Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

Personally: I think it's silly to deny that there are ground mathematical truths, I think using the phrase "social construct" is v misleading on many of these layers, I don't think that facts care about your feelings, but I do think gender is complex & feelings matter a whole lot

I think ground mathematical truths are so buried in erudite axiomatic theories as to be useless to talk about! The ground truths are boring and even things like "not not P implies P" are serious contentious issues in modern math!

And I think the average person would have an extremely difficult time discerning between things that are the former - boring erudite truths - and the latter - simple statements a large chunk of mathematicians disagree with!

The fact that simple-seeming axioms are actually sometimes very contentious is like the rigor issue — we can not know the answer, or the field can be mistaken about the answer, but that does not mean there is not an actual ground truth

If you convince yourself that "math" is just whatever the current fallible mathematicians persuade each other it is, and there's nothing deeper, you have to explain why rockets care what mathematicians think.

Engineering and math are different things, and rockets don't care about computable numbers or the axiom of choice or the excluded middle, but mathematicians think about these things. Do you define truth based on what rocket scientists care about?

Math is integral to physics, engineering, etc. Not all mathematical concepts will be forced to contend with reality anytime soon, but when they do, nobody gets to say "my math was right, the rocket was wrong."

I think this gets to the heart of it then: most of the "ground truths" that those folks care about are algorithms that people find useful, mixed in with a huge array of experimentally derived "constants" and coefficients. That's pretty far from Matt's philosophy of math reference