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Pseudoscience in Informatics

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-12 3:27

I often see individuals bashing mathematics as being nonscientific on /prog/.

How do you respond to the fact that branches which suffer from even worse practices exist within the field?

Like Bioinformatics ( heuristics and data mining data mining applied to something which is supposed to be an 4^3 wide instruction set )

or A.I. ( attempting of a invalid cybernetic transformation, hence the definition of a machine )

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-12 3:55

individual
It's just one ultrafinist. Such types of beliefs are rare. They're only locally fine beliefs, but as soon as you want to go meta or talk about abstract/general properties, they become unusable, potentially inconsistent.
Like Bioinformatics ( heuristics and data mining data mining applied to something which is supposed to be an 4^3 wide instruction set )
It can't be helped. We hardly have the computing power to ``do it right'', so people resort to hacks that will allow them any edge that they can get.
or A.I. ( attempting of a invalid cybernetic transformation, hence the definition of a machine )
I don't know what you mean by ``invalid cybernetic transformation''. If you actually believe that general AI is impossible, you'll have to either show some concrete infinities in our physics (such as reals), disprove a lot of cognitive science, or disprove the Church-Turing thesis. All 3 of those are highly unlikely.

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