Ron Maimon

You made a comment that caught my interest,
"I found that learning the ideas of actual topology, meaning homology, is best pedagogically using books from the 1960s at the latest, anything later makes it obfuscated for a beginner."

Hello Ron Maimon.  I am a senior undergraduate physics major, and I am wondering what would be the best way to learn topology.  I have the patience to learn unmotivated mathematics if necessary, but I do not prefer it.  I'm am currently teaching myself from Pugh's book on Real Mathematical Analysis.  Do you have any recommendations?  I have not yet chosen a specific field in physics to specialize in besides computational physics, which I chose merely because it seemed lie a practical decision.

Roooooon

Hi Ron, what's up? Have you heard about Roko's basilisk? I think this is a ridiculous idea.

I meant "not when there aren't moderators" below, obviously, not "not when there are moderators".

By the way, that tactic, of stopping the discussion and crying "rude", is extremely common when someone exposes a fatal flaw in your thinking. In physics, I saw this happen personally many times, I was sometimes guilty! When you realize you are wrong in a stupid way you should have seen in the beginning, the natural defense mechanism is to say "no, that's not what I meant, you're twisting my words..." instead of "oops, I goofed." It doesn't work online, at least not when there are moderators, because the arguments are in text and leave a permanent trace. The usenet debates were off-the-charts in terms of rudeness, but exposed serious issues in academia. For example, the Torvalds Tannenbaum debate about microkernels was basically Linus Torvalds saying "all Kernel academics are stupid about microkernels", and he was right, and it wasn't accepted until 2006, when it was revisited. It still isn't accepted by everyone, but it is accepted by everyone who develops kernels! That's good enough.

I deliberately over-use it, to test for Sams. I don't want to deal with Sams.

Now I got your point. But I think your use of it is a bit too much.

Hi Ron, you might read this: http://www.alternet.org/belief/sam-harris-made-himself-look-idiot-email-exchange-chomsky-and-has-shared-it-world
It seems that Chomsky agrees with your view that offensive language is sometimes necessary. Citation: "...And I agree that I am litigating all points (all real, as far as we have so far determined) in a “plodding and accusatory way.” That is, of course, a necessity in responding to quite serious published accusations that are all demonstrably false, and as I have reviewed, false in a most interesting way..."  And now I realize what you mean. Because Sam stopped discussing the topic because he (as you can read) wrote that Chomsky was too offensive (rephrased in my words). So it helped to expose the truth a bit I think. If Chomsky wasn't right, then it should be easy for Sam to refute some of Chomsky's arguments, but he just stopped the discussion and cried about Chomsky's language. (sry for the edits)

I fixed the dollar signs. In future, you can use the collapse sidebar button to get the buttons back. I think I know how to fix the bug...

A little bit of authority means that you are allowed to remove spam, decide whether things are off-topic, and remove gibberish and plagiarism, and that other people have the authority to remove you from authority if you do any more than this. Authority is not an on-off property, it's a continuum you grant, and this site grants as little as possible to the moderators and as much as possible to "the people".

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