[netsharc]

It's interesting how the debate is transferable to other topics. In theory maths should be able to be broken down to its basic components and be proven to be all true, or if something is false, then the whole thing collapses. But in practice things like this become so complex that it becomes a matter of conviction, influenced by things like ego.

Now imagine taking something like biology and vaccines. What happens if you rely on your experts and other rely on theirs, and they disagree?

[kamaal]

>>In theory maths should be able to be broken down to its basic components and be proven to be all true, or if something is false, then the whole thing collapses.

>>But in practice things like this become so complex that it becomes a matter of conviction, influenced by things like ego.

Isn't this like doing a bunch of AND , OR operations?

How does ego become a factor here? Either an expression evaluates to true or false. There are only two outcomes, why is there a confusion here.

[bubblyworld]

That's true, but in practice mathematicians rarely check a proof to that level of detail. In fact, they rarely write a proof at that level of detail. There just isn't enough time to do that for every result/review, so people take shortcuts. Most of the time it's fine because trained mathematicians take good shortcuts, but sometimes things slip through.

[bubblyworld]

Yeah, it's true, there is politics in mathematical truth, for better or worse. That is slowly changing with the adoption of proof assistants, I think. A lot of well-known names (like Tao and Conrad for instance) are starting to formalise large swathes of modern maths in Lean, for instance. Perhaps it will never get to a point where it is so easy that formal proof is required to publish a result, but who knows? It seems like a start.