The Returning Signal and Its Claim
"It makes me sad that I grew up looking up to the guy." A commentator wrote that about a mathematician he had admired since childhood, and someone replied in seven words: why sad? Outgrowing your heroes is growing up. This conversation starts from that exchange and walks back along something far more common than it: the habit of taking whatever comes back from the world, a reply, a result, a disappointment, as a message from someone else.
What is kept: that way of talking does real work. Things do come through other people and tools, and saying who dropped the plate is how it gets swept up…
The skinny
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