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4:48 AM · Feb 2, 2022Twitter Web App

i guess personally i'm just used to it, like yes there's this eldritch horror at the bottom of mathematics that makes a mockery of our attempts to be absolutely certain of anything, and... it's just not a big deal! regular math works just fine anyway, so does everything else

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i do think the proof is worth understanding if only as good mental training. i'm not sure in what exactly but it's something like "thinking using multiple levels of reference." my favorite explanation of incompleteness is scott aaronson's here: scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec

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also separately y'all might have fun learning more about the historical context of the foundational crisis in mathematics. it must've been a weird time to live through en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundatio

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· Feb 2

Replying to @JakeOrthwein

it's really a shame to learn this material without the historical context of the crisis in foundations and what a big deal it seemed like at the time. logicomix is the closest thing i know of to a really dramatic presentation: amazon.com/Logicomix-sear

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i've been informed that forrest landry apparently finds the incompleteness theorem (or some generalization of it that i don't understand) deeply significant but i can't make heads or tails of it yet mflb.com/uvsm_8/ict_dia

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that’s what makes it even weirder tbh

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This is actually one of the only college math things I ever learned (I took a class where we proved all the incompleteness, undecidability, etc theorems). And I remember being like “this is just a whole bunch of arbitrary machinery about nothing.”

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