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PaperclipPerfector  19d ago (text post)   35139 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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One of the most valuable courses I took in college was formal logic. I took two of these classes in community college before transferring to a university and to this day remain the most impactful. Basically Modus Tollens and such.

It fundamentally transformed the way I think more than anything, up until getting into software engineering, which I view as an extension of formal logic.

It would be so great if more people had exposure to such topics. But I don't have any faith that it would make a difference. Most of the people in my classes lamented it, viewed it as incredibly boring and hard, and did the absolute bare minimum to not fail the class.

I fully support the idea of a poll test. Too many of our countrymen are just downright idiots. They should not have a say in what we do as a nation.

It would be so great if more people had exposure to such topics. But I don't have any faith that it would make a difference. Most of the people in my classes lamented it, viewed it as incredibly boring and hard, and did the absolute bare minimum to not fail the class.

And here I'm reminded of Andrea Nye's Words of Power: A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic, written after that sort of bad experience with that sort of logic course, and arguing that "logic" as a whole is a tool of patriarchy, privileging the male way of reasoning over alternative, female ways of thinking. (Noretta Koertge's paper here discusses the book and Nye's arguments in it starting on page 3.)

To agree to some extent with @Glassnoser, how well does teaching logic work? In my experience, you usually don't need anything particularly complex, and it's always been very intuitive to me, such that there hasn't really been a need to precisely identify logical errors or forms. But I get, I guess, that not everyone has the same measure of logical intuition. Can it be taught in an effective manner that leads to an intuitive understanding of logic, without requiring explicit, tedious consideration? What made logic so impactful for you? How did things change?

It was really clarifying to me to be able to codify concepts that I intuitively knew. Which then made it easier to quickly "get" logical arguments and follow lines of argument, identify flaws quicker, etc. These were things my 20 year old self I was fine with before, but learning the formal rules, abstracting arguments into variables, and doing tons of proofs changed the way I engaged with arguments.

When these questions were being posted on Twitter, I saw people derive the answers using formal logic, but I knew what they were intuitively, which is probably the ability they're trying to test for.

It fundamentally transformed the way I think more than anything, up until getting into software engineering, which I view as an extension of formal logic.

An Introduction to Functional Programming Through Lambda Calculus by Michaelson starts from lambda calculus, extends it through logical inference to Lisp to typed ML in a few hundred cozy pages!

How can you know the poll test won't be the equivalent of diversity statements?

It's a good point.

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