kilgoar

Karma: −15

Illiteracy in Silicon Valley

kilgoar19 Apr 2025 18:08 UTC

0 points

0 comments2 min readLW link

kilgoar 18 Apr 2025 14:48 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Unbendable Arm as Test Case for Religious Belief
In technical parlance you’re supposed to say “contemporary,” or even “postmodern” to refer to the current era. In many important ways, modernity is passing. While your insistence that I use colloquial rather than technical terms is cute, it’s also despicably ignorant and you’re not making strong arguments against the wider view of history I’m presenting. You’re taking this a bit too personally, and I wish you would quit it with this rhetorical crap whereby you insert an overarching argument I’ve never made and knock it down with contemptible logical tricks. Read the history or don’t. Feel free to air out your ignorance in more of these facile posts of utter ignorance.
When I said that medieval Christians held a taboo against slavery and did not practice it, and explain the process by which secularization and early proto-sciences justified the creation of history’s most vicious form of slavery, medieval slavery in the Islamic world is not a counterexample in some kind of logical trap you’ve sprung. It’s a non sequitur.
While Liberal human rights tell you not to “keep serfs,” a stupid phrase meant to insist upon your false narrative of equivalence, remember that the most hard-headed Liberal of the early US, Thomas Jefferson, ensured that the institution of slavery would continue while owning slaves himself. And if you investigate his personal thoughts on the matter, he is weighing his religious misgivings against his proto-scientific reasoning, a common pattern in the slavery debate. His conclusion is that it was a regrettable economic necessity, and so Liberal values might tell you not to “keep serfs,” a painfully ignorant phrase, but like the medieval Peace and Truce of God, these are norms which can of course be broken or applied unevenly throughout the modern period.
If I were to criticize what you’re actually talking about, I think it’s nothing to do with history. Your whole thinking is suffused by mythology. Frankly, your ignorance of the topic of history is pretty typical and your supposed interest in the topic is patently fake.

kilgoar 18 Apr 2025 1:47 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Unbendable Arm as Test Case for Religious Belief
Serfs were not property of any master and ideally had protection against displacement and violence. In practice this didn’t always play out, but neither do liberal human rights. Equivocating serfdom to the displacement of millions of Africans as property is convenient and lazy, and completely illogical. And there is no denying the modernity in the African slave trade, the massive scale, the involvement of mechanization of the cotton gin, and on and on.
Probably just about every historian you can find is going to refer to the 1500s as the early modern or late medieval period, depending on just where in Europe you are, and it’s a time when religion became remarkably more harmful than it had ever been before, along with many other changes such as a terminal disruption of the church’s centralized worldly powers and the concentration of total powers into the state. And these changes are continuous with the present.
I’m not redefining modernity in some twisted way, this is all very conventional stuff. Who cares what “most people” think, they’re fucking wrong!

kilgoar 17 Apr 2025 23:35 UTC
−3 points
−2
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Unbendable Arm as Test Case for Religious Belief
We want to believe that as moderns we are better, more rational, so much more wise than people of the past, and it is this very conceited and highly sympathetic view of ourselves that is just so unthinkably blind. We may associate religion with the past in some vague way, an irrational set of beliefs that have been superseded by science. And perhaps that is true, but one can only look at the medieval and ancient world with a sense of their great innocence in all matters. Their values of humility, honor, faith, and so on are so different from our own imperatives of competition, survival of the fittest, and so on. There has never and hopefully will never be another era as vicious as the past five hundred years. Almost every comparison we can make is absolutely withering for the phony perspective that we are progressing into a more enlightened species. The more conventional view is that indeed humanity has become increasingly cruel, cold, and calculating even as standards of living, life expectancy, and political freedom has improved.
I can furnish you with the usual last argument in this back-and-forth. Indeed, the people of the past may have committed their own holocausts had they only invented factories and railroads, they may have bombed cities into oblivion had they only the technical knowledge to build massive fleets of thousands of bombers. Maybe ancient people would have worked harder to ship slaves across oceans and displace more peoples, if only they had better sailing ships. They simply couldn’t afford to house prisoners in massive systems before the industrial era made food incredibly cheap. But even if we accept this as true and factor religion out of this judgment, moderns are still left holding the bag. We are the ones who did these things, not them, and this constant fake history by which we make them out to be monsters is ludicrous in the extreme. It was the modern era when witch crazes began, it was the modern era when antisemitic pogroms begin, the modern era where we see the state persecutions of the Spanish Inquisition. These are all great examples of how religion can be made harmful, but they are also the leading edge of the modern world, mere hints of things to come. And let’s be clear, the Spanish Inquisition is carried out by a state that has seized the reigns of the church and is using it to their political advantage. That’s the common pattern in the early modern era, the passing of worldly church powers to nation states, it is reflecting a secularization of the powers, and their falling into the hands of the ambitious. Modern people are the ones who made religion a tool of harm, as we’ve done with literally every tool at our disposal. We are the ones to blame, I’m afraid.

