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loving-n0t-heyting:

loving-n0t-heyting:

The way adults talked up books as imagination-training always befuddled me as a kid, bc narrative books were sort of by nature anti-imaginative: they tell you (in more detail as adults like them better!) exactly what to picture and think of, and punish you by not making sense if you fail to follow these instructions. They seemed at least as imagination-averse as TV or vidyas, to which they were regularly opposed on this basis

In retrospect, they were conflating visualisation and inventiveness under the heading of Imagination as a sort of shell game: narrative books do improve yr Inventiveness in that they give you ideas to play with, and they put a higher deman on yr visualisation than tv/viddy games, but once you put the matter this clearly it becomes obvious the argument they were giving was just equivocation

What’s funny is that I am sort of a snob about text documents as a medium for argumentative/expository work, which teachers and parents never tried to force down my throat to begin with

Teachers didn’t try to make you read expository textbooks or write argumentative essays?

jadagul:

jadagul:

Today on the blog I start a new project: where do numbers come from?

By which I mean, mathematicians deal with lots of weird kinds of numbers. Real numbers, complex numbers, p-adic numbers, quaternions, surreal numbers, and more. And if you try to describe the more abstract types of “numbers” you sound completely incomprehensible.

But these numbers all come from somewhere. So I’m going to take you through a fictional history of numbers. Not the real history of the actual people who developed these concepts, but the way they could have developed them, cleaned up and organized. So in the end you can see how you, too, could have developed all these seemingly strange and abstract concepts.

This week in part 1, we cover the most sensible numbers. We start with the basic ability to count, and invent negative numbers, fractions, square roots, and more.

But that will still leave some important questions open—like, what is π? So we’ll have to come back for that in part 2.

stumpyjoepete

One question I had: the definition of algebraic #s is in terms of polynomials with rational coefficients. If you allow coefficients like sqrt(2) or “the smallest solution to {other polynomial}”, does this change anything or is the set closed under this?

Ooh, that’s a good point and I never addressed it explicitly. And you’re right, the answer is it’s closed under this algebra-izing thing; the fancy word is the “algebraic closure”.

And yes, if you just solve all the polynomials with rational coefficients (or integer coefficients, even), you get all the roots of polynomials with algebraic coefficients. And this is basically because if you have a polynomial with algebraic coefficients, you can multiply it by some other polynomials with algebraic coefficients and get a polynomial with rational coefficients.

In general this is, like, “because Galois theory”, but you can see the idea with square roots: If I have sqrt(a)x + sqrt(b), I can multiply by the conjugate sqrt(a)x-sqrt(b) and get ax^2-b. So so anything that’s a root of a polynomial with square-root coefficients is also a root of a polynomial with rational coefficients.

You don’t need Galois theory for this, just basic number fields. Given a polynomial with algebraic coefficients, form the companion matrix, whose entries are all 0, 1, or the coefficients of the polynomial and whose eigenvalues are the roots of the polynomial. Then take a number field containing the coefficients, which is a finite-dimensional vector space over Q, and pick a basis. Replace each entry of the companion matrix by a matrix giving the action of that algebraic number by multiplication on that basis. Now you have a matrix with rational entries, whose eigenvalues still include the roots of the polynomial. Its characteristic polynomial gives the desired rational polynomial.

jadagul:

cromulentenough:

jadagul:

jadagul:

Today on the blog I start a new project: where do numbers come from?

By which I mean, mathematicians deal with lots of weird kinds of numbers. Real numbers, complex numbers, p-adic numbers, quaternions, surreal numbers, and more. And if you try to describe the more abstract types of “numbers” you sound completely incomprehensible.

But these numbers all come from somewhere. So I’m going to take you through a fictional history of numbers. Not the real history of the actual people who developed these concepts, but the way they could have developed them, cleaned up and organized. So in the end you can see how you, too, could have developed all these seemingly strange and abstract concepts.

This week in part 1, we cover the most sensible numbers. We start with the basic ability to count, and invent negative numbers, fractions, square roots, and more.

But that will still leave some important questions open—like, what is π? So we’ll have to come back for that in part 2.

stumpyjoepete

One question I had: the definition of algebraic #s is in terms of polynomials with rational coefficients. If you allow coefficients like sqrt(2) or “the smallest solution to {other polynomial}”, does this change anything or is the set closed under this?

