If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it. (You can also make a shortform post)
And, if you are new to LessWrong, here's the place to introduce yourself. Personal stories, anecdotes, or just general comments on how you found us and what you hope to get from the site and community are welcome.
If you want to explore the community more, I recommend reading the Library, checking recent Curated posts, seeing if there are any meetups in your area, and checking out the Getting Started section of the LessWrong FAQ. If you want to orient to the content on the site, you can also check out the new Concepts section.
The Open Thread tag is here.
Thank you for taking the time to explain that. I never took linear algebra, only college algebra, trig, and calc 1, 2, and 3. In college algebra our professor had us adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing matrices and I don’t remember needing those formulas to determine they were linear, but it was a long time ago, so my memory could be wrong, or the prof just gave us linear ones and didn’t make us determine whether they were linear or not. I suspected there was a good chance that what I was saying was ignorant, but you never know until you put it out there and ask. I tried getting AI to explain it, but bots aren’t exactly math whizzes themselves either. Anyway, I now stand corrected.
Regarding the graph vs the equation, that sounds like you are saying I was guilty of reification, but aren’t they both just abstractions and not real objects? Perhaps your point is that the equation produces the graph, but not the other way around?