TobyBartels comments on Scientific Self-Help: The State of Our Knowledge - Less Wrong

138 Post author: lukeprog 20 January 2011 08:44PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (493)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: TobyBartels 30 January 2011 03:34:56PM *  1 point [-]

And I should have mentioned "experimental mathematics", which is really different! This term can be interpreted in weak and strong ways; the former, in which experiments are a preliminary to proof, is normal, but the latter, in which massive computer-generated experimental results are accepted as a substitute for proof when proof seems unlikely, is different. The key point is that most true theorems that we can understand have no proofs that we can understand, a fact that can itself be proved (at least if if you use length of the text as a proxy for whether we can understand it).