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My Grandfather Thought He Solved a Cosmic Mystery

204 points by gone35 8y ago

Isamu 8y ago
You can go astray without really becoming a crank. A true crank that can't let the crankery go develops delusions of persecution and conspiracy to keep the truth out. Going astray may be as simple as not being able to provide the necessary clarity, the clear road map that leads from what is familiar, to those in the field, to the novel thing you are proposing. I am talking of course of heavily mathematical fields. Not going to comment on the murkier situation outside of that.
- sp332 8y ago
  The article wonders (in the 5th-to-last paragraph) if a different kind of rejection might help reduce the number of people who turn into cranks. Sometimes they have an idea and it seems like they can't communicate it, so maybe just saying "I understand your point even if I think it's wrong" could help.
  - ssivark 8y ago
    Good point. In my experience, when communicating ideas, it helps to separate the nuances of “I hear/understand you” and “I agree with you”. For novel ideas, it takes a significant amount of time after you understand it, to decide on it. In the mean time it is important to suspend judgement while exploring the idea and its consequences. Most people genuinely interested in ideas want to make sure their thoughts have been understood, and will happily receive a critique if it comes to be. Seeing acknowledgment that they’ve been understood allows them to relax and start listening. OTOH, being repeatedly dismissed without being understood leads them to feel persecuted for novelty. Listening is an art.
    - behringer 8y ago
      It doesn't matter how good of a listener one is. If you can't refute a claim with evidence to the contrary, your refutation will feel like persecution. If a person can't be convinced with real evidence, that is the road to crack-pottery.
    - fossuser 8y ago
      I find it helps a lot when you're telling someone they're wrong first tell them how they're right. Typically there's some agreement with a difference of either an underlying core axiom or some other tradeoff that the two people are weighing differently. Pointing out the pieces you agree on helps the other person relax a little and open up when thinking about their position.
    - Kalium 8y ago
      You're absolutely right! People genuinely interested solely ideas will be satisfied to be understood and accept any reasonable critique that comes in response. One of the human failure modes that I witness on a regular basis is that people fail to separate "I hear/understand you" and "I agree with you" within their own heads. People have a tendency to assume that what they find convincing will be similarly convincing to another. As a result, if it's not convincing to another, this other person must not understand it properly and must just need to be educated on the subject. Or, more cynically, they aren't paying attention because they don't understand the importance of the work. My current operating hypothesis is that vanishingly few people are genuinely interested solely in ideas. Almost everyone has some ego at stake. Being told that your baby is ugly, no matter how kindly, compassionately, or empathetically it is done, is rarely a positive experience. This is where people like Dale Carnegie come in. Beyond the emotional aspects of it, there are other issues. It can be incredibly labor-intensive to delve deeply into a paper and determine how right or wrong it is. If it's wrong, it's even more work to understand precisely where and how it is wrong, and then give the kind of feedback a hypothetical egoless author genuinely interested solely in ideas would like. This can be a great deal to ask, unpaid, of people who have other things they would like to be doing. This is doubly true when most papers are patently wrong in some obvious way and the painstakingly handcrafted feedback unlikely to be taken up in the manner an idealist could hope for. I'm sure you have a way to handle this with the art of listening, and I'm just not seeing it. Can you help me understand? Again, you're completely right. It can definitely help to separate the ideas of understanding and agreement, and reasonable people interested in ideas will handle this gracefully! There just might be some room for nuance and perhaps a careful consideration of costs and burdens might be in order.
      - ssivark 8y ago
        > if it's not convincing to another, this other person must not understand it properly and must just need to be educated on the subject. Or, more cynically, they aren't paying attention because they don't understand the importance of the work. Here's a thumb rule I try to follow: Before having a strong opinion towards one side, one must be able to be articulate both (opposing) points of view. So, my goal in any discussion is to reach that stage -- mutually, if possible. After that point, I'm willing to trust reasonable people to exercise independent judgement. At least we can get a shared understanding of which differing assumptions lead us to different conclusions, and see whether there are any tests which will help us validate those assumptions. > Almost everyone has some ego at stake. Aye, we're all humans! All we can do is strive to be a little better each day :-) The same with regards to listening to someone -- I try to listen carefully and respond sincerely with what puzzles me. It's up to them what they wish to do with that. > It can be incredibly labor-intensive to delve deeply into a paper and determine how right or wrong it is. If it's wrong, it's even more work to understand precisely where and how it is wrong, and then give the kind of feedback a hypothetical egoless author genuinely interested solely in ideas would like. This can be a great deal to ask, unpaid, of people who have other things they would like to be doing. Absolutely! I don't mean to imply that one should take every crackpot paper seriously. I guess each researcher has a circle of respected colleagues whom one can trust for a little bit of indulgence. Also, this is partly what professors are paid for -- so I would hope they're willing to spend some time with their maturing students, and their colleagues, who have proven track records as researchers. An interesting related tidbit: Some of my physics professors were very sincere in asking eager grad students to have some humility and avoid spending much time on the murky swamp of quantum foundations (which has claimed many decades of smart researchers' lives)--and definitely not by ourselves, at least till we had a few manifestly productive years working on other things, and developed enough of a research sense to understand when to back away from unproductive lines of inquiry.
  - navait 8y ago
    It seems that most people told him they did not understand why he was trying to say, and he persisted in writing incomprehensible papers. What else could people do for him? Publish a mess and hope that validation doesn't lead to him sending them more stuff that nobody understood?
    - DoctorOetker 8y ago
      except the paper is very readable, I just did. without commenting on importance, novelty, truth ... he explains clearly the (conditional) probability functions and performs substitutions i.e. deriving conclusions.
      - your-nanny 8y ago
        I did the same and concur.
  - Isamu 8y ago
