reading these articles, I think the girls I was trying to impress were likely themselves "typical DFW asshole[s]" by the judgement of these authors. Men don't actually have a monopoly on "I am so smart" vanity (though I'd agree we seem more prone to it).
lemonberry · 1d ago
Have you read "Gravity's Rainbow" by Thomas Pynchon? If not, it's worth checking out.
chamomeal · 1d ago
Inherent Vice is such a fun whacky read too. I kinda wanted to read Gravity’s Rainbow but my friend (who also recommended Inherent Vice) said I probably wouldn’t have the patience for it lol. He’s usually right
lemonberry · 1d ago
Inherent Vice was great too. Gravity's Rainbow took me a few times to get into but it was a wild ride.
His early book "The Crying of Lot 49" was also really good.
spondylosaurus · 1d ago
Bleeding Edge is another fun, (relatively) short read if you want to go back for more Pynchon.
igor47 · 1d ago
As detective Blanc says in Glass Onion, "nobody has read" Gravity's Rainbow
11101010001100 · 1d ago
Yes, once you read IJ, it is very hard to find another book like it. It is almost as if IJ refers to itself.
jrm4 · 22h ago
House of Leaves, perhaps?
No comments yet
Boogie_Man · 1d ago
What race is Hal?
dpig_ · 19h ago
Not sure, but his dad's got a microwave for a head.
Boogie_Man · 18h ago
I'm sorry I have to do this but I'm presenting you with the "may not have read Infinite Jest award". You are the first recipient so please feel honored. I'm going to start doing this regularly online.
neuroelectron · 21h ago
Has anyone actually read Infinite Jest in its entirety? I got about 50 pages in and I'm pretty sure I got the jist of it from that. The constant slog into minutia and clunky grammar made it very slow reading for me. There were some funny parts but overall the effort didn't feel worth it.
I tore through Gravity's Rainbow (mentioned in another thread).
jquaint · 20h ago
I enjoyed Infinite Jest.
I think it's good book if you are someone who HAS to know all the details.
The book itself criticizes this way of thinking, while letting you in the all the details you could want. (the footnotes especially)
I get the sense that the writing style is a metaphor and part of it for sure.
I also really like many of the subtle ideas the book presents.
Though like many "post modern novels", it's not for everyone. If intentionally dull parts are not your thing, that's perfectly fine IMO.
neuroelectron · 18h ago
Yes the writing style is def a metaphor for the book's subject and why i feel like I already get it without having to read the whole thing. 1080 pages of that does feel like infinity.
kimfc · 17h ago
I had a very easy/boring job and where during last few month I spent most of my time reading infinite jest after finishing the days work. I really loved it but I probably won't read it again anytime soon, there's a pretty substantial upfront time investment you have to make before it starts getting enjoyable to read.
Though once you lock in with the world and flow of infinite jest it gets pretty amazing, I wish I had more people to talk to about it without coming off as a pretentious jackass. Also it's far more enjoyable to read it as an ebook where you can jump instantly from the text to footnotes and look up unfamiliar words. Reading the physical copy seems torturous to me.
Boogie_Man · 17h ago
What race is Hal?
neuroelectron · 11h ago
He's white.
Boogie_Man · 8h ago
Yet in another comment you said you only read 50 pages
dilap · 21h ago
Yeah definitely, multiple times. But I feel you! The first time I read it it took me months to make it past the first couple hundred pages. But once you get far enough in everything starts to gel and it gets really fun.
Boogie_Man · 18h ago
What race is Hal?
dpig_ · 19h ago
At about page 300 it starts to pay off hard and you fly through the rest. I definitely recommend giving it another go.
wissam124 · 7h ago
For the 20th birthday of the book's publication, there was an article in the Guardian that ended on this beautiful quote that captured the experience of reading the book perfectly for me:
"
It’ll be a slog, but around the point where it starts making sense, you will read these words:
'But you never know when the magic will descend on you. You never know when the grooves will open up. And once the magic descends you don’t want to change even the smallest detail. You don’t know what concordance of factors and variables yields that calibrated can’t-miss feeling, and you don’t want to soil the magic by trying to figure it out, but you don’t want to change your grip, your stick, your side of the court, your angle of incidence to the sun.'
