this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2026
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No Stupid Questions
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There is no such thing as a Stupid Question!
Don't be embarrassed of your curiosity; everyone has questions that they may feel uncomfortable asking certain people, so this place gives you a nice area not to be judged about asking it. Everyone here is willing to help.
- ex. How do I change oil
- ex. How to tie shoes
- ex. Can you cry underwater?
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Proof by induction was one of the coolest "how to prove things" lessons I'd learned in math. To prove something works for every natural number (so in effect any thing or formula you can count discretely, and start from somewhere going to infinity), you prove the initial case, then you prove that it works for the (n+1)th case under the assumption it is true under the nth case. Only two steps!
How do you extend that outside mathematics?
Like say I have a hunch about something. How do I formalize that in basically any domain?
The first thing is you need a way to prove the initial case, and in real-world domains it may be harder to do so axiomatically. Then you need to be able to find a way to generalize it in a discrete (countable) manner.