kilgoar 16 Apr 2025 15:15 UTC
−1 points
−8
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Unbendable Arm as Test Case for Religious Belief
When you say, “Christian Rome kept slaves,” that’s indeed underlining the point that the Christianization of Europe led to a long process of abolitionism taking place over hundreds of years. This trend would only reverse with the introduction of secular reasoning to dehumanize far-flung peoples of colonial territories. This slavery took a uniquely brutal form as the rationality and reason behind the dehumanization of others was, at the time, something more like expert consensus, and it would be religious concerns which, yet again, propelled abolitionism in more recent centuries. It takes quite extreme rhetorical gymnastics to force the long history of servitude into some traditional linear progress where the modern secular society is in all cases better. The fact is it was much worse.
The Islamic world did not in fact only enslave pagans. The Christian involvement in European slave trade through most of the medieval era was that of the victim and the slave, with their monastic sites perennial targets of viking raids. Because of the demographic collapse of the dark ages, Christian Europe was a backwater. Our enlightenment and industrial era histories roundly tell us that it was backwards Christianity to blame for the dark ages, but they were indeed making presumptions with logic rather than evidence. This kind of history tells us more about the historian’s society and its attitudes, while archaeological data and closer study has revealed that indeed, the people of Europe were ravaged for centuries by disease and the subsequent collapse of supply chains. The counterexample of Byzantine success shows that absolutely Christianity did not hamper the society in any meaningful way. One might say “but if they were liberal and secular they would have done better,” but that’s also like saying “if I had a machine gun I could have taken over medieval England.” True but facile. These things simply did not exist at the time.
I am not making the simple argument that religion makes for better societies, and I can see you’re totally confused here. Rather, there are many mistaken and misunderstood aspects about the time and especially the role religion played, which are covered over by this overreaction in industrial era revisionist histories, which have unfortunately become a point of faith and a conceit illustrating the superiority of the present. At no point did religion meaningfully forestall the “acceptance of evolution” nor did it similarly stop the investigations into Copernicanism. Copernicus was a canon of the church, a lifelong employee. Intellectuals such as Copernicus were nearly untouchable and had vast freedom to publish ideas of all kinds, given they do so with what we would consider an obscene degree of humility. Galileo had every right to publish anything he liked, but like Giordiano Bruno his more modern personality with reputation and glory-seeking behavior violated medieval norms of humility, leading to some degree of persecution for both of them. Certainly that offends our liberal and secular norms which celebrate individuals who do great things, but it is wildly incorrect to say that the church prevented Galileo or anybody from theorizing or studying astronomy. Indeed, the church was the motivator of most intellectual life, and it was far better to be doing astronomy for the church than astrology for power hungry nobles.
The main argument that the church stalled science is flatly absurd. One can equally say that “science forestalls science” because of its high standards for accepting novel theories. J. Harlen Bretz’s theory about the inundation of the scablands met extreme pushback from geologists because he had discovered evidence of ice dam floods. It is almost comical that the idea of a sudden massive flood was such a taboo for industrial-era scientists that they held back progress in their field out of a fear that Christians might somehow justify their great flood myth with this new evidence.

