logoalt Hacker News

ziiinqtoday at 4:37 AM1 replyview on HN

Yes and therefore?

You seem to be vaguely waving in the general direction of a point, without making any concrete claims or bothering to engage with the GP’s argument.

The tastes and interests of humans are absolutely not arbitrary. They are dictated by fate, the sun and the moon gods. Or maybe by the unitary evolution of the universe’s quantum state. Or by the probability distribution of finding ourselves in a particular branch of the universe.

What bearing does this have on whether math is a collaborative endeavor?

And what is unique to math, that your argument wouldn’t apply equally to physics, sociology or financial markets? All, “truth seeking” disciplines.


Replies

GPersontoday at 1:09 PM

You seem rather aggressive so replying to you feels pointless and uncomfortable.

Nonetheless, the person writes, “ Math has been almost purely arbitrary”.

This is simply a misusage of the word arbitrary, which is a word with a specific meaning you can look up if you are unaware, since mathematics is (obviously) not arbitrary in the sense this person wants to convey, in part for the reasons I state. Humans are not choosing arbitrary logical statements to prove true or false.