Re: Ullrichism; Was: a theory of countable reals

Stephen J. Herschkorn said:
I do not want to reduce another. Rather, I value David Ullrich's
mathematical contributions very much, as I suspect his students and
colleagues do. What I deplore is his mode of communication.

Then why don't you offer privately (by e-mail) to tutor him on
these matters of style of presentation? His rebuke of the OP was of
mathematical substance, namely that there does not exist a
countable complete ordered field, hence any belief to the contrary
by the OP is not of interest here. I agree with the substance of
that rebuke, and with it's appropriateness in this newsgroup.
However your complaint that his style was disfavorable, without
adding any mathematical content of your own, was IMO off-topic for
this newsgroup. (Note: In another newsgroup, such as the one that
deals with mathematics education, I forget the name of that
newsgroup although I remember seeing it once by accident,
discussions of style of education would be totally appropriate.)

Now if one or the other of you two doesn't have any e-mail address
which could be used for such private tutoring, then of course my
suggestion wouldn't be feasible, and you can ignore it.

Early in my training as a teaching assistant, I was given the
advice to avoid the word "obviously" in class.

I agree with that advice, but I don't see how it's on-topic in
sci.math. Perhaps you should find the name of that other newsgroup
that deals with math education, and add it as a cross-post, and let
this sub-thread gradually drift over to that newsgroup for anyone
interested in the topic, while the pure-math part of the original
thread may remain here? Just an idea. Take it or leave it.

I did a search just now to try to find that newsgroup. The closest
I could find is k12.ed.math, and I'm not sure that's the one I saw
before, but it might be.

Really OT (impeach GWBush, discovered just now while searching for math ed group):
<http://groups.google.com/group/comp.internet.net-happenings/msg/df5ece2c12afd786>

I was very glad to have received that advice, and I have striven
to avoid the word "obvious" since.

I hope you were rebuked privately, rather than have somebody come
into your classroom and rebuke you live during a class session
right in front of all your students.

such put-downs are rarely, if ever, productive. Even a crank
will just respond with more crankery to such remarks.

Putting hardened criminals in prison hardly ever converts them to a
legal career, but it acts as deterrent to novices who are
considering whether to follow Uncle George's path in crime or not.
Likewise I suspect several lurkers, upon seeing an obvious troll or
flake get rebuked, will decide to be more cautious before posting
anything really stupid themselves, either check their results more
carefully so that only the good stuff gets posted, or post in a
no-troll style such as showing all their work and politely asking
if anyone can see where they made a mistake.

Or flatly say something like, "It is clear you are not willing to
listen to reason," and leave it at that.

That kind of remark has no mathematical content, hence is useless
to enlighten lurkers as to why the rebuke was issued. I'd prefer
the nitpick approach: Find the very first mistake the troll makes,
state very clearly why that's a mistake, and ignore the rest of the
article that follows after the mistake, perhaps with a remark that
the rest of the article seems to be dependent on that false step
hence has no valid basis. The lurker can then concentrate on
understanding that one key point, why that one step isn't valid,
and maybe learn one thing. It's best to learn one thing at a time,
and really understand it, than to be distracted by hundreds of
simultaneous mistakes and just end up not really understanding
what's wrong with any of them. But that's just my opinion. YOMV.
.

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