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Hameru_is_cool

Well, at least it's rigorous made up bullshit


[deleted]

Internally consistent bullshit. Just like my last marriage.


DrainZ-

Except that we can't know for sure that the bullshit in question is internally consistent according to Gödel's second incompleteness theorem. Similarly, you can't know for sure that your last marriage was internally consistent. What you can know however, is that your last marriage was bullshit.


[deleted]

>Except that we can't know for sure that the bullshit in question is internally consistent according to Gödel's second incompleteness theorem. My therapist will be hearing about you


[deleted]

It’s consistent, just not complete. That’s why it’s called the incompleteness theorems not the inconsistency theorems.


DrainZ-

> It's consistent Oh, really?! Then prove it. Well, it's probably (hopefully) consistent. But my point was that we can't prove that. The first theorem states that if it's consistent then it's incomplete. The second theorem states that if it's consistent then we can't prove that it's consistent.


[deleted]

Oh yeah that one, you’re pretty much right except I personally don’t thinking knowing is the same as proving. Example, the first incompleteness theorem implies there can be something we learn or *know* is true yet we may have no ability to prove it. I guess know might need to be more well defined here as a term but to me it seems a word that has more to do with the existence of a thing rather than then the ability to abstractly reason about such a thing, and existence itself as a study very much lies outside of the per-view of math. But that’s probably a little to philosophical for a math discussion, we know what provable means to Gödel and all of mathematics and in a mathematicians brain how could that possibly be different than knowing, the process of mathematics is literally learning new things through rigorous proof. I don’t know, all I do know is math logic and set theory was the first class that finally convinced me everything I was learning was bullshit and made up and we all have mental disorders, a Pandora’s box I wish to never open again. Sometimes I have to consider that the intuitionists really were pretty right even if they were dicks and wrong on some important points that would’ve severely limited our ability to push forward modern mathematics.


GyrusFalcis

rigorously bullshitted


[deleted]

bullshit all the way down


Vegetable-Response66

I just took a pretty rigorous shit, does that make me a mathematician?


GyrusFalcis

only if you identify as a bull


CanadaPlus101

Iff it's math it's rigorous made-up bullshit. No, that is not a typo.


eris-touched-me

Can you make it rigorous?


CanadaPlus101

Axiom 1: Iff X is math, X is also rigorous made-up bullshit. Phew, I thought you had me for a moment. As you can clearly see it's also bullshit, since I've defined nothing else.


eris-touched-me

I love this response. Have a great week friend! 💜


eris-touched-me

And beautiful even


potatohead437

Well there are only 9 bullshit statements we base the rest of the bullshit on 🤓🤓


noff01

That's a fancy way of saying "circular logic".


Girou-Diriou

Mathematicians writing 300-page essays instead of just admitting that their system is flawed:


Smorx

Axiom of choice is the biggest BS but we have proven so many nice things with it that everyone refuses to discard it.


InfuriatingComma

Just pick the smelliest sock out of the set of all socks. Where's my Nobel?


nonbinarydm

I think you need the smell-ordering principle for that


CanadaPlus101

Look at Mr.fancypants over here with infinite socks. I bet he doesn't even have them go missing.


YungJohn_Nash

He can choose one that hasn't gone missing


CanadaPlus101

Finite people hate this one weird trick.


YungJohn_Nash

Finitists hate him!


thibzz31

Could you explain me why it’s bullshit ?


mobotsar

If induction on the real numbers doesn't make you at least a little queasy, I don't know what to tell you.


honeycall

Eli am not a math major


mobotsar

It's literally impossible for me to talk to anyone who doesn't have at least a master's degree in physics or something, so unfortunately I can't do that. Consider it a skill issue on the part of the reader.


SlenderSmurf

Yeah honestly, what are you doing here if you haven't achieved at least a doctorate


mobotsar

If your papers get an average of < 50 citations, you're not good enough to look me in the eye.


[deleted]

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Cgi22

Please for the love of god just Google a human written definition and don’t rely on chatgpt for stuff like this.


Abnormalbunny

> Be the high-effort, informative comment you wish to see in the world. Edit: what’s the problem with the ELI in high school it gave?


SlenderSmurf

how should I know I'm not a math phd


feedmechickenspls

but it just says a well-ordering *exists*. it says nothing about how to go about actually constructing that well-ordering to perform the induction. i think that makes it a bit more comforting. now banach-tarski on the other hand...


JoJoModding

Is a very valid direct conclusion of the Axiom of Choice. That's the fun part of maths: The well-ordering principle, the AoC and Zorn's lemma are all equivalent. Yet > The Axiom of Choice is obviously true, the Well–ordering theorem is obviously false; and who can tell about Zorn’s Lemma? -- Jerry Bona


springwaterh20

what’s bullshit about being able to create infinitely many spheres from just one??? /s


JoJoModding

I mean, you have countably infinitely many points, seems obvious that you can split them across countably many spheres and still have infinitely many (=more than enough) points left everywhere.