    The thing is, in mathematical fields, the reader is looking for a way to check what you are saying with what they know in terms of the math involved. In pure math for instance you should be able to follow the proof, or it might be possible to construct a counterexample, or at least to think about counterexamples. If the reader can't even get that far then maybe your paper is in trouble. In physics you still need some exposition that leads to being able to work out the math. Ultimately it should lead to something that is either fits with known theory or contradicts it, and in the case of a contradiction then it might be experimentally confirmed or denied. You've got an uphill struggle otherwise.
  - sjg007 8y ago
    Maybe the rejection letters provided more details as to why they thought his argument was invalid which isn't captured in the article. If they did not, it seems to me that the reviewers didn't offer specific criticisms which would have been more useful. I find these questions and paradoxes that illuminate the limits of logical reasoning quite fascinating.
    - mannykannot 8y ago
      It is hard to provide specific criticisms of a work one does not understand, and which makes no testable claims. If it is just one reviewer, then he may be missing the point, but if it is everyone, you have to give some thought to the possibility that it is you who is mistaken. In principle, someone could be both right and incomprehensible, but there's no way forward unless one can get some people to both understand and agree with you. Even then, you could end up with one faction thinking it is on to something profound, while another thinks they are mistaken, as is happening with Integrated Information Theory at the moment.
  - Isamu 8y ago
    I read the rejections in the article as saying "I don't understand you" or more specifically "you haven't made your case" rather than "you're wrong." I don't think they got to the point of deciding whether it was wrong or not. This might be more common in fields like physics, where it comes down to the math. If you can explain the math, and it seems flawless, then it is understandable and may be publishable. But it could still be wrong, in ways that could be verified by experiment.
  - ajkjk 8y ago
    I'm pretty sure the kind of rejection doesn't matter on this. http://web.mst.edu/~lmhall/WhatToDoWhenTrisectorComes.pdf http://web.mst.edu/~lmhall/WhatToDoWhenTrisectorComes.pdf is a fascinating read on this. I suspect that a sound mind will deal with most kinds of rejection well, but an unsound one will deal with none of them well.
    - dorchadas 8y ago
      > I suspect that a sound mind will deal with most kinds of rejection well, but an unsound one will deal with none of them well. I don't think this necessarily holds. I'd need to look at studies, but I feel that the more time you've invested into something, the worse rejection is, sound mind or not. And this would be compounded if you get the feeling the other person isn't even trying to understand you and your point of view.
    - cousin_it 8y ago
      But that article says the opposite thing, that a certain form of rejection really does work: "Thank you for developing a good approximation to the trisection of an angle! It has an average error of only 0.1 percent, according to this computer analysis of all angles from 0 to 180 degrees in steps of three. It compares favorably with past approximate trisections developed by X, Y and Z that work as follows..."
      - ajkjk 8y ago
        Okay, fair. Mostly I linked it to illustrate how many forms of rejection don't work. Basically rejecting someone is tricky business.
- pontifier 8y ago
  I feel a little like I'm on this road myself. I've got a design for a type of fusion reactor that is simple and elegant, but I'm having a devil of a time convincing anyone that it's worth working on. It feels like the Idea is stuck in limbo and I can't get the resources together to test it. I feel like I have a responsibility to the Idea itself. As long as there is a chance that it could work, dropping it feels criminal. It needs to be killed completely, through testing, or it's going to keep haunting me.
  - empath75 8y ago
    To convince someone to look at your fusion reactor plans, you have to first convince people that you'd be the kind of person capable of innovating in the field -- ie, publish papers, produce smaller results. Success follows success. Not knowing you or your ideas at all, I can already tell you that it's extraordinarily unlikely that you've come up with something new and effective, or you'd know how to get it built already.
    - pontifier 8y ago
      I know HOW to build it, I just don't have a million dollars laying around to actually do it. The prototype needs to be built inside an MRI machine.
      - jacquesm 8y ago
        That's going to be one heck of a prototype or one heck of a bang. Either way the results will be spectacular.
      - empath75 8y ago
        I meant you would know how to get funding for it, since nuclear physics research is a well established field.
        pontifier 8y ago
        I've looked at funding. I've talked to people in the field. There does not appear to be any money available from any source to fund any fusion projects other than Tokamaks or similar devices. Tokamaks by the way, were invented by an outsider with no previous domain knowledge...
deleted 8y ago
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GuiA 8y ago
Good article; strikes a nice balance between a loving ode to a grandfather, and exploring how science is much more conservative than one might think. Reminds me of this article [0], and specifically this passage, which makes the point that one metric of judging “crackpot ideas” that seem to come out of nowhere is by what they enable. Do they lead to the emergence of new results, or allow for the proof of things other than the direct thing that the theorem sets out to prove? ”Usually when there is a breakthrough in mathematics, there is an explosion of new activity when other mathematicians are able to exploit the new ideas to prove new theorems, usually in directions not anticipated by the original discoverer(s). This has manifestly not been the case for ABC, and this fact alone is one of the most compelling reasons why people are suspicious.” [0] https://galoisrepresentations.wordpress.com/2017/12/17/the-abc-conjecture-has-still-not-been-proved/ https://galoisrepresentations.wordpress.com/2017/12/17/the-a...
yters 8y ago
The basic idea doesn't sound crackpottish. There is only one correct representation of water to wine ratio, and a uniform distribution over all possible arrangements of water and wine would only give a single answer. Sounds like the problem lies in how the principle of insufficient reason is being applied.
- ajkjk 8y ago
  It strikes me instead as rather trivial. Burnside's Lemma, a fairly elementary result in group theory / combinatorics, is regularly used to compute probabilities by enumerating symmetries of the system under study. It's not a logical stretch at all to extend this to continuous / infinite-dimensional systems, and I think most theoretical physicists would be aware of this.
  - yters 8y ago
    Very odd that a world renown physicist would be branded a crackpot for making this observation. Why would making the principle of indifference apply to the continuous domain be controversial?
    - ajkjk 8y ago
      Well, we'd have to read what he was showing people to know. Maybe his presentation was deeply obfuscated, or maybe he was saying something slightly more subtle than what I mentioned. I'm just guessing from the hints in the article. From some googling I did find this: https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0310073 https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0310073
      - yters 8y ago
        This is an interesting conclusion: "Probabilities in physics could also be said to be measures of information interpreted within the framework of a physical theory."
    - fjuerfilis 8y ago
