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Noe one denies the virtues or achievements of logic, but as you know, the good ideas are also the most dangerous, since there is real danger of falling in love

by marklgr 10y ago

Noe one denies the virtues or achievements of logic, but as you know, the good ideas are also the most dangerous, since there is real danger of falling in love with them and applying them to everything ie. to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The idea that facts and logic are everything suggests that we could feed facts into some ubercomputer and the Truth would come out. As of today, it's clearly not the case--computers are excellent at computing, but they are pretty dumb. Humans must be around to select, prioritize, assign values, interpret, and put it all together. Otherwise, computers only spit the most mundane truths out of facts plus logic, and that was precisely one of the decisive criticism of positivim.

axlprose 10y ago
> the good ideas are also the most dangerous, since there is real danger of falling in love with them and applying them to everything Like how math was a good idea that was applied everywhere from physics to modern medicine and architecture? Don't get me wrong, it's a decent rule of thumb for a lot of ideas, but for formal languages with rigid structures and rigorous definitions such as mathematical logic, it doesn't quite work. In fact, applying a good idea to an area where doing so would objectively be detrimental, would inherently be not logical by definition. And That's the power of logic. If followed rigorously, it can actually protect us from going down a lot of inaccurate roads, because doing so means it's also highly probable that you're doing something inconsistent with formal logic. This is the same reason why strongly typed programming languages like Haskell and ML have such a cult following, it's because they prevent a lot of silliness from even starting to happen. It's just a specialized niche case of the same idea, letting people discuss complex ideas in a structured way so that they're easier to communicate and verify. Now imagine if he had that kind of clarity in communication with social issues... > The idea that facts and logic are everything suggests that we could feed facts into some ubercomputer and the Truth would come out. That's not necessarily true, and drastically undermines what logic actually is. We already know there are several problems that have been proven to be uncomputable, but that doesn't mean we can't use logic to understand them; logic is separate from computability, and vastly more powerful. Logic is what gave birth to the entire notion of computation in the first place, and there are many math proofs that are logically sound but not computable either. To paint logic simply as something that computers do is a mass disservice to what it represents and is capable of. The issue is usually not with how logic itself works, but with how people misuse, and more importantly, how people misunderstand it. It is just absolutely tragic how undervalued and widely misunderstood logic is in modern society, despite it having given us so much already.

by marklgr 10y ago

axlprose 10y ago

> the good ideas are also the most dangerous, since there is real danger of falling in love with them and applying them to everything Like how math was a good idea that was applied everywhere from physics to modern medicine and architecture? Don't get me wrong, it's a decent rule of thumb for a lot of ideas, but for formal languages with rigid structures and rigorous definitions such as mathematical logic, it doesn't quite work. In fact, applying a good idea to an area where doing so would objectively be detrimental, would inherently be not logical by definition. And That's the power of logic. If followed rigorously, it can actually protect us from going down a lot of inaccurate roads, because doing so means it's also highly probable that you're doing something inconsistent with formal logic. This is the same reason why strongly typed programming languages like Haskell and ML have such a cult following, it's because they prevent a lot of silliness from even starting to happen. It's just a specialized niche case of the same idea, letting people discuss complex ideas in a structured way so that they're easier to communicate and verify. Now imagine if he had that kind of clarity in communication with social issues... > The idea that facts and logic are everything suggests that we could feed facts into some ubercomputer and the Truth would come out. That's not necessarily true, and drastically undermines what logic actually is. We already know there are several problems that have been proven to be uncomputable, but that doesn't mean we can't use logic to understand them; logic is separate from computability, and vastly more powerful. Logic is what gave birth to the entire notion of computation in the first place, and there are many math proofs that are logically sound but not computable either. To paint logic simply as something that computers do is a mass disservice to what it represents and is capable of. The issue is usually not with how logic itself works, but with how people misuse, and more importantly, how people misunderstand it. It is just absolutely tragic how undervalued and widely misunderstood logic is in modern society, despite it having given us so much already.