There exists a program that answers the following question: "If 99.99% of academics are rarely misunderstood, but one single blog consistently sparks discussions, should that blog reconsider its presentation style?"
It's definitely math, or specifically logic. The writing style in the article leans heavily on logical statements.
Perhaps an interesting aside:
I always thought that mathematical logic, or at least the parts we typically learn to describe CS concepts, is pretty hardcore in terms of the abstract thinking we have to perform.
Until I saw what philosophers have to learn...
They are taught much richer and complex concepts that can describe how logic bleeds into written/spoken language and how you extract this logic from text. Logic is used, recognized and analyzed in pretty much _everything_ they do.
In contrast, we get by with the kindergarten version of logic for most things.
This subthread assumes that the blog is popularizing math concepts. If so, why can he not be bothered to write:
Let P be a set of programs that print all possible answers to the proposition P==NP . In this case, the possible answers are {"true", "false", "undecidable in ZFC"}. Then there trivially exists a program that can print the true answer to the proposition.
Everyone understands this. The amount of support he is getting here for the poor presentation is astonishing.
the other 99.99% of academics should reconsider their presentation style; the reason their papers don't spark such arguments is that they've given up on educating the ignorant the way scott does
you might say, no, plenty of academics teach undergraduates, and undergraduates are super ignorant. but undergraduates generally don't care whether bb(123456789) is computable or not unless that's on the exam, and their incentives run strongly counter to arguing with the professor if they're unconvinced; the way they've learned to play the academic game is by producing the desired answers, because that's what gets good grades, not finding holes in professors' reasoning
so i think people like scott and sabine hossenfelder are doing profoundly important work, and the groundless controversies around them demonstrate not the error of their ways but the astounding degree to which the current academic system is failing to educate the public
> the other 99.99% of academics should reconsider their presentation style; the reason their papers don't spark such arguments is that they've given up on educating the ignorant the way scott does
I don't see how the second part of the sentence implies the first. The primary role of academics is generating new knowledge. Educating the ignorant is a public service that few are willing or able to do. Scott Aaronson deserves a lot of credit for dedicating so much energy to his blog, it does not mean that 99.99% of his peers are wrong in focusing on advancing the frontier of knowledge.
it's a public service that nobody else is able to do, and if nobody does it, the result is catastrophe: legislating the value of pi, creationism in schools, prohibitions on glassware and borax and teflon, lynchings for witchcraft, acid attacks on girls for attending school, the ransomware pandemic, boko haram, the cambodian mass executions for wearing glasses or speaking french
i won't go so far as to claim that this imposes an individual moral obligation on every academic—that would be a variety of consquentialism with many consequences i shrink from—but at least it would be good to figure out how to demarginalize what scott is doing
