My understanding of up-arrow notation is: 2 ^^^ 5 means

2 ^^ (2 ^^ (2 ^^ (2 ^^ 2))) (with five 2's)

= 2 ^^ (2 ^^ (2 ^^ (2 ^ 2)))

= 2 ^^ (2 ^^ (2 ^^ 4))

= 2 ^^ (2 ^^ 65536), since Wikipedia calculates 2 ^^ 4 = 65536.

Now 2 ^^ 65536 means 2 ^ (2 ^ (2 ^ ...))) with 65536 two's. Call that number N (too large to really describe).

Then 2 ^^ N is 2 ^ (2 ^ ( ...)) with N two's.

The OP (u/boothby) was not the person I was addressing (u/bell-cot).

Are you maybe confusing math academia for psychology or social sciences? There is no replication crisis in math, no house of cards of self-proclaimed experts riding on bullshit. Mathematicians are _actually experts_ at a deep and extremely rigorous technical field -- many of them are even experts at computational approaches to problems! -- and when outsiders and upstarts resolve old conjectures, mathematicians generally react by celebrating them and showering them with fame, job offers and gushing articles in Quanta.

> Some students talk about turning to a different career later on, after they’ve made enough money. “Nowadays, English concentrators often say they’re going into finance or management consulting for a couple of years before writing their novel,” said James Wood, a Harvard professor of the practice of literary criticism.

> Mr. Desai said all of this logic goes, “‘Make the bag so you can do good in the world, make the bag so you can go into retirement, make the bag so you can then go do what you really want to do.’”

> But this “really underestimates how important work is to people’s lives,” he said. “What it gets wrong is, you spend 15 years at the hedge fund, you’re going to be a different person. You don’t just go work and make a lot of money, you go work and you become a different person.”

Something is a bit strange about this presentation. "Grassroots" is not the opposite of "passive", and likewise "participatory" is not the same thing as resisting dominant power structures. If anything, since lurking is something most people do most of the time, that would suggest it is first and foremost a conventional rather than radical activity (I mean this both literally and in terms of the implied political positioning of the typical internet lurker).

In any case, something can be understudied and worth studying, interesting or uninteresting, and worthy of celebration or not, whether or not it resists dominant power structures. If it turned out most people lurked because they were usually using the internet for information rather than action, and that it had nothing to do with resisting power structures, that would still be worth studying simply because it would be a major aspect of how people use the internet.