I know this is beside the point but I'm quite amused by this statement. Are you saying you're a totalitarian? I'm not trying to poke at you here; I'm genuinely interested what you consider the furthest thing from an anarchist to be?

Language is tremendously complicated. "Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana." "Hard hats must be worn on site; dogs must be carried on escalators", etc. Predicting the next token requires understanding, full stop.

> if the rules are followed, no understanding is neccessary.

The rules are the understanding.

(Note that understanding != consciousness)

We could make a very dumb biological calculator out of a few genetically-engineered neurons that would very obviously not be conscious.

It's still an open question if we can embed consciousness in our current microchips if we had enough of them together (which I think we currently don't), or if it requires some other physical process we don't fully understand, e.g. quantum. I strongly doubt it does require any quantum shenanigans, but even if it did, we can and will find all sorts of ways to make computers that can perform those shenanigans too. Eventually we're just going to stop being able to move the goalposts, unless you set those goalposts in magic-land.

No, I am incorporating multiple different lines of evidence from multiple sources, including my eyes, into a framework of knowledge that I am constantly challenging and questioning, and "the Earth is round" and "the sky is blue" have survived those challenges as good first approximations to the truth. Whereas "Jews control the world" has extremely flimsy evidence, strong counter-evidence, doesn't fit with my understanding of the world, and can be traced as a myth/meme to known bad-faith actors. Which, by the way, is all also true for "vaccines cause autism" and "the earth is flat".

Not everything is the same.

Maybe. Or they were pulled over for being black, or having tattoos, or being really hot, or because they criticized police brutality on social media, or because the officer needs to hit their arrest quota by the end of the month, or because they're driving an expensive car and the officer thinks they'll have lots of cash they can legally rob via civil asset forfeiture. We have far, far too many examples of all of these happening to say with any certainty that the police officer actually suspects anyone of an actual crime.

By the way, I have called in drivers who were badly impaired before. One kept driving up onto the curb, on the sidewalk and grass (next to a school!), then swerving back nearly into the oncoming lane, then stopping in the middle of the road, etc. Another kept swerving toward the concrete barriers on the highway, and when I passed them, they looked visibly asleep. Both times, the cops didn't care. They didn't send anyone. They sounded annoyed that I was bothering about that crap. The police do not care whether people are driving drunk or not, just like they do not care whether an active shooter is gunning down kids in an elementary school. They don't care if a violent dad with a restraining order has kidnapped his kids and is about to murder them, even when the mom tells them exactly where he has taken them. Their interests are orthogonal to the just enforcement of the law.

They have breathalyzers and blood tests. Field sobriety tests are not there to help police arrest drunk drivers, they're there to help police arrest whomever they want to.

> I wish we would focus on the actual crimes the police are there to stop as much as we do the police reform.

The U.S. is one of the most punishment-happy countries in the world. Nearly every politician vows to be "tough on crime". This is an incredible thing to say given the past 50 years of policing and justice in the U.S. Won't somebody please think of the children!?

> I am neither left nor right

The "center" is constantly moving and has been, on average, shifting far to the right over the last 20 years. Anyone who claims to be a centrist is therefore either changing their politics with the wind, or was far right all along.

Setting that aside, it's very difficult for me to take non-formalist views of mathematics seriously. I strongly suspect that anyone who subscribes to those views has some deep-seated confusion in their heads.

> Platonism, which believes [mathematical objects] exist in some timeless realm beyond this physical universe

This is equivalent to formalism, except perhaps in how the mathematician feels about it. What could any possible difference be? In what way could it ever matter in the slightest whether something "really exists", if we define that to be so weak as to include "in some timeless realm beyond this universe"? Surely pink goblins "really exist" in this sense as well. With such a weak definition, the difference between your "really exists" and my "really exists" is purely emotional.

> Yet another view is conceptualism-mathematical objects really exist, but in the human mind.

