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"The coolest thing about this all is watching the Internet doing what it was built for." And that would be commenting on a paper before anyone has finished rea
by hristov 16y ago
"The coolest thing about this all is watching the Internet doing what it was built for."
And that would be commenting on a paper before anyone has finished reading it?
Just kidding.
- Confusion 16y agoWell, that's an interesting point actually. Not just commenting before they have finished reading it: also commenting without enough knowledge to say anything useful about it. Moderators on meta.mathoverflow.com decided not to allow possibly premature discussions on mathoverflow: http://meta.mathoverflow.net/discussion/590/ http://meta.mathoverflow.net/discussion/590/. The arguments are quite reasonable: So answers could linger on MO asserting that some parts of the proof are correct, other sketchy, other flat out wrong and precious few people will be able to decide for sure if this is true or not.
- sprout 16y agoConsensus is an imperfect metric. Some of those things, even if discarded by consensus in the near-to-long term could prove valid in a couple years' time. We want as many avenues of exploration as possible, even once the proof is decided right or wrong.
- tqft 16y agoA minor point: that decision on meta.mathoverflow.net barely involved the moderators at all. One said what he was inclined to do, but otherwise it was the MO community.
- tetha 16y agoI am not entirely sure about myself here, but I think, I kind of like the way people handle this. Sure, there will be a lot of questions which are trivial to someone deep in the field and even more questions which are already answered in the paper, but these should be removed pretty fast. However, those questions which are not answered via "See page X" or "Look in that book, page X" will need explanation and will strengthen trust in this proof, should it be correct.