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The comments on this article are like a flytrap for people with exactly the kind of misconception the article is talking about.

by dash2 2y ago

xcanl 2y ago
There exists a program that answers the following question: "If 99.99% of academics are rarely misunderstood, but one single blog consistently sparks discussions, should that blog reconsider its presentation style?"
- groestl 2y ago
  "Yes, the blog should consider reviewing its presentation style." from you know who.
- dash2 2y ago
  He's popularizing interesting but complicated maths. That's always gonna attract people who think they understand it, but don't.
  - larsf100 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - dgb23 2y ago
      It's definitely math, or specifically logic. The writing style in the article leans heavily on logical statements. Perhaps an interesting aside: I always thought that mathematical logic, or at least the parts we typically learn to describe CS concepts, is pretty hardcore in terms of the abstract thinking we have to perform. Until I saw what philosophers have to learn... They are taught much richer and complex concepts that can describe how logic bleeds into written/spoken language and how you extract this logic from text. Logic is used, recognized and analyzed in pretty much _everything_ they do. In contrast, we get by with the kindergarten version of logic for most things.
      - aklquark 2y ago
        This subthread assumes that the blog is popularizing math concepts. If so, why can he not be bothered to write: Let P be a set of programs that print all possible answers to the proposition P==NP . In this case, the possible answers are {"true", "false", "undecidable in ZFC"}. Then there trivially exists a program that can print the true answer to the proposition. Everyone understands this. The amount of support he is getting here for the poor presentation is astonishing.
- kragen 2y ago
  the other 99.99% of academics should reconsider their presentation style; the reason their papers don't spark such arguments is that they've given up on educating the ignorant the way scott does you might say, no, plenty of academics teach undergraduates, and undergraduates are super ignorant. but undergraduates generally don't care whether bb(123456789) is computable or not unless that's on the exam, and their incentives run strongly counter to arguing with the professor if they're unconvinced; the way they've learned to play the academic game is by producing the desired answers, because that's what gets good grades, not finding holes in professors' reasoning so i think people like scott and sabine hossenfelder are doing profoundly important work, and the groundless controversies around them demonstrate not the error of their ways but the astounding degree to which the current academic system is failing to educate the public
  - ilya_m 2y ago
    > the other 99.99% of academics should reconsider their presentation style; the reason their papers don't spark such arguments is that they've given up on educating the ignorant the way scott does I don't see how the second part of the sentence implies the first. The primary role of academics is generating new knowledge. Educating the ignorant is a public service that few are willing or able to do. Scott Aaronson deserves a lot of credit for dedicating so much energy to his blog, it does not mean that 99.99% of his peers are wrong in focusing on advancing the frontier of knowledge.
    - kragen 2y ago
      it's a public service that nobody else is able to do, and if nobody does it, the result is catastrophe: legislating the value of pi, creationism in schools, prohibitions on glassware and borax and teflon, lynchings for witchcraft, acid attacks on girls for attending school, the ransomware pandemic, boko haram, the cambodian mass executions for wearing glasses or speaking french i won't go so far as to claim that this imposes an individual moral obligation on every academic—that would be a variety of consquentialism with many consequences i shrink from—but at least it would be good to figure out how to demarginalize what scott is doing
empath75 2y ago
I'm going to try and explain this in a simple way: If I ask you to write a program that returns false if 4 is an odd number and true if it's an even number, you would say that's trivially computable: def is_four_even(): return 4 % 2 == 0 Of course there's an even _simpler_ function: def is_four_even(): return true The two are both valid ways of computing that function. Four is even, it has always been even, you don't need to check if it's even, you can just return true. For all these complicated questions about that people are all getting wrapped up about the only difference is that we currently don't know how to write the first version of the function, and we don't know which of "return true" or "return false" is the correct version of the second form of the function, but _the second form surely exists_, which means that it is computable. Either P=NP or P!=NP, and that has been true or not true since the beginning of time, and _one_ of those two functions would have been correct to use from the beginning of time. It's computable, we just don't know which one to use right now. As soon as someone proves the status of P?=NP, you can just pick one of the two ('return false' or 'return true') if someone asks you write the function. It also doesn't really matter if a statement is provable in theory or not. Whether or not it's possible to prove that P?=NP, it is either true or it's false and it has always been either true or false, and one of those two programs is correct.
- intuitionist 2y ago
  > It also doesn't really matter if a statement is provable in theory or not. Whether or not it's possible to prove that P?=NP, it is either true or it's false and it has always been either true or false, and one of those two programs is correct. This is a pretty philosophically extremist statement (relying on a hardcore version of Platonism) and with my handle I can’t just let it stand unchallenged. :) I’m actually somewhat more sympathetic to excluded middle for P?=NP than for some other statements, so let’s start elsewhere. I don’t think it’s at all obvious that the continuum hypothesis is, and always has been, either true or false. We know it’s independent of ZFC, of course, and there are sensible “extra” axioms that would resolve it in opposite directions (e.g. V=L vs. MM). In order to believe that there’s a fact of the matter you need to posit a very well-populated Platonic realm, despite not needing that kind of philosophical commitment to do mathematics. Well, maybe P?=NP is just simpler than CH. It probably is! But you can imagine a case where it isn’t; e.g. if there exists an algorithm for 3-SAT (call it Algorithm A) which can be proved to be asymptotically optimal, and which runs in O(n^10^100) time if !CH, and exponential time if CH. Then the P?=NP question would be equivalent to CH, and you should have the same beliefs about its truth value. If you’re like me, that means you’re skeptical that it has a well-defined truth value “for all time” at all.

