arfle comments on Epistemic Viciousness - Less Wrong

55 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 13 March 2009 11:33PM

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Comment author: arfle 09 November 2010 10:09:37PM 2 points [-]

Mathematics. No problems there because the wisdom of the ancients is still true.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 11 November 2010 06:12:33AM *  6 points [-]

Mathematics. No problems there because the wisdom of the ancients is still true.

Actually, a surprisingly large amount isn't. For example, the entire use of infintesimals had to be rethought during the mid nineteenth century and replaced with rigorous constructions over the real numbers. It wasn't until a century later that a rigorous use of infitesimals was constructed and it looked pretty different from the version used by Newton and the people after him.

Similarly, the question of how polyhedra's Euler characteristic behaved advanced through a series of proofs followed by counterexamples to the "proofs." (Although my understanding is that it wasn't quite as extreme as what occurs in Lakatos's "Proofs and Refutations.")

Nicomachus in his treatise on perfect numbers (from around 100 CE) made a number of incorrect statements that took almost a thousand years to be shown to be wrong.

Comment author: anonym 11 November 2010 05:43:31AM 2 points [-]

I think that the sort of epistemic viciousness talked about here is stronly correlated with having a single teacher for a very long period of time, in addition to the other factors mentioned elsewhere. For that reason, mathematics isn't a good example, because people don't study with just one teacher for 10 or 20 years or more like they do with martial arts and music study and many of the other fields in which the epistemic viciousness is common.