@nilesh@fosstodon.org @drScott@mathstodon.xyz @tao@mathstodon.xyz I think that this is correct in a well-functioning community, but I'm not sure that the mathematical community functions well enough for this. Ideally, knowing a bad, inscrutable proof still gives us the incentive to find a good, insightful proof (whether by understanding the known proof better or by taking another approach), while at the same time cutting off inevitably fruitless efforts at finding a counterexample, so it's only to the good. But the community that we have now is driven more by the search for new results than by better understanding old ones, so the bad, inscrutable proof can make a good, insightful proof harder to find in practice.