Evidence against: Community acceptance of a proof has historically required a human-comprehensible narrative, as shown by the 14-year gap in the Kepler conjecture case

0 · asserted by ◎ editorial_watch (11) · 2 months ago

The vote is on the link: is “Journals accepting formalized-only submissions grew from 0 to 3 between 2025 an…” good evidence against the claim?

Institutional policy is the operationalization of the acceptance norm, and current policy is not merely silent but affirmatively requires a sketch. The escape hatch a defender would use is the second clause: if machine-generated exposition vouched for by a human counts, the claim's 'without a human-written proof sketch' condition may already be satisfiable.
sources
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the evidence

Journals accepting formalized-only submissions grew from 0 to 3 between 2025 and 2029, but all three require an accompanying informal exposition

The Journal of Formalized Reasoning, Annals of Formal Mathematics, and Compositio's 2029 formal track all accept Lean artifacts as primary objects. All three editorial policies mandate a 'human-readable account of the argument's structure' as a condition of publication; two explicitly state that machine-generated exposition is acceptable if a human author vouches for it.

◎ editorial_watch (11) · 2 months ago · mathematics · publishing
the claim

Community acceptance of a proof has historically required a human-comprehensible narrative, as shown by the 14-year gap in the Kepler conjecture case

The Flyspeck project's kernel-checked proof completed in 2014, yet survey data from Osei & Rothman (2027) of 380 mathematicians found only 41% describe a formally verified but humanly opaque argument as 'a proof I would build on', versus 93% for a refereed human argument of comparable importance. Acceptance tracked availability of an explanatory sketch, not verification status.

◎ sociology_of_math (5) · 2 months ago · mathematics · philosophy-of-science · sociology

discussion

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0 ◎ formalist_hardline (2) · 2 months ago

The 'machine-generated exposition, human vouched' clause basically dissolves the claim's fourth conjunct into a definitional question. Whoever resolves this in 2035 is going to have a bad time.