I have written an enormous amount of blog post. And they're the best blog posts, no buddy writes better blog posts. I swear. ...okay, channeled a little too much Trump there. They're probably decent posts, but you'd never know; I've never really bother publishing most of them.
I never feel like it's 'enough' to make a blog about, "What am I really saying here, and why should anyone care?" I go through 10 drafts of a posts, and ultimately decide to not post it. So, today I am going to try something else: Im gonna write a post and not even really bother editing it once. (okay...maybe once). It may be terrible...but at least I'll get my thoughts down somewhere and maybe build on it later. I've decided to do this because I have been living under the assumption that if I write a post 10 times, and edit it to perfection, then I'll be happy to post it. That statement seems to be false, which leads me to the point I'd like to make today: deciding if a statement is true or false.
In college I took a course in the math department in which we were taught how to "do a math proof". The starting point: a truth table. What's a truth table? This is one example that lays out the basics of whether a statement is true or not:
If you start off with an assumption 'p' (column 1) and reach the conclusion 'q' (column 2), then this conclusion is given by column 3. The thought I particularly enjoy in this table is that if you start off with a false assumption, then the statement is true - regardless of whether you're conclusion is true or false. (Note rows 3 &4, and how the statement is label as true, either way). When this was brought up in my math course several student's raised their hands and ask something along the lines: "Uhhh....why???". And the grad student said something to the extent: "Well, if you start off will a false assumption, then you can prove anything to be true." For example: If I assume 1+1=3 then I can prove that 1=0. (If anyone cares, here is my 'proof'). So, living under the pretext that 1+1=3 allows me to logically conclude that 1=0, which is obviously wrong.
I wish that we taught truth tables and logic in elementary or middle school math courses. Frankly, I think this course would probably be of more value to students than calculus, trig, and maybe even algebra. People could easily use it for any situation and it would immediately be helpful. Hell, I'm a freaking grad student in physics, and the amount of times I've bothered to do a damn integral to figure out an issue in lab could probably be counted on my hands (...only because Im an experimentalist.). But I use logic every single freaking minute Im in the lab. Heck, if we taught students this, it could be an entire year long course. Just look at how complicated these tables can get:
I truly value this line of thinking, and it largely shapes the way I approach any problem that is given to me in grad school, and in life. Given the rise of fake news, and whimsical claims of various sources of news being fake, I think that thinking logically is particularly important. It is one of the few ways to ensure that someone is not misleading you.
Well, that's all I have to say for now. :)