I had a friend who didn’t believe in the ability to just know things. He thought that if you couldn’t prove it mathematically it did not exist. In his universe, there was zero room for intuition.

A good example is being able to distinguish songs in a major and minor key. Like most people with musical training and interest, I can determine if a song is in a major or minor key in 2-3 bars. It’s not even hard. It is in fact ridiculously easy.

But he claimed I could not do it because I could not definitively say and then prove on paper which actual key a piece was in most of the time.

Now anyone who knows anything about music knows that these two things are related, but knowing a piece of music is in B♭ major or F minor has nothing to do with the fact that you can just listen to it and tell that it’s performed in a major or minor key.

And the same for him with anything else. Even though I had a better understanding of relativity as it actually works in this universe, he claimed I did not know anything about it because I could not work out quickly every equation to do with it. Yet he consistently got most answers wrong that required actually thinking about how relativity worked.

To him, “knowledge” wasn’t actual understanding — it was something a lot more mechanistic and constrained. Because he did not actually understand any of the equations he could work out at all or what they might mean for the world.

I think this is fairly common among STEM types, by the way. Which is why I bring it up. Such an oddball way to view the universe and what knowing something means.