Dammit, R. James! You can't just skip numbers like that and mess up Rice's streak!!
There's a nice tiling of butterflies there.
At the same time, you could say that narrow-mindedness was focus and restraint, things which __do__ work for innovation.
Another way of looking at the cohesiveness issue, is that if your community is so substantially strong, why do you need to exclude outsiders ? The best democracies include difference, revealing their strength through diversity. The worst extremist fascist states put it to death, revealing their dread of diversity.
Let the ad-hoc groups of intellectual collaborators be like democratic meritocracies not frightened facist states.
If you're looking at the tiny subset of outsider science that's chosen for correctness and publication-worthiness, of course you'll be enthusiastic about it. But these people, like Marjorie Rice, aren't really facing any obstacles from the establishment! If their work has merit, they usually get a warm welcome.
The elephant in the room is that >99% of outsider science is extremely bad, and can't understand why it's bad even after repeated explanations. Pretty much all the people complaining about the scientific establishment are like "fermatists", who used to hover around math institutes to have their proofs of FLT checked. If you're not familiar with such people, I urge you to actually look at a sample of their work and form your own opinion.
After that I think you'll be less eager to throw accusations around. A scientist's life is hard enough already, without people telling her she's an insecure evil fascist for rejecting torsion fields, the EmDrive, or Time Cube.
What does FLT stand for? Fermat's Last Theorem?
> 99% outsider science is extremely bad, and can't understand why it's bad even after repeated explanations
A challenge dealing with noise in a system is an opportunity for a solution, not a rationalization to censor people. That < .01% may be onto something big.
For whatever reason, this reminds me of the recent TED talk that got pulled because the speaker was challenging dogma in research. Can't remember the title off the top of my head.
Now I'm curious, how exactly did you come to believe that the scientific community is not welcoming to outsiders with good ideas?
Where are you getting that the math establishment is some kind of "frightened fascist state"? I have no idea what you're talking about here.
It's definitely neat that someone with no formal training outside of high school was able to come up with novel solutions to this problem. But I don't see the "fascist" community that you are arguing against trying to exclude anyone.
What's more, mathematics has consistently avoided the "Lakatos trap" of chasing "narrow-minded" research programs that it might be argued that plague science in general. Even physics: Alan Sokal's mock article accidentally zooms in on how we have failed to understand (and persist on failing to working on, at least since the Kolmogorov formalism) the everyday phenomenon of turbulent fluid dynamics even as we've grown to astounding heights in esoteric reductionist physics that are spuriously compared to a new metaphysics. And don't get me started on economics or even econometrics -- just the vast swaths of subjects we've given up on.
I am as uneasy with credentialism as anybody, and I think we need to find better ways around these problems, but it's important to understand that at least some of this community exclusiveness stuff actually serves a purpose.
It is positive, constructive and it works for outsiders to be included in science and art. it is also positive and correct to critically look at thing when you hold the highest potential of those things as important. Nothing is sacred beyond critical inquiry, that way lies dogmatic extremism. Being an apologist for a broken culture doesn’t help that culture, nor the context in which it operates.
If you choose to pretend that outsider art is all good and outsider science is all bad, and that the culture of art, science and math ( and tech ) are beyond reproach, and that the points raised have no value as opportunities to create improvements, and that scientists ( or mathematicians, or the establishment ) are poor fake victims who are suffering hardship for considering whether their cultures possess opportunities for improvement, if this is the case then I can understand how pretending that seems to make it easier for you, since you can hold to an unchallenged perspective and not experience the disruption that comes with questioning the lay of the land under your feet. Tho that choice isn't as likely to lead to reflection, as being open to questioning. And without reflection, no improvement.
And without questioning, no science.
Science is inspiring. Science isn't about protecting yourself from reflection, science is brave, science embraces reflection and self critical thinking, and science embraces belief in the face of the unknown, science embraces acknowledging the unknown, and running the experiment. Science embraces the question. Science is the opposite of dogmatic. Anything that claims to be science and shies away from openness, is the mere color of science.
Science is that very ideal : that strength is open vulnerability, and not dogmatic inflexibility. Science is an inspiration.
I believe the very sensitivity of these comments ( and the fact that they created the accusation in their interpreting, fabricating a connection to an accusation that was not stated ) reveals clearly that this issue is on people’s minds, and that in expectation of it being raised, and in expectation of its raising being troubling, they are not only defending against it, they are prematurely defending against it, and creating themselves the accusation that was not present and which they have hallucinated in their fear of it.
To be afraid of something is to suspect it.
So the very ideas I have raised have triggered this apparition to be conjured in these minds giving life and proof to the very questions I raised, and expanding the scope of relevance of the critique. It's not just about maths, clearly. It's about science as a whole. The argument was never "could this occur?" for we all know it could, and we have seen it, as have we all seen the kind of reflexive apologist rhetoric get triggered that was triggered here in denial of anything wrong with these culture’s held beyond question. The argument instead was a warning against the very defensiveness seen triggered in response to it, and a warning put now in clearer relief against the background of comments that display that very inflexibility and refusal of critical questioning that can lead to the exclusionist frightened culture warned about.
These comments are then nothing except my loyal supporters, they stand beside my warning as additional support for its importance, and in them we can see how the beginnings of dogmatic inflexibility take hold : through defensive denial of divergent ideas and refusal to question the conventional.
Let the ad-hoc groups of intellectual collaborators be like democratic meritocracies not frightened fascist states.