It’s a start, but I don’t know that this rather superficial level of formalization really gets you anywhere useful. I think in practice you will need to learn the domain specific formalization techniques to make real progress. I know Robin has occasionally asked people making comments on economics to offer a formal model, and I for one would have no idea how to begin. In my own field of computer security, sometimes a proposal is met with a challenge to define a threat model, and again this often serves to silence the amateurs.
In fact there is a danger that demands for formalization end up being a way of excluding those who are not members of the club.
Perhaps a better response to the forays of amateurs would be to define a formal model that represents your understanding of their argument, explain it to them, and see if they agree that it’s accurate.
That’s a lot of work to respond to an amateur’s argument with. Probably at least an order of magnitude more work than went into the original argument. And the formal argument is likely to end up being very different from the original, informal one; it would be very frustrating to take someone’s informal argument, formalize it, show that the formal version of the argument is incorrect, and then be told that your formalization missed some important insight.
Good examples of this include the efforts of posters on the newsgroup sci.math to make sense of arguments by math cranks who believe that they’ve proved the denumerability of the reals or what have you.
It’s a start, but I don’t know that this rather superficial level of formalization really gets you anywhere useful. I think in practice you will need to learn the domain specific formalization techniques to make real progress. I know Robin has occasionally asked people making comments on economics to offer a formal model, and I for one would have no idea how to begin. In my own field of computer security, sometimes a proposal is met with a challenge to define a threat model, and again this often serves to silence the amateurs.
In fact there is a danger that demands for formalization end up being a way of excluding those who are not members of the club.
Perhaps a better response to the forays of amateurs would be to define a formal model that represents your understanding of their argument, explain it to them, and see if they agree that it’s accurate.
That’s a lot of work to respond to an amateur’s argument with. Probably at least an order of magnitude more work than went into the original argument. And the formal argument is likely to end up being very different from the original, informal one; it would be very frustrating to take someone’s informal argument, formalize it, show that the formal version of the argument is incorrect, and then be told that your formalization missed some important insight.
Really? Maybe I’m just naive. Could you give me an example of an argument and its formalization?
Good examples of this include the efforts of posters on the newsgroup sci.math to make sense of arguments by math cranks who believe that they’ve proved the denumerability of the reals or what have you.