Terence Tao on Nostr: Mathematical arguments come the closest to providing a completely bulletproof ...

Mathematical arguments come the closest to providing a completely bulletproof negative result, although even mathematical reasoning must rely on some axioms. For instance, it is mathematically impossible to design a pyramid scheme in which everyone involved profits monetarily at the end of the scheme, if one assumes the axiom that the total amount of
money in the system is preserved. The "strategy stealing argument" similarly shows that, with some basic axioms concerning the free market, it is not possible to create a publically describable strategy to play the stock market with guaranteed positive returns, based only on publicly available information. Information theory shows that it is not possible to design a compression algorithm that can compress every single type of data input into a smaller size. And so forth. (3/7)