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Stuart_Armstrong comments on Correlated decision making: a complete theory - Less Wrong
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Comments (22)
The strongest theorems are those that have multiple proofs, or where the idea of the proof is easy to grasp (think Godel's incompleteness theorem). Proofs that depend on every detail of a long tedious calculation, and only on that, are rare.
Proof that err by using implicit lemmas, or assuming results they can't assume, are much more common, and mathematicians know this and are much more on guard for those errors.
But those kinds of proofs are not rare in cryptography. Which suggests that there's a selection effect going on in mathematics, where mathematicians choose which problems to work on partly by how likely the solutions to those problems will involve "strong" theorems with multiple proofs and perhaps be easily accessed by their intuitions.
Now what happens when the problem picks you, instead of you picking the problem? That is the situation we're in, I think, so sloppiness is a worse problem than you might expect.
This reads to me like macho bragging.
Both math and crypto contain errors. Are they the result of sloppiness? the kind of sloppiness Stuart Armstrong attributes to mathematicians?
I don't know much about crypto. LF is said to be repeatedly wrong (in crypto? in another field?). That must constitute a kind of sloppiness. Is it correlated with other kinds of sloppiness?
i see two kinds of sloppiness I see attributed in this thread to mathematicians: (1) that detectable by copyediting; (2) focusing on the hard parts and trusting the easy parts to take care of themselves. (2) can lead to (1). There's a third kind of sloppiness common in senior mathematicians: they supply the proof, but refuse to give the statement. Much of the difference is probably material that mathematicians include that people in CS simply omit. (is crypto published in conferences?)
According to Stuart, in math there are often errors where "beginning will be true, the middle completely wrong, and the conclusion correct". I was saying that this kind of error doesn't seem to occur often in crypto, and trying to figure out why, with no bragging intended. Do you have another hypothesis, besides the one I gave?
What is LF?
My working hypothesis is that math and crypto are very similar, this kind of error occurs frequently, and you just don't notice. What little crypto I know could be called complexity theory. I've read very little and heard it mainly orally. I've experienced this kind of error, certainly in oral complexity theory and I think in oral crypto. Of course, there's a difference when people are trying to reconstruct proofs that are stamped by authority.
I thought it possible you were talking about the person LF.