Jon Sterling on Nostr: I think a big source of people's confusion about zero and the empty set is the ...

I think a big source of people's confusion about zero and the empty set is the following:

(1) Conventional instructors and textbooks are *also* often confused about zero and the empty set.

(2) Even those who are not confused about zero and the empty set tend to treat them as special cases, so rather than giving uniform definitions of things, they uselessly give a piecewise definition with one case for the non-empty and the other case for the empty. If you think of things in such a broken way, it is natural to see the empty cases as mere bookkeeping that is easily forgotten...