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#explanation

2 posts2 participants1 post today

A quotation from Douglas Adams

What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that’s really the essence of programming. By the time you’ve sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you’ve learned something about it yourself.

Douglas Adams (1952-2001) English author, humourist, screenwriter
Dirk Gently, No. 1, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, ch. 4 [Richard] (1987)

Sourcing, notes: wist.info/adams-douglas/29566/

Philosophy of maths questions:

Say I want to ask for an explanation of some mathematical phenomenon (that is, to ask "Why is it true that <X>?"). You might offer a formal proof of <X>, but that doesn't feel like an explanation to me because a proof is essentially a statement that <X> is logically implied by the assumptions. So the proof, as an explanation, is equivalent to "because I chose these assumptions".

Are proofs the only explanations that pure maths has to offer?

Are there other forms of mathematical explanation (e.g. involving reference to assumptions outside the minimal axioms required for a formal proof)?

Is it even sensible to ask these questions in the context of pure maths?

Is it different when we shift to applied maths and have to recognise that the maths is a model of the system of interest (so there's a possibly fallible mapping between the maths and the system of interest and the mathematical axioms presumably correspond to assumed truths in the system of interest)?

Given that we live in the stupidest timeline[1], I thought this might be useful in reasoning about the world around you ...

Occam's Butterknife: With all else being equal, the stupidest explanation is likely the correct one. [2]

[1] You may have noticed a lot of people have expressed this observation in the last month or so...
[2] I don't care if Steve Sailer has used this term for something else.

Replied in thread

The most common explanation why it's called a tape is because you tape music to the icon. Or you tab it and that tape is just a sloppy spoken thing that just got used because it's phonetics sound better.

Similar we all know that the save icon is just that a prehistoric 3D printed safe before they invented keys. It has a heavy lid to prevent people from casually stealing stuff...,
...,

...
😬💩

#WordWeavers 15.12.2024 #extra #StarRyde #writing #inUniverse #WorldBuilding #explanation #SciFi #WIP

A quotation from Watterson, Bill:

«
CALVIN: Dad, how come old photographs are always black and white? Didn’t they have color film back then?
CALVIN’S DAD: Sure they did. In fact, those old photographs are in color. It’s just the world was black and white then.
CALVIN: Really?
CALVIN’S DAD: Yep. The world didn’t turn color until s…
»

Full quote, sourcing, notes:
wist.info/watterson-bill/72712