Re: Countable models of ZFC

On Oct 3, 9:29 am, "R. Srinivasan" <sradh...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Oct 3, 12:27 am, Marshall <marshall.spi...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Oct 2, 10:58 am, george <gree...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

But it would be HARD
to find an example of me doing TO ANYbody what Rupert just
did to me.

Responding in a restrained, polite, thoughtful way, you mean?

Seriously, though, do you have any interest in how you are
perceived? I mean, you might not care, but if you do, you
could check some kind of reputation database. Here's
Google Group's user pages for you and Rupert:

http://groups.google.com/groups/profile?enc_user=rAwQEhgAAABs8MHxxdLo...

http://groups.google.com/groups/profile?enc_user=4NOBKBIAAAC-4jxebDp7...

As of this writing, Rupert has 4 stars at 878 ratings, and you have 1
star at 15 ratings.

Admittedly this is a very course measurement, but it is still telling.
It shows me that a *lot* of people notice Rupert's posts and are
quite favorably impressed. In contrast, you make few impression
on people and they are extremely negative. You might be
tempted to write that off as being a response to your aggressive
verbal style, but that wouldn't be valid. Other people I know who
are quite verbally aggressive and insulting but who are very
well versed in their field I have seen get 3 star ratings, which
I rather interpret as a mix of 5 star content and 1 star style.
Whereas you just get 1 star, period.

I have noticed in the past that you are happy to take on
pretty much everyone and assert that they are all wrong.
Whatever. But lately you have also been writing about
how anyone can check the public record and it will
prove this or that in support of you. So I just wanted to
take a moment to point out to you that the public record
shows pretty clearly that people mostly don't notice
you and that when they do, they think you suck,
and that pretty much everyone agrees that Rupert
is a swell guy worth listening to. Make of this
what you will.

Hmmm.... I just noiticed that my rating is one-star too, from 25 guys.
Guess I paid the price for cross-posting to the special relativity
newsgroup asserting that my proposed logic NAFL does not support
specail relativity theory (which it still doesn't). My guess is that I
wiould get one-star from most of the guys in this newsgroup for most
of my posts. But Ithat doesn't put me off. I suggest to these guys
that they take some milk-of-magnesia, so that they can get less
constipated and rain down a couple of more yellow stars in future.

Here is my take on the comparison between Rupert and George. Rupert is
the good boy who is diligent, smart, diplomatic and is probably loved
by all, especially by his professors. George is a smart guy too, but
is the enfant terrible who offends a lot of people with his attitude.
Between the two of them most professors would pick Rupert as their
choice for a graduate student. Rupert would undoubtedly make
contributions to furthering the status quo in his research career and
would probably have a better chance in succeeding in academics as a
professor.

But personally I would prefer to take George as my graduate student,
if I were a Prof. (fortunately I am not). In my view, guys like George
are more likely to radically challenge the status quo. George is not
afraid to call a spade a spade, and though he will get a lot of stuff
wrong, he *could* eventually hit the jackpot with his approach.
Whereas Rupert, like a lot of other smart guys in this newsgroup, is
(in my view) too deeply into the status quo to radically challenge it.


I'm a little unclear about what you mean by the "status quo".

I quite often have the experience that I state a theorem and then
George starts ranting and raving about it, and using a lot of capital
letters, based on philosophical misgivings. Now, there's nothing wrong
with being interested in philosophy, and having philosophical views
which challenge the "status quo", but it shouldn't interfere with your
ability to understand mathematics. There's no doubt that the theorems
I state are theorems of ZFC (for example) and this could in principle,
be checked by computer. George should try to develop the capacity to
recognize facts like those and to separate them from the philosophical
axes he likes to grind.

Now, when you say I'm not going to challenge the "status quo", do you
mean as a philosopher, or as a mathematician? Most mainstream
mathematicians don't worry about foundational issues at all. They
agree on what counts as rigorous mathematical reasoning (most of them
are perfectly happy with the law of excluded middle, impredicativity,
the axiom of choice, and so forth), and they just get on with doing
mathematics, and once something has been established as a theorem
there usually isn't much controversy about it. People who work in
mathematical logic are more likely to think about foundational issues,
but that doesn't need to affect the mathematical part of your work,
you just specify in what formal theory your results go through.

In the context of philosophy the idea of challenging the "status quo"
makes a lot more sense. But there's also less of a consensus to
challenge in the first place. I quite like Geoffrey Hellman's modal
structuralism, myself, which is a form of mathematical realism which
is quite friendly towards strong set-theoretic reasoning. I'm not sure
how much of a "mainstream view" this is. I have the feeling that
people who are more philosophical than mathematical tend to be a bit
more skeptical about mathematical realism and strong set-theoretic
reasoning than I am. But on the other hand these ideas sit comfortably
with generally accepted mathematical practice today. So perhaps in
this sense I don't pose much of a challenge to the "status quo".

But I am interested in other foundational views and am happy to
consider them with an open mind. It's just that I personally have
never found George's points to be very coherently expressed and I also
think that it's unfortunate that he seems to allow his philosophical
views to get in the way of understanding mathematics.

For what it is worth, I think George deserves much better than the one-
star rating he has got from this newsgroup. Not that this rating or my
opinion matters in any way.

Regards, RS


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