By William Poundstone.
I must read more Poundstone. His books have great tiles like…
Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It)
Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street
Rock Breaks Scissors: A Practical Guide to Outguessing and Outwitting Almost Everybody
This book was very interesting. It tackles the question "What are the limits of our knowledge. Why lays beyond" Of course an naive optimist would say we can understand anything. But that's not entirely true.
Poundstone explores age old puzzlers like…
Are we a brain in a vat?
The Voynich Manusript.
NP Completeness.
So how does one prove that the universe was not created five seconds ago with all our memories the way they are? How can one prove that our brains are plugged into the Matrix?
The answers come from pragmatism. The theory that we were created five seconds ago, or that are brains are part of the Matrix, are not useful theories. They don't yield better predictions than a theory that the world exits basically as we perceive it. So how do we know that we are not part of the Matrix? We can't really know that, but Occam's Razor says that idea should be clipped out.
Occam's Razor isn't a rhetorical short cut. It's an argument against entropy. The more complex a system is, the less likely it is to work or be sustainable.
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