What to Do When the Trisector Comes (1983) [pdf]
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Re: What to Do When the Trisector Comes (1983) [pdf]
#2Also 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):
Re: What to Do When the Trisector Comes (1983) [pdf]
#3Also 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
These are fantastic. Thank you
Re: What to Do When the Trisector Comes (1983) [pdf]
#4Underwood Dudley has written more comprehensive books about mathematical cranks (in general) and trisectors (in particular) which are a delight to read.
Re: What to Do When the Trisector Comes (1983) [pdf]
#5Reads as if written by a Brontosaurus expert.
Re: What to Do When the Trisector Comes (1983) [pdf]
#6Related:
What to Do When the Trisector Comes (PDF, 1983) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34404927 - Jan 2023 (1 comment)
Beware of Cranks: Misguided attempts to solve impossible mathematical problems - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21206633 - Oct 2019 (61 comments)
What to Do When the Trisector Comes (1983) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14446708 - May 2017 (28 comments) (<-- hello!)
Re: What to Do When the Trisector Comes (1983) [pdf]
#7Underwood Dudley has written more comprehensive books about mathematical cranks (in general) and trisectors (in particular) which are a delight to read.
For some reason the article made me think about this quote from one of the 2025 MacArthur Fellowship videos, "I think there are some mathematicians who are kind of like the hiker who choose this massive peak they want to scale and they do everything they can to make it up the mountain. I'm more like the kind of hiker who wanders through the forest and stops to look at a pretty stone or flower and reflect on whether it's similar to a stone or flower that I've seen before."
Re: What to Do When the Trisector Comes (1983) [pdf]
#8The advice here is now increasingly out of date in the era of LLMs.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 into outright paranoid delusions.
Re: What to Do When the Trisector Comes (1983) [pdf]
#9I found the writing, and the descriptions of the types of trisectors, strangely poignant. Most of us do not attempt to trisect an angle with straightedge and compass; but surely many of us have other irrational obsessions with which we waste our time (I have certainly been guilty of this). I hope people can find time to look up from their interactions with social media and LLMs for enough healthy introspection to avoid these traps.
Re: What to Do When the Trisector Comes (1983) [pdf]
#10I was briefly a trisector in middle school but at least I was fortunate enough to have access to Geogebra which quickly showed me the error in my procedure. I wonder what other tools we can give a curious but potentially misguided person so they too do not fall too deep into the rabbit hole.