Tuesday, August 15, 2006
JSH: Nasty and pointless
There are quite a few facts that support my mathematical claims.
But I rarely get to just talk mathematical facts.
Instead I deal with people who learned insults as a tool to control.
Many of you come here looking at the aftermath, listen to them, and think I'm some horrible person who refuses to be reasonable, when the reality is that I am a very disillusioned person who used to think that at least in mathematics all you had to do was figure out something mathematically true that was important.
People who are truly brilliant do not need to call someone a fool or an idiot, a kook or a crackpot, or otherwise work to personally demean another person versus confront them on their ideas.
The problem I think though—which is the horrible theory I think is the best explanatio—is that in math society years ago, a trend started to go for complexity over simple answers as people worried about maintaining careers in a realm that is difficult because mathematical proof is difficult to find.
And we at the end of the devolution of the math field have people who do not do real mathematics, who not only avoid simple answers: they attack people who find them.
They defend a status quo that is anti-discovery.
They work to keep us from knowing.
People, I got a paper published in a mathematical journal. Your newsgroup went after the journal, not just with those emails, but in heated criticisms before them, and you overturned how math society supposedly works, by showing how easily a paper that went through the formal peer review process could just get censored—just like that.
And later the journal died.
Posters rationalize the details, but that was a HUGE event, which the mathematical public managed to just quietly let go by, like the littlest thing, like leaves floating down the river.
But my mathematial discoveries are simplifying results, where I use simple ideas, which could crush the machine that supports so many people—who are doing nothing of value at all.
Hide from the truth if you wish. Rationalize and lie about the details. Tell yourself your society is healthy when its members need the meanest tricks, descend to the depths of the nastiness that human beings can tell each other—to defend it.
But the real world is about development and change.
Humanity did not get to this point, to this level of technological progress, by failing when the discoveries had to be made, and the people who got in the way, well all the ones before, they are history now.
You fight the future, you fight the kind of pressure of progress that brought us planes, trains and computers, and books, and the arts, and medicine and so much more, and you are fighting against the human species itself.
And you will lose.
But I rarely get to just talk mathematical facts.
Instead I deal with people who learned insults as a tool to control.
Many of you come here looking at the aftermath, listen to them, and think I'm some horrible person who refuses to be reasonable, when the reality is that I am a very disillusioned person who used to think that at least in mathematics all you had to do was figure out something mathematically true that was important.
People who are truly brilliant do not need to call someone a fool or an idiot, a kook or a crackpot, or otherwise work to personally demean another person versus confront them on their ideas.
The problem I think though—which is the horrible theory I think is the best explanatio—is that in math society years ago, a trend started to go for complexity over simple answers as people worried about maintaining careers in a realm that is difficult because mathematical proof is difficult to find.
And we at the end of the devolution of the math field have people who do not do real mathematics, who not only avoid simple answers: they attack people who find them.
They defend a status quo that is anti-discovery.
They work to keep us from knowing.
People, I got a paper published in a mathematical journal. Your newsgroup went after the journal, not just with those emails, but in heated criticisms before them, and you overturned how math society supposedly works, by showing how easily a paper that went through the formal peer review process could just get censored—just like that.
And later the journal died.
Posters rationalize the details, but that was a HUGE event, which the mathematical public managed to just quietly let go by, like the littlest thing, like leaves floating down the river.
But my mathematial discoveries are simplifying results, where I use simple ideas, which could crush the machine that supports so many people—who are doing nothing of value at all.
Hide from the truth if you wish. Rationalize and lie about the details. Tell yourself your society is healthy when its members need the meanest tricks, descend to the depths of the nastiness that human beings can tell each other—to defend it.
But the real world is about development and change.
Humanity did not get to this point, to this level of technological progress, by failing when the discoveries had to be made, and the people who got in the way, well all the ones before, they are history now.
You fight the future, you fight the kind of pressure of progress that brought us planes, trains and computers, and books, and the arts, and medicine and so much more, and you are fighting against the human species itself.
And you will lose.
# posted by James Harris @ 23:45 
