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Author here. My goal is to eventually turn this series into a book whose target audience is young people growing up in households where science is either not v

by lisper 2y ago

Author here. My goal is to eventually turn this series into a book whose target audience is young people growing up in households where science is either not valued or actively denigrated, the kids who end up becoming flat earthers and young-earth creationists. Constructive criticism is welcome.

karmakaze 2y ago
Get technical proof reading, lots of technical proof reading. I'm no expert in anything and I can see so many flawed or incomplete or inappropriate arguments. This might be okay for an interesting coffee table book but not for anything serious. I'll list a few examples of where my shallow understanding differs. My biggest beef is "I've already tipped my hand and told you that (my hypothesis is that) mathematics is the study of possible models of objective reality." This is where I stopped reading altogether. That's not what most of mathematics is, such as those areas you listed. They are largely axiomatic systems of logic. That they correspond to such a degree with our experience of the 'real' world is the shocker. Another one is the Banach-Tarski "paradox", the paradoxical part isn't that there's two from one. We can do this with only the real number line between 0 and 0.5 and fill the line from 0 to 1. That this defies our experience of the world isn't surprising as we don't deal interactively with uncountable infinities of any degree. A final example is Church numerals--they encode numbers, just the numbers with no associated nouns. Something that might not make sense in our world but does in lambda calculus.
- lisper 2y ago
  > the paradoxical part isn't that there's two from one What do you think the paradoxical part is then? > We can do this with only the real number line Actually you don't even need the reals. You can do the same trick with just the rationals. Half of aleph-zero is still aleph-zero. > Church numerals--they encode numbers, just the numbers with no associated nouns. That's debatable. I would say that a Church numeral's noun is an action (actions are nouns), specifically, function application. [UPDATE] > My biggest beef is "I've already tipped my hand and told you that (my hypothesis is that) mathematics is the study of possible models of objective reality." I guess I didn't make it sufficiently clear that I'm not claiming this is an accepted consensus, this is a hypothesis that I am advancing and prepared to defend. Maybe I should be more explicit about that. > They are largely axiomatic systems of logic. I don't deny that. But not all axiomatic systems of logic are mathematically interesting. Chess, for example, can be axiomatized, but it's not particularly interesting from a mathematical point of view. You're not going to win a Fields medal for finding interesting chess puzzles. > That they correspond to such a degree with our experience of the 'real' world is the shocker. Yes, exactly. That is one of the facts that supports my position.
btilly 2y ago
To reduce math to models of objective reality, you need to say what a model is. To get Banach-Tarski you need to either accept Formalism - it is just a formal game whose concepts like uncountable sets do not "really" exist, or you need to accept that Platonic reality with uncountable things in it. If you try to model math in a way that can actually be rooted in objective reality, then you wind up with some form of Constructivism. And now Banach-Tarski goes away.
- lisper 2y ago
  > To reduce math to models of objective reality, you need to say what a model is. I did. See the paragraph that starts, "A model is any physical system whose behavior correlates in some way with another physical system." > If you try to model math in a way that can actually be rooted in objective reality... It's pretty clear you didn't actually read all the way to the end.
  - layer8 2y ago
    > "A model is any physical system whose behavior correlates in some way with another physical system." So when X is a model of Y, then Y is always also a model of X? (Since correlation is generally a symmetric relationship.) That seems like a strange definition of “model”.
    - gavagai691 2y ago
      I agree that this is a problem with the above definition of model, analogous to the (IMO fatal) problems with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deductive-nomological_model#Weaknesses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deductive-nomological_model#We....
      - lisper 2y ago
        That has to do with causality, which is a complicated topic that I was trying very hard to avoid at this point in the exposition. But maybe that was a mistake.
    - 2y ago
solresol 2y ago
It's pretty rare for a child growing up in an anti-science household to be convinced to change their worldview by abstract philosophy, not least because they won't have access to those sorts of books. It's quite common for a child growing up in an anti-science household to be convinced to change their views on science by devout Christians writing about evolution, dinosaurs, astronomy and so on. Fundamentalist parents are often quite surprisingly happy for their children to read those kinds of books because they are written from the perspective of the in-group. There's a reason that Life of Fred is popular. If you want to write a book about the theory of science and what truth is, go ahead, but you aren't going to make much of an impact on that particular target audience.
- lisper 2y ago
