the-sequences

Epistemic status: content summarized and synthesized (0-1 steps of reasoning) from the Sequences by Eliezer Yudkowsky. Unreasonable Effectiveness I’ve heard several people – professors, peers, and folks on the internet – express surprise at the "unreasonable effectiveness” of mathematics in describing the physical universe. In other words, they claim to be surprised that mathematical laws are able to describe the workings of the universe so precisely. From a certain point…

Epistemic status: content summarized and synthesized (0-1 steps of reasoning) from the Sequences by Eliezer Yudkowsky, specifically A Human's Guide to Words. Guiding Puzzle: Is X a Y? Questions of the form "is X a Y" are all over the place, and a huge amount of cognitive power goes into trying to answer them. Some of them are fun or trivial, like "is water wet" or "is cereal a soup".…