Formal logic ultimately ended up winning my fight with it; but my layman’s understanding is that logic is generalizable to any number of states(I think even some of the various infinities); binary logic just gets all the attention because unary logic is…less than wholly expressive; and going ternary or higher demands increasingly challenging handling of infinitesimally different voltage levels(it does show up in NAND flash, though, once the vendors started running out of other density options they started into indistinguishable-from-witchcraft discernment of multiple cell levels).
I’m reminded of a professor my Dad told me stories about having: when the first exam was being handed out he told the class of freshmen and sophomores “This is actually the same test I give to my graduate students; but of course I expect their answers to be completely different.”
That one was an econ professor, so there’s a much greater likelihood that both sets of expected answers are dubiously congruent with the truth; but the situation in mathematics seems similar in that the set of axioms you hand to the student doesn’t really change much; but the answers you expect change radically depending on level.
1 Like
That is genius!
Who says daycare has to be expensive? They can assemble mining rigs and pay their own way.
“Excellent” – C.M. Burns
1 Like
100% this. Learning about logic, cause-and-effect, and learning to reason out this sort of stuff is every bit as important as other aspects of life. There’s a reason Lego is so universally popular of course - it lets you enjoy make-believe while also teaching you about these concepts. One of the great takeaways from my own journey has been how important “engineering principles”, by which I mean the notion that things happen for a reason and that those reasons are very often simultaneously simple AND complex I think has contributed to my ability to not see the world as black-and-white, good-and-evil, right-and-wrong, but instead inately understand that there are a lot of interdependent effects behind, well, everything. And I think the world would generally be a better place if more people were able to think this way. I know I am constantly reminding myself of the importance of doing so.
Books like this are a great way to teach that concept.
7 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
