jwmgregory

I stumbled upon your other dialogue here while browsing the thread. I'm honestly not certain whether or not you're just trolling, but in case you're being serious... a word of genuine advice from someone who has gone into a field that has a lot to do with mathematics:

You seem like you're an undergrad student, potentially from the UK, potentially majoring in mathematics or a mathematics adjacent field. You do seem passionate about it, I can give you that. But seriously, friend, the way you handle discourse, debate & dialectic, and reasoning are all massively ill-equipped to actually handle working in this field. If you don't change you will fail in your career. This isn't meant to be mean, it is a legitimate and fair warning. I've met a lot of people just like you over the course of my own career, and they don't last very long if at all.

Separate ego from argumentation. Engage evidence on its own terms. Recognize that complex results sometimes defy intuition. Value clarity and logic over signalling status. The responses you are getting here are really light compared to what actual supervisors and peers are going to throw at you out there. You utterly failed to sway or convince anyone because you refused to even try. The problem is patently you here. I suppose I'm trying to tell you here and now, when it's just an irrelevant internet forum, versus later when your dreams and economic security get crushed because you can't maintain a research position. If you just continue on how you are, you're going to alienate all your peers. Nobody wants to work with someone who's more concerned with personally being right than finding the truth. That's what you've done here, in all the comments of yours I have read. For example, if you were actually concerned with the truth you would've outlined your reasoning for why the proof regarding the limit of -1/12 is incorrect. You didn't even begin outlining or clarifying the problem space. What is it that you find objectionable here? Because I don't necessarily disagree with you, that limit does imply nonsensical results in a broad context. That's not the context it is posited in, however. -1/12 is pretty famously derived from the Riemann Zeta Function evaluated at -1. If you'd engaged with the other guy's source in good faith, you'd understand that he was approaching the problem in that space. You'd then be able to formulate a counterthesis that appropriately addresses the argument at hand instead of strawmanning and posturing. You didn't do that though. Why? Because you were more concerned with being personally correct than finding out the truth. So your discourse stalled and you convinced nobody of anything at all! We're not here to debate, we're here to engage in dialectic.

Final word of advice - drop the ad hominem attacks, glaring assumptions, and refusal to engage with sources based on tenuous reasons. Those are going to prevent you from breaking into the career in the first place. Don't attack people, attack arguments and lines of reasoning. Attacking someone personally doesn't do anything but undermine your own credit.

This guy argued with me somewhere else in this thread. He engaged in all the exact same rhetorical strategies and was similarly bone-headed when it came to actual, applied concepts in math. I don't think you're gonna get very far with this one, man. BRAT is an acronym for BlackRoseAmongThorns, and they're really living up to the name!

You cant force a solution in a math question from the question

That's not generally true. That's entirely dependent on the question and whoever designed it. Solve for x in Ax = b can be solved a metric fuckton of ways. Solve for x in Ax = b using Gaussian elimination is solvable in much fewer, often one, way. That's just a trivial example but the idea that you can't both force a solution and have a non-trivial question is demonstrably false to anyone with experience.

You’re overcomplicating your reply and it doesn’t make it look any smarter.

Ah, so now length is the crime and experience is the verdict? Fascinating. Meanwhile, the logical contradiction in your own position remains completely untouched. I have a master's degree in ML/AI so I actually have quite a lot of experience in mathematics.

Do you actually have any experience in working in academics, or are you just 'speaking out of your ass'? It's not particularly relevant, either way. Your position would be more in-place at a high-school geometry class than in a genuine collegiate setting, let alone in academia or industry research.

You need to take a few steps back, you’re making a very long reply to something i haven’t said.

I mean, if you don't want to read people's replies then don't participate in discourse on an online forum. Idk what to tell you there. Not every single point in a thread pertains to you personally, and my response was relevant to the discussion at hand.

I WAS talking about solving a test question using material from another course, which is silly because that would be admitting “i can’t use the tool i was supposed to practice with during homework”.

Well, this isn't the point of tests, which if you considered my earlier replies, was actually my entire thesis, for the most part. But for the sake of debate, lets concede this point as just being true and see what happens. Assuming that a test is intended to show a mastery of the course's tools, using a tool from 'outside' of the course doesn't necessarily demonstrate that you "can't use the tool you were supposed to practice with." You either used the 'required' method correctly, demonstrating tool competence, or you didn't. If the problem gets solved by a different route, that's not necessarily a binary condemnation one way or the other. It's just more data.

Further, if we grant that this is the point of a test in education... then if it can be solved by an external tool or method, how is that the fault of the student? The student anticipates the instructor to design the course and test in a manner that might require the intended solutions... if it can be easily solved by alternative means, that is a failure of the test design, not the students. Rejecting these answers categorically is punishing students for the teacher's failures.

You’re tested on a drill, of course you’re not supposed to use a wrench, even if it does the job, success on the course test is (or at least supposed to be) a proof of you knowing the subject matter, this includes knowing the tools that are given to you.

