Through the Minefield

When mathematics makes sense, each piece seems to fit together. There’s no question about how to do things, because it’s all natural. This is what happens when you become good at algebraic manipulations. No matter how hairy the expression, you’re able to deal with it. Double-decker fractions aren’t frightening. Sure, it might be tedious to work through, but it’s doable. It’s sort of like strolling through a path in a meadow. Nothing is blocking you,…

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Overcoming folk-physics: the case of projectile motion for Aristotle, John Philoponus, Ibn-Sina & Galileo

A few years ago, I wrote about the importance of pairing tools and problems in science. Not selecting the best tool for the job, but adjusting both your problem and your method to form the best pair. There, I made the distinction between endogenous and exogenous questions. A question is endogenous to a field if it is motivated by the existing tools developed for the field or slight extensions of them. A question is exogenous…

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Visuals in Mathematics

There’s no doubt that writing is a useful tool. If anything, I’m biased towards writing. I write every day, so I know what it means to use words to craft an explanation. If you can use the right words in the right arrangement, almost everything becomes clear. That being said, there’s still a difference between writing and communicating. As much as I love writing about physics and mathematics, I realize that using this medium to…

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Techne and Programming as Analytic Philosophy

This week, as I was assembling furniture — my closest approach to a traditional craft — I was listening to Peter Adamson interviewing his twin brother Glenn Adamson about craft and material intelligence. Given that this interview was on the history of philosophy (without any gaps) podcast, at some point, the brothers steered the conversation to Plato. In particular, to Plato’s high regard for craft or — in its Greek form — techne. For Peter,…

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The Necessary Details

As a student in science, you’re taught how to understand the details, the gory bits of an argument or a concept. When you learn about Kepler’s law of equal areas being swept out in equal times, you’re not just told that fact, but you prove it. Each part of the argument is explained, and you get a full explanation. This is great, but the problem is that we don’t get to learn how to explain…

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Separating theory from nonsense via communication norms, not Truth

Earlier this week on twitter, Brian Skinner wrote an interesting thread on how to distinguish good theory from crackpottery. He started with a trait that both theorists and crackpots share: we have an “irrational self-confidence” — a belief that just by thinking we “can arrive at previously-unrealized truths about the world”. From this starting point, the two diverge in their use of evidence. A crackpot relies primarily on positive evidence: he thinks hard about a…

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By Convention

It’s game seven of the Stanley Cup Finals, and both teams are about to get on the ice. The camera hovers around them, and you notice that everyone has a complex array of fist bumps, arm movements, and rituals. Some even have smelling salts that they wave in front of them before the match starts. Superstition is rampant, and you roll your eyes as a scientist, knowing that it’s all nonsense. Except that it isn’t…

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On the Falsehood of Philosophy: a skeptic’s pastiche of Schopenhauer

Unless falsehood is the direct and immediate object of philosophy, our efforts must entirely fail of its aim.[1] It is absurd to look upon the enormous amount of wrong that abounds everywhere in philosophy, and originates in the words and writings of the greatest thinkers themselves, as serving no purpose at all and the result of mere error. Each separate mistake, as it topples an intricate system of thought, seems, no doubt to be something…

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Coloured Equations

title: A Splash of Colour author: Jeremy tags: [Academia, presentations, science] permalink: /splash-of-colour date: 2018-08-27 When giving a presentation, it’s difficult to present ideas in science or mathematics without the use of equations. It’s possible, but unless you’re exploring a geometry problem, you’re probably out of luck. If you want to get a message across to your audience that is more substantive than a bunch of emphatic adjectives about science, you need to use equations.…

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Hobbes on knowledge & computer simulations of evolution

Earlier this week, I was at the Second Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology (Evol2018). It was overwhelming, but very educational. Many of the talks were about very specific evolutionary mechanisms in very specific model organisms. This diversity of questions and approaches to answers reminded me of the importance of bouquets of heuristic models in biology. But what made this particularly overwhelming for me as a non-biologist was the lack of unifying formal framework to make…

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