A little knowledge can be more dangerous - and embarrassing - than complete ignorance.
Yes. As a math professor, I sort of agree and sort of disagree with this post. On the one hand, people have lots of misunderstandings about math, as people like John Allen Paulos have written. But on the other hand, it's NOT true that everything has a simple mathematical model. Often mathematical models that might be useful in physics are not especially useful elsewhere, and even more often the most important thing is not the model's predictions, but the errors.
Look at the Social Security model, for example. It's incredibly unreliable, because it makes long-time predictions based on a single... (read more)
A little knowledge can be more dangerous - and embarrassing - than complete ignorance.
Yes. As a math professor, I sort of agree and sort of disagree with this post. On the one hand, people have lots of misunderstandings about math, as people like John Allen Paulos have written. But on the other hand, it's NOT true that everything has a simple mathematical model. Often mathematical models that might be useful in physics are not especially useful elsewhere, and even more often the most important thing is not the model's predictions, but the errors.
Look at the Social Security model, for example. It's incredibly unreliable, because it makes long-time predictions based on a single... (read more)