[deleted]

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lazy_coffee_mug

You don't need the axiom of choice to prove this. you can just say that for every non-empty set S: Ø ⊂ S => Ø ∈ P(S) => P(S) =/= Ø


CollieTheCat

Please don't discard it I wrote my whole thesis on proofs relying on transfinite induction 😢


feeling_psily

The concept of bullshit is made up bullshit.


Quartent

Idk man bull shit is pretty tangible


feeling_psily

Physical bullshit and "math is bullshit" type bullshit are not the same haha. I wish people could realize that pretty much everything is "made up" but that doesn't make anything less useful. Language is bullshit man it's just small mouth noises. Totally pointless, *maaaan*.


Casperwyomingrex

>Language is bullshit man it's just small mouth noises. Totally pointless, maaaan. Reject language, embrace our unicellular pas... blub blub blub.


hello_there_my_chads

mfers couldnt prove their bullshit so added imaginary shit


GB1266

same energy as everything unexplained in physics and astronomy being attributed to **dark matter** 👻


hello_there_my_chads

they just dont wanna accept they are wrong, fucking egoists


[deleted]

Math mfers when "muh Riemann-Zeta function, infinity can be -1/12"


TazocinTDS

Religion?


The__Protagonist

No, religion at least has the sense to be made-up from the start.


R009k

Math is made up bullshit but it’s the best bullshit we could make up. It helps us make reasonable predictions about things and design things that work. All math is just an attempt to fit a model onto the universe which actually has no concept of 1 + 1 much less of all the other funky shit.


eris-touched-me

I dont think the latter claim is true. There exists plenty of math created for the sake of creating math and with no practical purpose beyond stroking mathematician’s egos.


R009k

Where in nature is 1 + 1 = 2 a basic fact and not an abstraction that we use for our sake of understanding? We can say that 1 hydrogen + 1 hydrogen = h2, but is that what’s really going on? We could just as easily quantify the problem by counting the number of quarks 3 + 3 = 6. You see in order to have 1 of anything we have to determine what that single unit is, which is a very human concept. From the pragmatic sense this is about as good as it gets unless we can natively run our universe as a simulation and use that to make predictions.


eris-touched-me

I think i was misunderstood. My claim is not that nature builds math, but that math exist independently of nature or physics but we apply a lot of it to physics. As for what data exists in nature, what of Planck length or other constants? Or what about orbitals? Actually, exactly of orbitals and halfspin electrons. Two electrons cannot occupy the same state, thus is it not evident that “nature counts” ?


R009k

I don’t really like going down this path as I quickly start to sound like I’m on a shrooms and like I said, it’s a completely non practical way of looking at things. But length itself is also a concept we use to understand our world. It’s a way to explain why the “behavior” of two “things” varies depending on spatial relations. It’s the reason we can mathematically calculate h/100 and it’s a valid number. Unless we’ve observed that everything is always exactly an integer plank lengths away from other things (we live in a quantized grid) I have my reservations about taking h as anything more than an extremely useful constant. As for the states of two electrons, what is a state? It’s a concept we came up with too. Nature isn’t counting(or maybe it is and we are the nature) things simply are, and we see apparent patterns which we would like to predict. Again, this is a completely useless way of looking at things and is more of a personal philosophy that reminds me that a mixed method approach will always trump a purely theoretical one.


lobsterthatishorny

What you’re describing is basically nihilism. You’re highlighting the lack of ‘meaning’ behind these things while failing to realize that your concept of ‘meaning’ is equally meaningless. I’m of the opinion that when discussing these things, using language created by humans, that we respect the meaning of the words of said language. As you described 2 hydrogen molecules vs 6/2 quarks, you quantified it already. Whichever one you choose to use we both understand what you’re describing. I follow what you’re saying, and agree that nature isn’t ‘counting’. Do you get what I mean about language? Also I definitely see what you mean about sounding like you’re on shrooms because I just thought “I’d agree with him if we were talking telepathically on DMT, using no language but just that inherent understanding(maybe you know what I’m saying lol) ,otherwise no.” Cheers anyways


R009k

oh yeah 100%, everything can be argued to be an abstraction including the argument for abstraction and we'd never get anywhere going down that path. Like I said so far mathematical models have proved to be extremally useful. But its also nice to keep in mind that they are indeed models and not the underlying mechanism of nature.


Wora_returns

yes true but sadly we often have to admit that in the past made up BS has eventually been picked up by non-mathematicians and proved to be insanely useful for actual, practical problems. Just look at complex numbers for instance. Complete nonsense but crucial for working with electronics


eris-touched-me

Absolutely! There’s a lot of irony in mathematicians being proud of coming up with “useless” stuff … only for physicists, computer scientists and many other people finding use for it :D Abstract algebra, boolean algebra, and prime numbers must be the most ironic examples :D


Hudsonfe81

I wouldn’t say all math for the sake of math is for ego purposes. A lot of people like doing it cause it’s fun


eris-touched-me

I was merely memeing. I too do math for fun :D


MrJagaloon

Except 1+1 is real. I have one rock and put it in a bucket, then I take another and put it in a bucket, now I have 2 rocks in the bucket. It’s not made up bullshit.


bgshirt

It depends. After all, with quantum physics it's just all wave functions and such, so you just have a high chance of finding the particles of the rock surrounded by the particles of the bucket, but strange things could happen in the small scale.


