Monday, April 16, 2007
Relief and wait and see
I was brought up learning modern problem solving techniques, and just took it for granted that using them was understood until I mostly as a lark started working on math problems that have been for a long time considered hard, and ran into a crap storm from math people.
So I made a lot of mistakes along the way, and found people who capitalized on those mistakes and they flamed me across the web as a crackpot, but then I naively thought that once I actually had real, solid results that would end.
And it didn't so I learned that I needed to work a political process and began looking for a mathematical proof that was hard to lie about and yesterday I put the finishing touches on one, and now, I'm in a wait-and-see mode, though I do feel relieved as well.
Where do solutions come from really? Why me and not someone else? Why this way?
But the saddest part of all this is that there are people who'd rather be wrong and congratulate each other as if they were right, than actually learn mathematics, and understand it, and be right.
The will to be wrong is something I think about as our world moves closer to what may be the end of humanity because of people who would rather be wrong and be convincing than actually solve problems and I have to say to myself that if our species goes extinct as a result, we deserved it.
We deserve it if we die out as a species because we let people get away with being wrong, and using group processes and being convincing to not solve problems until the problems can't be solved, and if everything before we were born was then meaningless and all the efforts of human beings before us were meaningless because of THIS generation that kills it all for nothing, then that's just the way it is.
Ultimately it is about backbone.
Maybe ultimately the human species is too weak to handle the truth.
And for that it will deservedly die. But, um, I hope not. I keep trying because I think there is something valuable to us. And I think our species can handle at least a little more of harsh reality.
But first I have to get past the people who would rather kill us all to live empty lies.
So I made a lot of mistakes along the way, and found people who capitalized on those mistakes and they flamed me across the web as a crackpot, but then I naively thought that once I actually had real, solid results that would end.
And it didn't so I learned that I needed to work a political process and began looking for a mathematical proof that was hard to lie about and yesterday I put the finishing touches on one, and now, I'm in a wait-and-see mode, though I do feel relieved as well.
Where do solutions come from really? Why me and not someone else? Why this way?
But the saddest part of all this is that there are people who'd rather be wrong and congratulate each other as if they were right, than actually learn mathematics, and understand it, and be right.
The will to be wrong is something I think about as our world moves closer to what may be the end of humanity because of people who would rather be wrong and be convincing than actually solve problems and I have to say to myself that if our species goes extinct as a result, we deserved it.
We deserve it if we die out as a species because we let people get away with being wrong, and using group processes and being convincing to not solve problems until the problems can't be solved, and if everything before we were born was then meaningless and all the efforts of human beings before us were meaningless because of THIS generation that kills it all for nothing, then that's just the way it is.
Ultimately it is about backbone.
Maybe ultimately the human species is too weak to handle the truth.
And for that it will deservedly die. But, um, I hope not. I keep trying because I think there is something valuable to us. And I think our species can handle at least a little more of harsh reality.
But first I have to get past the people who would rather kill us all to live empty lies.
# posted by James Harris @ 00:52 
