= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
anonym comments on Rationality Quotes October 2011 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (532)
Bertrand Russell
Or a mathematician.
http://xkcd.com/263/
I hope no-one takes the title-text of that as a challenge.
I actually did when I read it. If I ever get into an argument about the merits of racial segregation my speech is now prepared!
He did say "all exact science", a phrasing I think he probably chose carefully, so I'd charitably interpret the remark as being about people uttering purported scientific truths.
I think it's safe to say that Bertrand Russell knew about mathematicians, as he was one himself. :-)
Hydrogen atoms have exactly one proton.
What do you mean by "hydrogen atom" and "have" and "exactly" and "proton". ("One" I can deal with for now, but quantum physics makes the rest of your sentence meaningless (i.e. it makes your sentence an inexact high level description.))
By "proton" I mean a thingy that creates a potential well where an electron bops around, and by "hydrogen atom" I mean a single of these with a single electron in it, and by "have" I mean that when the electron has high enough energy you don't call it an hydrogen atom but "a proton here and an electron over there". This is of course a tautology.
By "one" I mean S(0) (and by "0" I mean the empty set), which is also a tautology. And if you don't know what I mean by "exactly" then you don't understand the parent quote anyway.
Admittedly a good counterexample would involve an exact truth that is not a tautology.
There are exactly zero unicorns.
But you can construct rigid, exact definitions for all of those things.
Though I suppose those definitions would have to be approximations. So Mathematics gets to have exactness to it, but of course Mathematics is typically not considered a science.