Ooh, that’s a good point and I never addressed it explicitly. And you’re right, the answer is it’s closed under this algebra-izing thing; the fancy word is the “algebraic closure”.

And yes, if you just solve all the polynomials with rational coefficients (or integer coefficients, even), you get all the roots of polynomials with algebraic coefficients. And this is basically because if you have a polynomial with algebraic coefficients, you can multiply it by some other polynomials with algebraic coefficients and get a polynomial with rational coefficients.

In general this is, like, “because Galois theory”, but you can see the idea with square roots: If I have sqrt(a)x + sqrt(b), I can multiply by the conjugate sqrt(a)x-sqrt(b) and get ax^2-b. So so anything that’s a root of a polynomial with square-root coefficients is also a root of a polynomial with rational coefficients.

i didn’t realize that the x^5 + x + 3 = 0 situation was a thing. So you there’s algebraic numbers you can’t represent with roots, multiplication and addition? is there no closed form solution at all?

Yeah this is one of the weirder bits. I might write a thing about just this at some point, but it was a tangent from the main goal of this series.

Given any quadratic equation, we can represent the solutions, as seen in the quadratic formula:

image

This was first developed in India around AD 628, and got its modern form in the Netherlands in 1594.

Given a cubic equation, we can represent all three solutions, as seen in the cubic formula:

image

The cubic formula was developed in Italy in the 1500s, as part of a running equation-solving competition among roving mathematicians.

The quartic formula looks like this:

image

It was developed around the same time as the cubic formula. It also looks appalling.

So how bad must the quintic formula be? Well, it doesn’t exist. That was proven in 1824 by Abel, following up an incomplete proof by Ruffini in 1799. In 1832 Galois basically invented group theory to give a really general formulation of these ideas. The fact that the alternating group of order n is not solvable for n>4 is equivalent to the inability to write down solutions with radicals for general polynomials of degree higher than four. (That’s why the term is “solvable”!)

But yeah, we can’t write down a closed-form solution to most higher-degree polynomials, at least not with radicals. I believe you can write down the solution to any quintic if you introduce a symbol for the inverse of f(x) = x^5+x. But you’d need more new symbols for degree six, and more more for degree seven, and… So we mostly just declared bankruptcy.

You can also solve the quintic with functions that don’t look like you obviously just designed them to solve this particular problem, such as elliptic functions and hypergeometric functions. But none that are closed form in the most common sense of the term.

prokopetz:

“Well ACTUALLY it’s called the Vocaloid fandom, not the Hatsune Miku fandom” buddy, I guarantee you that at least 50% of the people who are into Hatsune Miku couldn’t even name a second Vocaloid.

Dungeons and Dragons.

the-grey-tribe:

transgenderer:

EEAAO was a good movie but idk if it was like, a *great* movie. it was inoffensive. i think media that valorizes leading an average life is in sort of an awkward place because like by definition most of us will lead average lives, so theres a virtue in that, for like…wellness. but also it feels like very blatant sour grapes. and i think its hard to construct an ideology where an average life is *better* than a Great life, all else being equal

I gave my sister a DVD copy of EEAAO for Christmas. I saw it in the bargain bin, and I knew my sister would like it. Our mother wanted to watch it with us, so I warned her that she wouldn’t like it, my sister would like it, it was so overhyped by critics and the other movies of 2022 were so mediocre, it was a strong contender for best picture.

After we watched it, my mother asked me to justify myself. She asked for the time she spent watching that movie back. My sister had cried during CEO Waymond’s speech. My mother was aghast. It was visually interesting at first, but it devolved into a blur of VFX and subtitled monologues. It was too long. It was middling at best.

My mother (who made us all watch The Rise of Skywalker in a real cinema as a family even though I told her I knew I wouldn’t like it, but it was Christmas and we were all together before Christmas and we hadn’t had the popcorn experience together in years) watches Korean soap operas on Netflix with subtitles, but EEAAO broke her. She was devastated when my prediction turned out to be correct.

Anyway, EEAAO is an okay-ish movie. It’s not a Great movie. But in the ideology of EEAAO, that is better that a Great movie, all other things being equal. Or maybe that’s an artefact of the academy having no way to rank a movie below “no award” like the Hugos.

@transgendererr I don’t think EEAAO says a mediocre life is better? She goes back to her life because it’s her life, with her family, and not another version of her. It’s personal loyalty. Like “You should tell your children that you would rather have the life you have with them than another life when you had a fancier career instead, and you should be telling the truth when you say this” is valid life advice that doesn’t imply “It’s better to live a life with children than a life with a fancier career”.