      ... not a physicist here, but I do research on applied information theory and statistics. This grandfather's paper is sort of interesting to me because it starts to creep into some of my areas of expertise a tiny bit, but he seemed to be approaching it from a totally different perspective (of a physicist) that I'm less familiar with. I kind of so far seem to fall in the camp of "I kind of get what he's talking about but he's not quite connecting the dots, or isn't explaining himself well or something." To answer your question: in some cases, transferring probabilistic reasoning about discrete states to continuous states, or vice versa, is sort of trivial. But sometimes it becomes somewhat controversial, and often this is because it's unclear how the scale of information maps onto the scale of data, to put it murkily. When it's discrete, you know your observations have specific possible values, which in itself is a chunk of information. But when it's continuous, you have an infinite range of values, and what constitutes "indifference" can be unclear. Think of a scale (like a kitchen or bathroom scale), for example. The scale will have a certain accuracy within a certain range, and as you go further outside that range, the accuracy will decrease further and further. So, to make an analogy with the water-and-wine paradox, let's say I tell you "here's this container of walnuts, that could be anywhere from 0 to 100kg. What's the probability its mass as measured on this scale is in a certain range?" What would be adhering to the principle of indifference? You could argue it would be a uniform distribution over the numbers from 0 to 100, but you could also say it's somehow uniformly distributed over the distinguishable units of the scale, which will not be uniform from 0 to 100 because the meaningfulness of the scale's numbers will be compressed in its most accurate range, and stretched in its less accurate range, and there will also be issues with machine precision, etc. If you were counting walnuts though, you've kind of implicitly fixed the scale to the nonnegative integers, and assumed your ability to count doesn't get fuzzy at some point. So you assume uniformity on one scale is uniformity on another. E.g., if you think of Jeffreys prior as being one scaling of indifference, even with a Bernoulli variable, indifference isn't necessarily scaled as a uniform: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffreys_prior https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffreys_prior. I think this paradox involves (along with maybe being underspecified or poorly posed) somewhat related information-scale mapping issues, about how you define uniformity and what your "possibility space is" to be sort of Jaynesian about it.
it 8y ago
The linked article at https://www.researchers.one/article/2018-10-6 https://www.researchers.one/article/2018-10-6 seems well-argued, nothing outlandish. It doesn't talk about anything in quantum mechanics though. I was hoping to find that somewhere.
- SilasX 8y ago
  Yeah, it doesn't seem fair to call someone a crank if they have a lucid point with a subtle, hard-to-spot flaw; such arguments are typically wrong in interesting, useful ways. Edit: At risk of self-congratulation, that's what I feel is happening to me on HN when I try to meticulously untangle a complicated issue where I feel people are talking past each other, and then get quickly downvoted but never responded to. Case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14310444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14310444
  - DoctorOetker 8y ago
    I agree with you there, pointing out more precisely how people are talking past each other makes all sides pissed off...
    - SilasX 8y ago
      Whoa, after my linking, that old comment went from -2 to -1! I thought it was way past the point that you could vote on it! (It's ~15 months old.)
- your-nanny 8y ago
  it's there. scroll down and click icons
Aardwolf 8y ago
I don't understand what the paradox in the water/wine paradox is, after checking out its PDF (linked in the article, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/252476141_The_WineWater_Paradox_background_provenance_and_proposed_resolutions https://www.researchgate.net/publication/252476141_The_WineW...). The problem is defined without giving the distribution(s). Specifying a distribution makes the problem mathematically solvable. A uniform distribution for representing a ratio of 1/3 to 3 between two things does not match reality well because it gives more weight to one than the other, but I don't see why that's a paradox. You could generate random valid wine/water amounts (reject invalid combinations) and measure distribution of many experiments of that? You can define any distribution you want that makes more sense than those uniform ones. Ultimately though something is not specified, the distribution of the water amount and the distribution of the wine amount. Why is that a paradox? EDIT: the real question is how was the jug filled up. Did someone pour a random amount of water first, and then after that poured a random amount of wine within the allowable limit? Or did they pour the wine first instead? Or did they pour a random amount of both, and discarded it if after that the ratio was not within the 1/3 to 3 limit? Or some other method? That determines the distribution. The distribution of the ratio is more like a derived distribution, derived from the distribution of the wine, the distribution of the water, and how those two distributions depend on each other based on the method used to fill it up.
- bhk 8y ago
  The problem is that "uniform distribution" is hard to define. An even distribution of water/wine values is not the same as an even distribution of wine/water values. Thinking in terms of possible states, you can choose an even distribution of x from 0 to 1 and define: water/wine = x/(1-x) wine/water = (1-x)/x (which avoids being water-biased or wine-biased)
  - sjg007 8y ago
    So this is defining the random variable not as the ratio but as the implicit function that computes the ratio? So we are really looking at the density function of the hidden variable X? For the original problem it feels like the interval constraints on the ratio are causing the issue since they will be inverse. But maybe I am not clear on that...
convivialdingo 8y ago
I certainly understand the harsh reality of seeing a glimpse of a solution and finding no logical path there. For me, it's factoring large numbers in short times. I've spent 18 years on and off of the problem. Most of that time was coming up with novel ideas and then arriving at the same conclusions as everybody else. I'm too obstinate and "stupid" to know that the problem is practically unsolvable - but fortunately I'm not obsessive enough to throw my life into it. It's basically a hobby I do during my downtime. I like to call it mathematical finger painting, or nature walks through obscure numeric systems. Studying topics, geometries, ancient multiplication methods for fun, and generally scratching under the surface of "why" without knowing how.
- Henry_Miller 8y ago
  I like your attitude. It feels like the appropriate way to explore in the mysteries of Nature. I've only spent maybe dozens of hours thinking about prime numbers myself over the years and I just can't shake the feeling that the only way to do what you're trying is with fantastical computers containing practically infinite bits and run all the calculations in parallel. But that doesn't detract, I think, from the fun of trying to think of tricks to pass the time.
- teekert 8y ago
  I feel this way abut getting rich with some super smart idea that is just, just beyond the grasp of my intellect... This may well stay true for the rest of my life of course... More down to earth though, I'm a biologist and whenever I get this feeling related to work, scientifically I have learned to trust it and keep at it, it usually does mean there is something of value in my ideas.
