Re:Darpa Wants to Build a BS Detector for Science
by drunkenmonkey on Sunday July 30, 2017 @05:54PM
(#14888036)
Wouldn't, for example, set theory, be registered by such a machine as bs, owing to Russell's Paradox?
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Re:Darpa Wants to Build a BS Detector for Science
by joe_the_user on Sunday July 30, 2017 @09:38PM
(#14888950)
Well, if the mechanism was smart enough to flag naive Cantor/Frege set theory as contradictory by formulating Russell's Paradox, the thing would be pretty smart indeed. Naturally, you know Russell's Paradox only applies in that naive case rather than Zermelo-Fraenkel or Von Neumann–Bernays–Gödel theory.
However, I'd imagine the mechanism as having more modest goals - flagging the kind of language that's used to shore up papers with little logical basis, notice when hypotheses aren't used for conclusion or when conclusions are hypotheses, that sort of thing.