kilgoar 15 Apr 2025 16:08 UTC
1 point
−6
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Unbendable Arm as Test Case for Religious Belief
It’s very good for this discussion that we compare modern era chattel slavery with the feudal arrangement of serfdom, and I am glad you brought this up. In the premodern Christian medieval context, slavery was all but completely forbidden, with most of slave trade in Europe taking place between the pagan fringe and the Islamic world in places like Dublin, which were set up to traffic peoples captured in these raids. This is in stark contrast to the systematic chattel slavery of colonial powers of the modern era, which purchased and utilized slaves in entrepreneurial schemes. The common controversy was between dehumanization by 18th century sciences and church insistence upon the humanity of other races. However, by the time of the 18th century the church had long deprecated its worldly functions and was often little more than a shattered and subservient arm of various nation states. Serfdom explicitly forbid the displacement of peoples, and while it certainly was a form of servitude it was not one that broke families or had a motivation in profits. It was closer to a protection racket than to ownership.
What hospitality really meant in practice is hard to reconstruct from texts, but perhaps the greatest exemplar of virtue in the medieval era is Saint Francis of Assisi. His innovation was an order which accepted the most extreme poverty in order to be closer to the glory of God. Your fearful phrase, “overwhelmed by beggars,” is a modern perspective, as being beggars indeed provided the Franciscans with a spotless reputation. Indeed, when Byzantium faced an overwhelming influx of poorly-prepared crusaders out of the West, the failure of their hospitality formed much of the enmity which would later lead to their becoming a target for invasion. There is no rule which says a value must be practical or fair, and indeed this virtue of hospitality did occasionally set off international conflict.
As for this “You have to include X and Y” type rhetoric, no, I don’t have to do what you say. Don’t be rude. I am trying to contrast Christendom, medieval arrangements and society, to The West and the development of increasingly secular nation states in the modern era. I will talk about Islam now because that is a striking example of how the sudden appearance of a religion with extreme emphasis on textual rather than oral tradition quickly generates a class of literate experts and clerics. Indeed, new textual traditions rapidly propelled natural philosophy and societal organization forward by advancing literacy. If religion really did cause “dark ages” as the industrial-era mythology suggests, one would expect the Islamic world to have plunged into idiocy rather than making so many advancements. If Christianity indeed held back science, then why was the church the primary organization dedicating resources to intellectual life throughout the middle ages?
The big fallacy is that the church could have held back science at a time when it didn’t even exist yet. At the time of Galileo, there was no “scientific method” and no literature rationalizing why or how such a non-existing concept might be useful. We don’t see the concept of a “scientific method” until the industrial era! How can the church hold back something which doesn’t yet exist? And then, when science does actually exist, this is an era in which the church has not had worldly power for centuries. They are long gone as an intellectual force! There is some dumb kind of knock-on effect where some religious people now feel the need to deny and hold back science, and it is fair to say that religious people in the industrial era have the desire to hold back science. But they simply don’t have the power anymore, they are no longer the center of learning.
It’s certainly true that we are more sophisticated than more religious societies of the past, however, the cause and effect relationship you are implying is utterly conventional. The only problem is that upon nearly every consideration of the actual history, it is utterly wrong.

kilgoar 14 Apr 2025 23:12 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: JenniferRM’s comment on: Playing in the Creek
Unfortunately Golumbia passed away recently and is sorely missed. He explicitly states in the story that a game “without play” was not intended as a “sick burn” of any kind, and that he himself enjoyed these games. As a sometimes Minecraft player, I can for sure see there are indeed many elements of work within the game, as well as some necessity to create order and preserve oneself by securing shelter and resources. The joke “the children yearn for the mines” is a direct reference to this same observation, and Golumbia’s paper only shows this dynamic might be a good question to be concerned about. I don’t quite see where you are going with this claim that his conclusions are outdated, other than making a side point about changes in game genre conventions over the past decade.
“Play” and “not play” are far from value judgments, but rather fairly intense loaded terms that came out of the application of Husserlian logic to fields like Anthropology, History, Linguistics, and so on in a movement called Structuralism:
If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infinity of a field cannot be
covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field—that is,
language and a finite language—excludes totalization. This field is in fact that of freeplay, that is
to say, a field of infinite substitutions in the closure of a finite ensemble. This field permits these
infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say, because instead of being an
inexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is something
missing from it: a center which arrests and founds the freeplay of substitutions.
(Derrida, Structure, Sign, and Play)
So to take it back to the video game example, Minecraft is missing a strongly defined narrative where a JRPG has, to a much greater extent, a central narrative that binds the player into a story where there are few choices and a lot of work-like “grinding.”
The temptation and danger of AI is its conceptualization as the center of a narrowing marketing gimmick of hucksters.

