Re: Ullrichism; Was: a theory of countable reals

Michael Press wrote:

Your sweet reasonableness is suspect, even
questionable because of your campaign to reduce
another.


Ah, but 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. Since I assume that David does not
intend to be rude, I
conclude that he is simply unaware of his rudeness.
Communications from
him (on this forum and in e-mail) confirm this
conclusion. My hope is
that eventually David and others will develop an
awareness of the
derogatory connotations of his or their phraseology
and of how such a
mode of discourse is ultimately counterproductive.
Such awareness
should motivate change.

Here is a somewhat, but not completely, related
instance of linguistic
effect. Early in my training as a teaching
assistant, I was given the
advice to avoid the word "obviously" in class. For
if a student does
not find the conclusion obvious, then s/he feels
stupid. Not that the
use of the word was intended as an insult, but it has
its effect just
the same. Instilling self-loathing is not helpful in
any respect. I
was very glad to have received that advice, and I
have striven to avoid
the word "obvious" since.<<

Jesus! You've just cut the professor's vocabulary in
half! Eliminate "trivial" and students will see only
the back of a bald grey head, witnessing in silence
the outstretched hand creeping from a tweed jacket
sleeve to scrawl equations on the blackboard.

Just kidding. :-)


What we have here is something more nefarious. Often
the words David
choose *do* put-down the correspondent, though David
may sometimes not
be conscious of this effect. As I have stated
before, such put-downs
are rarely, if ever, productive. Even a crank will
just respond with
more crankery to such remarks. In fact, the crank
will take the
rudeness as a reason to dismiss the insulter's input
and just insult
him/her back. Better to just ignore the crank all
together than to
insult him/her. Or flatly say something like, "It is
clear you are not
willing to listen to reason," and leave it at that.


--
Stephen J. Herschkorn
sjherschko@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Math Tutor on the Internet and in Central New Jersey
and Manhattan

Ullrich is just being Ullrich.

Tom
.

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