FShrike

@BillDubuque indeed, the initial revision was quite lazy. I just wouldn’t want to delete it just yet

It's still not great, of course

@Ѕᴀᴀᴅ Several community users have put effort into improving this question

Curation is, of course, something I endorse

When books have value, someone learns and is glad when they find them in a library. Unless SE runs out of storage some day and we have to extremely carefully consider every entry, I won’t be sure that I see these as “completely orthogonal” - but I agree they are not exactly the same.

@Peter Is that a request to downvote or delete their answer? I’m not sure what your message is getting at

Ie “can I do this?” Rather than “check my proof”

how do you feel, instead, about questions which highlight a step in their proof which is intuitively plausible but they struggle to rigorously demonstrate?

@XanderHenderson A lot can be learned by checking details in proofs carefully and seeing where any subtleties or mistakes arise. Lord knows many authors are “guilty” of omitting very details, sometimes to the point of being incorrect, and a student can struggle to feel confident filling in those details for themselves or conducting their own proofs when their sources of authority are patchy. So of course there is value if the question is focused and made to be (somewhat) of general interest

^ noted, Jakobian

@MikeEarnest Reopened. I’m not sure I follow how two extra close votes were introduced after it had already been edited.

I apologise if I have spoken too strongly for you

From my pov I, at worst, sometimes mildly disagree with Xander. I'm not in the business of fighting or disrespecting moderators

but, sure, noted. My record on MSE is.. just fine. Essentially every reaction I ever have is neutral or positive; I often go out of my way to be helpful, especially to new users

I think it is wrong to say I clash

(most recently in the moderator election chat, I was responding to questions - some of which were in the direction of character-judging - anyway; I was not ranting to the wind)

Chatrooms are supposed to be conversational, but if I wore a diamond I would be less familiar.

@amWhy I don't remember making any specific accusations. I try here and in all places on MSE to write _moderate_ly. At any rate, I speak now in my capacity as an ordinary user. I would speak/intervene more carefully as moderator for obvious reasons.

Ah, don’t say that… I would hate moving. Long live SE, for all its faults. But I suppose you’ve been through this before

@FedericoRuck math.stackexchange.com/election?cb=1

@JyrkiLahtonen Most, if not all, candidates responded to the comments on their posts so I'm not sure what you mean there. Unless you mean for new responses to be made and shown, but I think the powers that be distinguish the nomination phase from the election phase for a reason

@JyrkiLahtonen All candidates had many comments underneath their nominations, including myself, only a handful of which were from Bill.

Right. Unless someone has been following closely, they might not even be aware the clarifying and (constructively) critical comments exist.

I agree we should all touch grass at some point

Certainly. It’s a fair question, and I can’t really convince you with hard evidence as you don’t know me in real life, but I do indeed “have a life” ; ) I am working with and talking with people just as often as I am doing maths, (the interpersonal aspect is what I like most about teaching maths, or really any subject) and maths has only really been a major aspect in my life for the last three years. I am no stranger to ‘handling’ very difficult people and ugly social situations, either.

It is probably too much in the sense I enjoy procrastinating working on my own mathematics by looking at other people's questions here... But I don't exactly spend a whole day here; you can get a "day of attendance" just by looking at the question list once, and maybe doing nothing else e.g. I'm much less active when at university. Not sure I get the echo chamber comment, though.

Aiming for a conversational/light tone. Writing introductions is hard ; )

It is not at all important. In my case, I mentioned it as a casual way of indicating I am actually emotionally invested in this place (of course, it would be a terrible metric and I don't mean it as such) and that I would be active, since I already am. Were I to be elected, I wouldn't struggle to find the time to serve in my role.

This is specifically about old, good questions closed for context reasons. If an old but otherwise good question was closed for any other reason, I don’t have an opinion

This is specifically about old, good questions closed for context reasons. If an old but otherwise good question was closed for any other reason, I don’t have an opinion

Their age puts those questions in a different category. They’re before EoQS was a big thing, and closing them doesn’t exactly send anyone a message (closing can usefully inform new users of proper conduct) since the person who wrote the question either got the message years ago, or has left.

@JyrkiLahtonen I would say old, interesting questions of value shouldn’t really be closed, partly for the reason you say. If they don’t have many answers, someone new could sweep in and make it worthwhile - if it’s open. If they have many answers because it’s just one of those questions, e.g. it’s a “what are some nice ways to think about [X]?” question, then new users can add value to that - if the question is open. If it’s a dupe target, then new answers can be migrated over. Etc.

And many newbie questions are poorly titled to boot

I agree. Especially since it’s hard to really express the nature of a question just from the title.

:thumbs:

@Mittens well, I suppose moderators can get involved then... I wouldn't mind moving distinct answers over to duplicate questions when appropriate

So users, in my view, unless I guess reputation-hunting is obviously occurring (quite difficult to know for sure) shouldn't be especially criticised for answering dupes

I also think good faith would be assumed. Many times have I answered a duplicate because I simply hadn't realised it would be a duplicate: I myself tend to assume good faith in the questioner, that they couldn't find what they were looking for themselves. This is intentionally naive; if I'm wrong, then I can calmly delete my answer, no problem. If I'm right, then I've helped someone

@JyrkiLahtonen I think genuine duplicates should be closed, no doubt about it. However, if the duplicated question received a good answer, which is reasonably different from the other answers at the original post, then the answer should be migrated over to the original post. Sometimes this isn't possible, because the original question got closed (which is kind of funny). There are rare instances where users close non-duplicates as duplicates, which I would want to look out for.

That is very much fair

If I may, I understood it to mean "I don't really want to answer these questions / pursue this line of conversation".

@Shaun I know PhD students who had “nothing” until their final year. I imagine your situation is not uncommon. But best wishes.

@psie It is more the overall structure of a normed vector space. You can draw lines, and by scaling vectors, and use homogeneity of norm to give these lines a specific length. In this way you can construct points arbitrarily close with an open ball, on the boundary. In a general metric space you actually have no control on what points do and don’t exist; normed spaces have much more structure

Maybe it is true but I suspect not. At any rate, no argument has been presented for jt

Every normed space is a metric space too, yeah. $\Bbb R^n$ is both (it is many things). But I disagree with the next claim. You know if you use the metric induced from a norm that the closed ball claim is true; you don’t know, and have not tried to prove, that if your metric is not induced from a norm the closed ball claim is false. So I disagree with the “only if”

Oh! Or did you mean, you want $\overline{B(x,a)}$ to be the closed ball of radius $a$ specifically? In which case you’re right the discrete metric is a counterexample

And every set is closed in the discrete metric, so the closure of these open balls are the same thing again, and can also be written as closed balls

@psie Under the discrete metric, an open ball $B(x,a)$ is either $\{x\}$ (if $0\lt a\le1$) or the whole space, if $a\gt1$. In either case, this is a closed ball as well. We have the closed ball of radius $1/2$ or the closed ball of radius $1$, say, as options to witness this claim.

^ thanks Xander. I guess the permalink can be found with some right clicking

It would be great if these chats allowed self-replies. Is that possible?