kilgoar 14 Apr 2025 19:20 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Cole Wyeth’s comment on: Unbendable Arm as Test Case for Religious Belief
I’m glad you understand. More properly, it is an argument for the Formalist philosophy of mathematics. The implications in terms of one’s personal religious choices are going to vary, of course, but Fideism is not a full equivalent to Agnosticism. Agnosticism says that we cannot have knowledge while Fideism says that knowledge is still possible through faith.

kilgoar 14 Apr 2025 18:54 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Cole Wyeth’s comment on: Unbendable Arm as Test Case for Religious Belief
Medieval logicians, theologians really, typically had a very strong Platonic principle whereby they could often prove the existence of God and derive His properties through reason alone. It was quite complex and tedious, and Occam’s razor left us with Fideism, the idea that any gap between reason and reality is in the final analysis filled only by faith. Overly complex self-justifying and self-reassuring linkages that attempt to schematize the relation between map and territory are practically useless and yet take up much of the intellectual life. History has been pretty harsh to Duns Scotus: the dunce, whose logic is considered by later secular sources to be utterly asinine and ridiculously wasteful. But, he was indeed a major influence for Occam.

In Occam’s words, “The ways of God are not open to reason, for God has freely chosen to create a world and establish a way of salvation within it apart from any necessary laws that human logic or rationality can uncover.”
Platonic thought wants us to be seeing shadows of reality, as in the cave allegory, and to use our power of deduction and reason to identify the essence of what it is, exactly, casting the shadows. Occam’s great breakthrough is in recognizing that using reason in this way relies on the presumption that God reasons in the same way we do, and that such a presumption introduces rather than reduces logical complications. This does not shut down the project of reason in the least, and it is far more like refactoring bullshit out of code.

kilgoar 14 Apr 2025 15:04 UTC
3 points
−7
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Unbendable Arm as Test Case for Religious Belief
We can happily and easily disprove the idea that Judeo-Christian cosmology “damages society” by comparing the modern secular society developing after 1500AD with that of the Christian society before it.
Poverty was a virtue, and neglecting the needs of others was sinful. The ancient unspoken law of hospitality remained, and turning away a beggar or a traveler who arrived at your door was an extreme taboo that has only very recently flipped. In the modern world, accepting an impoverished stranger into your house is widely considered a dangerous or harmful behavior. This attitude that poverty makes people evil stands in stark contrast with ancient superstitions that taught us Gods often take humble forms and seek hospitality to test our virtue. A failure of this test is most spectacular in the stories of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Warfare in medieval Europe and the ancient world did not very often target civilian populations as a strategy for conquest, as is the norm in modern warfare. Examples of the razing of cities and the mass killing of civilians in the premodern world are always framed as regrettable examples of cruelty or excess. In modern wars, the elimination of both internal civilian populations and those of an enemy have been repeatedly carried out as a systematic war strategy with a significant portion of resources dedicated and indeed sacrificed to that end.

kilgoar 14 Apr 2025 4:41 UTC
−1 points
−4
on: Unbendable Arm as Test Case for Religious Belief
The experience of eternity is not analogous at all to a conscious visualization exercise of any kind, as popular as the idea might be. Rather, it is far more relatable in the example of cathedrals and artworks.
I also recommend faith, but not because it has any kind of hyperstitious benefit for manifesting strength or so on, but rather because of the theological argument of Occam’s Fideism ringing true with my own personal mystical experience. The presumption that God, the very universe itself, should be coherent or rational and thus fit well to human conception is just an attempt to reassure ourselves that we are outside observers when we absolutely are not. What you call pure materialism, or what philosophers might call Platonism is indeed a form of profound faithlessness.

