[williamstein]

Kevin Buzzard told me that the worry that it might in fact be wrong is a huge motivator for him. I also once asked Serge Lang why so much mathematics is correct (which surprised me coming from programming where everything has bugs), and he said; “people do a large number of consistency checks beyond what is in the published proofs, which makes the chances the claimed results are correct much, much higher.” Another related quote Bryan Birch told me once: “it is always a good idea to prove true theorems.”

[adastra22]

I suspect he is massively overestimating the reliability of obscure mathematics.

[ykonstant]

> Kevin Buzzard told me that the worry that it might in fact be wrong is a huge motivator for him.

And then, when I raised concerns in Zulip about Lean's metaprogramming facilities being used to trick the pipeline into accepting false proofs, he said the opposite. He even emphasized that the formalization efforts are not for checking proof correctness, but for cataloguing truths we believe in.

This kind of equivocation turned me away from that community, to be honest. That was an extremely frustrating experience.

[semolinapudding]

For what it's worth, I don't think that Kevin Buzzard is the person you should talk to if you are interested in proof assistant design. As far as I know, Buzzard does not consider himself to be an expert in type theory or in proof assistants, and claims to be a mere user.

[seanwilson]

> “people do a large number of consistency checks beyond what is in the published proofs, which makes the chances the claimed results are correct much, much higher.”

I imagine one bias is because formal verification is such a huge effort, you're only going to do it for really interesting and impactful proofs, which means the proofs that get formal verified will already have been reviewed and critiqued a lot, and will be less likely to have glaring critical errors.