The thing I like about math is that it gives the feeling that the answers are in the territory. (Kinda ironic, when you think about what the “territory” of math is.) Like, either you are right or you are wrong, it doesn’t matter how many people disagree with you and what status they have. But it also doesn’t reward the wrong kind of contrarianism.
Math allows you to make abstractions without losing precision. “A sum of two integers is always an integer.” Always; literally. Now with abstractions like this, you can build long chains out of them, and it still works. You don’t create bullshit accidentally, by constructing a theory from approximations that are mostly harmless individually, but don’t resemble anything in the real world when chained together.
Whether these are good things, I suppose different people would have different opinions, but it definitely appeals to my aspie aesthetics. More seriously, I think that even when in real world most abstractions are just approximations, having an experience with precise abstractions might make you notice the imperfection of the imprecise ones, so when you formulate a general rule, you also make a note “except for cases such as this or this”.
(On the other hand, for the people who only become familiar with math as a literary genre, it might have an opposite effect: they may learn that pronouncing abstractions with absolute certainty is considered high-status.)
The thing I like about math is that it gives the feeling that the answers are in the territory. (Kinda ironic, when you think about what the “territory” of math is.) Like, either you are right or you are wrong, it doesn’t matter how many people disagree with you and what status they have. But it also doesn’t reward the wrong kind of contrarianism.
Math allows you to make abstractions without losing precision. “A sum of two integers is always an integer.” Always; literally. Now with abstractions like this, you can build long chains out of them, and it still works. You don’t create bullshit accidentally, by constructing a theory from approximations that are mostly harmless individually, but don’t resemble anything in the real world when chained together.
Whether these are good things, I suppose different people would have different opinions, but it definitely appeals to my aspie aesthetics. More seriously, I think that even when in real world most abstractions are just approximations, having an experience with precise abstractions might make you notice the imperfection of the imprecise ones, so when you formulate a general rule, you also make a note “except for cases such as this or this”.
(On the other hand, for the people who only become familiar with math as a literary genre, it might have an opposite effect: they may learn that pronouncing abstractions with absolute certainty is considered high-status.)