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I came across an interesting blog post by Rudy Rucker from 2012 that I found quite interesting and thought I would share with my fellow Soylentils. It is titled "Memories of Kurt Gödel" and it is quite an interesting read.
Kurt Gödel was unquestionably the greatest logician of the century. He may also have been one of our greatest philosophers. When he died in 1978, one of the speakers at his memorial service made a provocative comparison of Gödel with Einstein ... and with Kafka.
Like Einstein, Gödel was German-speaking and sought a haven from the events of the Second World War in Princeton. And like Einstein, Gödel developed a structure of exact thought that forces everyone, scientist and layman alike, to look at the world in a new way.
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.
Wikipedia's page on Gödel's incompleteness theorems summarizes:
The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an effective procedure (i.e., an algorithm) is capable of proving all truths about the arithmetic of the natural numbers. For any such formal system, there will always be statements about the natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system. The second incompleteness theorem, an extension of the first, shows that the system cannot demonstrate its own consistency.
Employing a diagonal argument, Gödel's incompleteness theorems were the first of several closely related theorems on the limitations of formal systems. They were followed by Tarski's undefinability theorem on the formal undefinability of truth, Church's proof that Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem is unsolvable, and Turing's theorem that there is no algorithm to solve the halting problem.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday August 16 2017, @05:16AM
Comments != interest. I know on the days that everyone on the internet likes to measure stuff by discussion metrics and "participation," but we all know here (or should know) the rules about how many people read or are interested in stuff vs. the much tinier fraction who participate actively. Those stats lean much more heavily toward viewers/readers and away from participants (I would assume) on stuff like hard-science articles.
Political articles attract more discussion because most people feel like they can have an opinion. Moreover, politics is often divided into easy "sides," creating built-in confrontation, which promotes discussion.
Commenting on a science article requires either WORK (RTFA) or pre-existing knowledge or both. Then it requires you to come up with something interesting to say -- "This doesn't quite make sense" or "I really liked this part of the finding." And most of those comments won't result in significant discussion -- the first just needs one knowledgeable explanation in reply, and the second doesn't really need any follow-up comments at all. Or you might have a comment of "this reminds me of some other related stuff" which again doesn't often require follow-up discussion.
Meanwhile, to comment on a political article, you only need to subscribe to a pre-existing side that agrees or disagrees, and then other people can easily just jump in and start yelling the other direction. So, frankly, your observation that there's more discussion on articles that facilitate discussion is basically a tautology.
I like the science and math and whatever articles a lot more than the political ones, and I'm more likely to actually bother to RTFA on science or math. The political ones are generally just prompts to get people yelling, so it's often not even worthwhile to RTFA since the discussion is going to rapidly head off the rails anyway.
TL;DR -- more comments != more interest (necessarily), but I already said that.