Re: JSH: What if no one believes you?

On Feb 16, 10:40 am, marcus_b <marcus_bruck...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
<snip>
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.


So rebuttals have been provided. All his argument
has been discredited: so then why do people pounce
on these threads to fling a few childish insults or
other crude/rude behavior, instead of simply leaving
him alone? The argument is dead, best thing to do is
just walk away from it.

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.


Which are much, much more complicated, correct?
(Or perhaps much more subtle: a truly ingenious
solution need not be extremely complex. There
is a difference between "simple" as in elegant
ideas, and simple as in simple-minded ideas.)
.

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