CronoDAS comments on Persuasiveness vs Soundness - Less Wrong
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Comments (19)
Hmmm...
There is a definite sense in which the second "theorem" is much simpler than the first. To get from "All men are mortal" and "Socrates is a man" to "Therefore Socrates is mortal" requires only a very short proof in first-order predicate logic.
In most formal proof systems, the proof of the Pythagorean Theorem from the axioms of Euclidean geometry would be much, much longer.