  I don't disagree, but FWIW, I've spent quite a bit of time studying theology, and Christian apologetics and YEC in particular. I actually ran a Bible study in conjunction with a local church for about four years. So I may have a little bit more leverage than you think.
  - quanto 2y ago
    Could you share what your leverage is in this case and how such leverage is reflected in the material? The preceding comment was a critique on your written material, not your personal leverage in the community.
    - lisper 2y ago
      The strategic purpose of this particular installment was to preemptively inoculate against ontological arguments for God, i.e. the argument that God is the source of logical and mathematical truth. But I didn't want to actually come out and say that explicitly at this early stage. I'm intentionally avoiding any overt mention of religion at this point. Does that answer your question?
- mysterymath 2y ago
  I was just such a person. I was taught that being a YEC meant that we were the only ones who earnestly sought after the truth. The world was blind, and by rejecting a corrupted authority and assessing the world on their own we were more likely to arrive at the truth. In college, I successfully took apart the arguments of the peers who tried to dissuade me from my beliefs. They weren't good arguments; they had no idea why what they believed was true, but I did. This reinforced my views more than anything. But, this earnest searching for the truth also led me to take philosophy of science and religion courses at my university, and that was the first time that I actually learned the mechanics of what went into the scientific method, and particularly why that method tends to achieve its goal of arriving at the truth. My entire primary and secondary education had never contained an discussion of this, nor had anyone I'd ever spoken to known it. I also came across the talk.origins pages (https://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-welcome.html https://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-welcome.html), which contained the first full exposition I'd seen of not just the theory of evolution, but also the tremendous host of failed falsification opportunities that support it. I was pulled into a more correct view of the world kicking and screaming, by the same forces that had kept me away from it for my entire life. I can't speak to how common my experiences are, but I'm endlessly grateful to those who didn't presume that there wasn't anyone like me out there. Admittedly I do have a stick up my butt about this, since it's a refrain I hear often. But I suspect that many of the flat-earthers out there are budding scientists in disguise, poorly served by their environment, and waiting to be freed.
downboots 2y ago
Have you talked to your users?
- lisper 2y ago
  I've spent decades studying YEC and Christian apologetics. I even ran a Bible study for four years, and I was on the YouTube YEC debate circuit for a while. I don't know if that counts as "talking to my users" but I'm not going in to this cold. In fact, the reason I wrote this installment in the series is because I know that apologists often cite the (alleged) "purity" of mathematical truth as evidence for the existence of God and I wanted to nip that argument in the bud.
lanstin 2y ago
Saying that Richard Nixon either did or did not eat eggs for breakfast at a certain date is a bit naive. There are many possible physical occurrences where the material reality will fail to neatly fall into whatever definitions you have of Richard Nixon, eat, breakfast and eggs. Reality itself is pretty cut and dry, till you start to take many worlds seriously, but the mapping of human concepts to physical phenomenon is very very slippery. Would you take it as a given that for some universal wave function, there is a mathematical predicate, formed from your Unicode, that corresponds to “a human is in the room”? It is plausible but unproven and seems like quite a big assumption to incorporate into your world view.
- lisper 2y ago
  Yes, natural language is very problematic, and those problems extend even to what are normally considered very cut-and-dried propositions like "The sun rises in the east" or "The earth is round" or even "one plus one equals two." If you have a better example to suggest, I'm all ears. FWIW, I take many-worlds very seriously. You might find this interesting: https://blog.rongarret.info/2019/07/the-trouble-with-many-worlds.html https://blog.rongarret.info/2019/07/the-trouble-with-many-wo...
  - lanstin 2y ago
    I take issue with this: "I don't know about you, but my subjective experience is that there is exactly one of me at all times. I consider this aspect of my subjective experience to be an essential component of what it means to be me. " People that meditate do not find this unitary illusion to be fundamental, but find that what seems at first to be a singular entity is in fact an entity consistenting of multiple parts, different neural systems or whatever, whose interactions together make up a sort of fictionalized self, which is really the victors story of what happened, not a persistent entity. But my question was more basic, do you think that the mathematical formalism you are endowing with "truth" can even express something like "conscious beings exist" or "a cat is under the table"? It can express things at the level of particles and bosons and so on, and plausibly something like "the average kinetic energy in this room is such and such" but unlike building up math from set theory or category theory, there's no clear formalism for "person" or "mind" in the mathematics of QFT. Maybe it can be, maybe it can't, we don't know. It's a very strong assumption to say it can be absent proof of that.