- hexscrews 8y ago
  I'd say that even if your answer is completely wrong, at least you can document WHY it was wrong. And maybe someone can open up a new vein of inquiry that branches off yours. It reminds me of a sci-fi story where people who decided that they were tired of being emulated retired to a virtual mine where they try to discover new mathematical proofs. They didn't have to do it, since it served no real purpose. But it opened up new avenues of knowledge.
audleman 8y ago
In high school my friend's Dad thought he had found a flaw in modern Physics understanding that would change everything. Physicists, he claimed, refused to see the truth because they were too loyal to Einstein. He sat me down and showed me flaws in a bunch of equations, which was duly impressive until I went to college and took Physics 101. Turns out he was ignoring things like redshift of light; when I plugged in the right equations the classical model held. I tried to argue with my friend, but I had just proved that I was brainwashed by Big Phys. I learned that his Dad cornered anybody he could to evangelize his theories and had been doing so for years. He developed a theory that women and children were more receptive to his revolutionary ideas, so was in the process of writing a book that was more conversational in tone. Last I heard he was still at it.
- beefok 8y ago
  it's sad that he tries to validate his idea by evangelizing to laymen instead of trying to convince "big science" of his ideas. My dad was and is the same way -- everyone is in some massive conspiracy plot to misguide the public. Typically there are demons or other some suches that are pulling the puppet strings. A few months ago he was convinced the world was flat.. It's this whole Dunning-Kruger effect that seems to affect so many people. I think there are generations of people who missed out on a proper education and a healthy skepticism.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - driverdan 8y ago
    That sounds more like mental illness than a lack of education.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    "I think there are generations of people who missed out on a proper education and a healthy skepticism. " I don't think it's education. Most conspiracy theorists I have met seem to have a deep discomfort with our world and this is their way of explaining it. I think other people turn to religion for the same reasons.
bmc7505 8y ago
"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science." -Feynman
- n4r9 8y ago
  Surely this is more relevant to scientific theories, rather than a logical theory of interpretation of probability?
rossdavidh 8y ago
It seems that, in some ways, a "crank" is not defined by what they believe or say, nor by whether what they believe or say is true, but by the relation between themselves and their society. Had Freud been in a society that treated the idea of the Oedipus complex differently, perhaps he would have become a crank. Some, like Darwin, were too circumspect to become cranks, but plenty of respected scientists, whether their main ideas were right or wrong, were not "cranks" mainly because of the way their peers reacted to them, not because of anything about them, or their ideas.
- scotty79 8y ago
  Freud was definitely a crank. People back then just didn't know any better so they never called him on his bs on the spot. I was interested in psychology in high school trying to understand people around me. I even considered studying psychology. Then somebody gave me Freud to read. The horror I felt when I understood that his "theories" were just the observation of the world but through his deeply disturbed eyes and uniquely bent mind... After that I decided that I don't want to have anything to do professionally with trade that still haven't properly distanced themselves and apologized for ever considering that this Freud guy had some merit. Freud, the father of psychoanalysis. Why not António Egas Moniz, the father of neurology, neurosurgery and psychiatrics.
  - gnulinux 8y ago
    I know absolutely nothing about psychology except I read some Freud. I don't have any opinions about psychology, or the nature of psychology, or Freud (tbh I'm not that interested either). But I'm not clear why I'm supposed to believe you more than psychology community. See, I'm not trying to be skeptical, I'm just trying to understand who is crank, and you stating Freud crank doesn't seem to make him crank in my eyes. Am I wrong? Why?
    - scotty79 8y ago
      You are not wrong. You shouldn't believe me over anyone else. I'm just sharing personal experience and opinion. If you want to form an opinion about Freud please do research what psychological community thinks about him and why. Basically, "he was asking interesting questions and giving wrong answers but we remember and value him for the questions." > I know absolutely nothing about psychology except I read some Freud. For me it sounds like "I know absolutely nothing about piloting aircraft except I read some notes of failed inventor that tried to build a flapping wings plane before Wright brothers flew, but noone remembers his name because aviation is not psychology." Or "I know exactly nothing about solar system except I read some Ptolemy." If you are interested in Freud, read Freud. If you are interested in psychology read something way more modern. What I think distasteful is that psychological society didn't distance their trade from Freud enough and in 2018 you were under the impression that reading Freud counts in any way towards learning psychology. And to address your more general point. How can you know if Freud is the crank or I'm the crank without knowing anything about the subject and without any interest in the subject? You can't but it's ok since you have no interest. And if you are pressed against the wall you are safer with opinion of majority. Not even majority of psychological community. Just majority of people. Freud was famous so he can't be that bad.
gcbw2 8y ago
So annoying they didn't link to the full articles, in it's various forms.
your-nanny 8y ago
Just finished reading one of the guys papers. I've read a lot of crack pots, and this guy's paper exhibited none of the typical features (megalomania, nonsequiturs, grandiose claims, complaints about persecution or conspiracies to silence the truth, and. so on). He might be wrong (didn't read carefully enough to reach my own conclusions, and I'm well aware of my own limitations), or he might have gone too far from his own expertise to be taken seriously by the right people, but not a crack pot
n4r9 8y ago
The Oxford physicist mentioned in the article may well be Joy Christian, who has submitted numerous articles to Arxiv giving what he claims to be a violation of Bell inequalities using Clifford algebras. You can find them just by searching Arxiv for his name. I spent some time reading these articles and the various refutations - and refutations of refutations - when I was a grad student, as I wanted to nail down where either he or Bell was fundamentally wrong. I never succeeded, but since Bell's proof was much simpler and understandable, and involved more elementary objects, and had been scrutinised for much longer without any serious flaws forthcoming, whereas Christian's proofs appeared to have some issues under debate, I came away thinking it likely that Christian was wrong. Disappointing that I couldn't find the "central" flaw, if there was one. Sad that a talented scientist should spend so much of their career simply alienating themselves from the community in this way.

