gwern comments on Proofs, Implications, and Models - Less Wrong

58 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 30 October 2012 01:02PM

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

Comments (209)

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

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 October 2012 01:59:36AM 13 points [-]

Mainstream status:

This is meant to present a completely standard view of semantic implication, syntactic implication, and the link between them, as understood in modern mathematical logic. All departures from the standard academic view are errors and should be flagged accordingly.

Although this view is standard among the professionals whose job it is to care, it is surprisingly poorly known outside that. Trying to make a function call to these concepts inside your math professor's head is likely to fail unless they have knowledge of "mathematical logic" or "model theory".

Beyond classical logic lie the exciting frontiers of weird logics such as intuitionistic logic, which doesn't have the theorem ¬¬P → P. These stranger syntaxes can imply entirely different views of semantics, such as a syntactic derivation of Y from X meaning, "If you hand me an example of X, I can construct an example of Y."

I can't actually recall where I've seen someone else say that e.g. "An algebraic proof is a series of steps that you can tell are locally licensed because they maintain balanced weights", but it seems like an obvious direct specialization of "syntactic implication should preserve semantic implication" (which is definitely standard). Similarly, I haven't seen the illustration of "Where does this first go from a true equation to a false equation?" used as a way of teaching the underlying concept, but that's because I've never seen the difference between semantic and syntactic implication taught at all outside of one rare subfield of mathematics. (AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!)

The idea that logic can't tell you anything with certainty about the physical universe, or that logic is only as sure as its premises, is very widely understood among Traditional Rationalists:

... as far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

--Albert Einstein

Comment author: gwern 04 November 2012 11:00:33PM 1 point [-]

How mainstream is the Monte Carlo methods stuff, specifically the kitten-observing material?