A seriously smart, friendly, productive guy
Matt Arnold, who produces the audio version of Meaningness, is a seriously smart, friendly, and productive guy.
Matt is available for front-end web developer roles, preferably working with React or Vue, and is seeking a fully-remote position. You can see his work experience on LinkedIn and reach out to him through email at fluidity@hey.com.
The collapse of rational certainty
New page: The collapse of rational certainty
This tells the story of how the foundational crises in mathematics and physics a century ago shattered eternalist systems—most importantly social institutions—which seem entirely unconnected to us. Our current era of incoherent irrationalism and government fumbling is downstream from the failure of rationalism a hundred years ago.
The page is in How Meaning Fell Apart, but it complements Part One of In The Cells Of The Eggplant, which explains how rationalism goes wrong technically. I mostly avoided discussing the history there; the new page treats the same material historically rather than in technical terms.
I posted a summary placeholder version of the page in 2015, intending to finish it “soon.” I didn’t, because it seemed to require an unreasonable amount of work. I was inspired to finish it now because Matt is about to reach it in his production of the audio version of How Meaning Fell Apart.
I’ve been obsessed with this material since I was a 19-year-old math undergraduate. There was this thing… When I asked math professors certain obvious questions, they’d get some negative emotion I couldn’t quite place, and they’d abruptly change the subject, or just pretend I hadn’t asked. “So, what is a real number?” or “How do proofs work?” I couldn’t figure out why no one else was asking these basic questions, nor why none of the professors were willing to discuss them. So I went to the library and found the official answers myself; and when I was 19 they seemed satisfactory.
It was only decades later that I understood that the professors’ weird behavior was anxiety left over from the collective trauma of the foundational crisis. It was before their time, but not before their own teachers’ time. They understood that the official answers were papering over a bottomless chasm of horror.
So I’ve read an awful lot about this over several decades, and the whole story is familiar to me. Most pieces are familiar to anyone who’s had a serious STEM education, although maybe it’s all vague and the significance is missed because the overall narrative hasn’t been spelled out. In fact, I had to spend a couple full-time weeks doing the research for this page, consulting upward of a hundred sources, to check facts and find quotes and make sure I remembered the details right.
That’s because no one has ever written this up before. Which is really extremely odd. The foundational crisis was one of the most important episodes in twentieth century history, because it led to postmodernity, which was the major theme of the second half of the century, and yet no professional historian has ever bothered to explain it.
I suspect this is the same pattern of neglect I’ve griped about in the cases of nihilism and of my explanation of why rationalism doesn’t work technically. These are all topics that the relevant academic fields agree are of great importance, but have mysteriously failed to engage. In each case the facts are uncontroversial and easily available in the open literature, Wikipedia even, but no one has ever put them together. My theory is that the obvious analyses are obviously obvious if you know those facts, and therefore you can’t get academic credit for them. So no one has bothered.
But this means critically important understandings are unavailable to laypeople. And then somehow it becomes my job to write them up for the first time ever. I think I should get a public service medal or something.
Anyway, I’m happy with the way “The collapse of rational certainty” came out. It’s more fun and inspiring than I expected. I hope you enjoy it too.