March 10, 2005

All bloggers are liars

Posted by John Quiggin
Slate runs a good debunking of romantic popular misinterpetations of Gödel’s theorem. Key quote
The precise mathematical formulation that is Gödel’s theorem doesn’t really say “there are true things which cannot be proved” any more than Einstein’s theory means “everything is relative, dude, it just depends on your point of view.”
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen dubious appeals to intuition or claims about chaos theory and the like supported with reference to Godel’s theorem, but I have derived the following proposition:

Quiggin’s metatheorem: Any interesting conclusion derived with reference to Gödel’s theorem is unfounded.

Feel free to evaluate with reference to the post title, and your level of interest in the formalist program.

Posted on March 10, 2005 09:09 PM UTC
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