eli_sennesh comments on Hedonium's semantic problem - Less Wrong
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Comments (61)
I can't say I like the analogy. The point of modeling an infinitely thin line is to generalize over lines of any actual thickness. The point of modeling a perfect circle is to generalize over all the slightly ellipsoid "circles" that we want to be perfectly round. We pick out mathematical constructions and axioms based on their usefulness in some piece of reasoning we want to carry out, check them for consistency, and then proceed to use them to talk about (mostly) the real world or (for fun) fake "worlds" (which occasionally turn out to be real anyway, as with non-Euclidean geometry and general relativity).