@RRL @MartinSleziak @AlexanderGruber Indeed I was referring to the comments by quid. Note that I said specifically "whether or not the other mods agree is unknown". That is agreeing that answering PSQs is against the rules. Obviously everyone agrees it is undesirable.
@TheGreatDuck There aren't enough of us to "do justice" to sorting and evaluating all of those questions even just to mark "looks good" or "problem here!" We see them when we see then and do our best to do triage? initial votes, send for closure, edit to improve, etc. It's exhausting....
@TheGreatDuck Have you thought about actively participating in review queues? That can help.
Review queues can determine closures, low quality posts, first posts that end in closure, closure of posts deemed low quality, for deletion of low quality answers,
@TheGreatDuck You can earn rep by making good edit suggestions; it doesn't take a tone of rep to begin to qualify from taking part in reveiw queues. But you gotta wanna. You're also able to pay attention to problematic posts you see to downvote, upvote, etc. Everyone starts somewhere.
Anyway...I'm fading out of sharp attention right about now. Need some R&R.
@amWhy You assume my issue is not being able to acquire rep. I don't participate on the site anymore. I just hang out in chat. I spent almost 2000 rep in bounties. It's in my opinion that I probably shouldn't have that much rep. I'd be closing every question coming through that didn't look right.
@TheGreatDuck I do not assume that your issue is you can't acquire rep. I've known you to be able to do so. I provided that option say, editing posts, as a means to contribute. I am seeking only to help you contribute as you'd like to, if you want to, that's all.
@amWhy my opinion for about a year is that the site is more or less a sinking ship with the waters being bad attitudes and dissent towards each other. When the main chat has people spamming flags for amusement just to get users in trouble, I highly doubt post quality is the concern anymore. I mostly stick around because there isn't really any other math sites on the internet period. It's either come here or don't bother.
and that isn't an issue towards any particular user
@XanderHenderson: Thank you. I can see there are debatable issues, but I'm now on board with the view of this group towards PSQs in general. So closure and deletion (if no effort is made to improve it) solves the problem with regard to both question and answer.
@gmiusi The first one has some very strange close votes, it's neither too broad nor is it seeking personal advice. It's just a tiny bit then a PSQ. Also it's from 2011.
@ArnaudD. Hmm I only see gimusi's 2 posts above my message.
Also my post should have read "a tiny bit better than a PSQ".
@DRF Really? There's a message posted by Holo saying that it's just a misclick. But Holo only talks about the second message, and I just noted that both posts have "seeking personal advice", so maybe that's not the explanation (this incertitude is why I removed my previous message).
@Holo I just noticed that the pin for Lord_Farin's list was posted on the same day, so I guess it will also expire soon. It would be a good idea to repost it and repin it as well. Not necessarily you, I'm just replying to the message because it's related.
@Holo But are you sure that that the pin will expire so soon? I thought it lasted 14 days (and the FAQ confirms this).
@Did @amWhy @CarlMummert: This is nearly void of actual mathematics and I am sad to see it on Math SE. Shockingly, the poster even claims it is rigorous in a comment.
It is still early here. Is the issue that there is not a fixed starting point? It is early here. I think the issue of the starting point is subtle in the original question, so a wrong answer that assumes the starting pointis fixed might be informative, in theory
@CarlMummert It's not just that. The whole answer is written in such a way that only people who can solve the original question themselves can extract any useful information out of it. To put it another way, I don't consider such sloppy mathematics to be useful to keep around. Both of us can easily construct rigorous arguments to prove the claims in that post, but to me the issue is whether the target audience can or not.
For example "for small |x|, only the first few terms are important, so the effect of computing the sines is to do almost nothing, except for a small reduction of the absolute value of |x|." is really saying nothing of value.
Other points have been raised by N.S:
@Sam Here are few of the things I have a hard time digesting. The reasoning to deduce that $|\sin(x)|<|x| -\frac{|x|^3}{7}$ is wrong (even if the conclusion is right). If the terms of an alternating series decrease it doesn't imply that the sum of the series decrease... The part about each embedding subtracting $|x|^3/7$ is again wrong, since $x$ changes with the embedding.... And the last part of the argument, namely deciding that the limit must be $0$, is explained very badly... What does "one more iteration cannot converge back" even mean? — N. S.Apr 25 '13 at 14:13
This OP to undelete. Please consider that the asker here was going to improve his answer by adding alla teh details about his derivation for the solution. He reached that result after a lot of work yesterday and I think he deserve some attention for that. Thanks
@gimusi I will be removing your posts about seeking closure of four posts, ALL of which happened to be answered by Did. That is blatant targeting of questions answered by a specific user. I will move them to the chatroom I moved comments from you that were off topic here, so that moderators can see you in action.
Folks. Would be really nice if you could not sling mud at one another and instead flag for mod-attention on site.
If the scope of this room is unclear, I can highly recommend seeking consensus about what type of questions can and should be closed through this room on your meta
Chat in and of itself is not a medium well-suited to discussion
This room was placed in timeout for 2 minutes; the topic of this room is "For feedback/discussion/requests of Close/Reopen/Undelete/Delete/Edit for questions and answers on Math SE (for Math Meta stuff go to chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/64952/math-meta-chat instead)" - conversation should be limited to that topic.
Chat isn't suited for discussing the behaviour of it's participants beyond a short feedback
@gimusi it has been made clear by a room owner that what you're currently doing doesn't sit right with them. If you want to appeal against that, I highly recommend seeking a private chat with mods
@gimusi To get back on-topic, I'm torn about this one. I agree that this deletion was too fast for my taste, but it really is not a great question, and probably a duplicate (for example this was among the "Related questions").
