> Where have the lovers of certainty and deduction gone? I can't help but think our general laziness and acceptance of "close enough" fast solutions is going to

> Where have the lovers of certainty and deduction gone? I can't help but think our general laziness and acceptance of "close enough" fast solutions is going to bite us in the end. They've always been a small group and naturally they congregate in spaces that value certainty and deduction, such as computing. If we look backward at the history of the sciences, we'll see physics and math figuring prominently. Physics was and still is all about making mathematical models about messy, inconsistent phenomena. Math is certainly "correct" but not deterministic in the same way that computing is and proofs are still largely (but not always anymore) human endeavors of creatively applying theorems, lemmas, and factorings to mathematical objects and relations. The theory and practice of statistics predates computing and is all about reasoning under uncertainty. Underneath all the "1s and 0s" in your computer are very real analog voltages that gates are reacting to to process your logic. It's pretty much just computing and logics that really value certainty and deduction. So really it's the opposite: the computing craze added value to certainty and deduction when there really wasn't much before.