Re: Goedel - interesting problem?

From: Acme Diagnostics (LFinezapthis_at_partpostmark.net)
Date: 06/07/04 

Date: 6 Jun 2004 19:43:07 -0500

Chris Menzel <cmenzel@remove-this.tamu.edu> wrote:
>On 6 Jun 2004 13:09:18 -0500, Acme Diagnostics
><LFinezapthis@partpostmark.net> said:
>> [Lots of stuff...]

I made a major error in my last reply. I criticized your technical
explanation in terms of the intended reader's comprehension. In fact, I
should have cast it in terms of my own ignorance and invoked the
judgement of credentials to cure that. Probably a meaningless
distinction to you, but important to me.

>I think productive interchange is at an end. Aside from the fact that
>you can't refrain from insults

There are subtly implied and direct insults. I greatly despise the
former, usually enjoy the latter. Right, I was thinking I had gone
overboard and should have edited the post for that instead of just
adding the blurb at the bottom. I apologize. I belong to humor groups
where insults are only funny. I'll take a look at that.

>when sincere responses get too technical
>for your tastes,

See, you can be funny too. That *is* funny. I can stand outside and
laugh at myself. But my Usenet housekeeping job is flaming
pretentious dorks. Now that wouldn't work too well if I became one
myself, would it?

What have you posted here that hasn't been posted 100 times before?
OTOH, I post a lot of original material and keep a tally of it, and
anyone on Usenet with half a brain can understand all of my posts, as
in marketing. Nobody is left out. Nobody is made to feel inferior.
Nobody is made to think their opinions are less worthy for lack of a
phd. Good thing most people don't do that, but still we are
underrepresented. I post it in hopes of critical review prior to
publishing review. Most of it stands without serious rebuttal,
disagreement, flaming, etc. (as with kookdom). It's the main
reason most people put up with my antics.

>you are clearly not going to be persuaded away from a
>view I find patently absurd: that obscure, amateurish, and demonstrably
>incorrect statements

I have no problem with that, especially the incorrect statements. I've
posted too much about that to repeat. But you seem to think you are
immune. Your opinion carries exactly as much weight as mine. You
haven't figured that out yet, evidently by your one-liners and
characterizations.

One more time on "rely." By relying on judgement of credentials for
technical validity (appropriately approximate for editing requirements)
there is a probability of being wrong. You could be right, the author
could be wrong. But only an evaluation of your credentials could change
that probability very much in my POV. Judging those is a great deal of
work and you haven't helped (there are ways to do it unpretentiously).
Nobody here has given me a reason to even google their nic. OTOH
the very first post I read of the article author's blew me out of my
chair, and more-or-less consistently since then.

I've taken plenty of hits for claiming my ignorance, but you still have
not acknowledged either the obvious editing component of "Masterpiece
of explanatory text" or intended reader after several rounds and
constant reminders. You are in denial about that. Until you do, little
you say could persuade me, and in that sense you are correct. You
cannot make that move for the reason I gave in the last post. That
often happens in chess. The opponent resigns because the only
move left loses. And here you are disengaging, but maybe for the
reason you give.

>that purport to be expressions of clear
>mathematical theorems somehow nonetheless manage accurately to convey
>the essential content of those theorems to their readers.

You still have a naive view of logic, like I had in my teens. Logic is
hard. The few books are important in the beginning, but become
trivial in the greater scheme of things. The hardest academic logic
subject is applied statistics. That's at the other end of logic.

> So it really
>seems to me that both of us have better things to do.

Not me. Talking to people who think differently is most rewarding.
Publishing your ideas for criticism is crucial. As opposed to you,
evidently, I read and thought about every word you said. I learned from
talking to you, I just don't know exactly what yet. I don't think very
fast on that level, and it wasn't easy.

>Best of luck,

Same here. Perhaps someday we will meet again under more pleasant
circumstances. No doubt we have interests in common and share many
opinions as well.

I'm sure you are a very good programmer. Nothing I said about that
means anything. You have a good handle on theoretical logic from what
I can tell. But these are skills. I used to be a concert organist,
and that has a pretty hard skill component too. Skills are great, but
they're intellectually easy, especially math and symbolic logic. The
knowledge is spoon fed in a textbook. X hours of practice, Y learned.
With the right books, X minutes, Y learned. But there's creative
reasoning too (hopefully not too creative) and you can't find it in a
book, by definition. Probably the biggest part of that is editing, aka
sitting in the dark room, but which has an artistic component (which I
lack) that you can't learn in a book, again by definition. The skills
are part of the meta-logic foundation, but only a part of that, even.

Larry