"
ball_of_lint · 13h ago
"Once you've read this book, then you can read a good book"
(/s - I have read and enjoyed Infinite Jest. It's very reasonable for someone to not enjoy it though)
Boogie_Man · 18h ago
Yes I have and I think I'm the only person not lying about that fact.
spondylosaurus · 17h ago
I am curious... what's up with your "What race is Hal?" questions throughout this thread? Unless I'm super unobservant I legitimately don't remember it being made explicit in the novel. Avril is obviously French-Canadian[1], so she's presumably white, which would also make Hal at least half white, but I don't remember any description of JOI's appearance (when he was alive lol) or ethnicity beyond him being very tall.
I feel like a more definitive question could be "Which ETA student is missing several fingers?" or "How did Bruce Green's mom die?" or "What's the call sign for Joelle's radio station?" or "What roams the Great Concavity?"[2]
[1] I can't remember if CT is a true Quebecker or not, but if he is, I could at least say that Mario is 100% French-Canadian, lol.
[2] Or I just thought of another... "Which ETA student has an ironically apt disease?"
Boogie_Man · 8h ago
It is made explicit. I believe your questions are more easily Google-able.
spondylosaurus · 2h ago
Well this was gonna bother me until I figured it out, so, drumroll... Hal Incandenza is... a white boy! Or at least he says he is. Who would've thunk.
> "I’m a privileged white seventeen-year-old U.S. male."
I think it has the air of a trick question though. Most readers will (correctly) assume that Hal is white, which the text does little to dispute or confirm barring a throwaway reference or two (and which is unlikely to stand out in their minds since it confirms what they already assumed), so encountering such a question makes it seem like the answer is more complicated than "Shockingly, the tennis heir protagonist written by a white American author is also a white American kid." And for many people it's somewhat gauche to admit that you assumed a character was white by default, so if you hazard a (correct) guess of "Well he's white, isn't he?" but it turns out there was a different throwaway reference to him being a quarter Puerto Rican or something, you might be a little embarrassed!
EDIT: I forgot there is actually a throwaway reference to Hal being (at most) 1/8th Native American, lol.
> ...a great-grandmother with Pima-tribe Indian S.W. blood, and Canadian cross-breeding...
Boogie_Man · 36m ago
You are correct, and I'm proud to grant you the first "Actually Read Infinite Jest" award. You've also come to the proof differently than I did: there's a section wherein the two urban black gentlemen who work at ETA rescue a severely intoxicated stork from the subway. They specify that James was a lost "white boy", which, along with his mother being French Canadian, inform the reader that he is "white".
You've also sniffed out my question's exploit, wherein people who haven't actually read the entire book, and who may have read the line about his dark skin near the beginning of the book, will reveal themselves because they assume the obvious answer can't be correct. They "tell on themselves" as the kids say. I smile at the idea that overthinking causes people to reveal they didn't read a book in which overthinking is a major theme. I highly suspect the majority of other commenters in this thread did not fully read the novel. This doesn't make them bad or "inferior", but lying does. They know they are wrong because my pointing it out caused them to become angry.
I've started a re read, and I'm taking notes this time. Perhaps we should start a HN bookclub.
I do need a new proof if this thread makes this one Googabale.
ofalkaed · 17h ago
So how about contributing something constructive?
Boogie_Man · 8h ago
Sorry you didn't read the book
TeaBrain · 20m ago
You aren't as extraordinary as you think you are by finishing the book. It is long, but it isn't incredibly long. By making this insinuation of others' lack of honesty in their claims of reading the book, it's as if you either believe the book to be unbearably boring for the average reader, which is odd for a fan of a literary work, or perhaps you'd just prefer to gatekeep this imagined status that you've invented for yourself, as someone who has managed the supposedly inhuman accomplishment of finishing the book. I and likely a decent many others in this thread have read it through. However, I've never convinced myself to have achieved something uniquely exceptional by simply having read what an author wrote, like you seem to have done.
rurp · 20h ago
I totally agree, IJ might be the single most disappointing book I've read given the extreme hype around it. The writing style felt very self-indulgent and annoying. The funny/clever parts rarely seemed amusing to me.
