[FRIAM] theorems suck the air out of the room

[∄ uǝlƃ]

On the tails of the conversation about quantum woo and my pushback against any "authority" private therapists may have about generalities in psychology, this podcast pushed me over the hump:

Cranky About Theory - Computing Up 36th conversation
http://computingup.com/the-theory-theorem-computing-up-36th-conversation

which I found because I followed the link in Ackley's ALife 2020 tutorial ... always a mistake! >8^D Ackley splatters my attention like all the old demigods ... in a good way, obviously. It struck me that *this* is a much better characterization of why I dislike both quantum woo and ... psychologizing (?) [⭕]. So, we can make up some analogous concepts like "physicalizing", to mean the misappropriation and misapplication of physical concepts (e.g. quantum woo), and "mathematizing", to mean the reification and over-estimation of what some math concept or theorem may *mean*.

It's not that I have any objection to claiming, for example, the parallelism theorem might help us think about the world in a different (or even better) way. It's that I have these pre-installed or maybe innate *triggers* that are flipped when someone [⎈] physicalizes, psychologizes, or mathematizes, especially into what-was-otherwise-a-normal-conversation. When it happens, it's very much like what Ackley describes. It sucks the air out of the room. And that's true EVEN IF the jargonal reference is spot on and appropriate, but would take us into an 8 year long PhD program in order to understand *that* the jargonal reference was correct. Carrying such a conversation through, where 1 or more gurus school the others for . freaking . ever. just to get to some result that doesn't carry us very far is akin to the concept of "asymptopia" referenced in the podcast ... in principle possible, infeasible in practice.



[⭕] Particularly in a derogatory, uninformed, or hyperbolic way ... like diagnosing Trump from a distance.

[⎈] Not when *I* do it, of course, only when other people do it.

-- 
☣ uǝlƃ