Lossy Compression, The Counting Argument, and Ontology

 Are three things I don't care about. The question of ontology is pointless to me. I can't even perform a combinatorial proof if you asked me. I've never in my life been interested in compression as a computer skill. So the idea that these three ideas would all come together came from a very different impulse. Anti-theory. 

I couldn't put my finger on it, but the abuse and misappropriation of theory to sieve information from literary texts seemed beyond the pale of any reasonable thing a person would do. Why?

Because from my perspective, all they were doing was mapping one idea to another and the utility of this was not apparent. Anti-theory seemed to allow me a baseline to critique this impulse so that is why these three things were important to me. I was also interested in the abuse of theory for racial, gender, and other forms discrimination and prejudice. So, if we're racist, we map an individual person to a biased image that we've created of them and see that image instead of the person. Very intuitive. No one else was thinking this way until Hofstedter.

So, here I am, a kid with knowledge of Western ontology because he literally despised it learning linear algebra on a support board for amateur coders in the FreeBasic community when a conversation about Jews erupted.

That's it. That's the moment. Message board. Coders. Lossy compression. Anti-semitism.

The Scene

There's a group of four of us who participate in a thread where we trade code making pretty pictures with pure math. I'm way behind all of these guys. The one dude is an Australian physicist named Richard. Another is a Scottish mathematician by the handle Dodicat, and there is a third man who suffers from mental illness but enjoys math. He decides to discuss his theory on Jews which I won't get into here. Suffice it to say he was wrong.

AT THE SAME EXACT TIME, this guy is also attempting to explain how you can compress information losslessly. Richard explains to him that this is impossible and the proof he supplies is the counting argument. I made the connection to ontology vis a vis a mapping argument.