So far I only really experienced this with two people on the Fediverse. @SmartmanApps@programming.dev (I have no compunction about @ing him, I assume he’s blocked me since he stopped replying to me ages ago - does that mean I win??) seems mainly to use the internet to further his incorrect beliefs about maths. He’s a maths teacher, but his knowledge seems to run out around the end of high school maths (contradicting some high school maths), and he doesn’t have the intellect to understand how maths beyond that point even works: he fundamentally doesn’t understand what a mathematical definition is, for example, so when he reads standard sources he doesn’t even understand how they contradict him.
omfg you weren’t kidding. just wasted 15 minutes scrolling through his comment history. multiple pages were for a SINGLE COMMENT THREAD where he just dug his heels in about operator precedence of all things and refused to budge. completely and utterly closed-minded while being ignorant to anything much beyond middle-school level. I feel sorry for the poor saps that tried engaging with him
Yeah that was me, and now I made you suffer with me! Mahahahaaa!
But to be honest I found the whole thing quite entertaining. It’s a puzzle working out what the hell he believes, because he doesn’t actually have the level of awareness and understanding to state his position clearly. So every conversation he has on this it’s five levels of back-and-forth before he reveals that actually he thinks that, in working out an expression like a(b+c) the very first thing you must do is apply the distributive property to turn it into (ab+ac), because he has got it in his head that the term “multiplication” only applies to multiplication with an explicit symbol like a×b, and if there is no symbol he thinks it’s completely different. Hence when order-of-operations rules say “multiplication” after “brackets” he thinks that does not apply to the aforementioned case. And then his lack of awareness comes in, because it’s not just that he doesn’t realise he’s wrong; he doesn’t even realise that nobody else is doing it that way.
I’m still not completely convinced he’s not a troll, but his dedication across platforms* to this one topic, and his lack of versatility as regards trolling on other topics, pushes it onto the side of sincerity.
*I googled his username and have seen him push this line on GitHub, math.stackexchange, and Mastodon - where he also has pet topics about how 0.999… ≠ 1 and how Cantor’s theorem on the uncountability of the reals is wrong because, get this: infinite sets don’t exist - both of these being more entertaining but worse in terms of disinformation
I once found usenet messages from my granny in web archive - probably long lost now (she was already dead when I found them, and they were at least a decade old then - she was the tech-savviest granny I ever knew). She was engaged in a fierce debate about religion, so telling people they’re wrong on the internet must run in the family.
So far I only really experienced this with two people on the Fediverse. @SmartmanApps@programming.dev (I have no compunction about @ing him, I assume he’s blocked me since he stopped replying to me ages ago - does that mean I win??) seems mainly to use the internet to further his incorrect beliefs about maths. He’s a maths teacher, but his knowledge seems to run out around the end of high school maths (contradicting some high school maths), and he doesn’t have the intellect to understand how maths beyond that point even works: he fundamentally doesn’t understand what a mathematical definition is, for example, so when he reads standard sources he doesn’t even understand how they contradict him.
Everyone else pales in comparison.
omfg you weren’t kidding. just wasted 15 minutes scrolling through his comment history. multiple pages were for a SINGLE COMMENT THREAD where he just dug his heels in about operator precedence of all things and refused to budge. completely and utterly closed-minded while being ignorant to anything much beyond middle-school level. I feel sorry for the poor saps that tried engaging with him
Yeah that was me, and now I made you suffer with me! Mahahahaaa!
But to be honest I found the whole thing quite entertaining. It’s a puzzle working out what the hell he believes, because he doesn’t actually have the level of awareness and understanding to state his position clearly. So every conversation he has on this it’s five levels of back-and-forth before he reveals that actually he thinks that, in working out an expression like
a(b+c)the very first thing you must do is apply the distributive property to turn it into(ab+ac), because he has got it in his head that the term “multiplication” only applies to multiplication with an explicit symbol likea×b, and if there is no symbol he thinks it’s completely different. Hence when order-of-operations rules say “multiplication” after “brackets” he thinks that does not apply to the aforementioned case. And then his lack of awareness comes in, because it’s not just that he doesn’t realise he’s wrong; he doesn’t even realise that nobody else is doing it that way.I’m still not completely convinced he’s not a troll, but his dedication across platforms* to this one topic, and his lack of versatility as regards trolling on other topics, pushes it onto the side of sincerity.
*I googled his username and have seen him push this line on GitHub, math.stackexchange, and Mastodon - where he also has pet topics about how 0.999… ≠ 1 and how Cantor’s theorem on the uncountability of the reals is wrong because, get this: infinite sets don’t exist - both of these being more entertaining but worse in terms of disinformation
fuuuuuuuuck
infinity not actually existing gotta be the funniest of them all
Ah, internet crackpots. What fun.
https://old.reddit.com/r/math/comments/myqphx/genius_meets_lunatic_1994_discussion_between/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_personality#Eccentric_personalities
I once found usenet messages from my granny in web archive - probably long lost now (she was already dead when I found them, and they were at least a decade old then - she was the tech-savviest granny I ever knew). She was engaged in a fierce debate about religion, so telling people they’re wrong on the internet must run in the family.