@ArnaudD. Thanks for your point of view. My main point it that the asker worked a lot on that yesterday with me to solve by himself the question and He was going to improve the OP. I think that such good proposal should be rewarded. But of course it is only my point of view. Thanks again. Bye
Now that I've read all the comments there, I'm not sure it's accurate to say that the asker worked a lot. It seems to me that the conversation is pretty much just you giving the solution step-by-step, with the asker commenting that he/she can't do the next step in-between. It could be useful to him/her, but it's not really worth preserving on MSE.
@ArnaudD. My idea was that the asker rewrite down the entire work in his OP in order to reconsider all the steps. Note that I only gave tips but all the foundamental steps were made by him/herself. Thanks anyway for your kind feedback. Bye
I've done some majorish editing on this question. Currently it has two close votes (including mine) but the OP is cretainly trying. His math maturity seems to just be rather low and he's not quite sure what to write I think. What's an acceptable amount of editing?
I could probably edit the question to make it nice and intelligible, but that would be putting words in the OP's mouth a bit. Though I think the things that are missing are fairly obvious.
One other question. How close do duplicate questions have to be? In particular are the questions "Show that $A$ can't be split into $B$ and $C$ such that both have property $Y$" a duplicate of the question "Show that for every $D$ either $D$ or it's complement doesn't have property $Y$", when we know that $A$ is $D$ union $D$ complement?
@ArnaudD. Thank you. I voted to close, and in this case it feels reasonable since the question is about graph theory and as such I would assume the OP/any user interested in the problem knows enough logic to finish that implication but I wonder if for more basic problems this wouldn't be the case.
I think that even for something more basic I'd still vote to close. Worst case scenario, the asker posts a comment saying they don't understand, and all it takes is to clarify the meaning of "splits" (which may even be done by pointing to an existing question perhaps).
Please look at this question. If I am reading it correctly, all of the answers (most of which are four years old) are incorrect. I have provided what I believe is a correct answer. Please tell me if I am being an idiot.
@XanderHenderson Nah you're right. Unless there used to some extra constraint on the set $A$ then $sup(A)$ certainly doesn't have to be a limit point of $A$.
There's a perfectly good definition of limit point as "a limit of sequences in X" which includes all points of X. Under that definition it is clear that sup(A) is a limit point of A. I expect this is what the extant answers meant.
Don't know that you need bounded. You just don't get a $sup(A)$ in that case. So depending on how you read the quantification it could work. Ofcourse the question is extremely vague. We have no idea what linearly ordered set we are working in. If it even is linearly ordered. Could be a general boolean algebra for all we know.
Anyway back on topic I think Xander's answer is certainly useful and correct. I would consider adding a comment underneath that points to it just because it's not gonna get up past all the other answers.
@DRF In the unbounded case, you get $\sup(A) = \infty$, which is not a real number. It is some other object, but is definitely not contained in $A$ or its collection of limit points.
Unless, of course, we decide to work on the extended real numbers
@XanderHenderson I don't think you can get away with the last claim though. You can have discrete sets whose sup is also their limit. Particularly note $\{0-1/n|0<n\in \mathbb{N}\}$ unless I'm mistaken.
I think this can be deleted; it's been closed as part of a contest, and the asker edited it out. I've rolled back the edit and suggested that the asker delete it properly.
Point set topology is dumb. I am not sure that you can come up with a nice, general family of sets which have their supremum as a limit point. Or, rather, if you did, it would essentially come down to "The set of subsets $A$ of $\mathbb{R}$ with the property that $\sup(A)$ is a limit point of $A$ is the set of subsets $A$ of $\mathbb{R}$ having the property that $\sup(A)$ is a limit point of $A$."
Then I would advise patience. According to the graph above, the main chat room is most active in an hour or three. You might just have to wait for people in the US to either wake up or get off of work / out of class.
Speaking of class, I should probably get out of here and prepare some lecture notes for this afternoon.
@DRF I don't see a problem with the conversation; it seems you'll have been talking about a question, the adequacy of the answers, etc. If there is somewhere you really really want me to send the conversation to, let me know, and I'll oblige. But no worries from me.
@amWhy I voted to reopen the question, but I also raised a moderator flag suggesting that it be locked for historical significance, as it really doesn't adhere to the current consensus regarding what is a "good question".
@XanderHenderson Perhaps at least for some cases when the question is similar (i.e., it is target of many duplicates or at least many posts contains links to it and, at the same time, it is lacking if we view it from the today's standards), historical lock might be a reasonable solution.
We talked about historical locks some time ago in this room - here is a link to my message which is perhaps somewhere near the middle of that conversation (which touched also on other topics).
Probably it might be useful to make a post on meta concerning use of historical lock for the purpose of "preserving" questions.
2
Another case where I would consider historical lock a useful action (or at least definitely preferable over deletion) is when the post is linked on some other website which is at least a bit important. For example, if a question from this site is referenced on Wikipedia.
Sorry for the digression, it was a bit related to historical locks. (If somebody wants to, we can discuss WP and its relation to MO/MSE further in Math Meta chat.)
The question Compute $ \lim\limits_{n \to \infty }\sin \sin \dots\sin n$ was recently closed. I agree that, by modern standards, the question is not a good one. It is simply a problem statement question, and would rapidly be closed if it were posted today.
However, the question has proved to b...
The question Compute $ \lim\limits_{n \to \infty }\sin \sin \dots\sin n$ was recently closed. I agree that, by modern standards, the question is not a good one. It is simply a problem statement question, and would rapidly be closed if it were posted today.
However, the question has proved to b...
