Lars P. Syll

Touring again. Guest appearance​​ in Berlin. Regular blogging to be resumed next week.

Gödel and the limits of mathematics .[embedded content] Gödel’s incompleteness theorems raise important questions about the foundations of mathematics. The most important concern is the question of how to select the specific systems of axioms that mathematics is supposed to be founded on. Gödel’s theorems irrevocably show that no matter what system is chosen, there will always have to be other axioms to prove previously unproven truths. This, of course,...

Tid är en bristvara i tv. Om man likväl ––som så ofta nu för tiden — använder dyrbar sändningstid till struntsaker och menlös ”underhållning” måste det finnas ett skäl. Televisionen är — fortfarande — för en stor del av befolkningen en viktig källa till information och världsbild. Att fylla ut programtablåer med trivialiteter blir därför ett effektivt medel att — istället för att fungera som ett effektivt instrument för åsiktsbildning och reflektion — tränga undan viktig...

When in mathematics the unknown becomes the unknown quantity in an equation, it is made into something long familiar before any value has been assigned. Nature, before and after quantum theory, is what can be registered mathematically; even what cannot be assimilated, the insoluble and irrational, is fenced in by mathematical theorems. In the preemptive identification of the thoroughly mathematized world with truth, enlightenment believes itself safe from the return of the...

En plats i mitt hjärta (personal) Sankt Pauli mellersta kyrkogård i Malmö är en plats som, sedan jag flyttade tillbaka till Malmö efter femtio år, kommit att betyda mycket för yours truly. Hit söker jag mig gärna för långa promenader med min hund, men också många gånger för att söka tröst och vilsam kontemplation ‘far from the madding crowd’. En lisa för själen. Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,    Their sober wishes never learn’d to...

Julian Assange et la liberté de la presse .[embedded content]

In 1990, two economics PhD students at the University of Chicago, Jeffrey Smith and Kermit Daniel … composed “Economics to Sociology Phrase Book” in order, as they put it, “to help economists adjust their way of speaking in a manner that will make it comprehensible to Sociologists” … Concerning economics terminology, by the way, one can see that not much has changed since then. Oleg Komlik

.[embedded content]

A couple of years ago, Paul Krugman had a piece up on his blog arguing that the ‘discipline of modeling’ is a sine qua non for tackling politically and emotionally charged economic issues: In my experience, modeling is a helpful tool (among others) in avoiding that trap, in being self-aware when you’re starting to let your desired conclusions dictate your analysis. Why? Because when you try to write down a model, it often seems to lead some place you weren’t expecting or...

Foucault’s cryptonormative approach — a critique I always found Foucault’s work frustrating to read. His empirical accounts are interesting and some of his concepts fruitful – disciplinary power, capillary power, surveillance, technologies of the self, the entrepreneur of the self, for example – and he was prescient about neoliberalism, but his theoretical reasoning is often confused. His attempts to define power, and his unacknowledged slippage between...