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Comment by pandaman | Hacker News Reader

It's not a problem at all. For example, people do mistakes in calculations all the time but since Math is not faith and/or consensus based nobody flies off the handle and runs a public ostracism campaign on them. You think Bloomberg spent 500M on his campaign so he spent more than if he had given 1M to every citizen of the US? You just look like a fool but there are not going to be 1000 Math professors signing letters to excommunicate you and your bank accounts are not going to be shut down and you still keep your job in New York Times.

If you feel that your science won't stand without harassing heretics, perhaps it is the problem with the soundness of your science and not the folly of the heretics?

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What happens when there are 10 million citizens demanding their million dollars, who won't take "but that's not how math works" for an answer?

They don't get their million dollars.

And then we call out the National Guard to put an exclamation point at the end of that sentence.

I am a bit late to your train of thought so it seems to have left the station without me. Are you saying we solve mathematical problems with the National Guard? Correct grammar with it? I honestly cannot understand what are you trying to say here.

I think he's saying that if there are 10 million citizens demanding something, and they're certain that they're correct, then it might require the National Guard to prevent them from taking what they believe to be theirs. In a society where those 10 million people accept the authority of the world's greatest experts in arithmetic, there presumably wouldn't be 10 million people making unreasonable demands because their thinking would have been set right by experts. I'm not 100% sure if this is a water-tight argument, but I think it's what the parent comment was getting at.

I see. This seem to be a narrowing of the more general idea that suppressing wrongthink will get rid of wrongdoers but applied to science specifically. If history to be believed the general idea had failed in its numerous implementations.

I think the problem was that it takes much more resources to react to the wrongthinkers while simultaneously selecting the most capable wrongdoers to the point that the wrongdoers are able to overthrow the government.

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