Enough people say they love the book that it's probably just a style thing that didn't click for me, but I regret how much time I spent slogging through the book and never bothered to finish it.
kolbe · 20h ago
Cool. We care. Keep talking.
trefoiled · 1d ago
This isn't the only example of a debate over intentionality in mistakes in Infinite Jest. The book's french is also littered with errors so egregious that most think they could only have been intentional [1].
I haven’t read IJ in a while, but I don’t think I agree with the first one. Unless he specifically said that each player has an equal chance of winning, I would not assume that to be the case.
sanderjd · 1d ago
Interesting! But then it seems like he would have said it a bit differently, that the odds of that particular tournament with those specific players ending in a tie were much lower.
lou1306 · 1d ago
> the Mean Value Theorem for integrals is a theoretical tool for proving the existence of this particular x'. It does not, however, offer any method of finding the value of x'. Therefore, it is difficult to imagine how the Mean Value Theorem for integrals could be employed in Pemulis' Eschaton calculations.
Knowing the character, at least this one could be explained as yet another parlour trick from Michael Pemulis. God knows how he actually calculated those values.
thaumasiotes · 1d ago
> Intentional math errors in David Foster Wallace's work
The actual title of this piece is "Dubious Math in Infinite Jest". There is no suggestion, in the title or the contents, that the errors are intentional. In the author's words:
> As I have said, I have no theories to explain the existence of these errors.
rafaepta · 1d ago
You’re right. I’ve just changed the title of the article adding “(un)” to the beginning. I can’t prove the errors are intentional, but given the author’s reputation it would surprise me if they weren’t.
Jtsummers · 1d ago
Instead of editing the title, the guidelines have this to say:
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
Edited titles (without a reason, like abbreviating them to fit or removing elements suggested by the guidelines for elimination) just get reverted, you're creating work for the mods by not submitting the original title.
caminanteblanco · 1d ago
Yes, the title entered here on HN is misleading and misrepresents the actual article.
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ProllyInfamous · 19h ago
David Foster Wallace & David Sedaris are both "consummable media" in that they're pleasurable to read... but you walk away from their material and just feel empty (except for esoteric connections you might've woven into your own storyline). With any expert technical knowledge, you'll quickly know that Wallace wasn't any expert.
I've only read Infinite Jest once, and would have edited it differently myself — but the scenes on addiction are powerful, stressful, and accurate (as somebody over a decade california clean). Pale King is better prose, but in both cases DFW isn't a "complete" author — he expects too much from his readers.
At least in Sedaris' case, he keeps his prose brief =D
I'm not sure; clearly DFW had some math aptitude but these also could have been honest mistakes. Presumably it would have been harder for editors to check these things in the 90s.
The probability error seems harder to explain and likely just a mistake.
Edit - While searching a bit more about this, I found an interesting perspective on a message board:
> The main thing that I think argues for Pemulis not being as smart as he thinks he is, is that he is the analogue of Polonious from Hamlet. In Hamlet, the court jester (the "fool") is actually really wise and always speaks the truth (=Mario), while the King's supposedly "wise" counselor, Polonious, actually gets everything wrong.
I find that pretty compelling. I hadn't really thought about deeper correspondences with Hamlet beyond Hal and his parents.
https://infinitesummer.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=471
Vast majority of character's are well explained and the answers are all in the novel, just need to look at their childhood and upbringing.
> I am the machine gun ammo bearer, cause they figger I can carry a lot of shit on account of my size. Before we lef, a couple of other fellers axed if I would mind carryin some of their han grenades so’s they could carry more orations, an I agreed. It didn’t hurt me none. Also, Sergeant Kranz made me carry a ten-gallon water can that weighed about fifty pounds.
Unlike Forrest, the reader knows a gallon of water weighs roughly eight pounds and is not spared the extent of his burden.
Maybe at the time. Presumably that gets an explanatory footnote in modern editions?
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Haha, you have to love those quaint, backwards Americans and their “freedom units”. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, we can peacefully enjoy the fact that 3.785 litres of water weighs exactly 3.785 kg.
