[TechBro8615]

I find these "fork in the road" questions endlessly fascinating, and that's exactly what I was getting at with my comment about the motivation for formalizing mathematics. And it doesn't just apply to math, but the whole "tech tree" of human history. How many seemingly arbitrary choices led us down a path that unknowingly diverged from some alternative future?

Last time I commented about this [0], I made some guy irrationally angry as he told me I sounded like I was 19 years old. And in an earlier comment [1], another guy took extreme offense to my questioning of the statement "with enough marbles, the discrete distribution behaves like a continuous distribution."

It seems there is some high priesthood of mathematics and physics that doesn't like when you ask these sorts of questions.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35018407

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35201603

[skissane]

> Last time I commented about this [0], I made some guy irrationally angry as he told me I sounded like I was 19 years old

If people make comments like that, flag them and email dang ([e-mail]) and he’ll do something about them

> It seems there is some high priesthood of mathematics and physics that doesn't like when you ask these sorts of questions

In my personal experience, most professional mathematicians and physicists are open to questioning the foundations of their discipline, and deal charitably with doubters (even those who are coming from a place of misunderstanding).

I suspect most of the “high priests” you speak of aren’t actually professionals at all, just Internet randoms who (at best) know only slightly more than you do, and who know very little about the norms of civil dialogue