The Only Flame War You’ll Ever Need
March 20th, 2006 by WaltThis post on Scott Aaronson’s weblog is every internet discussion thread in microcosm (except for ours, which are shockingly polite by internet standards). Scott thought he was explaining the notion of non-constructive proof to a dense but argumentative student. If you read the comment thread, though, you’ll discover that the “student” thought Scott was some sort of nut who imagined he’d invented a computer more powerful than a Turing machine.
March 21st, 2006 at 10:31 am
That actually made my day.
March 21st, 2006 at 12:09 pm
That one is rather harmless, still. When I started reading science blogs and forums a few years ago, I remember being very intimidated by the behemoth Bogdanov-related threads in which dozens of people with rather spectacular differences in proficiency would take part. Insults, accusations of “intellectual bankruptcy” and “dubious credentials”, phony proofs and counterexamples, all you had to do is ask.
March 21st, 2006 at 3:15 pm
There’s an important point there. More and more people have computation as their model for mathematics and so they have difficulty with the notion of an existence proof. Confusing “there exists…” with “here is a construction of…” is not at all unusual.
March 21st, 2006 at 3:19 pm
“More and more people have computation as their model for mathematics . . .”
So Brouwer may have won his argument by default!
March 21st, 2006 at 10:27 pm
Never having heard of an Oracle is the shocking part. How could NP have even been explained to this person?