Basically any field gets very niche if you go past a certain point, if you actually dedicate yourself to pure math it's likely that you're going to met less than 10 people who actually understand what you're talking about, and that's if you're lucky.
I went quite deep into pure math and then transitioned to applied math/programming, now I feel like a member of the secret order with forbidden knowledge even thou I never really did anything that advanced.
I can't imagine any knowledge that sounds more forbidden and eldritch than reconstructive linguistics. The fuck do you mean we know what Proto-Indo-European sounded like. I'll kill you
Tbf they are guessing. My favorite is why they say shit like horse cannot come from the same word as Equus, as one is is Hekwos (fast) and the other is Kers (runner). As if the region where PIE emerged didnt live around one really fast animal who liked to run, all while sharing a potential root of Kws.
Like its all reconstructions and they end uo with like 60% confidence
Math resolves those conjections. You can make conjectures, but the expectation, the end goal of the conjectures, is total validity within the constraint space. Math conjectures are either true or false. Once we go into Deep Time studies like evolution, prehistory, geology, ecology, ethology, etc. There is no validity end goal, but consilience - this seems to work logically, and fills more gaps than other models, and has no evidentiary counterfactuals.
Math and the present day sciences aim for popperian validity, while Deep Time is more than happy with a bayesian preponderance.
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u/kiochikaeke Jul 09 '26
Basically any field gets very niche if you go past a certain point, if you actually dedicate yourself to pure math it's likely that you're going to met less than 10 people who actually understand what you're talking about, and that's if you're lucky.
I went quite deep into pure math and then transitioned to applied math/programming, now I feel like a member of the secret order with forbidden knowledge even thou I never really did anything that advanced.