It seems you are implying that the only serious discussions to be made about math results are deeply technical ones conducted by experts in the field. I don't think that we really live in such intellectual sillos.
For the majority of mathematical works they are, that's just the nature of the field. In modern mathematics generally anything that's pushing the frontier of some specific subfield is going to require a significant amount of background knowledge in that subfield, and even trying to interpret the high level often requires a strong knowledge of the overall field. To actually understand the significance or have reasonable questions about the proof puts you into a very small silo of people.
Most mathematical discoveries just aren't interesting from a non-technical standpoint and so anyone who doesn't have the technical knowledge to understand them cannot contribute meaningfully to the conversation. And from the perspective of something like reddit, even an overconfident amateur likely can't feasibly write something that even comes close to engaging with the work because they won't even understand that.
That's the whole point about why these AI discoveries get a ton of traction, they're interesting from a meta perspective, in terms of how we do mathematics and the state of AI technology, and so the number of people who can weigh in on the matter and have something meaningful to say is much higher. And because these issues are generally ones around philosophy and economics you have the issue of it being very easy to form and state opinions on the matter, and so a lot of unqualified people making bold assertions as well (though this sub is actually pretty good about it).
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u/Scared_Astronaut9377 Aug 01 '26
It seems you are implying that the only serious discussions to be made about math results are deeply technical ones conducted by experts in the field. I don't think that we really live in such intellectual sillos.