by lisper 2y ago

karmakaze 2y ago

Get technical proof reading, lots of technical proof reading. I'm no expert in anything and I can see so many flawed or incomplete or inappropriate arguments. This might be okay for an interesting coffee table book but not for anything serious. I'll list a few examples of where my shallow understanding differs. My biggest beef is "I've already tipped my hand and told you that (my hypothesis is that) mathematics is the study of possible models of objective reality." This is where I stopped reading altogether. That's not what most of mathematics is, such as those areas you listed. They are largely axiomatic systems of logic. That they correspond to such a degree with our experience of the 'real' world is the shocker. Another one is the Banach-Tarski "paradox", the paradoxical part isn't that there's two from one. We can do this with only the real number line between 0 and 0.5 and fill the line from 0 to 1. That this defies our experience of the world isn't surprising as we don't deal interactively with uncountable infinities of any degree. A final example is Church numerals--they encode numbers, just the numbers with no associated nouns. Something that might not make sense in our world but does in lambda calculus.

lisper 2y ago
> the paradoxical part isn't that there's two from one What do you think the paradoxical part is then? > We can do this with only the real number line Actually you don't even need the reals. You can do the same trick with just the rationals. Half of aleph-zero is still aleph-zero. > Church numerals--they encode numbers, just the numbers with no associated nouns. That's debatable. I would say that a Church numeral's noun is an action (actions are nouns), specifically, function application. [UPDATE] > My biggest beef is "I've already tipped my hand and told you that (my hypothesis is that) mathematics is the study of possible models of objective reality." I guess I didn't make it sufficiently clear that I'm not claiming this is an accepted consensus, this is a hypothesis that I am advancing and prepared to defend. Maybe I should be more explicit about that. > They are largely axiomatic systems of logic. I don't deny that. But not all axiomatic systems of logic are mathematically interesting. Chess, for example, can be axiomatized, but it's not particularly interesting from a mathematical point of view. You're not going to win a Fields medal for finding interesting chess puzzles. > That they correspond to such a degree with our experience of the 'real' world is the shocker. Yes, exactly. That is one of the facts that supports my position.

btilly 2y ago

To reduce math to models of objective reality, you need to say what a model is. To get Banach-Tarski you need to either accept Formalism - it is just a formal game whose concepts like uncountable sets do not "really" exist, or you need to accept that Platonic reality with uncountable things in it. If you try to model math in a way that can actually be rooted in objective reality, then you wind up with some form of Constructivism. And now Banach-Tarski goes away.

lisper 2y ago
> To reduce math to models of objective reality, you need to say what a model is. I did. See the paragraph that starts, "A model is any physical system whose behavior correlates in some way with another physical system." > If you try to model math in a way that can actually be rooted in objective reality... It's pretty clear you didn't actually read all the way to the end.
- layer8 2y ago
  > "A model is any physical system whose behavior correlates in some way with another physical system." So when X is a model of Y, then Y is always also a model of X? (Since correlation is generally a symmetric relationship.) That seems like a strange definition of “model”.
  - gavagai691 2y ago
    I agree that this is a problem with the above definition of model, analogous to the (IMO fatal) problems with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deductive-nomological_model#Weaknesses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deductive-nomological_model#We....
    - lisper 2y ago
      That has to do with causality, which is a complicated topic that I was trying very hard to avoid at this point in the exposition. But maybe that was a mistake.
  - 2y ago

solresol 2y ago

It's pretty rare for a child growing up in an anti-science household to be convinced to change their worldview by abstract philosophy, not least because they won't have access to those sorts of books. It's quite common for a child growing up in an anti-science household to be convinced to change their views on science by devout Christians writing about evolution, dinosaurs, astronomy and so on. Fundamentalist parents are often quite surprisingly happy for their children to read those kinds of books because they are written from the perspective of the in-group. There's a reason that Life of Fred is popular. If you want to write a book about the theory of science and what truth is, go ahead, but you aren't going to make much of an impact on that particular target audience.

