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othercriteria comments on Strong intutions. Weak arguments. What to do? - Less Wrong Discussion

17 Post author: Wei_Dai 10 May 2012 07:27PM

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Comment author: othercriteria 10 May 2012 09:08:15PM *  6 points [-]

On the other hand, working on topology for a while gives one the meta-intuition that one should check reasonable sounding statements on the long line, the topologists's sine curve, the Cantor set, etc.

Comment author: komponisto 12 May 2012 03:24:24AM 1 point [-]

Or better, one's idea of what constitutes a "reasonable-sounding statement" in the first place changes, to better accommodate what is actually true.

(Checking those examples is good; but even better would be not to need to, due to having an appropriate feeling for how abstract a topological space is.)

Comment author: othercriteria 12 May 2012 04:19:05AM 2 points [-]

Completely agreed. Part of this might look like a shift in definitions/vocabulary over time. Coming to topology from analysis, sequence felt like a natural way to interrogate limiting behavior. After a while though, it sort of became clear that thinking sequentially requires putting first-countability assumptions everywhere. Introducing nets did away with the need for this assumption and better captured what convergence ought to mean in a general topological spaces.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 10 May 2012 09:46:39PM 0 points [-]

Sure. But we don't have much in the way of actual AI to check our intuitions against in the same way.