Sunday, June 10, 2007
JSH: Statement of the problem
Mathematicians are so completely disconnected from the real world that they can no longer be trusted to tell the truth even about mathematics itself. Their world is ruled by vote, and in its democracy, mathematical proof can be useless against the group opinion.
In fact, mathematicians today no longer believe in proof outside of their opinion.
See: http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_06_03.html
Independent research can simply be ignored by the current mathematical community without regard to even basic proof of value by measures that most people including experts in other academic areas are known to consider the most compelling reasons for importance, like uniqueness in an important area.
So I can have a find of mathematical function that finds prime numbers and counts them in a way never before seen, as it uses the summation of a partial difference equation, which is distinguished by allowing you to move to a partial differential equation, and mathematicians can simply state that is not of interest, and not be compelled to do what most would consider the right thing.
Worse, even publication no longer matters, as with other mathematical research of mine I did get published, following a well laid out process involving formal peer review, and that publication was not only reversed by a few emails from posters of the sci.math newsgroup falsely claiming error in my paper, but later the journal itself simply shut down, and the hosting school Cameron University went so far as to remove all mention of the now defunct journal.
That journal and the papers that had been published in it for nine years would have simply gone into total limbo if not for the efforts of EMIS, which continues to provide the published editions on its mirror servers.
See: http://www.emis.de/journals/SWJPAM/
The full problem then is that mathematicians are capable not only of ignoring mathematical proof, but also of ignoring important research easily seen to be unique by people in other fields, which can be made relevant to other fields, as I've pointed out by noting that at the heart of my prime counting function is a discrete damped oscillator.
The article I link to above is titled "When is a proof?" and is written by Keith Devlin, a mathematician at Stanford. He talks of two types of "proof", where one is proof as most people think of it and the other is the following quote:
"The left wing answer (fuzzy, democratic, and human centered) is that a proof is an argument that convinces a typical mathematician of the truth of a given statement."
I emailed him an early draft of the paper that did eventually get published by the now defunct SWJPAM and retracted, before that event, and his reply was that it was the left wing type.
Um, I use VERY basic mathematics deliberately now with a focus on quadratics (simplifying from the paper which used cubics), and it does not matter, as mathematicians seem to have escaped completely to a position that a proof is only what they want to be a proof.
And you have a dead math journal as some evidence of how big this issue is.
But it is bigger than mathematics because it goes to how academia does research.
Editors as proven by those at SWJPAM can make bizarre decisions that are all about fuzzy, democratic, human-centered stuff, and nothing about the value of the research.
I suggest to you that the current system of formal peer review is out-dated and itself defunct, and it is past time for a system of independent measures probably including cross-disciplinary evaluations.
Mathematicians have good reason to fear my discoveries as they can either help close doors on research that many mathematicians around the world are working on—getting pay and often state funding, as well as prizes—or show errors in the field itself, so protecting against the truth is about academic fraud.
But more importantly than their will to ignore important research is the ability to get away with it on this scale.
I suggest to you that academics in almost any area of research can potentially do the same because the system is not setup for proper policing despite the tremendous advantage members of a discipline can get by dissembling as a group about information in their field.
Only independent evaluations by people who are not themselves invested can bring back some degree of certainty beyond the verisimilitude of academic assertions. Are they actually true based on all the information available, or is it just that for some academics the appearance of truth is important for funding and their careers?
My own personal belief is that the mathematicians have shown the flaws in an out-dated academic system that carries too much from medieval times and ignores what we know today about human nature and the ability of even large groups of highly intelligent people to ignore inconvenient truths.
It is past time that academics lost the glow of being better than ordinary people, and we accepted that they too can engage in large scale fraud at a level so high that even the death of a journal can be tossed off as just an ordinary, every day thing just so that they do not have to handle the truth.
When the future of our species depends on how we handle the truth, the issue is more than just, academic.
The problem as stated I think needs to be answered but I do not know what the answer is.
I present it to the group for suggestions:
Is there any solution to academics deciding against acceptance of inconvenient truths in their own field? Or specifically, can mathematicians be made to accept proof that they do not want as it is inconvenient to their careers?
