In the same vein is the talk Pathological Physics: Tales from 'The Box' [1] which talks about various physics papers written by amateurs and sent in to the physics department at the university the speaker was in.
What to Do When the Trisector Comes (1983) [pdf]
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Re: What to Do When the Trisector Comes (1983) [pdf]
#12I had a lot of contact with computer science students coming from the other side, meaning they used Z3 or other (SMT) solvers as blackboxes which they just use at a certain point in their algorithm without having thought what theories they are using (the T in SMT) and what's undecidable in general or in that theory.
So I had quite a few "groundbreaking" approaches end in disappointment.
It's important to know the capabilities and limits of your tools.
Re: What to Do When the Trisector Comes (1983) [pdf]
#13Also relevant to this topic: Fred Gruenberger's Measure for Crackpots (1962): https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2006/P2678... John Baez's Crackpot Index (1998): https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
That Gruenberger piece is a fantastic read and still applicable today.
Re: What to Do When the Trisector Comes (1983) [pdf]
#14It’s interesting to me that Augustus DeMorgan’s view of “a paradoxer” is someone who “attacks the consequences, direct and indirect, of the mathematical method.” (gentle paraphrase)
Why is that the central tenet of being a paradoxer? To me, that’s how I learn and internalize things. I take the premise under study, find some consequence that feels absurd, and turn it this way and that in my mind until the flaw in my own previous thinking becomes clear to me.
Are there better ways of learning?
Does this make me more prone to being a paradoxer?
Re: What to Do When the Trisector Comes (1983) [pdf]
#15The advice here is now increasingly out of date in the era of LLMs. Trisectors are more numerous and voluminous than ever, while being less obvious and more effective at wasting your time, and approaching a far greater variety of subjects, and any kind of response to one has a much greater risk of outright aggressive and even threatening responses as sycophantic AIs escalate their users otherwise benign hyperfocus in…
Out of date?
If what you say is true, shouldn’t that make the understanding of trisectors more urgent and important? If anything, this is more relevant than before.
Re: What to Do When the Trisector Comes (1983) [pdf]
#16It’s interesting to me that Augustus DeMorgan’s view of “a paradoxer” is someone who “attacks the consequences, direct and indirect, of the mathematical method.” (gentle paraphrase) Why is that the central tenet of being a paradoxer? To me, that’s how I learn and internalize things. I take the premise under study, find some consequence that feels absurd, and turn it this way and that in my mind until the flaw in my o…
It makes you a paradoxer if you stopped after the step of finding the consequence that feels absurd.
Re: What to Do When the Trisector Comes (1983) [pdf]
#17The sheer amount of dedication is awe-inspiring. In the 80s, at Imperial College, London, Theoretical Physics Group, we came across some correspondence intended for one of the professors, I think. This person had evidently "translated" his native Spanish into English, laboriously, via some dictionary we thought. We spent many tea breaks puzzling over phrases such as
"Is well-knew the refran: of the said to made it has a good road."
Re: What to Do When the Trisector Comes (1983) [pdf]
#18The advice here is now increasingly out of date in the era of LLMs. Trisectors are more numerous and voluminous than ever, while being less obvious and more effective at wasting your time, and approaching a far greater variety of subjects, and any kind of response to one has a much greater risk of outright aggressive and even threatening responses as sycophantic AIs escalate their users otherwise benign hyperfocus in…
LLMs are trisector factories.
Re: What to Do When the Trisector Comes (1983) [pdf]
#19The advice here is now increasingly out of date in the era of LLMs. Trisectors are more numerous and voluminous than ever, while being less obvious and more effective at wasting your time, and approaching a far greater variety of subjects, and any kind of response to one has a much greater risk of outright aggressive and even threatening responses as sycophantic AIs escalate their users otherwise benign hyperfocus in…
Out of date? If what you say is true, shouldn’t that make the understanding of trisectors more urgent and important? If anything, this is more relevant than before.
I'm not sure. I think LLMs makes different people into trisectors and they trisect in different ways-- so not just much more numerous but also somewhat different in character.