I’m sympathetic to this concern (it’s why I don’t like the QM sequence and think thinking about many-worlds is mostly a waste of time), but I also think math has the potential to be a useful toy environment in which to practice good epistemic habits (as suggested by shev’s recent litmustest posts), especially around confusing paradoxes and the like. Many of the complications of reasoning about the real world, like disagreement about complicated empirical facts, are gone, but a few, like the difficulty of telling whether you’ve made an unjustified assumption, remain.
I don’t think lots of math is a good direction to take the site. And I say this as a person with a mathematics degree.
I think mathematics is a bit too much of a fun distraction for us nerds from the hard problem of “refining the art of human rationality”.
I’m sympathetic to this concern (it’s why I don’t like the QM sequence and think thinking about many-worlds is mostly a waste of time), but I also think math has the potential to be a useful toy environment in which to practice good epistemic habits (as suggested by shev’s recent litmus test posts), especially around confusing paradoxes and the like. Many of the complications of reasoning about the real world, like disagreement about complicated empirical facts, are gone, but a few, like the difficulty of telling whether you’ve made an unjustified assumption, remain.