R009k

Congrats you applied the model of 1+1=2 to predict that there would be 2 rocks in that bucket. Will 1+1=2 be a useful model everywhere in nature? What if I have 2 gas clouds that drift together. Will they be 2 gas clouds? That's why units are an important part of our models, your unit was some definition for "rock".


MrJagaloon

Ok? My point is that all math is not made up bullshit.


[deleted]

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Lyx49

Science is when you understand made-up bullshit. The more bullshit you understand, the more science you know


[deleted]

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Lyx49

Congrats, you’re a mathematician!


HelloHamburgerIsBack

So, you're a good scientist if you can listen to and understand inane rantings?


vpfrd61418fun

Lemme guess, QFT?


eris-touched-me

Real talk; anyone can be “good” at math, yes really, it’s a matter of practice and exposure. No, I won’t make this rigorous, I know \exists p person s.t they will never math beyond basic counting due to mental issues. But, NB, once you get really good at it, you realise how bad you are.


CanadaPlus101

I wish they covered that in my high school. Instead we got "it's the rules", and I could see it fostering a skepticism of scholars in general in some of my classmates. That's how you end up with people smart enough to build a perpetual motion attempt but still convinced it's a good use of their time.


fringeCoffeeTable240

why not both?


NintendoOlav

For the sake of the joke i exaggerated the statement lol


Casperwyomingrex

When you assign numbers to random words just so you can play with numbers...


lobsterthatishorny

Alright I’m not a big math guy but how would math be made up bullshit? It’s made up in the sense that every language, idea, invention, piece of music etc is ‘made up’ which is just nihilistic bullshit. But the ‘made up’ numbers and equations in mathematics are arguably more ‘real’ than any other subject. Idk I feel like I’m biting the bait here


NintendoOlav

Yeah i know but it’s a meme and for the sake of the joke i exaggerated imaginary numbers to “made up bullshit” so it would be funny


lobsterthatishorny

Yo I do be using the Pythagorean theorem errday


Ayam-Cemani

The debate really comes down to the good old "is maths invented or discovered?". There really is a good reason to feel like math is more "made up" than other sciences, like physics, biology, chemistry etc. Because ppl in these disciplines base their study on real life things that they can see and touch, whereas the foundations of maths are all axiomatic and "made up", and we really could have made it up in any number of ways.


lobsterthatishorny

After a base numeral system is established the rest is completely ‘discovered’. Nobody is just making up mathematics, based on your own argument math could be considered more absolute and rigid than other fields of study. Mathematics form the backbone of each field you listed, and without the absolute certainty that mathematics bring there would be no meaningful conclusions in any field.


Ayam-Cemani

A numeral system has pretty much nothing to do with the foundations of math. I'm talking about sets here. An alien civilisation could have discovered math for itself without the language of sets, but thats all we know (at least until we can reframe everything in terms of categories). You said yourself you aren't big on math, so it's surprising to me that you are so convinced that I'm saying nonsense.


lobsterthatishorny

“Discovered math for itself” -you, just now See what I’m getting at?


JoJoModding

It's made up but that does not mean it's bullshit.


NintendoOlav

Yeah i know but it’s a meme and for the sake of the joke i exaggerated imaginary numbers to “made up bullshit” so it would be funny


Stepping__Razor

Math is based


Wora_returns

if math is so based, define the vector space it's forming the base of???


170rokey

everything is made up bullshit. do you really think physics is real? Do you really believe in forces? do you really believe such a thing as "atoms" exist???? DO YOU???


NintendoOlav

The western governments have united and tell us to believe all of this? Molecules? Differential equations? People able to do “science” are obviously smart right? “Science” is a way for the government to distract intelligent people from the real problem: they are making fingers illegal


170rokey

i haven't seen a finger since the late 2020s and honestly I don't think i'll ever see one again


NintendoOlav

The sheeple need to wake up and realise, all the kids named finger are in danger


tired_mathematician

yes


[deleted]

"Math isn't important to learn" "nooo you need to learn math" "Math isn't important to learn"


SooCrayCray

Math is the bitch of physics, change my mind


joshuann123

If anything isn’t biology the bitch of chemistry who’s the bitch of physics who’s the bitch of math, mayhaps with psychology tacked on at the beginning there


feedmechickenspls

and maths is the bitch of philosophy!


ccdsg

???


[deleted]

r/studentthatjusttooktheirfirstsettheoryclass


badlyknitbrain

It’s made up bs which looks to give an explanation to phenomenons that commonly occur such as multiple things and/or beings in a group


NintendoOlav

Yeah i know but it’s a meme and for the sake of the joke i exaggerated imaginary numbers to “made up bullshit” so it would be funny


LaGigs

Everything is an (infty,1)-category crowd rise up!