Comments, revisited
January 21st, 2008 by WaltI had to go and unapprove a bunch more comments. I am erring on the side of removing anything provocative.
Things to know:
- Yes, I will freely “censor” the blog. No, I don’t care how much this offends your most deeply held beliefs. Yes, I am the new Hitler/Stalin.
- You do not a university affiliation to comment here. You can even be a crackpot. All I ask is that you keep it polite, and don’t take over unrelated threads.
January 25th, 2008 at 9:01 am
I am not affiliated with a university. I am not a mathematician. My degrees are in biology and business.
Learning the calculus was akin to my efforts to learn slick magic tricks. I was always aware that my execution was anything but poetic.
I know that I am not Ars Mathemcatica’s intended audience, but I sneak in anyway because every now and again, as is true with ‘Why the Riemann Hypothesis’ someone writes something that clarifies things for me.
I thank you for that.
Alberto
January 26th, 2008 at 9:08 am
“You can even be a crackpot…”
Funny, how among all the crackpots I have known in my life, including the most amateur crackpot and the most tenured university crackpot, I have yet to find one who openly admitted to being a crackpot.
Hence I have only fuzzy models of the degree of my own crackpottery. I do have some legitimate credentials — celebrity coauthors, refereed publications, chairing of tracks and sessions at international science conferences — yet I find a dash of crackpot to be a spice sometimes appreciated.
I don’t mind being in the “fringe-topic, unclassifiable and/or crackpot” session of a conference.
And I do intentionally write some very provocative and counter-Establishment papers, sometimes excusing myself when I submit them, with “since I’m not seeking tenure, let me contemplate the following bizarre thought experiment…”
January 26th, 2008 at 10:02 am
JVP’s comment is food for thought: “am I a crackpot?”
I don’t think I am. An eccentric, a loose cannon, even a bon vivant, but I don’t really see psychoceramics. Of course, I can’t get a clear picture of myself except as reflected through others, so if someone thinks I’m a crackpot it’d be nice if I were let in on the secret.
January 26th, 2008 at 11:33 am
“O would some power the giftie gie us
To see ourselves as others see us”
We’re all trapped in that Great Jewel Net in which everything is reflected in everything else, but for what it’s worth, John, I don’t think you’re a crackpot. A crackpot generally has trouble admitting that people who disagree with him just might have a point — I don’t see that coming from you.
There may be other symptoms, like tendencies to self-aggrandize over what are actually minor accomplishments in life (but again, this is not directed at you, John).
The question is sort of amusing in a Liar’s Paradox sort of way. I can imagine someone admitting that he used to be a crackpot (are there chapters of CA out there? “My name is Todd Trimble, and I have not trisected angles for 2 years”).
January 26th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
You’re all crackpots. I was just being polite.
January 27th, 2008 at 6:04 am
The category of “crackpot” is a little bit slippery. It can’t simply mean someone who thinks he proved something he hasn’t, or else e.g. Andrew Wiles would have fallen into the category after his first non-proof, which took him more than a year to fix. By the time De Branges proved Bieberbach, he had already published so many incorrect proofs that no one even wanted to check the latest, and he had to go all the way to Russia to find qualified reviewers willing to travel that long and winding type-script with him. In those days, Reagan was still rattling missiles at the Soviets, the St. Petersburg Seminar in Geometric Function Theory was still the Leningrad Seminar in Geometric Function Theory, and De Branges’ quest for confirmation was a lot more exotic than the same trip would be today.
Since mathematics has been founded on well-defined terms ever since Euclid, you might think fuzzy vocabulary would serve as an infallible indicator of crackpotism, but if we swear out a crackpot warrant for everybody who ever talked about “motives,” some very famous mathematicians will end up in jail.
January 28th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
“You’re all crackpots. I was just being polite.”
Ha ha … I was just thinking that, and then I read it. Your comment made me laugh.
Seriously though, if you have to ask “am I a crackpot” then the answer is ….”yes.” A lot of internet crackpots seem to be nice people with an interest in math/science, who get a thrill out of being associated with math/science by commenting on blogs like this one. If you wish to elevate your status from crackpot to amateur, the method is very simple: leave the blogs alone, turn off your computer, and crack open a textbook from your local library. One hour of doing real problems on your own beats a lifetime of blog discussions when it comes to understanding math.
January 28th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
I bet actual crackpots never, ever ask themselves if they are crackpots. Humility is not a virtue that accompanies being a successful crackpot, in my experience.
January 29th, 2008 at 12:32 am
Who said I was successful?
January 29th, 2008 at 3:09 am
I agree with Walt that: “I bet actual crackpots never, ever ask themselves if they are crackpots.”
I, of course, asked a meta-question about psychoceramic coefficients and recursion.
The psychology is vaguely parallel if we make a domain transformation or two:
Do heretics ask themselves: “Theologically, am I a heretic?”
Except, of course, in strategically in preparing their defense.
Jewish community AND Christian community: “Baruch Spinoza: you are obviously a heretic, and we cast thee out.”
Spinoza: “You petty fools, and this world, and all matter and energy and time and space are all merely low amplitude first-order perturbations in the Mind of God. Also, Albert Einstein will say the same, more mathematically, in a few centuries, and admit that my Theology is the basis of his. So nyah, nyah, nyah.”