You can be formalist and still argue about whether humans invented or discovered math. Beyond that, this is again just relying on the weakest possible definition of "really exists", with some added human-centric arrogance added in. Crows can count to 5; it's patently absurd to claim they are using something that is "not mathematics" or some completely alien form of mathematics that humans cannot access, because it's crow-brain math rather than human-brain math. This sounds like the Copenhangen Interpretation but for math: humans brains are magic! What are we doing? What are we talking about?

> This idea that some mathematical objects are in a philosophical sense “more real” than others is a big motivator of mathematical constructivism

Yet again, this is still formalism. Up until here, you've used the word "real" in such a weak tautological sense as to have no connection to our (or any possible) universe. But here, you've switched back to "real" meaning "having any bearing on our universe". So you're saying "constructivists consider different axioms useful than ZFC mathematicians do." More often they don't even really think about usefuless at all, it's just something that caught their interest and they decided to explore it.

There simply is no "non-formalist" mathematics.

When the Overton Window shifts to the point where saying "people should be decent to one another" becomes a radical ideological statement, make sure you flag every comment that says that too. We can't have radical ideologues on HN, after all.

Are you suggesting that the results of calculations should always be some sort of primitive value? It's not clear what you're getting hung up on here.

Getting this wrong will not be a learning experience, because it will kill you. This is an incredibly dangerous thing to do and should only be done by people who already know what they're doing.

That's not just a tangential tidbit -- you don't learn well when you are completely out of your depth. You learn well when you are right at the edge of your ability and understanding. That involves risk of failure, but the failure isn't the important part, operating on the boundary is.

What do any of these have to do with guarantees of long-term compatibility? I'm not arguing that there should be One Programming Language To Rule Them All, I'm asking about whether we can design better guarantees about long-term compatibility into new programming languages.

> What?? No. If it was there'd never be any bugs.

Are you claiming there is no incorrect math out there? Go offer to grade some high-school algebra tests if you'd like to see buggy math. Or Google for amateur proofs of the Collatz Conjecture. Math is just extremely high (if not all the way) on the side of "if it compiles, it is correct", with the caveat that compilation only can happen in the brains of other mathematicians.

    weather forecasting models <=> code <=> math

    weather forecast <=> program output <=> calculation results

That is not counter to what I'm saying.

    Mathematical notation <=> Programming Languages.

    Proofs <=> Code.

You are certainly free to use a different set of axioms than ZF(C), but you need to be very careful about which proofs you rely on; just as you are free to use a very different programming language or programming paradigm, but you may be limited in the libraries available to you. But if you wake up one morning and your code no longer compiles, that is the analogy to one day mathematicians waking up and realizing that a previously correct proof is now suddenly incorrect -- not that it was always wrong, but that changes in math forced it into incorrectness. It's rather unthinkable.

Of course programming languages should improve, diversify, and change over time as we learn more. Backward-compatible changes do not violate my principle at all. However, when we are faced with a possible breaking change to a programming language, we should think very hard about whether we're changing the original intent and paradigms of the programming language and whether we're better off basically making a new spinoff language or something similar. I understand why it's annoying that Python 2.7 is around, but I also understand why it'd be so much more annoying if it weren't.

Surely our industry could improve dramatically in this area if it cared to. Can we write a family of nested programming languages where core features are guaranteed not to change in breaking ways, and you take on progressively more risk as you use features more to the "outside" of the language? Can we get better at formalizing which language features we're relying on? Better at isolating and versioning our language changes? Better at time-hardening our code? I promise you there's a ton of fruitful work in this area, and my claim is that that would be very good for the long-term health and maturation of our discipline.

And yet math proofs from decades and centuries ago are still correct. Note that I said we write "code that lasts", not "programming languages that never change". Math notation is to programming languages as proofs are to code. I am not saying programming languages should never change or improve. I am saying that our entire industry would benefit if we stopped to think about how to write code that remains "correct" (compiling, running, correct behavior) for the next 100 years. Programming languages are free to change in backward-compatible ways, as long once-correct code is always-correct. And it doesn't have to be all code, but you know what they say: there is nothing as permanent as a temporary solution.