204 points by gone35 8y ago

You can go astray without really becoming a crank. A true crank that can't let the crankery go develops delusions of persecution and conspiracy to keep the truth out. Going astray may be as simple as not being able to provide the necessary clarity, the clear road map that leads from what is familiar, to those in the field, to the novel thing you are proposing. I am talking of course of heavily mathematical fields. Not going to comment on the murkier situation outside of that.

sp332 8y ago
The article wonders (in the 5th-to-last paragraph) if a different kind of rejection might help reduce the number of people who turn into cranks. Sometimes they have an idea and it seems like they can't communicate it, so maybe just saying "I understand your point even if I think it's wrong" could help.
- ssivark 8y ago
  Good point. In my experience, when communicating ideas, it helps to separate the nuances of “I hear/understand you” and “I agree with you”. For novel ideas, it takes a significant amount of time after you understand it, to decide on it. In the mean time it is important to suspend judgement while exploring the idea and its consequences. Most people genuinely interested in ideas want to make sure their thoughts have been understood, and will happily receive a critique if it comes to be. Seeing acknowledgment that they’ve been understood allows them to relax and start listening. OTOH, being repeatedly dismissed without being understood leads them to feel persecuted for novelty. Listening is an art.
  - behringer 8y ago
    It doesn't matter how good of a listener one is. If you can't refute a claim with evidence to the contrary, your refutation will feel like persecution. If a person can't be convinced with real evidence, that is the road to crack-pottery.
  - fossuser 8y ago
    I find it helps a lot when you're telling someone they're wrong first tell them how they're right. Typically there's some agreement with a difference of either an underlying core axiom or some other tradeoff that the two people are weighing differently. Pointing out the pieces you agree on helps the other person relax a little and open up when thinking about their position.
  - Kalium 8y ago
    You're absolutely right! People genuinely interested solely ideas will be satisfied to be understood and accept any reasonable critique that comes in response. One of the human failure modes that I witness on a regular basis is that people fail to separate "I hear/understand you" and "I agree with you" within their own heads. People have a tendency to assume that what they find convincing will be similarly convincing to another. As a result, if it's not convincing to another, this other person must not understand it properly and must just need to be educated on the subject. Or, more cynically, they aren't paying attention because they don't understand the importance of the work. My current operating hypothesis is that vanishingly few people are genuinely interested solely in ideas. Almost everyone has some ego at stake. Being told that your baby is ugly, no matter how kindly, compassionately, or empathetically it is done, is rarely a positive experience. This is where people like Dale Carnegie come in. Beyond the emotional aspects of it, there are other issues. It can be incredibly labor-intensive to delve deeply into a paper and determine how right or wrong it is. If it's wrong, it's even more work to understand precisely where and how it is wrong, and then give the kind of feedback a hypothetical egoless author genuinely interested solely in ideas would like. This can be a great deal to ask, unpaid, of people who have other things they would like to be doing. This is doubly true when most papers are patently wrong in some obvious way and the painstakingly handcrafted feedback unlikely to be taken up in the manner an idealist could hope for. I'm sure you have a way to handle this with the art of listening, and I'm just not seeing it. Can you help me understand? Again, you're completely right. It can definitely help to separate the ideas of understanding and agreement, and reasonable people interested in ideas will handle this gracefully! There just might be some room for nuance and perhaps a careful consideration of costs and burdens might be in order.
    - ssivark 8y ago
      > if it's not convincing to another, this other person must not understand it properly and must just need to be educated on the subject. Or, more cynically, they aren't paying attention because they don't understand the importance of the work. Here's a thumb rule I try to follow: Before having a strong opinion towards one side, one must be able to be articulate both (opposing) points of view. So, my goal in any discussion is to reach that stage -- mutually, if possible. After that point, I'm willing to trust reasonable people to exercise independent judgement. At least we can get a shared understanding of which differing assumptions lead us to different conclusions, and see whether there are any tests which will help us validate those assumptions. > Almost everyone has some ego at stake. Aye, we're all humans! All we can do is strive to be a little better each day :-) The same with regards to listening to someone -- I try to listen carefully and respond sincerely with what puzzles me. It's up to them what they wish to do with that. > It can be incredibly labor-intensive to delve deeply into a paper and determine how right or wrong it is. If it's wrong, it's even more work to understand precisely where and how it is wrong, and then give the kind of feedback a hypothetical egoless author genuinely interested solely in ideas would like. This can be a great deal to ask, unpaid, of people who have other things they would like to be doing. Absolutely! I don't mean to imply that one should take every crackpot paper seriously. I guess each researcher has a circle of respected colleagues whom one can trust for a little bit of indulgence. Also, this is partly what professors are paid for -- so I would hope they're willing to spend some time with their maturing students, and their colleagues, who have proven track records as researchers. An interesting related tidbit: Some of my physics professors were very sincere in asking eager grad students to have some humility and avoid spending much time on the murky swamp of quantum foundations (which has claimed many decades of smart researchers' lives)--and definitely not by ourselves, at least till we had a few manifestly productive years working on other things, and developed enough of a research sense to understand when to back away from unproductive lines of inquiry.
