>>11707086>>11707099Avatarfagging has practical purposes.
You speak differently if you have an idea who you are talking to, what they know and how credible and motivated their posts are.
You can go on any board, say /tv/, and spend 3 hours in a thread taking with people who behind the curtains don't give the slightest shit about what they say. You can try to decipher math posts about subject you only faintly understand, not realizing the posts are by people who understand it even less and summarize Wikipedia articles, making you think they give insight.
One main issue I have with /sci/ is that generally people won't invest in questions that are not immediately answerable in 2 short sentences. And indeed, I suppose most here had the experience that they find a question posted on /sci/ that they can answer, invest 25 minutes or whatnot to give an answer, but ending up being the second and last poster in the thread.
Apart from the cancerous attention-whoring that you speak of (which certainly is a major factor), hangouts like /mg/ and some red line in terms of the shitpost topics and meme topics is an attempt to remedy some of the drawback that consequence-less anonymous posting introduces.
>>11707105I never got into it in any depth, but I have the feel that results in symbolic dynamics should translate into many fields, by mapping the symbolic objects discussed there injectively into various theories.
I find ergodic theory interesting in as far as it related to statistical mechanics and it's relation with phenomenological thermodynamics.
>>11706818I never got the appeal of puzzles or math competition type problems, faggot.
I like the study of proofs with content in the Curry-Howard sense.
As far as available logic introductions go, I like
http://www.personal.psu.edu/t20/notes/logic.pdfor
https://www.amazon.com/Logic-Structure-Dirk-van-Dalen/dp/3540208798Btw. today I read
https://www.amazon.com/Modal-Homotopy-Type-Theory-Philosophy/dp/0198853408 
