Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by DiscourseFan 1127 days ago
Mathematical models aren't real in the same way as human social life is. Just like social structures, they are accorded certain laws, which determine their order; but human social structures have real effects, whereas one can modify axioms in a mathematical model and nothing changes until you apply that model to social life. By all means, math can model certain things from basic, accepted axioms that even we aren't aware of and give us conclusions we could've never predicted; but to pretend that this somehow implies that our axioms, which we constructed, are somehow "right" or "wrong" in and of themselves, and not in their relation to how we use such math to organize society--I believe that logic is extremely flawed.

Political ideology is always in the service of constructing a logic to sustain itself, consciously or not, someone constructing a set of axioms that just so happen to lead to the political conclusion they find most favorable, and then they call those axioms true. Whatever truth value someone ascribes to mathematical axioms, whether they be "right" or "wrong," is far less important than for what purpose they are employed.