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> I don't believe you can prove anything Go do some math proofs and report back
by hasbroslasher 10y ago
> I don't believe you can prove anything
Go do some math proofs and report back
- Sacho 10y agoMath proofs rely on arbitrarily chosen axioms; tps5 describes a similarly arbitrary approach to reasoning, e.g.: > Someone might say "I know she is lying because she used this term which liars always use plus I read this story about a woman making up harassment charges to elicit sympathy." Using a mathematical approach, maybe they started from an axiom that liars use specific terms which out them as such. Then after several theorems and lemmas, they managed to establish what that specific term is. Without the guarantees given by the axiom, all the knowledge they managed to build upon it is dubious. The problem with axioms is that they fall outside of the "purity" of maths - they're basically "something a bunch of people agree on". When you scale that to billions of people, it tends to fall apart(also evidenced in maths, where there's lots of questions which set of axioms to use as the foundation for a specific branch). Very mushy.
- hasbroslasher 10y agoMeant that as a joke, mate. Humor isn't known for traveling well on the web.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- dang 10y agoWe detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13194581 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13194581 and marked it off-topic.