Monday, January 08, 2007
JSH: Consider the letdown
Imagine you have decades working on one of the most prestigious areas of mathematics and have countless "deep" conversations with other "great" minds who have pondered, thought about, and considered the mysteries of those enigmatic wonders—prime numbers.
You are in awe at the beauty and complexity locked within mathematics you barely grasp and maybe only two or three people in the world completely understand, and it is your dream to someday just barely scratch the surface a little deeper just to understand a little bit more, just a bit more…
And then some loudmouth on Usenet posts a simple—to you—function that is the key to understanding it all, just like that, and he's not even a mathematician.
His degree is in PHYSICS!!!!!!!
What's this? Some Cosmic Joke? God laughing at you?
It cannot be. So what to do? What to do…
Ignore him! That'll teach the Universe!
Like you can be forced to comprehend what you thought was incomprehensible! Like you'll sit by and understand what you thought would never make complete sense to you.
NEVER!!!!
****************************
If that sounds like some joke to you, try hard, really hard, to imagine putting years of your life into something, working very hard, believing one thing, only to have it shattered.
Answers might not be what most people really want.
Ever consider that?
[A reply to someone who said that James' algorithm yields no new insights whatsoever.]
So why lie? Why do posters like you keep fighting admitting even the simplest thing like it is the only known multi-variable prime counting function?
Why not acknowledge that no other known prime counting function can do what human beings do and find the helper primes on its own?
Lying about simple stuff betrays the reality here, which is that the simplicity of what I found is what people like you deny.
It's like if you're arguing with some person claiming that 2+2=5, and you count out 2 fingers and count out 2 more fingers and they say, FIVE!!!
You know it's not about what's true at all.
My research is simple. It's far simpler than most prime research.
Gut check people—my research is far simpler.
And in the lies told by other about that simplicity, you can see the real tale about how far mathematicians can be willing to go to hold on to complicated, when simple truth hurts too much to accept.
You are in awe at the beauty and complexity locked within mathematics you barely grasp and maybe only two or three people in the world completely understand, and it is your dream to someday just barely scratch the surface a little deeper just to understand a little bit more, just a bit more…
And then some loudmouth on Usenet posts a simple—to you—function that is the key to understanding it all, just like that, and he's not even a mathematician.
His degree is in PHYSICS!!!!!!!
What's this? Some Cosmic Joke? God laughing at you?
It cannot be. So what to do? What to do…
Ignore him! That'll teach the Universe!
Like you can be forced to comprehend what you thought was incomprehensible! Like you'll sit by and understand what you thought would never make complete sense to you.
NEVER!!!!
****************************
If that sounds like some joke to you, try hard, really hard, to imagine putting years of your life into something, working very hard, believing one thing, only to have it shattered.
Answers might not be what most people really want.
Ever consider that?
[A reply to someone who said that James' algorithm yields no new insights whatsoever.]
So why lie? Why do posters like you keep fighting admitting even the simplest thing like it is the only known multi-variable prime counting function?
Why not acknowledge that no other known prime counting function can do what human beings do and find the helper primes on its own?
Lying about simple stuff betrays the reality here, which is that the simplicity of what I found is what people like you deny.
It's like if you're arguing with some person claiming that 2+2=5, and you count out 2 fingers and count out 2 more fingers and they say, FIVE!!!
You know it's not about what's true at all.
My research is simple. It's far simpler than most prime research.
Gut check people—my research is far simpler.
And in the lies told by other about that simplicity, you can see the real tale about how far mathematicians can be willing to go to hold on to complicated, when simple truth hurts too much to accept.
# posted by James Harris @ 22:17 