I do like the idea of Mario as a court jester though.
(I'd also forgotten about the janitors, who are clearly a reference to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern)
Rudy Rucker wrote a scathing review here: https://www.rudyrucker.com/oldhomepage/wallace_review.pdf
I actually read Everything and More and it's probably even worse than that. Though I'll admit that I'm a little bit biased; I'm a sort of Aristotelian Realist or even a Finitist when it comes to mathematics, and I view Cantor's hierarchy of infinities as... well... schizo at best.
The review-writer clearly hates the book before he even gets to the mathematics. The whole book is striking a middle ground between expressing every step of mathematical rigor, and describing in a more literary way how to feel about these concepts. All of these "errors" are just the author passing over a point in less detail than you would want from a text on set theory. I thought it was great, and for anyone who enjoys both set theory and Infinite Jest, I would strongly recommend the book.
I understand that some people don't like it, but it should be viewed as "controversial" rather than "everyone agrees that it's riddled with errors".
This alone is a pretty substantial, even foundational, error.
The author of the review, Rudy Rucker, is a sort of cult/underground author of math-heavy science fiction. I don't think he's opposed to framing things in a literary way, so long as it's not misleading or falsely dramatized. Like, e.g., Godel ending his days in some sort of forced confinement, as DFW seems to have suggested?
The core problem with this book is that it is a great book for people who love both math and Infinite Jest. But, that might be an audience of nobody. Or almost nobody, because it does include me.
I really hate this. If you don't care to understand something, why would you want to absorb the feelings that somebody else thinks you should have from understanding it? It reminds me of all the cringey posturing that undergrads engage in because their English professor mentioned a couple of philosophers during lectures and it totally changed their wardrobe.
Like... I hate journalism that profits off of xenophobic fear mongering. A book from a genuinely curious and interesting author who did some moonlighting in more formal subjects, though? That seems harmless and kind of cute at worst. Maybe a little misguided, maybe not.
It's a weird energy to bring to a relatively innoccuous corner of the world.
The review mentions some very unfortunate errors that are not "passing over a point in less detail": suggesting that Cantor's diagonal argument depends on the AC and that CH is equivalent to c = 2^ℵ₀.
I wasn't familiar with the book and had just read the review; I wouldn't blame the author, but the publisher should have contacted someone for proofreading.
Maybe Pemulis gave Hal an obviously wrong derivative, and when uncorrected, drove Pemulis to abruptly end the tutoring. Maybe Pemulis said it right but Hal heard it wrong. Or...
Maybe it's "just" another sign they're in an alternate universe where even the math is different. That's pretty much how I feel about it
Unlike physics, there are no conceivable alternate universes with different math. That's what's so cool about math: it could not possibly be any different. There could be alternate universes where they've discovered different amounts of it, or named the discoveries different things, but everything that is "wrong" in math in our universe is universally (multiversally?) wrong.
Why not? There's not much tethering our axioms-on-paper to what is necessarily true, past what we can empirically observe. For instance, a universe that is "exactly like ours, except the truth of the continuum hypothesis is flipped" seems no less conceivable than our own universe, given that we don't even have any solid evidence for its truth or falsehood in the first place.
If we're willing to treat mathematical and logical ideas as physically contingent, then it's only a few further steps to "the concepts of identity and discreteness and measure in this universe are different than ours, so all our mathematical axioms are not applicable". Though it would be very difficult to translate any stories from such a universe into our own ideas.
We can and do create two alternate models of math with CH and ~CH as axioms, in this universe, right now. No need for alternate universes. There's no reason to think the CH is either true or false in the natural laws of our universe -- what would that even mean?
I suppose it's distantly possible that models where CH is true happen to represent our own universe much better than models where CH is false, and that there are other universes that are better represented by models where CH is false. Even if that were true, all the math is still the same, we're just preferring some models over others.
Presumably something like "you can/cannot collect an uncountable group of points in physical space and still not have enough to fill a physical volume".
