VKS comments on Rationality Quotes September 2012 - Less Wrong

7 Post author: Jayson_Virissimo 03 September 2012 05:18AM

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Comment author: VKS 05 September 2012 07:12:06AM *  5 points [-]

The view, I think, is that anything you can prove immediately off the top of your head is trivial. No matter how much you have to know. So, sometimes you get conditional trivialities, like "this is trivial if you know this and that, but I don't know how to get this and that from somesuch...".

Comment author: GDC3 02 October 2012 06:08:27AM 3 points [-]

Relatedly, a mathematician friend said that he uses "obvious" to mean "there exists a very short proof of it." He has been sometimes known to say things like "I think this is obvious but I'm not sure why yet."