It's harder, but only in that you have to be a bit better at math to do it. There are some amazingly bad assumptions that are just accepted, and many that are just obscured or glossed over. Likewise, while math does narrow the space, often it narrows it to lead to the desired answer, not to lead to reality, the problem being that people …
It's harder, but only in that you have to be a bit better at math to do it. There are some amazingly bad assumptions that are just accepted, and many that are just obscured or glossed over. Likewise, while math does narrow the space, often it narrows it to lead to the desired answer, not to lead to reality, the problem being that people mistake "the math works out" with "this matches reality pretty well".
You aren't wrong that applying math does help sort out some "is this even possible?" kind of issues that our intuition might just gloss over, but it doesn't help so much as one might hope, and often clever people will create math models that get the answer they want, intentionally or not.
It's harder, but only in that you have to be a bit better at math to do it. There are some amazingly bad assumptions that are just accepted, and many that are just obscured or glossed over. Likewise, while math does narrow the space, often it narrows it to lead to the desired answer, not to lead to reality, the problem being that people mistake "the math works out" with "this matches reality pretty well".
You aren't wrong that applying math does help sort out some "is this even possible?" kind of issues that our intuition might just gloss over, but it doesn't help so much as one might hope, and often clever people will create math models that get the answer they want, intentionally or not.