>>12768698To be honest, it's mostly this. Also, there are a lot of SJWs on here and SJW types tend to have a distaste for game theory and social choice theory, despite the fact that both ironically lend a lot of support to leftist claims about the limitations of free markets and our electoral and party system.
>>12768786>He just found a clever way to phrase things we had known for centuries.This is true about pretty much everything in science and math. No idea is completely original a pure. So-called "new ideas" are generally just new combinations of old ideas, or new ways of elaborating on and clarifying old ideas. Don't get me wrong, we learn new things all the time, but we're always adding on top of existing bed rock. For example, new methods and ideas in mathematics usually come about by people formalizing pre-existing intuitions, or more explicitly identifying a connection that was only hinted at previously. For instance, Descartes' development of analytic geometry was definitely a huge scientific development, but basically, he was basically just extending and elaborating on the Ancient Greek theory of geometric proportions.
Group theory was a huge development, and it has produced genuinely unexpected results, but in it's most basic (and historical) form, it's really just a language that formalizes our intuitions about symmetry in a precise manner.
Set theory is another example. We all have an intuitive understanding of a collection of objects. Like any mathematical theory, set theory just pics some of those intuitions, and then formalizes them (and it also leaves out some of the other intuitions we might have).