Also EEAAO is pretty clear that an average life is good if you are honest with yourself about your strengths and weaknesses, honest with your parents instead of lying to them because you’re afraid of their reactions, accepting of your children and show them you love them, and have a good spouse who you appreciate for all you do for you. Again that’s good advice and pretty actionable most of the time. There’s no evidence that all else is equal in the movie!

@the-grey-tribe Also isn’t there some subtext to the reason your mom didn’t like the movie that can be uncovered by reading your other posts about her?

argumate:

poipoipoi-2016:

collapsedsquid:

poipoipoi-2016:

collapsedsquid:

One obvious question is: If you are “another, healthy bank” working through this weekend to buy SVB and assume its deposits, how much would you pay for the assets, which were worth $212 billion in December? [8] I am pretty sure the answer is higher than $8 billion, the amount of insured deposits: The FDIC will not be on the hook for the insured deposits. The $15 billion of FHLB advances are also quite senior and will presumably be no problem to pay back.

I would also guess — not investing or banking advice! — that the answer will also turn out to be higher than $188 billion, which is the total amount of deposits plus FHLB advances. I say this not because I have done a detailed analysis of SVB’s assets but because it seems bad for the FDIC to wind up a big high-profile bank in a way that causes significant losses for depositors, including uninsured depositors. There was a run on SVB in part because there hasn’t been a big bank run in a while, and people — venture capitalists, startups — were naturally worried that they might lose their deposits if their bank failed. Then the bank failed.

If it turns out to be true that they lose their deposits, there could be more bank runs: Lots of businesses keep uninsured deposits at lots of banks, and if the moral of SVB is “your uninsured transaction-banking deposits can vanish overnight” then those businesses will do a lot more credit analysis, move their money out of weaker banks, and put it at, like, JPMorgan. This could be self-fulfillingly bad for a lot of weaker banks. My assumption is that the FDIC, the Federal Reserve, and the banks who are looking at buying SVB all really don’t want that. If you are a bank looking at buying SVB, and you do a detailed analysis of its assets and conclude that they are worth $180 billion, and you come to the FDIC and say “I will take over this bank and pay the uninsured depositors 95 cents on the dollar,” the FDIC is going to look at you and say “don’t you mean 100 cents on the dollar,” and you are going to say “oh right yes of course, silly me, 100 cents on the dollar.”

Love that private banks exist with this pretense that they compete in and are disciplined by the free market.

I mean, SVB was destroyed by the Central Bank of the US Government as a matter of official policy for the crime of, among other things, buying a bunch of mid-duration Treasuries and bonds and then being unable to hold them to maturity as some of their depositors pulled their cash.

Because for a bunch of functional reasons, it’s hard to MAKE LOANS in Silicon Valley. All those startups have giant piles of cash from the VC funding. And since a giant pile of cash doesn’t pay for the costs of running a bank in 2019 (It does in 2023 b/c it’s in short-duration Treasuries), they put them in mid-duration Treasuries and corporate bonds instead.

And then they had a bank run after the sale value of those assets were destroyed by the Central Bank.

And I’m not saying that was blameless. For some functional reasons, they were very definitely the slowest dude trying to outrun the lion. But as a matter of functional policy, the US Government had better ask if it’s acceptable when “People who buy Treasuries” get eaten by Lions.

Or at least when “People who gave people money who bought Treasuries with it” also get eaten by Lions and we start asking questions about uninsured bank accounts.

Especially when by Lion, i mean “Historically unprecedented fastest hiking cycle since WW2 where the Federal Reserve is trying to put millions of people out of work as significant percentages of global energy, food, and fertilizer supplies (…and ¾ths of our iron) go offline.”

Surely it was Thiel who annihilated the bank

Banks have solvency crises and liquidity crises.

Liquidity crises on solvent banks get resolved pretty cleanly (ML: I buy the bank for the value of the deposits and also this Snickers bar) and quickly. Rough on the equity, but we’d have had a resolution already if that was the case.

Solvency crises are… harder.

And thanks to the Federal Reserve every single bank on the planet including the Bank of Japan is Mark-to-Market insolvent.

Now most of them won’t go illiquid (Thanks Thiel!), but the ones that do? Hoo boy.

