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Comment by playdead | Hacker News Reader

> don't really make us use math differently

Even is we suppose what you're saying is correct — the goal isn't really to change how we use mathematics, but to understand what math is in a deeper explanatory sense. If that's not a project that interests you, that's totally fine.

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Could you give me an example of meaningful insight of what math is that relies on such ontological discussions? Since my issue is not with ontological debates as such but rather ontological questions formulated in a manner which is impossible to meaningfully answer. I think we can learn great things about mathematics (and world) by looking how people do math, or how people speak about math, but asking what math is seems to me to be a way of framing that instead of providing insights is dividing people into camps based on aesthetic preferences.

We often investigate things without knowing what value, if any, doing so will produce. It seems odd to require a business plan up front here. People do have them, entire metaphysical projects rest on this question and they can definitely tell you why it matters to them, but I question whether they should have to.

I mean philosophy, metaphysics and philosophy of mathematics have over 2k years of history and the only example of the influence that I know it had was that ancient Greeks didn't want to use 0 in accordance with the rule that being is and non-being is not, similarly with Pythagoreans hiding the existence of irrational numbers. If you know of some examples which had positive effect then I would really like to know about them and this is not a sarcasm or anything. I just fail to see the importance of the debate.

Search "Brouwer" in this thread.

Yea I saw that, I will check him out, thanks.

It would be odd if we made deep advances in understanding math at an explanatory level without having some kind of translation to how people do math.

Maybe, but it doesn’t seem like a requirement. Like having an understanding of jazz at the level of music theory vs being a jazz musician.

It's also difficult for me to believe that deep advances in music understanding would fail to translate to actual music.

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