TheAncientGeek comments on Mathematics as a lossy compression algorithm gone wild - Less Wrong

35 Post author: shminux 06 June 2014 11:53PM

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Comment author: TheAncientGeek 20 June 2014 03:35:11PM 0 points [-]

Not actually the job of maths..."this hammer doesn't work, you can't drive in screws with it"

Comment author: buybuydandavis 20 June 2014 06:49:02PM 0 points [-]

Math doesn't have a "job". It's use by people to fulfill their ends. For most people, those ends are prediction.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 20 June 2014 07:05:26PM *  0 points [-]

Grab an arbitrary piece of maths and it won't predict anything. There is a technique and speciality and skill of finding the right pieceof maths to match the territory, and that is called physics.

Meanwhile...no professional mathematician gets sacked for failing to predict or otherwise being empirically correct. It's not their job.