there's a loooooooong path from accepting that our ape nature constrains how we reason to specializing it to white-male apes
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but not to recognizing that how we talk about and use “reason” has a history. Multiple competing histories, actually, across cultures.
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the claim that it is white-male-Christian is silly because there's a non-human mathematical reality under consideration
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I’m not an idealist so we can agree there’s external reality, but plenty of mathematicians argue that math has nothing to do with it.
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I am a pure partisan in that. Math is external reality and part of the fabric of reality. We are also part of the same fabric.
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That’s a challenging position because there are multiple internally consistent but mutually contradictory versions of some bits of math
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Imagining humans, even white Christian males, invented the Mandelbrot set or Godel's paradox is giving ourselves too much credit
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I’m enough of an institutionalist that I don’t care about whether those things are “true”. I care how knowledge is created & propagated
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that's an honest position. I wish more people were as honest. I am the opposite. I care about new truths, not how they're found
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If you care about new truths you should care about how they’re found. Chasing “pure reason” you can cripple actual engines of knowledge
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Of course I care about the integrity of the process. What I detest is undermining truths to attack the means.
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