- navait 8y ago
  It seems that most people told him they did not understand why he was trying to say, and he persisted in writing incomprehensible papers. What else could people do for him? Publish a mess and hope that validation doesn't lead to him sending them more stuff that nobody understood?
  - DoctorOetker 8y ago
    except the paper is very readable, I just did. without commenting on importance, novelty, truth ... he explains clearly the (conditional) probability functions and performs substitutions i.e. deriving conclusions.
    - your-nanny 8y ago
      I did the same and concur.
- Isamu 8y ago
  The thing is, in mathematical fields, the reader is looking for a way to check what you are saying with what they know in terms of the math involved. In pure math for instance you should be able to follow the proof, or it might be possible to construct a counterexample, or at least to think about counterexamples. If the reader can't even get that far then maybe your paper is in trouble. In physics you still need some exposition that leads to being able to work out the math. Ultimately it should lead to something that is either fits with known theory or contradicts it, and in the case of a contradiction then it might be experimentally confirmed or denied. You've got an uphill struggle otherwise.
- sjg007 8y ago
  Maybe the rejection letters provided more details as to why they thought his argument was invalid which isn't captured in the article. If they did not, it seems to me that the reviewers didn't offer specific criticisms which would have been more useful. I find these questions and paradoxes that illuminate the limits of logical reasoning quite fascinating.
  - mannykannot 8y ago
    It is hard to provide specific criticisms of a work one does not understand, and which makes no testable claims. If it is just one reviewer, then he may be missing the point, but if it is everyone, you have to give some thought to the possibility that it is you who is mistaken. In principle, someone could be both right and incomprehensible, but there's no way forward unless one can get some people to both understand and agree with you. Even then, you could end up with one faction thinking it is on to something profound, while another thinks they are mistaken, as is happening with Integrated Information Theory at the moment.
- Isamu 8y ago
  I read the rejections in the article as saying "I don't understand you" or more specifically "you haven't made your case" rather than "you're wrong." I don't think they got to the point of deciding whether it was wrong or not. This might be more common in fields like physics, where it comes down to the math. If you can explain the math, and it seems flawless, then it is understandable and may be publishable. But it could still be wrong, in ways that could be verified by experiment.
- ajkjk 8y ago
  I'm pretty sure the kind of rejection doesn't matter on this. http://web.mst.edu/~lmhall/WhatToDoWhenTrisectorComes.pdf http://web.mst.edu/~lmhall/WhatToDoWhenTrisectorComes.pdf is a fascinating read on this. I suspect that a sound mind will deal with most kinds of rejection well, but an unsound one will deal with none of them well.
  - dorchadas 8y ago
    > I suspect that a sound mind will deal with most kinds of rejection well, but an unsound one will deal with none of them well. I don't think this necessarily holds. I'd need to look at studies, but I feel that the more time you've invested into something, the worse rejection is, sound mind or not. And this would be compounded if you get the feeling the other person isn't even trying to understand you and your point of view.
  - cousin_it 8y ago
    But that article says the opposite thing, that a certain form of rejection really does work: "Thank you for developing a good approximation to the trisection of an angle! It has an average error of only 0.1 percent, according to this computer analysis of all angles from 0 to 180 degrees in steps of three. It compares favorably with past approximate trisections developed by X, Y and Z that work as follows..."
    - ajkjk 8y ago
      Okay, fair. Mostly I linked it to illustrate how many forms of rejection don't work. Basically rejecting someone is tricky business.
pontifier 8y ago
I feel a little like I'm on this road myself. I've got a design for a type of fusion reactor that is simple and elegant, but I'm having a devil of a time convincing anyone that it's worth working on. It feels like the Idea is stuck in limbo and I can't get the resources together to test it. I feel like I have a responsibility to the Idea itself. As long as there is a chance that it could work, dropping it feels criminal. It needs to be killed completely, through testing, or it's going to keep haunting me.
- empath75 8y ago
  To convince someone to look at your fusion reactor plans, you have to first convince people that you'd be the kind of person capable of innovating in the field -- ie, publish papers, produce smaller results. Success follows success. Not knowing you or your ideas at all, I can already tell you that it's extraordinarily unlikely that you've come up with something new and effective, or you'd know how to get it built already.
  - pontifier 8y ago
    I know HOW to build it, I just don't have a million dollars laying around to actually do it. The prototype needs to be built inside an MRI machine.
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      That's going to be one heck of a prototype or one heck of a bang. Either way the results will be spectacular.
    - empath75 8y ago
      I meant you would know how to get funding for it, since nuclear physics research is a well established field.
      - pontifier 8y ago
        I've looked at funding. I've talked to people in the field. There does not appear to be any money available from any source to fund any fusion projects other than Tokamaks or similar devices. Tokamaks by the way, were invented by an outsider with no previous domain knowledge...

