[FRIAM] FW: sfx News: Three Tuesdays Tomorrow Night Instead

2008-10-07 Thread Nicholas Thompson
I am taking the liberty of forwarding this to the FRIAM group because I think it is such a great opportunity. It is the kind of thing large numbers of people pay big money to go here in some hotel ball room somewhere and it is happening right here in Santa Fe.Please see below. Hope to

Re: [FRIAM] Wittgenstein

2008-10-07 Thread John F. Kennison
Glen, You have made some interesting points. I don't deny that forming a proof involves invention and symbol manipulation. I also agree that mathematical truth is different from scientific truth. I now think the core question is whether a proof, according to the usual rules of symbol manipulat

Re: [FRIAM] government hierarchy (was Re: Willful Ignorance)

2008-10-07 Thread glen e. p. ropella
Thus spake Phil Henshaw circa 10/07/2008 12:15 PM: > Well, the reliance on competence is relative to the difficulty of the task. > As our world explodes with new connections and complexity that's sort of in > doubt, isn't it? Isn't Taleb's observation that when you have increasingly > complex pro

Re: [FRIAM] Wittgenstein

2008-10-07 Thread Phil Henshaw
Or. another angle. Proofs represent discoveries about the invented grammar they use, with the proviso of "so far as we can see"? The way we define grammars changes to suite our intentions occasionally, but we're generally trying to identify things inherent in nature, for grammars drawn as con

Re: [FRIAM] government hierarchy (was Re: Willful Ignorance)

2008-10-07 Thread Phil Henshaw
Well, the reliance on competence is relative to the difficulty of the task. As our world explodes with new connections and complexity that's sort of in doubt, isn't it? Isn't Taleb's observation that when you have increasingly complex problems with increasingly 'fat tailed' distributions of corre

Re: [FRIAM] Self-awareness

2008-10-07 Thread Phil Henshaw
Russ, Oh, just that scientists appear to be one of the main violators of your self-awareness principle. Scientists tend to describe the physical world as if they are unaware that science constructs descriptive models of things far too complex to model, that might behave differently from any ki

Re: [FRIAM] Wittgenstein

2008-10-07 Thread glen e. p. ropella
Thus spake John F. Kennison circa 10/07/2008 10:53 AM: > Okay, suppose someone else simply entered some numbers in a Suduko > grid and said, "I wonder whether there is any solution that > incorporates these numbers, and, if there is a solution, is it > unique?" I concede that the person who did thi

Re: [FRIAM] Wittgenstein

2008-10-07 Thread John F. Kennison
Okay, suppose someone else simply entered some numbers in a Suduko grid and said, "I wonder whether there is any solution that incorporates these numbers, and, if there is a solution, is it unique?" I concede that the person who did this invented the problem. But if I prove that there is a solut

Re: [FRIAM] Wittgenstein

2008-10-07 Thread glen e. p. ropella
Thus spake John F. Kennison circa 10/07/2008 10:01 AM: > I would like to respond to Wittgenstein's idea that a mathematical > proof should be called an invention rather than a discovery. When > solving a Suduko puzzle, I often produce a logical deduction that the > solution is unique. It seems clea

Re: [FRIAM] Wittgenstein

2008-10-07 Thread John F. Kennison
I would like to respond to Wittgenstein's idea that a mathematical proof should be called an invention rather than a discovery. When solving a Suduko puzzle, I often produce a logical deduction that the solution is unique. It seems clear to me that I discovered that there is only one soluti