lisper 2y ago
I don't disagree, but FWIW, I've spent quite a bit of time studying theology, and Christian apologetics and YEC in particular. I actually ran a Bible study in conjunction with a local church for about four years. So I may have a little bit more leverage than you think.
- quanto 2y ago
  Could you share what your leverage is in this case and how such leverage is reflected in the material? The preceding comment was a critique on your written material, not your personal leverage in the community.
  - lisper 2y ago
    The strategic purpose of this particular installment was to preemptively inoculate against ontological arguments for God, i.e. the argument that God is the source of logical and mathematical truth. But I didn't want to actually come out and say that explicitly at this early stage. I'm intentionally avoiding any overt mention of religion at this point. Does that answer your question?
mysterymath 2y ago
I was just such a person. I was taught that being a YEC meant that we were the only ones who earnestly sought after the truth. The world was blind, and by rejecting a corrupted authority and assessing the world on their own we were more likely to arrive at the truth. In college, I successfully took apart the arguments of the peers who tried to dissuade me from my beliefs. They weren't good arguments; they had no idea why what they believed was true, but I did. This reinforced my views more than anything. But, this earnest searching for the truth also led me to take philosophy of science and religion courses at my university, and that was the first time that I actually learned the mechanics of what went into the scientific method, and particularly why that method tends to achieve its goal of arriving at the truth. My entire primary and secondary education had never contained an discussion of this, nor had anyone I'd ever spoken to known it. I also came across the talk.origins pages (https://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-welcome.html https://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-welcome.html), which contained the first full exposition I'd seen of not just the theory of evolution, but also the tremendous host of failed falsification opportunities that support it. I was pulled into a more correct view of the world kicking and screaming, by the same forces that had kept me away from it for my entire life. I can't speak to how common my experiences are, but I'm endlessly grateful to those who didn't presume that there wasn't anyone like me out there. Admittedly I do have a stick up my butt about this, since it's a refrain I hear often. But I suspect that many of the flat-earthers out there are budding scientists in disguise, poorly served by their environment, and waiting to be freed.

downboots 2y ago

Have you talked to your users?

lisper 2y ago
I've spent decades studying YEC and Christian apologetics. I even ran a Bible study for four years, and I was on the YouTube YEC debate circuit for a while. I don't know if that counts as "talking to my users" but I'm not going in to this cold. In fact, the reason I wrote this installment in the series is because I know that apologists often cite the (alleged) "purity" of mathematical truth as evidence for the existence of God and I wanted to nip that argument in the bud.

lanstin 2y ago

Saying that Richard Nixon either did or did not eat eggs for breakfast at a certain date is a bit naive. There are many possible physical occurrences where the material reality will fail to neatly fall into whatever definitions you have of Richard Nixon, eat, breakfast and eggs. Reality itself is pretty cut and dry, till you start to take many worlds seriously, but the mapping of human concepts to physical phenomenon is very very slippery. Would you take it as a given that for some universal wave function, there is a mathematical predicate, formed from your Unicode, that corresponds to “a human is in the room”? It is plausible but unproven and seems like quite a big assumption to incorporate into your world view.

lisper 2y ago
Yes, natural language is very problematic, and those problems extend even to what are normally considered very cut-and-dried propositions like "The sun rises in the east" or "The earth is round" or even "one plus one equals two." If you have a better example to suggest, I'm all ears. FWIW, I take many-worlds very seriously. You might find this interesting: https://blog.rongarret.info/2019/07/the-trouble-with-many-worlds.html https://blog.rongarret.info/2019/07/the-trouble-with-many-wo...
- lanstin 2y ago
  I take issue with this: "I don't know about you, but my subjective experience is that there is exactly one of me at all times. I consider this aspect of my subjective experience to be an essential component of what it means to be me. " People that meditate do not find this unitary illusion to be fundamental, but find that what seems at first to be a singular entity is in fact an entity consistenting of multiple parts, different neural systems or whatever, whose interactions together make up a sort of fictionalized self, which is really the victors story of what happened, not a persistent entity. But my question was more basic, do you think that the mathematical formalism you are endowing with "truth" can even express something like "conscious beings exist" or "a cat is under the table"? It can express things at the level of particles and bosons and so on, and plausibly something like "the average kinetic energy in this room is such and such" but unlike building up math from set theory or category theory, there's no clear formalism for "person" or "mind" in the mathematics of QFT. Maybe it can be, maybe it can't, we don't know. It's a very strong assumption to say it can be absent proof of that.