XPost: comp.theory
From: acm@muc.de
[ Followup-To: set ]
In comp.theory olcott wrote:
> On 11/16/2025 4:20 PM, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
>> In comp.theory olcott wrote:
>>> On 11/16/2025 2:49 AM, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
>>>> Tristan Wibberley
>>>> wrote:
>>>>> On 15/11/2025 11:59, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
>>>>>> Very clever people have attempted to show
>>>>>> inconsistencies in the mathematical foundations, without success. Less
>>>>>> clever people don't have a chance of doing so.
>>>>> That's /much/ better politics but still sorely lacking. It leaves open
>>>>> the avenue that the clever people did indeed show the inconsistencies to
>>>>> themselves and to some others but they didn't show them to /you/.
>>>> That's not the way the world works. Such results would have been
>>>> published in a mathematical journal, and immediately attracted scrutiny.
>>> That is not the way that the world works. A brilliant
>>> tenured PhD computer science professor could have been
>>> fired merely because he brought up the idea that the
>>> halting problem might be wrong. No one bothered to look
>>> at any of the words that he wrote. The fact that he
>>> challenged conventional wisdom was considered blasphemy.
>> I put it to you that this has never happened. Tenured professors don't
>> go around asserting falsehoods in their own field.
> It is not a falsehood.
I put it to you again, that no tenured professor has ever been sacked for
this reason.
> It is a truth that you utterly will not pay attention to because you
> are too damned sure of yourself.
I think that by "it" you mean the halting theorem. Yes I'm sure of
myself because this theorem has been unequivocably proven as well as
being utterly trivial.
>> If they do, they are a danger to their students, and should be
>> removed. It is common knowledge that Wolfgang Mückenheim, who teaches
>> at Augsburg, asserts falsehoods on sci.math. It is generally agreed
>> there he should be dismissed.
> People utterly refused to look for any errors in his
> reasoning. They assumed that he must be wrong entirely
> on the basis that he challenged conventional notions.
People didn't have to look. His errors were damned obvious, and they
were pointed out ad nauseam on sci.math, just as your errors have been
pointed out ad nauseam here. Neither of you has paid the slightest
attention to these notices of errors. You both just evade them, or
ignore them, and carry on blasting falsehoods into a newsgroup. You are
both cranks.
> He has many papers published in JACM.
Hopefully not about Set Theory.
>> If a geography academic were to promulgate the notion that the Earth was
>> flat, he should likewise be fired. Those in authority that assert and
>> teach falsehoods should not have such positions.
>> Again we're not talking about "conventional wisdom", we're talking about
>> firmly established knowledge. "Conventional wisdom" is much weaker than
>> established knowledge, and it is often false.
>>>> Something like this did happen some years ago, I can't remember the
>>>> exact details, but I think it was a "proof" that integer arithmetic was
>>>> inconsistent. An even cleverer mathematician (I think it might have
>>>> been Terence Tao) found flaws in the proof, and the paper was withdrawn.
>>>>> That leaves open to the recipient of your message the possibility that
>>>>> they're merely reading a message from the wrong person. Especially in
>>>>> dead-usenet they can expect it to be true.
>>>>> Also, it's /literally/ a mere appeal to received doctrine which is a
>>>>> famous fallacy, one of the famous ones.
>>>> Not "received doctrine", but established knowledge. You don't call it
>>>> "received doctrine" when you rely on the abilities of a car mechanic to
>>>> service your car or a doctor to service you.
>>> No one in any technical field: computer science,
>>> mathematics, and logic can tolerate challenges to
>>> the foundational assumptions of their field.
>> No, mathematicians can't tolerate cranks telling them that 2 + 2 = 5, or
>> an arbitrary angle can be trisected by ruler and compass, or that the
>> halting theorem is wrong. Academics hate lies and falsehoods.
>> By "challenges" you mean ignorant cranks disputing established knowledge.
> You probably don't even know what the term [foundational assumptions]
> means.
I assume it means what it says.
> I will give you a concrete example ZFC overturned the foundational
> assumptions of naive set theory.
Did it really? Naive set theory is still widely used, though with
awareness of its limitations. Much like Newtonian mechanics is still
widely taught and used despite the development of Special Relativity.
Both naive set theory (as it is now called) and Newtonian mechanics were
found to have problems, and they were modified by highly educated very
clever specialists. There is no such problem with the Halting Theorem.
>>> Everything has been proven to work correctly within
>>> those foundational assumptions over many decades.
>> Indeed, yes. One such foundational assumption is that if you drop
>> something it falls. Some people high on LSD decided that assumption was
>> false and jumped out of windows with tragic results.
> In other words you are saying that you are still
> dumb enough to accept the Russell's Paradox is sound?
> Is ZFC crack-pottery?
Must you be so offensive? I am not saying anything like that at all. A
paradox is not the sort of thing that is either sound or unsound. It
simply is. ZFC is the currently accepted version of set theory, and
unresolved problems with it haven't been found.
>>> Only Philosophers in those technical fields can
>>> have sufficient open mindedness to objectively
>>> consider alternatives to the foundational assumptions.
>> Wrong. Philosophers are insufficiently competent in the technical fields
>> to be able to evaluate them effectively. Only technical experts are able
>> to do this. The example you sometimes cite, of the new set theory ZFC,
>> was not formulated by philosophers.
> It is extremely rare that a single person will
> be sufficiently open minded and technically competent.
If that is the case, technically competent wins over "sufficiently open
minded" (whatever that might mean) every time. You certainly wouldn't
have accepted some new cancer treatment from somebody "sufficiently open
minded" in preference to those provided by technically competent doctors.
I seem to remember that a few years ago in the USA, "sufficiently open
minded" people suggested bleach as a treatment for covid-19.
> I operated on the basis of the intuition that if
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