91–100 of 175 posts
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LLMs giving some people way too much confidence to conceptually shoot from the hip hehe - “effort to refute bullshit is order of magnitude more than to refute it”.
Derrida, go back to your grave, you messed up the quote!
(p.s. this whole comment section is wild - the green & getting downvoted accounts? They said the most credible things of anyone )
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Well said. Thanks for calling out these sort of posers and charlatans on HN. We should not tolerate these people if we are to discuss/argue/motivate interesting/hard subjects productively. I automatically discount anybody on HN (until i have looked at their profile/comment history/any personal bio websites etc.) who claim they have read/studied a) Euclid's Elements b) Newton's Principia c) Maxwell's Treatise on Elect…
I've certainly read and studied material explaining f), but I haven't read the original paper (besides, isn't that in German?). The proofs aren't that hard, as I remember them, maybe they're harder in original form? To be clear: I specialized in logic, formal verification and programming language theory at uni. This was a while ago, and I'm on new parent amounts of sleep, so pls b nice.
I recently came to know of The Annotated Godel: A Reader's Guide to his Classic Paper on Logic and Incompleteness by Hal Prince which i think i need to sit with :-)
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>there is indeed a huge logical error at the heart of the whole enterprise but it was not discovered until much later by Kurt Gödel. Which leads us to our next borderline impenetrable book, Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.
To each their own, I read GEB several times and enjoyed the intellectual challenge and the humour. Hofstadter wrote a followup book: I am a strange loop. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop
He has another book about the beauty and challenges of translating poetry, but it’s actually about the sudden death of his wife and it's been too sad for me to finish.
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> Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. I gave that book to my mathematician grandma, and she found it so boring she couldn’t finish it - “All this stuff was known for decades”. True anecdote.
Well, it's a pop-sci tome, not a research article. However, it is pretty dated these days.
For an accessible introduction before beginning this, consider his _Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy_: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Mathematical_P... and for ease of reading see the various PDF versions at: https://people.umass.edu/klement/imp/
Of you prefer an even more entertaining approach and a very gentle introduction into the topic, I recommend the comic "Logicomix" which tells Russel's journey (though not historically correct all the time for story telling reasons). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logicomix
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I've certainly read and studied material explaining f), but I haven't read the original paper (besides, isn't that in German?). The proofs aren't that hard, as I remember them, maybe they're harder in original form? To be clear: I specialized in logic, formal verification and programming language theory at uni. This was a while ago, and I'm on new parent amounts of sleep, so pls b nice.
I have tried to read some articles and watch some videos "explaining" Godel but never really understood it. Everyone seems to be explaining the mechanics of what Godel did but explaining the Why is lacking i.e. What was it in mathematics that got him even thinking on these lines in the first place? Can this problem be demonstrated with a simple toy axiomatic formal system? How did he hit upon his approach? Answers to…
I do teach PM when I teach theory of computation, but largely to tell the story of how we discovered the limits to computation.
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I've certainly read and studied material explaining f), but I haven't read the original paper (besides, isn't that in German?). The proofs aren't that hard, as I remember them, maybe they're harder in original form? To be clear: I specialized in logic, formal verification and programming language theory at uni. This was a while ago, and I'm on new parent amounts of sleep, so pls b nice.
I have tried to read some articles and watch some videos "explaining" Godel but never really understood it. Everyone seems to be explaining the mechanics of what Godel did but explaining the Why is lacking i.e. What was it in mathematics that got him even thinking on these lines in the first place? Can this problem be demonstrated with a simple toy axiomatic formal system? How did he hit upon his approach? Answers to…
The work is in creating the theorem / contradiction from that point, but in the big picture, the approach doesn’t have to come from nowhere.
Instead of spending time beating one’s head against Russell and Whitehead, I would advise reading Homotopy Type Theory (aka the HoTT Book). Dependent types are cool and mind-expanding, but higher inductive types are downright mind-altering. The Little Schemer/Typer could be used as a preparatory text to gear one up for HoTT. It also has the advantage of being a bit more applicable to functional programming languages,…
I tried to read HoTT. First chapter on type theory is great and pretty easy to follow. The second chapter, I got completely lost. I don't remember why, maybe they fixed it since. But I find univalence axiom intriguing. I am interested in different approach to types, using triage calculus, which is more "materialist" than "structuralist" - type is given by the structure of the (quoted) term in normal form (unlike lamb…
Univalence says that equality is equivalent to equivalence, ie, formalizing the notion of when we can use equivalence rather than equality as a step in a proof. In practice, we often only care about proofs “up to equivalence”.
A way to think about this:
- equality is an identity map
- equivalence is an isomorphism
For example, 2 in Z and 2 in R do not have an identity map between them — but do have an isomorphism.
I think the key insight of univalence is not collapsing equivalence into equality — but allowing it to remain a second truth relation.
We don’t want 2 in Z to be equal to 2 in R (because we collapse type distinction), but we do want them to be equivalent — so we can do equivalent reasoning about arithmetic in R to reach conclusions about Z.
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I don't know the exact curriculum and I'm sure it's changed over the years, but one of my girlfriends from back in the day really did go to a school that had one like this. St. John's College, which has two campuses in Annapolis, MA and Santa Fe, NM. They had no majors and everyone learns by reading the classics directly. They also have to learn classical Latin and Greek and read many in their original languages. I d…
I heard about St. John's from a twitter thread and find it deeply baffling. It's as if a group of monks wanted to keep the quadrivium and trivium but their clock stopped at the 16th century. One of their faculty proudly said they study analysis by reading Descartes! Which I thought was a highbrow joke but nope, dead serious. There's a reason that 'standing on the shoulders of giants' is a thing. Dive into the classic…