I also cite the speech that Iago makes to the audience in Shakespeare’s Othello. His actions and plans are ascribed superficially plausible motives behind them… but then he kills his own wife pretty much because he could, which weakens his argument to those in the audience who were somewhat peresuaded. He got annoyed with her and then… knife time for Emilia. Verbally, at first, he is grappling rather cleverly with the question: “Am I an evil, villainous, antagonist?” He concludes otherwise, in a brilliant rationalization of his modus vivendi (not so vivendi for Desdemona or then Othello).
Anyway, Iago’s arguments to his pawn Rodrigo, and to himself, and to us, bear the seeds of their own disproof, as nicely analyzed in “Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies” by James E. Hirsh
http://books.google.com/books?id=SwbFjl16BAAC&pg=PA188&lpg=PA188&dq=iago+shakespeare+rationalization+monologue&source=web&ots=bECX5HPiPr&sig=1OfiM3v_qdEO5mgU9CC7nQRlUNQ
That axiomatization of the relativity of evil by Iago changed the nature of bad guys forever, in English literature, just as John Milton’s Satan ["Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven"] had done in Italian, and Goethe’s Mephisto in Faust, for German.
As John Rumrich wrote:
“‘Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven’
In saying this Satan distinguishes himself from the shade of
Achilles, who tells Odysseus that it would be better to live as the
servant of a slave than to reign over all the exhausted dead.”
Michael Bryson makes a natural transformation and probes more deeply into meta-politics:
“Milton puts many of these very same arguments in the mouth of his Satan. Satan uses the Protestant rhetoric of legitimate rebellion by ‘princes’ or ‘inferior magistrates’ against a king and transforms it into a rallying cry for the overthrow of God himself. Satan continually refers to his compatriots as ‘Princes,’ as ‘Powers,’ as ‘Potentates.’ Even the poem’s narrator gets in on the act: in referring to Mammon in his pre-fall role as Heaven’s architect, the narrator gives readers an image of ‘Scepter’d Angels’ who viewed ‘many a Tow’red structure high,’ angels who ’sat as Princes, whom the supreme King / Exalted to such power, and gave to rule, / Each in his hierarchy, the Orders bright’ (I. 733-737). The political structure of Heaven itself is drawn on a model of a King and his princely magistrates, the very magistrates by whom, according to the above-mentioned Protestant thinkers, resistance, rebellion, and overthrow could be carried out under the right circumstances.
In making Satan the mouthpiece for Protestant theories of rebellion that spell out the ‘proper’ relation of the individual Christian to secular authority, Milton critiques not only the theories themselves (which tended to uphold secular tyranny so long as it was decent enough to refrain from intruding into the realm of Christian religion), but also the notions of magistracy and kingship contained therein. Milton wants to take the arguments of Luther, Calvin, Mh ntzer, and Marshall into much more radical territory than those men were willing to enter.”
[ The Tyranny of Heaven
Milton's Rejection of God as King
Michael Bryson
U. Delaware Press, 2004]
So, meta-meta-question: am I a meta-crackpot? And what is the fixed point of this sequence?
February 6th, 2008 at 11:00 pm
[...] only is John Armstrong a failed crackpot, he is wrong about statistics. Statistics is, from the mathematical point of view, a perfectly [...]
February 7th, 2008 at 11:59 am
I learn a lot of things from reading this blog. Such as that Milton wrote in Italian.
February 10th, 2008 at 10:54 am
Any idea why you get so much spam on this blog? Of the math blogs I read, this receives far more than others.
February 11th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
# johnshade Says: “I learn a lot of things from reading this blog. Such as that Milton wrote in Italian.”
Hmmm. Good catch. My point was about Great Writers who wrote in their vernacular, rather than in learned Establishment Greek or Latin, and thus thrust that vernacular into Canonical Literature, instead of just low-brow pop culture.
I suppose I should claim some sort of categorical or Topos Theory triality wherein Milton wrote in Italian exactly to the extent that Dante wrote in German, which in turn is exactly the same extent as Goethe wrote in English.
And then provide a proof from James Joyce. Or a German crossword puzzle on a Klein bottle, in which is embedded a Chess puzzle as a poem in Russian by Nabokov.
As a teacher, my philosophy of education is to award you a Gold Star for extra credit for catching me in a mistake. Now, what KIND of star is that, you may well wonder…
For the uninitiated, since we are talking about Writers’ Writers:
John Shade [born July 5, 1898; died July 21, 1959] is a fictional character in Vladimir Nabokov’s 1962 hypertext novel “Pale Fire.” Or so we would have you believe [cf. Professor Pnin; "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight; "The Hyperprismatic Bezel"].
February 12th, 2008 at 1:59 am
Todd: Do you read comments through the RSS reader? For some reason comments that get weeded out by the spam filter still show up in the RSS feed.
February 12th, 2008 at 8:22 am
No, I don’t. I’ve bookmarked this site and read it directly.
Even though you do periodic clean-up, a lot of spam appears to get past the filter.
February 13th, 2008 at 12:44 am
Walt, I clean up a lot of the comment spam while you are sleeping. But, not always before it gets picked up by RSS readers.
It seems that the spammers are getting better at getting past the captcha.
February 13th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
Well, there’s your answer, Todd. Ars Math gets so much spam because I sleep.