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I felt bad about posting the above about 7 hours after I posted it, but couldn't edit it :-P. I should have stayed out of the discussion because I don't think

I felt bad about posting the above about 7 hours after I posted it, but couldn't edit it :-P. I should have stayed out of the discussion because I don't think I helped. But basically what I was trying to say was that I don't think your response was clear enough -- in fact I had to think about it quite a bit before I understood what you were trying to get at. At the time I felt that it probably would have been better not to say anything at all than to leave a reply that was difficult to understand. I think the OP left feeling bad about the situation when they could have left thinking, "I learned something today". I hope you can appreciate the irony in typing that, given that I did the same thing! Anyway, I enjoyed your blog post and it gave me lots to think about. Thanks for doing it.

ColinWright 9y ago
I'm glad you did post it - your comment made me think about it more carefully. In math circles my originally reply would have been considered overly verbose, and when I'm talking about math I tend to drop into that style of communication. I needed to kick to get me out of it and explain in more detail. But this is a standard problem when teaching proof in math. All too often a proposed "proof" simply doesn't prove the theorem, and if the theorem is actually true it can be extremely difficult to explain why the "proof" is wrong, inadequate, or incomplete. The most common form is "Well, I can't see how anything could go wrong." and that's notoriously hard to get around. But I'm pleased you posted, and I'm pleased you enjoyed the post. Thank you.