Wikipedia:Mathematical_models_in_physics. I deleted material on the Banach-Tarski paradox

A couple weeks ago I made a big edit on the Wikipedia article titled "Mathematical_models_in_physics", deleting some stuff that seemed to imply that "mathematics is not always faithful to physics" because of the Banach-Tarski Paradox.

I posted my justification for this here

Also here:
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why a place like Edinburgh is socially better than a place like London

The reason why a place like Edinburgh is socially better than a place like London:

If you live in London, you need to belong to some sort of club, or be friends with your colleagues from work. Otherwise you need to make an effort to meet new people and keep in touch with the people you meet. Unless a friendship develops rightaway (very rare), it's a big effort to meet up with people. This also creates a pressure about asking people out.

If you live in Edinburgh, you are very likely to live in the center. You're more likely to bump into the same people again and again, and it's much easier to invite someone to lunch, and to keep in touch with them even if you make no effort at all. You get to be familiar with the whole city quickly, and feel at home more easily. Edinburgh must be more like my Bucknell experience, but with a much bigger and more adult population.

Also, Edinburgh has a strong demographic filter towards highly-educated people, especially in the sciences.

This is a bit counterintuitive to me, especially if you think that London has a greater total number of interesting people.

DOP

My advisor Rens Bod is a computational linguist and the major proponent of a theory of language called "Data-Oriented Parsing" (DOP) (due to Remko Scha, another colleague of ours) which says that people produce language by reusing chunks they've seen before, whether concrete word-sequences or abstract rules.

While grammars attempt to be minimalistic, DOP proposes "maximalism": a theory of language has to incorporate a learner's whole language experience. It takes a child ~1000 days worth of information to learn a language, and the DOP philosophy is that children are not being informationally inefficient: we need most of that information in order to teach the same language to a computer. (OTOH, if you take a rule-based grammar + a dictionary, this will always take up less information)

Rens likes to generalize DOP to all kinds of human cognitive artifacts. I claim that all human artifacts can be parsed: language, music, film... and scientific knowledge. The latter is the subject of my thesis. Information produced by non-intelligent processes, OTOH, cannot be parsed. Parsing may be an intelligence universal: beings that handle a lot of information need to be able to organize it somehow. It would be an interesting project to make an algorithm that distinguishes human artifacts from data produced by non-intelligent processes (weather, geological, astronomical) or nature-made designs (plants, animals). I wonder if gzip can tell the difference, since compression is a kind of universal learning.


Michael Tomasello is an influential cognitive scientist who has a complementary view. While we say that maximalism is necessary for language acquisition, he says that it's sufficient (contra Pinker):
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(see also his "Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition")

For the second time in my life, I am siding against Pinker. And I really like the guy!

(The other time was about logical reasoning, when he promoted Cosmides's "cheater detection" theory. See here for why)