Re:“Subject: Urgent Warning”
by jordigh on Tuesday January 19, 2016 @10:52AM
(#10931479)
That seems a bit... I want to say cruel, but maybe it's not? I'm sure most of these mathematical cranks have various kinds of mental illnesses. Perhaps referring them to each other is creating an ad-hoc support group, or perhaps it's just ridiculing them.
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Agreed. However, at some point in time remember Galileo was also called a crank. Be careful in that respect.
Indeed. He was totally a crank, and also an asshole (which is what got him under house arrest). He was rightfully rejected by contemporary scientific community for pushing a model that didn't even agree with empirical data about planetary motions they've accumulated so far, as opposed to the commonly accepted models.
Yes, be careful in that respect, because the story of Galileo is one of the common historical misconceptions.
EDIT: Sources - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10878748.
Could you please give me some citations, papers or any reference? Was he not an advocate of the Heliocentric model accepted today, that almost got him killed?
Please correct my historical misconceptions.
Added a link to sources to my original comment.
Will definitely be reading that thanks. However this does not change my initial point: some forward thinking individuals are ahead of their time and are sometimes ostracized for the wrong reasons.
I agree that some crank-looking people end up being Ramanujan, but the vast majority are not. When you look at the lunacy that most cranks put out, you start to see that there is a sea of weirdness out there, and doubtlessly a lot of mental illness. The old http://crank.net still seems to be up (hah! "powered by GNU m4"), so take a stroll to get a sample of the common thing that maths and physics profs have to wade through in their inboxes.
Keep in mind for the vast majority of human existence thus far, humans sometimes just flip their shit and become untrustworthy. So some percentage of humans always expecting this from everyone is probable. So which is the mental illness, expecting a fellow primate is or will become bezerk, or that fellow primates non-deterministically do in fact go bezerk?
I have no doubt the signal to noise ratio is disconcerting. Not all shells contain precious perls...
"In the late 1950s, three men who identified as the Son of God were forced to live together in a mental hospital."
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...
doesnt end well