A couple of months ago, my friend Isaac Morehouse asked me to talk about the philosophy of mathematics and why I consider it so important.
Appeals to mathematics are everywhere, from COVID lockdowns to NFL play calling, and if our concepts about math are flawed, we make the world a significantly worse place.
What does scientific progress look like? Is it steady progress, getting ever closer to the truth?
What about cases where we seem to have lost knowledge or the foundations of a theory we’ve been building on turned out to be wrong? Can that still be useful? Is that still progress?
These are some of the questions I explore with Geoff Anders. Geoff is a philosopher and research program designer who is studying how knowledge works.
He founded Leverage Research, an institute which studies the history and philosophy of science. Their mission is to understand how scientific progress happens so that we can apply those lessons to new or struggling fields.
Check out the Leverage Research website here: https://www.leverageresearch.org/
Or on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/LeverageResearch/
You can read Geoff’s series about knowledge here: https://medium.com/@geoffanders
Follow him on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/geoffanders
A critical thinker must have the ability to zoom in and zoom out – to hyper-focus on cause and effect and to see how things interconnect in the big picture.
It’s a common and critical error to be too-zoomed-in or too-zoomed-out. The over-focused mind is like the mathematician who doesn’t realize the assumptions of his model are non-mathematical and likely wrong.
The under-focused mind is like the mushroom-enthusiast that’s content concluding “All is one”, with no finer-resolution of analysis.
The careful thinker must be constantly zooming in and zooming out, gathering ideas from all levels of resolution.
Libertarians like myself tend to focus on the abuse of power hierarchies. The existence of a “ruling class” makes most of us uneasy. However, might these sociological structures serve a valuable purpose? Are they inevitable parts of human society? Samo Burja joins me to discuss.
Guest’s website: http://www.samoburja.com
Episode 100 of Patterson in Pursuit! Wow, what a milestone. Thanks to everybody who has listened to and supported the show. I hope it’s created value for you. In this episode, I share my personal thoughts about the show, some of my motivations, the conversations that were impactful to my own philosophy, and some funny experiences along the way.
And of course, more heretical thoughts about the philosophy of mathematics.