If so, how?
In fact, mathematicians today no longer believe in proof outside of their opinion.
See: http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_06_03.html
Independent research can simply be ignored by the current mathematical community without regard to even basic proof of value by measures that most people including experts in other academic areas are known to consider the most compelling reasons for importance, like uniqueness in an important area.
So I can have a find of mathematical function that finds prime numbers and counts them in a way never before seen, as it uses the summation of a partial difference equation, which is distinguished by allowing you to move to a partial differential equation, and mathematicians can simply state that is not of interest, and not be compelled to do what most would consider the right thing.
Worse, even publication no longer matters, as with other mathematical research of mine I did get published, following a well laid out process involving formal peer review, and that publication was not only reversed by a few emails from posters of the sci.math newsgroup falsely claiming error in my paper, but later the journal itself simply shut down, and the hosting school Cameron University went so far as to remove all mention of the now defunct journal.
That journal and the papers that had been published in it for nine years would have simply gone into total limbo if not for the efforts of EMIS, which continues to provide the published editions on its mirror servers.
See: http://www.emis.de/journals/SWJPAM/
The full problem then is that mathematicians are capable not only of ignoring mathematical proof, but also of ignoring important research easily seen to be unique by people in other fields, which can be made relevant to other fields, as I've pointed out by noting that at the heart of my prime counting function is a discrete damped oscillator.
The article I link to above is titled "When is a proof?" and is written by Keith Devlin, a mathematician at Stanford. He talks of two types of "proof", where one is proof as most people think of it and the other is the following quote:
"The left wing answer (fuzzy, democratic, and human centered) is that a proof is an argument that convinces a typical mathematician of the truth of a given statement."
I emailed him an early draft of the paper that did eventually get published by the now defunct SWJPAM and retracted, before that event, and his reply was that it was the left wing type.
Um, I use VERY basic mathematics deliberately now with a focus on quadratics (simplifying from the paper which used cubics), and it does not matter, as mathematicians seem to have escaped completely to a position that a proof is only what they want to be a proof.
And you have a dead math journal as some evidence of how big this issue is.
But it is bigger than mathematics because it goes to how academia does research.
Editors as proven by those at SWJPAM can make bizarre decisions that are all about fuzzy, democratic, human-centered stuff, and nothing about the value of the research.
I suggest to you that the current system of formal peer review is out-dated and itself defunct, and it is past time for a system of independent measures probably including cross-disciplinary evaluations.
Mathematicians have good reason to fear my discoveries as they can either help close doors on research that many mathematicians around the world are working on—getting pay and often state funding, as well as prizes—or show errors in the field itself, so protecting against the truth is about academic fraud.
But more importantly than their will to ignore important research is the ability to get away with it on this scale.
I suggest to you that academics in almost any area of research can potentially do the same because the system is not setup for proper policing despite the tremendous advantage members of a discipline can get by dissembling as a group about information in their field.
Only independent evaluations by people who are not themselves invested can bring back some degree of certainty beyond the verisimilitude of academic assertions. Are they actually true based on all the information available, or is it just that for some academics the appearance of truth is important for funding and their careers?
My own personal belief is that the mathematicians have shown the flaws in an out-dated academic system that carries too much from medieval times and ignores what we know today about human nature and the ability of even large groups of highly intelligent people to ignore inconvenient truths.
It is past time that academics lost the glow of being better than ordinary people, and we accepted that they too can engage in large scale fraud at a level so high that even the death of a journal can be tossed off as just an ordinary, every day thing just so that they do not have to handle the truth.
When the future of our species depends on how we handle the truth, the issue is more than just, academic.
The problem as stated I think needs to be answered but I do not know what the answer is.
I present it to the group for suggestions:
Is there any solution to academics deciding against acceptance of inconvenient truths in their own field? Or specifically, can mathematicians be made to accept proof that they do not want as it is inconvenient to their careers?
If so, how?
# posted by James Harris @ 11:57 