deleted 8y ago

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GuiA 8y ago

Good article; strikes a nice balance between a loving ode to a grandfather, and exploring how science is much more conservative than one might think. Reminds me of this article [0], and specifically this passage, which makes the point that one metric of judging “crackpot ideas” that seem to come out of nowhere is by what they enable. Do they lead to the emergence of new results, or allow for the proof of things other than the direct thing that the theorem sets out to prove? ”Usually when there is a breakthrough in mathematics, there is an explosion of new activity when other mathematicians are able to exploit the new ideas to prove new theorems, usually in directions not anticipated by the original discoverer(s). This has manifestly not been the case for ABC, and this fact alone is one of the most compelling reasons why people are suspicious.” [0] https://galoisrepresentations.wordpress.com/2017/12/17/the-abc-conjecture-has-still-not-been-proved/ https://galoisrepresentations.wordpress.com/2017/12/17/the-a...

yters 8y ago

The basic idea doesn't sound crackpottish. There is only one correct representation of water to wine ratio, and a uniform distribution over all possible arrangements of water and wine would only give a single answer. Sounds like the problem lies in how the principle of insufficient reason is being applied.

ajkjk 8y ago
It strikes me instead as rather trivial. Burnside's Lemma, a fairly elementary result in group theory / combinatorics, is regularly used to compute probabilities by enumerating symmetries of the system under study. It's not a logical stretch at all to extend this to continuous / infinite-dimensional systems, and I think most theoretical physicists would be aware of this.
- yters 8y ago
  Very odd that a world renown physicist would be branded a crackpot for making this observation. Why would making the principle of indifference apply to the continuous domain be controversial?
  - ajkjk 8y ago
    Well, we'd have to read what he was showing people to know. Maybe his presentation was deeply obfuscated, or maybe he was saying something slightly more subtle than what I mentioned. I'm just guessing from the hints in the article. From some googling I did find this: https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0310073 https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0310073
    - yters 8y ago
      This is an interesting conclusion: "Probabilities in physics could also be said to be measures of information interpreted within the framework of a physical theory."
  - fjuerfilis 8y ago
    ... not a physicist here, but I do research on applied information theory and statistics. This grandfather's paper is sort of interesting to me because it starts to creep into some of my areas of expertise a tiny bit, but he seemed to be approaching it from a totally different perspective (of a physicist) that I'm less familiar with. I kind of so far seem to fall in the camp of "I kind of get what he's talking about but he's not quite connecting the dots, or isn't explaining himself well or something." To answer your question: in some cases, transferring probabilistic reasoning about discrete states to continuous states, or vice versa, is sort of trivial. But sometimes it becomes somewhat controversial, and often this is because it's unclear how the scale of information maps onto the scale of data, to put it murkily. When it's discrete, you know your observations have specific possible values, which in itself is a chunk of information. But when it's continuous, you have an infinite range of values, and what constitutes "indifference" can be unclear. Think of a scale (like a kitchen or bathroom scale), for example. The scale will have a certain accuracy within a certain range, and as you go further outside that range, the accuracy will decrease further and further. So, to make an analogy with the water-and-wine paradox, let's say I tell you "here's this container of walnuts, that could be anywhere from 0 to 100kg. What's the probability its mass as measured on this scale is in a certain range?" What would be adhering to the principle of indifference? You could argue it would be a uniform distribution over the numbers from 0 to 100, but you could also say it's somehow uniformly distributed over the distinguishable units of the scale, which will not be uniform from 0 to 100 because the meaningfulness of the scale's numbers will be compressed in its most accurate range, and stretched in its less accurate range, and there will also be issues with machine precision, etc. If you were counting walnuts though, you've kind of implicitly fixed the scale to the nonnegative integers, and assumed your ability to count doesn't get fuzzy at some point. So you assume uniformity on one scale is uniformity on another. E.g., if you think of Jeffreys prior as being one scaling of indifference, even with a Bernoulli variable, indifference isn't necessarily scaled as a uniform: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffreys_prior https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffreys_prior. I think this paradox involves (along with maybe being underspecified or poorly posed) somewhat related information-scale mapping issues, about how you define uniformity and what your "possibility space is" to be sort of Jaynesian about it.

it 8y ago

The linked article at https://www.researchers.one/article/2018-10-6 https://www.researchers.one/article/2018-10-6 seems well-argued, nothing outlandish. It doesn't talk about anything in quantum mechanics though. I was hoping to find that somewhere.

