TobyBartels comments on Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields - Less Wrong

73 Post author: Vladimir_M 15 February 2011 09:17AM

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Comment author: TobyBartels 15 February 2011 11:22:49PM 2 points [-]

Even in mathematics, you can find contrarian opinions that much of the field is meaningless. What we have is (or at least seems to be) logically proved from the basis of certain assumptions, but we could as easily have picked very different assumptions and proved different theorems instead. There is a prevailing opinion that certain assumptions (the mainstream foundations of mathematics) are correct or at least useful, but correctness ultimately reduces to an aesthetic judgement, and usefulness is known to be exaggerated.