User:IssaRice/Strength of a mathematical statement

From Machinelearning

Strong vs subset

A puzzle: why do we say P is stronger than Q if P is a subset of Q, but we also say that a theorem is stronger if it is more general (so bigger)?

  • One reply/intuition uses something like possible world semantics, e.g. see Wei Dai's post on Aumann's agreement theorem. There is just one possible world (a single ω∈Ω), but our information state is the set of all possible worlds that we cannot distinguish, so the less we know, the more possible worlds we think we could be in.
  • One visualization is to use a Venn diagram. The stronger the statement, the more our movement is restricted, as we are forced to be in more and more sets.
  • When we say a strong statement like ∀xP(x), we are saying P(x1)∧P(x2)∧⋯∧P(xn). When we say a weak statement like ∃xP(x), we are saying P(x1)∨P(x2)∨⋯∨P(xn). It seems like in both cases we are accumulating more and more things.

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