Re: JSH: What if no one believes you?

On Feb 16, 3:27 am, mike3 <mike4...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Feb 15, 4:48 pm, Gib Bogle <bo...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:



marcus_b wrote:
On Feb 15, 3:09 pm, Gib Bogle <bo...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Here is an interesting question: Is JSH's mental problem biological
(faulty wiring, bad brain chemicals) or environmental (bad upbringing)?

There's nothing wrong with his genetics or 'wiring'.
My theory is that he got into some very bad habits
when he was quite young - he took standardized tests,
he did well, he was sent to a gifted kids summer camp
at Duke University, and it went to his head. He got in
the habit of thinking he was a boy genius and that he
didn't have to work hard to learn the same stuff that
other kids did; that he had been identified as a
Superior Being - he got in the habit too of looking
down on everyone else - he thinks that stupid
academic mathematicians are so wrapped up in their
elaborate theories that they have lost touch with
the simple obvious ideas, and that he is uniquely
able to go right to the heart of problems and find
those simple ideas because, well, because he has
been certified as a Boy Genius.

So was it 'bad upbringing'? I wouldn't blame
his parents who were probably perfectly nice folks
who encouraged him to think he was a special guy -
that's what parents do, and should - but to some
extent, by adolescence, we are bringing up ourselves,
and he got into to some very bad mental habits,
partly out of laziness and partly out of the
"the world owes me a living" kind of thinking.

The SWJPAM episode is highly indicative of this.
He got a paper "accepted" (for a few hours) - the
editor told him it "passed peer review" - very
unlikely, this was almost certainly a stupid clerical
error - but he felt horribly cheated when the editor
yanked it, and of course he blamed everyone but
himself. IT PASSED PEER REVIEW!!! UNFAIR, UNFAIR,
UNFAIR! And he blamed mathematicians at large for
not giving him his due, like when he was a kid and
got to go to Duke summer camp (as he deserved).

So it's not genetic - no evidence for that - it's
not upbringing exactly - there is no one to blame
for his present state except himself.

Such is my view.

The reason I'm not convinced that environment (bad habits learned etc.)
is a sufficient explanation is that many people have the same experience
in childhood of being made to believe that they are special, gifted
etc., but in most cases subsequent experience and reflection lead to an
adjustment to reality. In JSH's case the adjustment to reality hasn't
taken place. This is where something about his nature comes into play.
In my view.

No, I don't think so, I think he could change if he wanted to.
He doesn't want to.

Conclusion: He does not change.

Implication: Why bother with "debating" him any more??? Why
jump on these threads in the first place?


Personally, I thought it was interesting to
see what was wrong with his "4 equations -
4 unknowns" argument, and if you look back you
can see that Rotwang was able to show that with
some straightforward algebra, and in the end
even Harris had to see the sense of it. Similarly,
his proposed (though vague) use of the Chinese
Remainder Theorem - there was the germ of an idea
there, and without looking at it in some detail,
you knew it was in the too-good-to-be-true category
- the challenge was to show exactly what was wrong
with it and to explain it so even Harris could
understand it [although there is no evidence that
he tried to do so]. And again, with this last
variant involving the 4 equations, seeing why
it wouldn't work was an interesting challenge.

Harris is creative though totally wrong-
headed and has terrible intuition and really
does not know what a proof is - you know
he's wrong immediately, but coming up with
a valid counterargument and explaining it
in a simple way is sometimes worth the effort.

Harris too grossly, grossly underestimates
the ingenuity and insights that others have
constructed to deal with factoring - he thinks
that no one has ever before considered his
simple little ideas - e.g., seeing if factoring
modulo primes can somehow tell you something
about non-modular factoring - and it is
interesting to contrast his half-baked ideas
with ideas that actually move things forward.

Marcus.

Not to suggest an equivalence, there could be some parallel with a
certain type of extremely anti-social psychosis. Some psychopathic
individuals have a brain chemistry that makes them very "low affect",
i.e. they have very low response to normal stimuli, and require high
stimulus to get a normal level of response. There is nothing inherently
anti-social about this, but when it is combined with bad environmental
factors (e.g. physical and/or emotional abuse as a child, lack of legal
opportunities for stimulation) it can create an angry person dangerously
lacking in empathy, and capable of torturing and murdering without
compunction. The parallel I mean to illustrate is the combination of
biology and environment needed to create this condition.

Here is an outstanding example of the phenomenon:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Kuklinski

And therefore, he could still change, as the environmental
conditioning
can be worked on. Since it requires the combination of both, removing
one part therefore gets rid of that combination, and hence the effect.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: JSH: What if no one believes you?
    ... (faulty wiring, bad brain chemicals) ... My theory is that he got into some very bad habits ... not upbringing exactly - there is no one to blame ... The reason I'm not convinced that environment ...
    (sci.math)
  • Re: JSH: What if no one believes you?
    ... (faulty wiring, bad brain chemicals) ... My theory is that he got into some very bad habits ... So was it 'bad upbringing'? ... The reason I'm not convinced that environment is a sufficient explanation is that many people have the same experience in childhood of being made to believe that they are special, gifted etc., but in most cases subsequent experience and reflection lead to an adjustment to reality. ...
    (sci.math)