Re: JSH: Math journals do not just die


jstevh@xxxxxxx wrote:
gjedwards@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
jstevh@xxxxxxx wrote:
My previous post was meant to scare you,

Congratulations. I am terrified. Will you be personally wielding the
'hammer' this time or can we just expect a bog-standard thermonuclear
war?

Hey it scares me that there can be no route past mathematicians when
even publication can just be routinely dismissed, and even a math
journal dying is just a regular thing.

To bring context, suppose that some government in the US were going
totalitarian, and people within the country who were worried about this
believed that if only they could get the word out, people would react,
and got a news article outlining abuses published.

But it wasn't in a major newspaper, but was in a small electronic one,
yet still they hoped that people would listen, only to have the editor
cave to censorship pressure directed against the news article and pull
it from the electronic edition.

And then the entire newspaper died a few weeks later.

That person would despair realizing that democracy had already died,
and there was no hope.

That's the fear I want people to understand. Mathematicians have
created their own little society that can break its own rules at will,
so that even publication is meaningless for someone the group wishes to
label "crackpot".

Mathematicians have achieved totalitarian control.


James Harris

Like you, I am a physicist (PhD as it happens), not a mathematician.
However, I do not need any mathematician to tell me that p mod 3 does
not generate a pseudorandom sequence. In fact, I'll make you a promise
here and now: when the math community starts insisting that p mod 3
DOES generate a pseudorandom sequence and then tries to convince me of
that by talking in 'math-ese', THEN I'll believe that mathematicians
are trying to control me. Deal?

.