So now we notice that bank accounts are creditors of the bank and it’ back to the bad old days of Great Depression bank runs. We spent a considerable amount of effort stopping those.

in a zero interest rate environment surely you charge customers fees to safely hold their deposits!

if you put their deposits somewhere such that you can’t pay them back on demand then they’re not deposits are they

The interest rate raises weren’t even that fast, or that large, compared to what simple models of the Fed would predict or recommend!

bambamramfan:

redantsunderneath:

brazenautomaton:

argumate:

invertedporcupine:

argumate:

invertedporcupine:

invertedporcupine:

invertedporcupine:

image

Matt Yglesias’ curiosity about the rationalist movement was apparently pretty serious; he sounds more and more like us all the time.

Update: Matt discusses this extensively on the Rationally Speaking podcast.

In addition to talking about immigration and YIMBYism, Julia and Matt discuss the Iraq War, and this part is really fascinating to me.  I think of Julia as certainly being more intelligent than I am, and Matt as possibly more intelligent than I am.  But they both got it wrong at the the time, and not only did I get it right, but if you had asked me at the time, I would have given about 90% of what Matt gives as the reasoning now for why he was wrong.

(In their defense, I was already in graduate school in a foreign policy-adjacent field at the time, while they were only undergraduates, so I would have been less deferential to “a bipartisan majority of the establishment thinks this is a good idea”.)

they supported the invasion of Iraq? exactly how high were they at the time? undergraduates should be smashing metaphorical windows, not being deferential to the establishment’s opinion on committing war crimes!

In fact, one of the reasons for error they give at the time was a) not knowing where to go to find the best arguments against the war and b) hearing really stupid arguments from the metaphorical window-smashers around them.

(The Internet and social media would subsequently drub in the lesson that there is no position so obvious/correct that there is nobody making stupid arguments in favor of it.)

they didn’t know where to go to find the best arguments against the war, therefore they supported the war? how the fuck are they qualified to speak on any topic after admitting something like that? don’t you default to opposing aggressive wars of invasion in the absence of a good reason?

Yglesias is 39 years old! he was 22 in 2003! old enough to know better, and the reasons given in support for the war were surely far stupider than those opposing it.

I can understand supporting it because you’re planning a career in Washington or as a pundit given that Serious People Support Wars, but that just marks you as a craven asshole.

“you should default to opposing aggressive wars of invasion”

you should! and they did! unfortunately for them, and us, the bipartisan majority expert consensus said that it wasn’t an aggressive war of invasion, it was an attempt to free an oppressed populace who needed our help from a cruel criminal dictator who was also trying to kill us. the two of them didn’t know where to go to find arguments against it that weren’t from window-smashing idiots.

probably because the anti-war arguments at that time focused heavily on “this is an aggressive war of invasion where our country plans to loot and impoverish and oppress another nation to appease wicked corporate interests” and that wasn’t true. like we can look back on the past and see “oh, yeah, they didn’t do that.”

they genuinely believed they were going to ge greeted as liberators. they genuinely believed they were going to bring the Iraqis out of oppression and into the freedom and stability of democracy. It was a horrible fucking idea that would never ever work and they only thought it would due to gaping ideological blind spots, but chanting “No blood for oil!” doesn’t work against people who aren’t trading blood for oil. As usual, left-ish messaging of the day focused primarily (not exclusively though, there were people actually talking about what a bad idea it was, though the ones i remember most were comedy and satire people like the Onion and the Daily Show) on assuming the people that disagreed with you believed everything you did, that they also believed that the war was exchanging blood for oil and you just had to tell them not to do that.

I’m sure present company is excluded, but it seems to me that people forget a lot of the long run up to the second Iraq war from the national consciousness perspective. There are several things to consider:

