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If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it

433 points · 285 comments · num42

trhway · 1789801366 · focus · HN ↗
It starts to sound like medieval science - "understanding" instead of proofs. And like a medieval army loosing a battle in the open field tries to retreat back into the fortress, people, facing the prospects of machine doing intelligent tasks better than humans, start to retreat into areas like intuition which supposedly aren't reachable by the machine. Some go even further starting to talk about religion. It is very Hegelian that the crown jewel achievement of our civilization starts to drive people away from the foundational principles of that civilization.
1. card_zero · 1789802504 · focus · HN ↗
  Basing science on proof (or anyway believing that you can) is Logical Positivism, a mindset that opposes the method of falsifiability. But of course mathematics is all about proof, and for that reason I was wary of it for a very long time.
  1. someguynamedq · 1789812141 · focus · HN ↗
    Fortunately this is not basing science on proof. It's just making it much easier to do proofs when that is what we choose to do

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