About these Posts

I am attempting to build up a corpus of relatively digestible material on reasoning from a mathematical perspective, leaning heavily on Whitehead, Keynes, Turing and Good. If one post is too terse you may be able to find another that clarifies.

In the short-run this focusses more on avoiding common mistakes than on describing alternative approaches. This is because in my experience

existing common sense + proper logic etc :→ disaster

I speculate that common sense has evolved to cope with most familiar situations and hence, while it may be logically flawed, it tends to be ‘good enough’ from a pragmatic perspective. I do think that there is scope to be able to improve on common sense to cope better with the many current problems that I think are exacerbated by the limitations of common sense, e.g. where our confidence in science or the legal system is ‘knocked back’. But we have to be careful before mixing incompatible modes of reasoning.

Dave Marsay