Comments | ultrawaffle: More bad math journalism

ultrawaffle

More bad math journalism

Jan 02, 2007 11:03

The New York Times Science section had an article today on free will and consciousness. Overall a decent article, but its discussion of Godel's incompleteness theorem made me want to drive a nail into someone's head. ( Rant )

Comments 7

tajmahall January 2 2007, 22:33:21 UTC

Why do people so often assume that purely abstract mathematical results about infinite structures are the right explanation for trivial, completely finitistic everyday facts?

Well I don't know about you, but my thoughts and ideas are purely for the betterment of other people's hormonal balance and self-contentment. Pays better that way.

And since when is Janna Levin, a physicist who wrote a novel about Godel, an expert on logic and philosophy of mathematics?

It's useful when applying for funding. (Just kidding. Or maybe not. Who knows?)

darkerline January 3 2007, 01:06:14 UTC

As Lewis Carroll stated in Alice Through The Looking-Glass, that thing Epimenides said isn't a paradox. It just means the guy lied. IF he were the only Cretan who ever said a word, and IF that was the only thing he'd said, it would be a paradox. As it is, it's just a false statement.

That's not the only thing by far that bothers me about the article, but it's a common mistake that drives me nuts every time I see it.

tajmahall January 3 2007, 02:26:33 UTC

Yeah. That, and the stupid "roosters don't lay eggs" thing drive me nuts. Even Smullyan fell for the latter.

oxeador January 3 2007, 02:39:43 UTC

The article also talks about people who believe that quantum mechanics gives evidence for the existence of free will. I didn't know that anyone actually seriously believed that.

You do not have any New Age friend, do you?

easwaran January 4 2007, 20:33:17 UTC

Them and Roger Penrose.

easwaran January 4 2007, 20:46:23 UTC

Actually, the article in general is pretty good - I would never have imagined an article in the newspaper that actually makes (somewhat) clear the distinction between libertarianism and compatibilism about free will. Of course, the Libet experiments are far overblown, and they didn't ask any of the many people that have criticized his interpretation of them for comment. (Well, Dennett may have criticized them at some point, but they asked him about other things ( ... )

easwaran January 4 2007, 20:50:24 UTC

That works for me, because I am comfortable with so-called physicalist reasoning, and I’m always happy to leverage concepts of higher mathematics to cut through philosophical knots.

Why do people so often assume that purely abstract mathematical results about infinite structures are the right explanation for trivial, completely finitistic everyday facts?I think this is a perfectly reasonable position for someone to take, and I would agree with the author here. But I would also agree with you that mathematical results about infinite structures are very rarely the right explanation for trivial and finitistic everyday facts. However, free will isn't something trivial, and part of the question is about predicting the future (as in the difference between predicting and choosing one's own future actions) which is connected to the problem of extrapolation from only finitely many data points. There are strong analogies between the problem of induction (assuming the future will be like the past) and mathematical undecidability, but it's ( ... )