A monthly thread for posting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently (or had stored in your quotesfile for ages).
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
ETA: It would seem that rationality quotes are no longer desired. After several days this thread stands voted into the negatives. Wolud whoever chose to to downvote this below 0 would care to express their disapproval of the regular quotes tradition more explicitly? Or perhaps they may like to browse around for some alternative posts that they could downvote instead of this one? Or, since we're in the business of quotation, they could "come on if they think they're hard enough!"
This is horribly, horribly wrong, and I talked about it on an Open Thread here.
I continued my critique on my blog, which drew Landsburg out of the workwork and had a back-and-forth with him, which continued onto his blog. He did follow-up posts here and here, but I haven't replied much further on those, because I was really starting to get caught up in "someone is wrong on the internet" syndrome.
Anyway, here's what's wrong (if you don't want to read the links): there is no consistent definition of terms that makes Landsburg right. After a lot of critique, the error turns out to hinge on the meaning of "exist". Put simply, math doesn't exist -- not in the same sense that e.g. biological organisms exist, which meaning Dawkins is using there.
Basically, Landsburg is positing the existence of a Platonic realm of math that is always "out-there", existing. This is a major map-territory confusion, and should be a warning to rationalists. It's a confusion of human use of math, with the things that can be described in the language of math. The only way he supports this position is by rhetorical bullying: "come on, you don't really think the numbers didn't exist before humans, do you?" And leads him into deeper confusions, like believing that we "directly perceive" mathematical truths and that they can tell us -- by themselves -- useful things about the world. (The latter is false because you always require the additional knowledge "and this phenomenon behaves in way isomorphic to these mathematical expressions", which requires interacting with the phenomenon, not just Platonic symbol manipulation.)
(Note that everything he claims is true and special about math, theists claim about God, but this post is already too long to elaborate.)
The only sense Landsburg is right is this: it has always been the case that if-counterfactually someone set up a physical system with an isomorphism to the laws of math, performed operations, and then re-interpreted according that same isomorphism, it would match up with that that follows from the rules and axioms of math.
But Dawkins's claim doesn't deny that at all; he's claiming that populations of organisms evolved, not that "the counterfactual mathematical expression of evolution's working" evolved, the latter of which would indeed be in contradition of the previous paragraph.
I agree; but interestingly, that doesn't imply that mathematical Platonism is false. I'm becoming more and more convinced that the universe is a relatively simple mathematical object, and that this universe existing is a special case of all mathematical objects existing.