this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] xor@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 2 weeks ago (14 children)

Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is the dumbest and least profound theorem ever made.
e.g.

  1. the second sentence is false.
  2. the first sentence is true.

omg! reality is crumbling!

[–] exasperation@lemm.ee 15 points 2 weeks ago (9 children)

It was a response to philosophers who were trying to come up with a robust axiomatic system for explaining math. Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica attempted to formalize everything in math, and Goedel proved it was impossible.

So yes, it's a bit of a circlejerk, but it was a necessary one to break up another circlejerk.

[–] xor@lemmy.dbzer0.com -4 points 2 weeks ago (8 children)

that seems fine for it’s purpose, but the modern interpretation is dumb. Even the way Godell went about proving it is dumb.
how about:
x = 2
2x = 3,000
omg! they’re inconsistent! big whoop….

it just irks me because i saw all these smarty pants talking deep stuff and referencing how the incompleteness theorem changed everything, and it was basically just stoner philosophy, with a rigorous, needlessly convoluted proof.
when i finally read it, being sure it was over my head, it was like cracking a secret code that turned out to say “drink ovaltine”

[–] MBM 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Incompleteness means that maybe it's actually impossible to prove or disprove the Riemann hypothesis, or whether P=NP. I think that's a big deal. Maybe the fact that there are meaningful results shown to be unprovable (like axiom of choice) is more satisfying?

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