Anyway, the idea is that properties of 'ordinary' numbers and logical constructs could similarly just be models specifically useful for our own universe. E.g., propositional logic only works because our universe allows us to write truth tables that are causally valid, natural numbers only work because our universe allows us to count over discrete objects, etc.
There'd be no big gap between 'physics' and 'math': all 'math' that we can talk about would just be the 'physics' of things that work on paper in our universe. And in particular, 'the physics of math-on-paper' could conceivably work differently in an alternate universe, and our own ideas and discoveries would be inapplicable.
> propositional logic only works because our universe allows us to write truth tables that are causally valid, natural numbers only work because our universe allows us to count over discrete objects, etc.
No, none of this is true. Our universe also allows us to write truth tables that are not valid. We do not dematerialize upon writing down a logical fallacy. Our universe does not seem to contain any infinities at all, and if it does, they're almost certainly countable; yet we can still reason about uncountable infinities without ever having observed them. Our universe seems to exist in only 4 dimensions, yet we can still reason about high dimensional spaces. Why should the constraints of our universe matter to our math at all, other than making some things more obvious than others?
> all 'math' that we can talk about would just be the 'physics' of things that work on paper in our universe
That is just patently obviously not what math is. We have tons of math that is not describing the physics of our universe as we know it.
That's what GP was saying ("there are no conceivable alternate universes with different math", and none with a different derivative in particular), but I see no reason why math-as-we-know-it couldn't just be inapplicable to different 'conceivable' universes.
Really? For that to be possible, the continuum hypothesis would have to be either true or false in our universe, which does not appear to be the case.
But... we don't. We use integers to describe physical space. We have real numbers as a mathematical construct, but we have never applied them to even a single physical problem. That's impossible to do, because specifying a real number takes an infinite amount of information.
The proof is also similarly easy: it’s a straightforward application of Stirling’s approximation to the formula (2N!)/(N!*N!)/2^(2N).
Another possibility is that Pemulis is simply bad at math :D
The probability that this “mistake” is intentional is related to how likely an informed reader would be to recognize this mistake.
So... we can't know for sure, but there's a strong case that any particular little weird error, DFW intended it to be this way. Especially for a "basic calculus" issue like this, for someone who wrote a whole book on the mathematical history of infinity. (Which arguably has its own errors, but those tend to fall more in the category of simplifications for the lay reader, IMO.)
> So... we can't know for sure, but there's a strong case that any particular little weird error, DFW intended it to be this way.
You'd have to assume that every time he got called out on an obvious error and insisted he'd meant it all along, he was telling the truth.
They were more mis-simplifications by the lay writer.
I read it again about a decade later after all those games were over for me, just for myself, and loved it even more that time.
For some people, it just really does hit a nerve!
Interesting though, considering the popular meme among women, that men think reading IJ makes them look smart.
https://reductress.com/post/why-im-waiting-for-the-right-man...
https://www.reddit.com/r/davidfosterwallace/comments/evsylv/...
The only crowds I know of where IJ has truly become a mainstream piece of knowledge are /lit/, some specific subreddits, some specific twitter circles, a bunch of edgy hipsters, and HN. I bet there are more of those, ofc, but imo IJ absolutely isn’t something most people would recognize or be able to appreciate those memes about it that you shared (which I actually think are funny and hit the mark well).
Maybe I am just in the wrong circles irl, but I often enough get to hang out with people who read way more books than an average person (or me) does, and I am yet to encounter any who actually read IJ. And even those who are aware of it are relatively minor in numbers.
Whoever is reading it is eager to come of age, but is likely super obnoxious because they're not there yet. At least that's how I think of myself reading it at 25.
Though I dunno, this was a long time ago, much closer to the publication date of the book (like a decade and a half before either of these articles were published), and I'm not sure this cynicism had quite taken off yet.
Also, I'm a bit skeptical of the gender lens on this, at least at that time period. From reading these articles, I think the girls I was trying to impress were likely themselves "typical DFW asshole[s]" by the judgement of these authors. Men don't actually have a monopoly on "I am so smart" vanity (though I'd agree we seem more prone to it).
His early book "The Crying of Lot 49" was also really good.
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I tore through Gravity's Rainbow (mentioned in another thread).
