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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
related to this, i've observed a funny pattern with respect to godel's incompleteness theorem specifically that the better someone understands the technical details behind it, the less philosophical or metaphysical significance they assign it
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David Chapman
@Meaningness
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🆕🔭 How the foundational crises in math and physics a century ago undermined confidence in social institutions, leading—via the anti-rational New Age and Evangelical movements—to our current chaotic dysfunctions. meaningness.com/collapse-of-ra
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
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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Jake Orthwein
@JakeOrthwein
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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Jake Orthwein
@JakeOrthwein
Chaitin:
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David Chapman
@Meaningness
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3️⃣ Mathematical logic was invented to eliminate all nebulosity; it conclusively failed. But computers are logic made flesh; as a consolation prize, we got the whole contemporary world out of logicism’s failure. Gregory Chaitin’s delightful explanation: arxiv.org/html/nlin/0004
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