kilgoar 14 Apr 2025 0:06 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s comment on: Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s Shortform
That’s all well and good, but there’s cost-benefit calculations which are the far more salient consideration. If intelligence is indeed a lever by which a reduction is made, as constrained by these hEC factors, certainly image and video generation would be a very poorly-leveraged position in a class with mass persuasion or archeology. Diminishing returns are not a hard ceiling, as you might have intended, but rather a challenge that businesses have attacked with staggering investments. There is an even worse problem lurking ahead, and I think it challenges the presumption that intelligence is a thing which meaningfully reduces patterns into predictions. With enough compute, reduction in a human sense becomes quaint and unnecessary. There is not really much need for pithy formulas, experimentation, and puzzle solving. Science and mathematics, our cultural image of intelligent professions, can very quickly become something of a thing of the past, akin to alchemy or so on. I see technology developing its own breakthroughs in a more practical-evolutionary rather than theoretical-experimental mode.

kilgoar 13 Apr 2025 18:21 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s comment on: Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s Shortform
The idea that the skill of mass persuasion is capped off at the level of a Napoleon, Hitler, or Cortés is not terribly reassuring. Recognizing and capitalizing on opportunity is a skill also, hallmarked by unconventional and creative thinking. Thus, opportunity cannot be a limitation or ceiling for persuasive power, as suggested, but is rather its unlimited substance. Persuasion is not only a matter of the clever usage and creation of opportunity, but it is also heavily interlinked with coercion and deception. Adversarial groups who are not aware of a deception, who are affected by overgrown fear, they are among the most easily fooled targets.
I fully reject the presumption that the humanities are “capped” at some level far below science, engineering, or math due to some kind of “noisy” data signatures that are difficult for the human mind to reduce. This view is far too typical these days, and it pains me to see engineers so often behaving as if they can reinvent fields with glib mechanistic rhetoric. Would you say that a person who has learned several ancient languages is “skill capped” because the texts they are reading are subjective remnants of a civilization that has been largely lost to entropy? Of course not. I cannot see much point in your essay beyond the very wrong idea that technical and scientific fields are somehow superior to the humanities for being easier to understand.

kilgoar 12 Apr 2025 14:29 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: SoerenMind’s comment on: Learned pain as a leading cause of chronic pain
The historic perspective of ME/CFS is one, as usual, which gave me a greatly increased understanding for what the term is meaning. It was developed to refer to patients in the 80s who flooded doctors with reports of chronic infection of Epstein-Barr, commonly known as Mono. There was a glut of media reports on the phenomenon of chronic EBV, much like we see with long COVID currently. The landmark study coining the term CFS showed that they just were not showing any difference to healthy people who had previously suffered Mono, ruling it out as a cause, and the biggest shared issue was actually a high incidence of panic disorders.
However, the condition has been known about for quite a long time and it is probably wrong to think it is always or entirely psychogenic. In the linked paper above, we see a history going back to the 19th century looking at the now obsoleted diagnosis of Neurasthenia.
This condition appears to be an inability of the body to break out of a sickly anaerobic metabolism once a disease has passed. It also commonly appears and disappears without apparent cause. A study last century, mentioned in the above-linked history, showed that indeed, sufferers on a treadmill produced very unusually high buildups of lactic acid. Injections of lactic acid into a control group were unable to recreate the condition or its hallmark panic attacks.
Both MECFS activists and the medical community in general do not accept the idea that the brain could cause such misery, and it is a cesspool of blame, damaging care, and anger from both sides.
Having suffered from Mono, COVID, and Lyme these are all fevers somewhat unlike the Flu. Each gradually tapered off over the course of weeks, leaving me with no morning where I woke up thinking, ah, I’m definitely feeling healthy again. I have never in my life had anything like a panic attack, and so I don’t think I’m prone to the condition at all.
My recommendation is that general practitioners, psychiatrists, psychologists, and activists are all to be avoided. I would go all in with the Functional medicine from a neurologist in this one.