  1. Not to get all Žižekian, but even if Bush did feel like there was “unfinished business,” that Saddam still being an issue was red ink on dad’s legacy, it is also true that most of people saying this were pathologically projecting because there was simply a widespread feeling in the American public that that “we should have finished the job.”
  2. People forget that the weapons of mass destruction thing felt entirely credible. The New Yorker article Crisis in the Hot Zone (1992) led to the publication of the Hot Zone book by Richard Preston (1994) leading to 5 to 7 major motion pictures in 1995 in 1996 about apocalyptic pandemics (12 Monkeys is in there don’t forget). As we started to close out the decade, there was a shift to being concerned specifically about biological weapons. Richard Preston’s follow up book the Cobra Event (1998, about a “rocket vector” terrorist engineered virus) was padded with an extensive appendix primarily making the case that Iraq had a biological weapons program, the UN inspectors were constantly being stymied by the Iraqi government and could not do their jobs, and this was a real tangible threat. All of this is true - there was clearly evidence of a program, but I don’t think it was until later that it was questioned how much of that was a not very advanced program, the cover-up of which made people think was more advanced than it was. Bill Clinton read this book, and started a whole fucking department over it.
  3. The time between the two wars was really tiresome in a international tension and humanitarian crisis sense (the Balkans contributed to the atmosphere, but we are talking Iraq). There was a feeling that Baghdad was constantly indulging in brinksmanship, with the UN having to put up or shut up, and however each time played out it was always the Iraqi people who suffered. It was not just “we will liberate them from this totalitarian regime” but also “we will liberate them from being a human shield for this asshole.” I don’t know, someone should unearth ratios of the number of excess deaths between the wars per year (just the sanction starvation alone) versus the same during the following occupation.
  4. This might be orthogonal to the point, but in the discourse there is an awful lot of goofy-footing between Afghanistan and Iraq. Each have a different set of issues and I feel sometimes anti American-imperialism rhetoric will just kind of use anything from either to shore up a point about the one they’re talking about. Notably, you couldn’t find anyone who was against the invasion of Afghanistan other than real marginal figures, while anti-Iraq invasion sentiment was pretty palpable in a large number of people that weren’t extremists in any sense (there was just, like, almost none of these people in congress). I worked with a guy who was totally for Afghanistan but when the run up to Iraq started he began calling Bush an “aspiring war criminal.”

TLDR, we were coming off of a decade of Iraq being an unruly child who didn’t take punishment or correction well and had created a huge international and humanitarian problem which was an embarrassment as well as a tragedy. The US was implicated as the party that had led everyone in. The world was amped up already with certain 90s anxieties and after 911 the invasion of Afghanistan wasn’t enough to quell this energy to go out and project power in order to solve something. Even when the weapons of mass destruction thing being bullshit became common knowledge (again, not entirely bogus, but more a matter of Chaney, and it was always Chaney in this narrative, choosing to cook the books on something real but largely their propaganda to justify our actions), that just freed people up to admit this was all part of an initiative to establish a beach head for democracy in the Middle East, yada yada yada. It became more about “geez, who thought that would work.” The oil thing never really washed, I don’t think anyone ever believed it except for the people writing (and their direct readership) really long articles (that Get Your War On guy was just on a podcast recently that I listened to, I had forgot about him). I think everyone was always aware that Halliburton and the other “engineering” firms were getting hella paid, but you know that was just normal kind of corruption/profiteering that we’re used to.

There was the famous Onion point-counterpoint:

image

but I think the only thing you’re missing is how much the American center-left trusted European institutions at the time. They were like the grownups our left-establishment wanted America to be, who had strong multi-national institutions and universal healthcare, and were given a lot of credibility (like say, WHO and the CDC before COVID.) George W. Bush saying the war was a good idea that would work out? No Democrat believed that. But Tony Blair, now that’s someone who’s judgment you can take to the bank.

… which sounds laughable now, but that is largely because of the Iraq War that we started seeing them as cynical bureaucrats.

(And as MattY says himself in those various interviews: no one’s credibility was on the line more than the leaders who pushed for it. If nationbuilding and the hunt for WMD’s failed, the people who would look the worst were Bush and Blair. So why would they possibly be lying here? Even at maximum cynicism, why would they want to get into a war that will become a giant disaster? The center-left underestimated at the time how the engineers of the war were not merely misguided, but stupid in a way that destroyed their own legacy too.)

Imagine if someone had said before the war “After we defeat Saddam, Bush is going to hand over administration of Iraq to a bunch of random people who applied to work at the Heritage foundation”. How many people would have believed them? Some, I guess!

discoursedrome:

transgenderer:

transgenderer:

why is there so much discourse about doing the dishes. do you people not own a dishwasher. or like, put your dishes right in the dishwasher soon after youre done with them

okay so a little under 70% of households have dishwashers, not sure how this corresponds to how many people have dishwashers, i think its a fair assumption that larger households are significantly more likely to have a dishwasher because the cost is distributed among more people, etc. so i think probably at least 80% of people live in a house with a dishwasher

I’m actually kind of startled that it’s so high; I’ve never lived in a place with a dishwasher and it never even occurred to me that it was something people would care about. I wonder if it’s a cultural thing.