Finally, even in your own analogy, your logic doesn't really hold up as a conclusion. A person who uses a wrench to complete a drilling task has still demonstrated both the ability to get the job done and problem-solving flexibility. If the examiner wants to know "can they use a drill," the question must force the use of a drill. If it doesn't, the metric itself has failed. Essentially, you are saying that a test's whole purpose is to measure the student's ability to use a proscribed tool. Yet, we are still sitting here arguing about what happens when a test... doesn't fulfill that purpose? Do you not see the clear contradiction starting to appear here? This isn't just a case of bad test design, the counterexamples here can't just be easily squared away with a No True Scotsman argument. This definition of what makes a test 'useful' is just logically incoherent...

In reality, tests don't measure the student's ability to use tools. The purpose of a test is decided by who designs the test. Often, however, the goal is to best glean student's cumulative knowledge. We've famously known for hundreds of years, however, that you can't directly know anything outside of your own existence. So, in practice, tests measure a many different things. Your zealous and iconoclastic views on academia basically preclude the possibility for cross-disciplinary practices and knowledge. All of human knowledge is people smearing the lines we draw in the sand. Sometimes we see a prettier picture than before.

Edit 2: If you continue down this thread, there's a lot of trolling going on. This could be for 2 purposes, make me look like an unreliable source (on biology, that might be true) and ruin the vibe.

lmfao are you fucking joking? you made yourself look like an unreliable source by referring to such a dogshit website/article. it actually required zero help from anybody else to shoot your credibility.

i understand the architecture and ethos of modern academia/pedagogy, i don’t need an explanation.

i’m just not convinced that this methodology or this culture is the best way to instill skills and knowledge in individuals.

it certainly makes people good at becoming corporate peons later in life, only learning to problem solve in limited contexts where a higher authority grants you permission on what to think or use in your solution building process.

i’d like to live my life in a way that doesn’t make nearly religious appeals to a higher power, however. i’ve met many peers who will teach their students exactly contrary to the traditionalist take you’ve shown here… and you know what? their students seem to, anecdotally, have better outcomes than the stuffier traditional ones. the traditional model assumes that, like you said, showing didactic ability to repeat the exact steps and methods taught in the course demonstrates proof of conceptual knowledge in the subject. modern research into how human learning actually works has demonstrated handily that this assumption is entirely unfounded, and that those two things don’t directly correlate the way many would imply. the traditional educational model is broken and no longer serves modern society in any real way other than as a class barrier. you can learn basically anything you want nowadays on the internet. society won’t play ball with you until you fork up an arm and a leg to go “network” at a college, usually, though…

regardless of how you feel the united states falling to a fascist regime effects everyone on the globe the same way the industrial power of germany falling to fascism was cause for global war.

frankly, you are espousing the one of the most ignorant opinions i’ve ever heard. i’m not saying this because in some pearl clutching american. im saying this because you seem to have no idea about how cause and effect play out on a world stage.

keep feeling safe and acting like none of it matters. your country isn’t immune to what’s happened here, and it’s certainly not immune to a fascist american military. you’re no better than the 60-ish% of americans who complacently have allowed the current status quo to come to pass.

because modern academics don’t always actually care about teaching people and are often more concerned with weird ego competitions.

people might try to justify this sort of behavior to you but just know drawing the dots between the constellations in human knowledge is what you’re supposed to be doing, even if you don’t do it well.

this isn’t a conspiracy theory to the people saying it is. these systems are well attested to exist already. predictive policing is already being used. fucking watch yourselves. big brother sees all.

i honestly stopped reading after you called my job prompt engineering.

machine learning has been a specialization for well over a century. i have a master’s degree in it, im an expert on the topic and am certain what i do is not “prompt engineering.”

do you think LLMs like ChatGPT just sprung out of the ground like plants? people had to design those. even if you don’t like them figuring out how to build one is engineering, doubtlessly so. using a tool that has been engineered isn’t engineering, obviously, but i’m not going to further entertain this strawmanning.

it can be true and new things can be created, and if you understood how large systems of data worked you would clearly understand how these aren’t mutually exclusive. creativity is different from originality. one is real, the other doesn’t actually exist.

please, name even a single piece of media that is wholly original from all of human history. i’ll wait. there isn’t one. everything takes pieces of everything else.

i’m an ML/AI engineer, i could generate plenty of things locally or at the university on their systems without a megacorp involved anywhere in the pipeline at this stage.

people would defend AI art bc they’re not conceited and do not hold weird selective views regarding what art is. that’s really all it is.

people can hate the technology all they want but that doesn’t change the fact that what they’re actually mad at is the result of solely corporatism and capitalism. the actual technology itself is a fucking fascinating take on statistics and how to handle big data. what, megacorps abused math so now i’m supposed to hate math? i’ll never understand you guys!