Harristotelian Logic

If there is one thing that truly shocks me about the modern mathematical community is that it just completely shuts the door.

So these people will label you a crackpot or a crank and destroy anything, even their own stuff, to make that stick and it does not matter what you can prove.

When I was thinking about meddling in the mathematical world and looking for my own proofs, I thought to myself that I'd use simple or what are often called elementary methods not only to help myself not get muddled into very complex mathematics, but also to make it easier to explain.

But that makes it despairingly easy to know these people actually, quite deliberately, lie about mathematical proof.

So I got published and you can do a web search on "SWJPAM" and look through posts on the sci.math newsgroup when they were attacking that journal for publishing a paper of mine, and see the conspiracy to email the editors against my paper planned out in posts.

They shut the door. I played by the rules. I wrote a paper representing years of research, and months of effort which I passed through a number of mathematicians. I sent the paper to a peer reviewed mathematical journal which took months of review before it told me the reviewers liked it and they published it.

Then some people sent some emails, and they made fun of me when in despair I posted about how my parents had been proud, or how my teacher's had been proud of the publication and I had to try and explain the odd retraction. My own father thinks I'm crazy and told me so because he doesn't believe that something this massively wrong could be happening. So he thinks I must be wrong.

They have no limits. People on the newsgroup made fun of my having to explain to my family and teachers this situation. It's like they're inhuman if you cross them. Like, to them, nothing is sacred.

The math people do not follow their own rules, and they get away with it.

The example I've given with the prime counting function is meant to let you go beyond rhetoric. As is your ability to do a search on the now dead journal and see that it did exist. See how long it existed, and see what happened to it now.

What if you had a paper published in that journal?

People from the math community take the time and trouble to smear me across the web.

That kind of political behavior is learned, and to be effective it has to be practiced.

But why? Why do mathematicians need high level political attack skills?

I say, because they have learned to lie because it's so hard to check many of their claims and those claims are worth money, from funding to math prizes, to just having jobs as professors and researchers at universities, the lies are worth money.

And when you lie a lot for money, you need to be good at it, like politicians.

Maybe it is inevitable that the search for truth is finally lost by every species before it dies, when people find that the effort and energy involved in getting to real answers is beyond them, so a civilization turns to pretend.

Maybe the real story of our future is that our world finally becomes mostly actors pretending to be people who are mathematicians, or physicists, or before the final crumble, even doctors or lawyers because the hardest thing to find or handle can be the truth.

[A reply to someone who wondered what would James' father think about this post or about this one.]

What's wrong with those messages?

In both I'm contemplating a thorny issue as for a while I concluded that a final solution to the problem of getting my research acknowledged would be to figure out an answer to the factoring problem, which underlies the security of the Internet itself.

My fear with that was that, hey, I might succeed! And if I did it could have dramatic consequences for a lot of people, and I went through a lot of moral and ethical searching about the problem.

At the time of the second message I was afraid I had succeeded and had decided to release the information, and thought that two particular posters might get in trouble if it did cause some negative consequences as they had spent to much time attacking the research.

Kind of like if before September 11th, someone had been posting warnings on Usenet about hijackers flying planes into buildings in a terrorist attack, and a couple of posters had been criticizing the idea and that person as a crackpot and then it happened.

My belief in the past was that they might face severe negative consequences, while today I think they'd probably just get ignored as most people do not think of Usenet as a credible source.

But based on my past belief I felt I should warn them, and it turned out I was wrong.

The Internet's security system is not currently known in wide areas to be broken, there has been no major correction to the world's stock exchanges based on it being broken, and no crash of the world economy followed by a great depression in the United States.

So my fears did not materialize into reality.

[A reply to someone who wrote that, in both posts, Jame expressed no doubt whatsoever and that, instead of that, he wrote as if he was absolutely certain.]

I was certain, and I was wrong.

Maybe there is where I think mathematicians and physicists go totally different ways as I think that statement can make sense to a physicist, but the concept seems to give mathematicians all kinds of bizarre trouble.

Certainty is not proof—it's a feeling.

So if certainty is not proof how do we actually know anything?

In physics we concern ourselves not so much with absolute certainty as with what works in the real world, so we know something in physics on the basis of repeatability and predictability.

Knowledge should give us something in the real world in terms of knowing something will happen, acting to make that something happen and then seeing it happen as expected.

That is knowledge, and repetition of the above gives us a feeling of certainty, but it is not proof of absolute truth.