I checked the numbers by housing type and for 2020 and it’s gone up since 2015, even!

image

The weird thing is that “2-to-4 unit building” rate dragging everybody else’s down, no idea why that’s so much lower than 5+-unit buildings.

Maybe duplexes and such are more likely to be older since recently people have been building a greater amount of single family homes and big apartment buildings? Definitely most appliances are more likely to occur in recent buildings.

loving-n0t-heyting:

loving-n0t-heyting:

“logic is Pure and sublime and of more-than-human provenance”

no. false. ignorant. blasphemous, idolatrous, confusing finger w moon. algebra is of God; logic was fashioned by mortal men in Its image

image

This is a tempting thing to say but you really can’t reduce them to the same level. Even if algebra and logic are both several rungs down on the emanation hierarchy from the Monad its still important algebra stands on top between the two

All mathematics (I gather this is least the case for combinatorics tho) articulated with sufficient precision involves some amount of “artefacts of implementation” that miss like, The Point. But in logic these artefacts can kind of overwhelm everything else; details about bookkeeping suddenly feature at the heart of many important proofs and theorems.

An example I remember our prof drawing out attention to in logic core: it’s important in proving metalogical results to speak of the existential generalisation ∃x φ(x/τ) of a sentence φ containing a singular term τ, which is intuitively just the sentence you get by swapping out in φ a specified instance of τ for x and slapping the quantificational expression ∃x in front of the resulting sentence; this is basically the relationship between “vriska is the most tumblrwoman” and “for some X: X is the most tumblrwoman”. But this simple recipe doesn’t work. What if x already appears elsewhere in φ? Bound or unbound? Change those to y instead? Well what if y is there too? So you have to specify a uniform relettering of the variables to make sure nothing finnicky happens; in fact, if you want to guarantee there is a unique generalisation of φ(τ), you have to give (basically) a deterministic algorithm for determining how to reletter the variables. It’s not just that this is tedious, it’s that it wollops you over the head as yr doing it saying, “This does not matter to The Thing this theorem is about! This is fixating on form over substance, representation over represented!” And it’s true!

The underlying problem is that logic is, speaking loosely m, the study of the behaviour of formal languages, and language will always be to the right on Plato’s divided line of the thing the language is about. So there is smth essentially sublunar about logic. Still, it’s the philosophical area with the most widely studied rich connections to philosophy, so we must look where the light is falling!

Obvious to you but probably not to everybody reading this is that if you make a slight mistake on this kind of thing, the most likely outcome is that the entire logical system you’re defining becomes completely useless because every single statement becomes provable or something of that nature.

discoursedrome:

eightyonekilograms:

ghostpalmtechnique:

rustingbridges:

discoursedrome:

The marketing people who figured out ways to sell yogurt to Americans were on top of their game, but that was 40 goddamn years ago, can we stop having supermarket displays that are 80% different types of sweetened flavoured yogurt at this point? imagine if we treated milk like this

the objectively correct way to acquire unflavored yogurt is to make it. also I don’t have to imagine it, I’ve been to japan, and strawberry milk kicks ass

I don’t want unflavored yogurt. I want the low-sugar, high-fat yogurt that is the norm in Europe. I was genuinely pissed off after I got yogurt in Geneva and then couldn’t find anything here like what they take for granted there.

I think what dd is talking about is yogurt as a cooking ingredient. If you’re trying to make e.g. tikka masala, you need unflavored, full-fat, non-Greek yogurt, and that is increasingly a pain in the ass to find. My closest grocery store has exactly one brand of it among the entire yogurt shelf, and on a given day it’s a toss-up whether there will be any in stock.

I’m counting basically any level of sugar and fat as long as they don’t add sugar or otherwise flavour it, but yeah I’m thinking in particular of the kind of “default” yogurt that can either be eaten by itself or used as an ingredient to make other stuff. It’s inherently more versatile because you can use it as a base to make other things, including sweetened flavoured yogurt if that’s your jam. (Though for what it’s worth the “everything has flavouring and sugar added” problem seems to occur even with Greek yogurt and similar variants, nowadays. Exhausting!)

you can use it as a base to make other things, including sweetened flavoured yogurt if that’s your jam

Quite possibly using jam!