The comments on this article are like a flytrap for people with exactly the kind of misconception the article is talking about.

by dash2 2y ago

The comments on this article are like a flytrap for people with exactly the kind of misconception the article is talking about.

xcanl 2y ago

There exists a program that answers the following question: "If 99.99% of academics are rarely misunderstood, but one single blog consistently sparks discussions, should that blog reconsider its presentation style?"

groestl 2y ago
"Yes, the blog should consider reviewing its presentation style." from you know who.
dash2 2y ago
He's popularizing interesting but complicated maths. That's always gonna attract people who think they understand it, but don't.
- larsf100 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - dgb23 2y ago
    It's definitely math, or specifically logic. The writing style in the article leans heavily on logical statements. Perhaps an interesting aside: I always thought that mathematical logic, or at least the parts we typically learn to describe CS concepts, is pretty hardcore in terms of the abstract thinking we have to perform. Until I saw what philosophers have to learn... They are taught much richer and complex concepts that can describe how logic bleeds into written/spoken language and how you extract this logic from text. Logic is used, recognized and analyzed in pretty much _everything_ they do. In contrast, we get by with the kindergarten version of logic for most things.
    - aklquark 2y ago
      This subthread assumes that the blog is popularizing math concepts. If so, why can he not be bothered to write: Let P be a set of programs that print all possible answers to the proposition P==NP . In this case, the possible answers are {"true", "false", "undecidable in ZFC"}. Then there trivially exists a program that can print the true answer to the proposition. Everyone understands this. The amount of support he is getting here for the poor presentation is astonishing.
kragen 2y ago
the other 99.99% of academics should reconsider their presentation style; the reason their papers don't spark such arguments is that they've given up on educating the ignorant the way scott does you might say, no, plenty of academics teach undergraduates, and undergraduates are super ignorant. but undergraduates generally don't care whether bb(123456789) is computable or not unless that's on the exam, and their incentives run strongly counter to arguing with the professor if they're unconvinced; the way they've learned to play the academic game is by producing the desired answers, because that's what gets good grades, not finding holes in professors' reasoning so i think people like scott and sabine hossenfelder are doing profoundly important work, and the groundless controversies around them demonstrate not the error of their ways but the astounding degree to which the current academic system is failing to educate the public
- ilya_m 2y ago
  > the other 99.99% of academics should reconsider their presentation style; the reason their papers don't spark such arguments is that they've given up on educating the ignorant the way scott does I don't see how the second part of the sentence implies the first. The primary role of academics is generating new knowledge. Educating the ignorant is a public service that few are willing or able to do. Scott Aaronson deserves a lot of credit for dedicating so much energy to his blog, it does not mean that 99.99% of his peers are wrong in focusing on advancing the frontier of knowledge.
  - kragen 2y ago
    it's a public service that nobody else is able to do, and if nobody does it, the result is catastrophe: legislating the value of pi, creationism in schools, prohibitions on glassware and borax and teflon, lynchings for witchcraft, acid attacks on girls for attending school, the ransomware pandemic, boko haram, the cambodian mass executions for wearing glasses or speaking french i won't go so far as to claim that this imposes an individual moral obligation on every academic—that would be a variety of consquentialism with many consequences i shrink from—but at least it would be good to figure out how to demarginalize what scott is doing

empath75 2y ago

I'm going to try and explain this in a simple way: If I ask you to write a program that returns false if 4 is an odd number and true if it's an even number, you would say that's trivially computable: def is_four_even(): return 4 % 2 == 0 Of course there's an even _simpler_ function: def is_four_even(): return true The two are both valid ways of computing that function. Four is even, it has always been even, you don't need to check if it's even, you can just return true. For all these complicated questions about that people are all getting wrapped up about the only difference is that we currently don't know how to write the first version of the function, and we don't know which of "return true" or "return false" is the correct version of the second form of the function, but _the second form surely exists_, which means that it is computable. Either P=NP or P!=NP, and that has been true or not true since the beginning of time, and _one_ of those two functions would have been correct to use from the beginning of time. It's computable, we just don't know which one to use right now. As soon as someone proves the status of P?=NP, you can just pick one of the two ('return false' or 'return true') if someone asks you write the function. It also doesn't really matter if a statement is provable in theory or not. Whether or not it's possible to prove that P?=NP, it is either true or it's false and it has always been either true or false, and one of those two programs is correct.

intuitionist 2y ago
> It also doesn't really matter if a statement is provable in theory or not. Whether or not it's possible to prove that P?=NP, it is either true or it's false and it has always been either true or false, and one of those two programs is correct. This is a pretty philosophically extremist statement (relying on a hardcore version of Platonism) and with my handle I can’t just let it stand unchallenged. :) I’m actually somewhat more sympathetic to excluded middle for P?=NP than for some other statements, so let’s start elsewhere. I don’t think it’s at all obvious that the continuum hypothesis is, and always has been, either true or false. We know it’s independent of ZFC, of course, and there are sensible “extra” axioms that would resolve it in opposite directions (e.g. V=L vs. MM). In order to believe that there’s a fact of the matter you need to posit a very well-populated Platonic realm, despite not needing that kind of philosophical commitment to do mathematics. Well, maybe P?=NP is just simpler than CH. It probably is! But you can imagine a case where it isn’t; e.g. if there exists an algorithm for 3-SAT (call it Algorithm A) which can be proved to be asymptotically optimal, and which runs in O(n^10^100) time if !CH, and exponential time if CH. Then the P?=NP question would be equivalent to CH, and you should have the same beliefs about its truth value. If you’re like me, that means you’re skeptical that it has a well-defined truth value “for all time” at all.