@ParamanandSingh: Hey!

I don't want to go off-topic in the other chat-room that much, so... =)

Concerning that medical lie thing, I too tried hard.

I wasn't aware that you visit this room @user21820

Oh actually SBA invited me here many years back.

I spent a few hours digging around just to be very sure that I wasn't hurting an innocent person by claiming that they were lying.

Eventually I found some archived copies of that user's profile that corroborated with various claims on reddit about their snarky comments invoking Namagiri.

So I decided that it was impossible for me to be wrong.

@user21820: I am not so much of a religious person but still I think doing all this in the name of some godess/deity is wrong.

The joy of sharing of your mathematical achievements with like minded people is much more than boasting around with a closed form solution.

I don't know what sort of satisfaction is gained by such boasting. Worst was the lot of upvotes garnered by those answers.

Indeed. The only problem was that before I did my digging, there were no extant comments on SE itself that provided evidence for Cleo claiming to have gotten the answer from Namagiri.

So I would be relying on thin ice (other commenters' short comments claiming Cleo was lying) if I didn't find other evidence.

It's great that you found all this evidence. I was just pissed off and never ever looked up any answer of that user (well there wasn't much to learn there)

@ParamanandSingh Hahaha..

@user21820 : This voting and gaming aspect of math.se is not fully compatible with the idea of mathematical correctness and intellectual honesty. But I guess we have to live in an imperfect world.

@ParamanandSingh I can see that the voting system actually works alright in SO. For them, most questions are about how to do something in some software environment. The answers either work or don't work.

It is, however, a stupid system for things like Math.

Where there is also the homework lair.

There is also a dishonesty side of SO, though it has nothing to do with the voting system: Lots of people now copy solutions from SO without knowing how they work. We don't see the effects yet, but in the future there will be lots of software in household items that are broken due to incompetent programmers who cobbled together something from SO...

@user21820: there is the aspect of judging correctness but more serious issue is that many don't care that much about it.

Yes that is the biggest issue; most Math SE users don't care for quality.

Even among the professors! No idea why, actually.

Like many professions teaching is also an economic activity. And usually (at least in short term) dishonesty pays some dividends in any economic activity. A professor who is giving some appealing or intuitive ideas will be perhaps more popular among students compared to someone who is hell bent on rigor.

For me all this nonsense in the name of intuitive has to be stopped. It's like you give me money but I don't want to work for it. If you want an explanation get ready to dig the details and not just crave for some superficial idea

There are ample examples in history of math (and physics too) where people had to finally accept things which are counter-intuitive. Real analysis is full of many such examples of pathological functions.

And I am sure your field of logic also has some example which are difficult to deal just by intuition.

@user21820: anyway it's time to sleep here. Will catch you later. Bye!

@ParamanandSingh Indeed.

@ParamanandSingh Chat again soon! Sorry I was away for a bit just now.

@ParamanandSingh The example that always comes to my mind is the compactness theorem for FOL, which is not only non-constructive but necessarily so. Two interesting facts that show this are:

(1) Compactness trivially yields a non-standard model of PA, but there is no computable non-standard model of PA, so the compactness argument cannot have a computable witness!

(2) There is a computable infinite binary tree (i.e. a computable set S of finite binary strings closed under prefixes) with no computable infinite path (i.e. binary string whose finite prefixes are all in S), despite the fact that the same argument to prove compactness for countable FOL theories also proves that there is in fact an infinite path.

So in some sense compactness for even countable FOL theories is truly non-constructive.

Worse is when it is applied to uncountable theories, which I cannot get my mind around. I can mentally grasp countable iterations, but I cannot grasp uncountably long iterations...