kilgoar 12 Apr 2025 14:01 UTC
−13 points
−3
in reply to: Zach Stein-Perlman’s comment on: Zach Stein-Perlman’s Shortform
This post is first and foremost an exercise in the danger of nesting parentheticals. The conventional view is that a parenthesis is an aside or a parallel thesis to the sentence. I think you can easily get away with eliminating all of them as your ideas are forming a coherent whole.
As for the topic at hand, you are spot on that LLMs are less scary than ever, and the risks posed by a poorly designed language model are limited to legal and reputational problems for the businesses training and deploying them. There is no sense in hoping for effective self-policing. We so often see the chemical industry choosing disaster over even minimal safety, even when the costs to them are much higher in the long run. Large corporations are increasingly chaired by a revolving door of finance people who optimize for short term gains and personal rewards, rather than the engineer-CEOs of last century who remained in their position for decades. As long as the leadership in these companies care about the long term viability of their products and assets, the situation is relatively stable. However, that is altogether the exception rather than the rule.

kilgoar 11 Apr 2025 15:01 UTC
18 points
1
on: Playing in the Creek
Said more plainly, it is utterly naive to believe Anthropic is motivated by a desire for play in the same way as a child playing with the flow of water. However, when couched within a well-crafted metaphor, sprung on us only after the fact, the careless reader may not even consider the argument’s basic premise but accept it on the basis of literary pleasures alone.

I don’t mean to pick on you personally, OP, far from it. This particular genre of intuition pumping essay is the bread-and-butter for Rationalist discourse. It’s as if the writer cooks a meal and wants us to taste it blindfolded, revealing to us what we’ve consumed only after the fact. This is somewhat of a manipulative rhetoric to inflict on a reader, as there is a sleight of hand type of deception going on. The sequences have many such examples of intuition pumps, and while they may or may not make for persuasive essays, the stylistic choice only hampers understanding. It is better to plainly state one’s idea up front rather than make an apparent attempt to fool oneself or the reader into a belief. “See? I knew you actually liked onions!”
That said, your thought about play requiring ephemerality is spot on, and it is a way of thinking in which the dangers of AI may be altogether flipped into benefits for humanity. Some of your biography resembles Dave Golumbia, a writer and humanities professor who left software for the same sentiments you are expressing here. I recalled his essay, Games without Play, and it is surprising how many of the most addictive games, for example World of Warcraft, have seemingly found their success by eliminating play.

How to defeat superintelligence, the Sta-Hi way

kilgoar9 Apr 2025 13:58 UTC

−7 points

0 comments3 min readLW link

kilgoar 8 Apr 2025 23:54 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: sjadler’s comment on: Ben Pace’s Shortform Feed
The record is the journalist’s and not the interview subject’s. When the journalist says something will be off the record, they have some authority on the matter, as they are the ones who will be writing said record. The meaning in this sense is a mere reassurance and nothing more.
When an interview subject requests for statements to be off the record, or worse, declares that they are off the record before saying them, they are of course requesting or merely performing a reassurance. Add to this picture a subject also requesting editorial powers, and it is just an amusing situation.
Denying future access is the main power the subject can exercise over the journalist, and refusing to say further things does not really undo any potential damage. It is much better for a subject to prepare beforehand with completely sound answers at the ready, and best to not participate at all if they have the slightest concerns.
Generally, a journalist does want to create an accurate picture, and they will usually be quite pleased to jump through the subject’s hoops to get them there. It’s best to just let the subject think that “off the record” means something, even as they are being recorded.

kilgoar 8 Apr 2025 1:47 UTC
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on: Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project
This calls to mind Borges, On Exactitude in Science. When everything has been reduced, ie the completion of the Great Reduction, there ceases to be any use in it. It is unwieldy as what it describes. And in the final analysis, it is yet a faddish creation of temporal power.

To follow the footsteps of Husserl, we can perform a much more fundamental reduction, possible by collapsing nouma and noesis. We do not have a “map,” there is no “territory” at all. Rather, we build logic upon something more indisputable, Being, and already our reason is no longer crippled with this confused, hierarchical, operation-driven set of discrete definable terms. Much better, processes and time are implied, our embodied limitations are also implied. This binary world of confusing essences and correlations, ancient Platonism really, pervades so much needless discussion and leads to a foolish talk about pausing and accelerating the very flow of time. It is a rhetoric of grasping at a godlike power, Exactitude in Science.

