Thanks for pointing out my imprecise statement there! What I meant of course “is we can’t prove the Collatz Conjecture” (which is a simple statement about a simple dynamic system), but I wrote something that doesn’t precisely say that, so apologies for that.
The main thing I intended to convey here is that the amounts of effort going into proving simple things (including the things you have mentioned that were in fact proven!) are often extremely unintuitively high to people not familiar with this, and that this happens all over CS and math.
Thanks for pointing out my imprecise statement there! What I meant of course “is we can’t prove the Collatz Conjecture” (which is a simple statement about a simple dynamic system), but I wrote something that doesn’t precisely say that, so apologies for that.
The main thing I intended to convey here is that the amounts of effort going into proving simple things (including the things you have mentioned that were in fact proven!) are often extremely unintuitively high to people not familiar with this, and that this happens all over CS and math.