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TheAncientGeek comments on Mathematics as a lossy compression algorithm gone wild - Less Wrong
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Work at what? For whom? Mathematicians are happy with maths that is of no use to physicists.
And that's fine. In fact, that's great. If people want to enjoy the aesthetics of conceptual structure, I hope they call me over for the fun.
But the "what" in the "work at what" I was speaking, is "predicting other data points, not yet observed", per the OP.
Not actually the job of maths..."this hammer doesn't work, you can't drive in screws with it"
Math doesn't have a "job". It's use by people to fulfill their ends. For most people, those ends are prediction.
Grab an arbitrary piece of maths and it won't predict anything. There is a technique and speciality and skill of finding the right pieceof maths to match the territory, and that is called physics.
Meanwhile...no professional mathematician gets sacked for failing to predict or otherwise being empirically correct. It's not their job.