I think it's good book if you are someone who HAS to know all the details.
The book itself criticizes this way of thinking, while letting you in the all the details you could want. (the footnotes especially)
I get the sense that the writing style is a metaphor and part of it for sure.
I also really like many of the subtle ideas the book presents.
Though like many "post modern novels", it's not for everyone. If intentionally dull parts are not your thing, that's perfectly fine IMO.
Though once you lock in with the world and flow of infinite jest it gets pretty amazing, I wish I had more people to talk to about it without coming off as a pretentious jackass. Also it's far more enjoyable to read it as an ebook where you can jump instantly from the text to footnotes and look up unfamiliar words. Reading the physical copy seems torturous to me.
" It’ll be a slog, but around the point where it starts making sense, you will read these words:
'But you never know when the magic will descend on you. You never know when the grooves will open up. And once the magic descends you don’t want to change even the smallest detail. You don’t know what concordance of factors and variables yields that calibrated can’t-miss feeling, and you don’t want to soil the magic by trying to figure it out, but you don’t want to change your grip, your stick, your side of the court, your angle of incidence to the sun.' "
(/s - I have read and enjoyed Infinite Jest. It's very reasonable for someone to not enjoy it though)
I feel like a more definitive question could be "Which ETA student is missing several fingers?" or "How did Bruce Green's mom die?" or "What's the call sign for Joelle's radio station?" or "What roams the Great Concavity?"[2]
[1] I can't remember if CT is a true Quebecker or not, but if he is, I could at least say that Mario is 100% French-Canadian, lol.
[2] Or I just thought of another... "Which ETA student has an ironically apt disease?"
> "I’m a privileged white seventeen-year-old U.S. male."
I think it has the air of a trick question though. Most readers will (correctly) assume that Hal is white, which the text does little to dispute or confirm barring a throwaway reference or two (and which is unlikely to stand out in their minds since it confirms what they already assumed), so encountering such a question makes it seem like the answer is more complicated than "Shockingly, the tennis heir protagonist written by a white American author is also a white American kid." And for many people it's somewhat gauche to admit that you assumed a character was white by default, so if you hazard a (correct) guess of "Well he's white, isn't he?" but it turns out there was a different throwaway reference to him being a quarter Puerto Rican or something, you might be a little embarrassed!
EDIT: I forgot there is actually a throwaway reference to Hal being (at most) 1/8th Native American, lol.
> ...a great-grandmother with Pima-tribe Indian S.W. blood, and Canadian cross-breeding...
You've also sniffed out my question's exploit, wherein people who haven't actually read the entire book, and who may have read the line about his dark skin near the beginning of the book, will reveal themselves because they assume the obvious answer can't be correct. They "tell on themselves" as the kids say. I smile at the idea that overthinking causes people to reveal they didn't read a book in which overthinking is a major theme. I highly suspect the majority of other commenters in this thread did not fully read the novel. This doesn't make them bad or "inferior", but lying does. They know they are wrong because my pointing it out caused them to become angry.
I've started a re read, and I'm taking notes this time. Perhaps we should start a HN bookclub.
I do need a new proof if this thread makes this one Googabale.
Enough people say they love the book that it's probably just a style thing that didn't click for me, but I regret how much time I spent slogging through the book and never bothered to finish it.
[1] https://ask.metafilter.com/116066/French-language-in-Infinit...
Knowing the character, at least this one could be explained as yet another parlour trick from Michael Pemulis. God knows how he actually calculated those values.
The actual title of this piece is "Dubious Math in Infinite Jest". There is no suggestion, in the title or the contents, that the errors are intentional. In the author's words:
> As I have said, I have no theories to explain the existence of these errors.
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edited titles (without a reason, like abbreviating them to fit or removing elements suggested by the guidelines for elimination) just get reverted, you're creating work for the mods by not submitting the original title.
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I've only read Infinite Jest once, and would have edited it differently myself — but the scenes on addiction are powerful, stressful, and accurate (as somebody over a decade california clean). Pale King is better prose, but in both cases DFW isn't a "complete" author — he expects too much from his readers.
At least in Sedaris' case, he keeps his prose brief =D