yesterday a brother of mine told me that some practices (spiritual, religious, physical, or otherwise) will literally keep parts of the practice secret from practitioners until they have reached a certain level of maturity. this is not to gatekeep, but to ensure that subtler lessons are not misunderstood and then proliferated wrongly
almost every language merits this concern: the release of a concept to a general audience practically guarantees that it slowly gets "watered down", losing much of its original meaning and intent. (I have been told that this is sometimes called the "euphamism treadmill")
It occurred to me, though, that math uniquely does not have this concern. I should clarify that by "math" I do not mean mathematics as a cognitive practice (ie, learning and understanding) but as a syntactic practice (ie, rigorous definitions and proofs). while there absolutely may be watering-down of a concept in mathematics on a cognitive level (see popsci articles on Godel's incompleteness theorem), the same is not true of mathematics on a syntactic level, as a proliferation of a syntactic mathematical construction either (A) correctly reproduces definitions and proofs, and is therefore correct; or (B) incorrectly reproduces definitions and proofs, and is therefore incorrect.
(There is a long and interesting discussion to be had about whether this notion of "syntactic mathematics" exists in any real sense, or is at all meaningful or useful, but that's another topic)
the way I see it, this boils down to the fact that (syntactic) mathematics is denotative, and just about every other language is not. almost all use of language can be seen as an attempt to transfer an experience from one person to another. there is a fundamental bootstrapping problem with this insofar as the only way we have to describe an experience is through other experiences. this means that every individual of an audience is limited as to what experiences they are able to receive through words. (try describing what a psychedelic high is to someone who's never experienced it.) The same is not exactly true of math: if you can emulate a Turing Machine, then you can "do" math on a syntactic level
this is not intended to be me fawning over mathematics, by the way. Its denotative nature is not intrinsically Good nor Bad, but I definitely find it interesting
