MrMind comments on Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project - Less Wrong

29 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 December 2012 12:26AM

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Comment author: MrMind 07 December 2012 05:27:07PM 2 points [-]

Am I the only one who feels this way?

Absolutely not, it's quite a common feeling among mathematicians :)

Comment author: Ritalin 07 December 2012 06:44:47PM 3 points [-]

Ah, yes, the mathematician's double take. One should be wary of those, especially at a high level; when an elder mathematician wants to skip inferential steps for the sake of expediency, there's a chance that "then a miracle occurs" is somewhere in that mess of a blackboard.

In fact, the whole point of having a younger chevruta is so that they can point out that kind of details the bigger, more inferentially-distant minds might accidentally gloss over. They're like the great writer's spell-checker. Or like the comment section for Yudkowsky's blog posts.

Joking aside, I was actually wondering if others here felt the same way as I about EY's latest sequence of posts.