i dream of being possible

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reading this essay about math education

And while there are parts that I don’t quite agree with (but I think this has more to do with my anti-rationalist bias than anything else). I love this line:

The saddest part of all this “reform” are the attempts to “make math interesting” and “relevant to kids’ lives.” You don’t need to make math interesting— it’s already more interesting than we can handle! And the glory of it is its complete irrelevance to our lives. That’s why it’s so fun! (source)

This pretty much where I am at with logic and philosophy. Especially logic. What is fun about it is the fact that it is almost entirely irrelevant to our actual lives. And by ‘almost entirely’ i mean, completely and utterly irrelevant.

The fact that it has practical applications in computer science is incidental. The people who created the parts of classical logic weren’t concerned about whether or not it would be useful, but simply looking for a simple explanation for a rather complex problem (too complex, it turns out, for logic to handle…)