Rudy Rucker spoke with Gödel several times, once mentioning the question of Exactitude in Science.
The Kafkaesque aspect of Gödel’s work and character is expressed in his famous Incompleteness Theorem of 1930. Although this theorem can be stated and proved in a rigorously mathematical way, what it seems to say is that rational thought can never penetrate to the final, ultimate truth. A bit more precisely, the Incompleteness Theorem shows that human beings can never formulate a correct and complete description of the set of natural numbers, {0, 1, 2, 3, . . .}. But if mathematicians cannot ever fully understand something as simple as number theory, then it is certainly too much to expect that science will ever expose any ultimate secret of the universe.
Remarkably, we read that Gödel was yet a Platonist:
I asked him how best to perceive pure abstract possibility. He said three things, i) First one must close off the other senses, for instance, by lying down in a quiet place. It is not enough, however, to perform this negative action, one must actively seek with the mind, ii) It is a mistake to let everyday reality condition possibility, and only to imagine the combinings and permutations of physical objects—the mind is capable of directly perceiving infinite sets, iii) The ultimate goal of such thought, and of all philosophy, is the perception of the Absolute. Gödel rounded off these comments with a remark on Plato: “When Plautus could fully perceive the Good, his philosophy ended.”
Immediately I think of The Aleph, another story of Borges, one in which a human mind perceives all of reality within a single point. The genius of Borges is to illustrate this fulfillment of Platonism in the context of a personal relationship, where we are seeing something obscene and voyeuristic in the absolute.
A more conventional view for 21st century Mathematicians is Formalism, where we are viewing math and logic as games.
The game of mathematics is, for some obscure reason, a useful game. Some strings of symbols seem to reflect certain patterns of the physical world. Not only is “2 + 2 = 4” a theorem, but two apples taken with two more apples make four apples.
It is when one begins talking about infinite numbers that the trouble really begins. Cantor’s Continuum Problem is undecidable on the basis of our present-day theories of mathematics. For the formalists this means that the continuum question has no definite answer. But for a Platonist like Gödel, this means only that we have not yet “looked” at the continuum hard enough to see what the answer is.
It is my view that Platonism is unnecessary justification for logic-as-rhetoric. Gödel had to deny the passage of time to save the unnecessary separation of concept and reality, but it was a folly.
How much easier it is to see language as Borges does in This Craft of Verse, passion and poetry a unified whole. How much easier to play, than to rattle away about pausing and fast forwarding and so on.

kilgoar 6 Apr 2025 19:48 UTC
26 points
5
on: Why Have Sentence Lengths Decreased?
Should we extend the scope of the data to include pre-Carolingian texts, it would of course approach infinite sentence length as punctuation had rarely been implemented. Even worse, should we go back into ancient Roman or Greek texts, a naive appraisal might also lead us to believe that syllables per word also approach staggering levels of complexity, since the convention of placing spaces or interpuncts between words was uncommon.

Indeed, spacing between words, capitalization, and punctuation were expressly introduced for readability incidentally, a consequence of the practical ease in the mindless and error-prone process of manual copying of documents, which came before the invention of the printing press.

It’s not controversial to say that writing with sentences and spacing between words is easier to understand. But what do we gain by counting the punctuation in Chaucer’s romance, a drama by Dickens, and a novel by Rowling, and comparing them? The fact of the matter is that modern editions of Chaucer’s works have recognizable punctuation only in translation. You’re going to see strange things like interpuncts which are not clearly correlating to modern punctuation, and are requiring interpretation, and they aren’t going to be consistent between versions. Gothic punctuation is a fun rabbit hole, if you are interested in that.

I am unsure that the data is showing sentences are getting shorter. It is including eras in which the present norms or conventions for punctuation had not yet been established. There is great sense in studying how and why these conventions are developed, but I do not think these statistics are themselves a puzzle which needs solving.

kilgoar

Illiter­acy in Sili­con Valley

How to defeat su­per­in­tel­li­gence, the Sta-Hi way

Illiteracy in Silicon Valley

How to defeat superintelligence, the Sta-Hi way