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I don't really understand how terms like "moral" or "faithful" came to be adopted in mathematical parlance. I understand these words are intended to convey some

I don't really understand how terms like "moral" or "faithful" came to be adopted in mathematical parlance. I understand these words are intended to convey some technical meaning, but why muddy the waters between 'is' and 'ought'? As Hume recognized, reason only teaches us about the way things are, not the way they ought to be. What mathematicians do with that knowledge is in their own hands.

bopbeepboop 5y ago
“Moral” as I’ve heard it means something akin to “moral of the story”: “This is morally correct, but suffers from a technical fault in the naive approach.” …is the same as… “The higher order structure of this proof is a reasonable (and ultimately correct) idea, but you can’t use the most basic encoding of your objects as parameters because of a technicality, and instead must first transform the parameters before being fed into the proof schematic.” …and is akin to… “Your password check function has the right logic, but you need to filter inputs to prevent SQL injection.” Every field that has to make that kind of technical comment has a language for it — and for some reason, the analogy in mathematics was between the moral of a story and the idea behind a proof.