SilasX 8y ago
Yeah, it doesn't seem fair to call someone a crank if they have a lucid point with a subtle, hard-to-spot flaw; such arguments are typically wrong in interesting, useful ways. Edit: At risk of self-congratulation, that's what I feel is happening to me on HN when I try to meticulously untangle a complicated issue where I feel people are talking past each other, and then get quickly downvoted but never responded to. Case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14310444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14310444
- DoctorOetker 8y ago
  I agree with you there, pointing out more precisely how people are talking past each other makes all sides pissed off...
  - SilasX 8y ago
    Whoa, after my linking, that old comment went from -2 to -1! I thought it was way past the point that you could vote on it! (It's ~15 months old.)
your-nanny 8y ago
it's there. scroll down and click icons

Aardwolf 8y ago

I don't understand what the paradox in the water/wine paradox is, after checking out its PDF (linked in the article, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/252476141_The_WineWater_Paradox_background_provenance_and_proposed_resolutions https://www.researchgate.net/publication/252476141_The_WineW...). The problem is defined without giving the distribution(s). Specifying a distribution makes the problem mathematically solvable. A uniform distribution for representing a ratio of 1/3 to 3 between two things does not match reality well because it gives more weight to one than the other, but I don't see why that's a paradox. You could generate random valid wine/water amounts (reject invalid combinations) and measure distribution of many experiments of that? You can define any distribution you want that makes more sense than those uniform ones. Ultimately though something is not specified, the distribution of the water amount and the distribution of the wine amount. Why is that a paradox? EDIT: the real question is how was the jug filled up. Did someone pour a random amount of water first, and then after that poured a random amount of wine within the allowable limit? Or did they pour the wine first instead? Or did they pour a random amount of both, and discarded it if after that the ratio was not within the 1/3 to 3 limit? Or some other method? That determines the distribution. The distribution of the ratio is more like a derived distribution, derived from the distribution of the wine, the distribution of the water, and how those two distributions depend on each other based on the method used to fill it up.

bhk 8y ago
The problem is that "uniform distribution" is hard to define. An even distribution of water/wine values is not the same as an even distribution of wine/water values. Thinking in terms of possible states, you can choose an even distribution of x from 0 to 1 and define: water/wine = x/(1-x) wine/water = (1-x)/x (which avoids being water-biased or wine-biased)
- sjg007 8y ago
  So this is defining the random variable not as the ratio but as the implicit function that computes the ratio? So we are really looking at the density function of the hidden variable X? For the original problem it feels like the interval constraints on the ratio are causing the issue since they will be inverse. But maybe I am not clear on that...

convivialdingo 8y ago

I certainly understand the harsh reality of seeing a glimpse of a solution and finding no logical path there. For me, it's factoring large numbers in short times. I've spent 18 years on and off of the problem. Most of that time was coming up with novel ideas and then arriving at the same conclusions as everybody else. I'm too obstinate and "stupid" to know that the problem is practically unsolvable - but fortunately I'm not obsessive enough to throw my life into it. It's basically a hobby I do during my downtime. I like to call it mathematical finger painting, or nature walks through obscure numeric systems. Studying topics, geometries, ancient multiplication methods for fun, and generally scratching under the surface of "why" without knowing how.

Henry_Miller 8y ago
I like your attitude. It feels like the appropriate way to explore in the mysteries of Nature. I've only spent maybe dozens of hours thinking about prime numbers myself over the years and I just can't shake the feeling that the only way to do what you're trying is with fantastical computers containing practically infinite bits and run all the calculations in parallel. But that doesn't detract, I think, from the fun of trying to think of tricks to pass the time.
teekert 8y ago
I feel this way abut getting rich with some super smart idea that is just, just beyond the grasp of my intellect... This may well stay true for the rest of my life of course... More down to earth though, I'm a biologist and whenever I get this feeling related to work, scientifically I have learned to trust it and keep at it, it usually does mean there is something of value in my ideas.
hexscrews 8y ago
I'd say that even if your answer is completely wrong, at least you can document WHY it was wrong. And maybe someone can open up a new vein of inquiry that branches off yours. It reminds me of a sci-fi story where people who decided that they were tired of being emulated retired to a virtual mine where they try to discover new mathematical proofs. They didn't have to do it, since it served no real purpose. But it opened up new avenues of knowledge.

audleman 8y ago

In high school my friend's Dad thought he had found a flaw in modern Physics understanding that would change everything. Physicists, he claimed, refused to see the truth because they were too loyal to Einstein. He sat me down and showed me flaws in a bunch of equations, which was duly impressive until I went to college and took Physics 101. Turns out he was ignoring things like redshift of light; when I plugged in the right equations the classical model held. I tried to argue with my friend, but I had just proved that I was brainwashed by Big Phys. I learned that his Dad cornered anybody he could to evangelize his theories and had been doing so for years. He developed a theory that women and children were more receptive to his revolutionary ideas, so was in the process of writing a book that was more conversational in tone. Last I heard he was still at it.

beefok 8y ago
it's sad that he tries to validate his idea by evangelizing to laymen instead of trying to convince "big science" of his ideas. My dad was and is the same way -- everyone is in some massive conspiracy plot to misguide the public. Typically there are demons or other some suches that are pulling the puppet strings. A few months ago he was convinced the world was flat.. It's this whole Dunning-Kruger effect that seems to affect so many people. I think there are generations of people who missed out on a proper education and a healthy skepticism.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- driverdan 8y ago
  That sounds more like mental illness than a lack of education.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  "I think there are generations of people who missed out on a proper education and a healthy skepticism. " I don't think it's education. Most conspiracy theorists I have met seem to have a deep discomfort with our world and this is their way of explaining it. I think other people turn to religion for the same reasons.

bmc7505 8y ago

"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science." -Feynman

n4r9 8y ago
Surely this is more relevant to scientific theories, rather than a logical theory of interpretation of probability?

rossdavidh 8y ago

It seems that, in some ways, a "crank" is not defined by what they believe or say, nor by whether what they believe or say is true, but by the relation between themselves and their society. Had Freud been in a society that treated the idea of the Oedipus complex differently, perhaps he would have become a crank. Some, like Darwin, were too circumspect to become cranks, but plenty of respected scientists, whether their main ideas were right or wrong, were not "cranks" mainly because of the way their peers reacted to them, not because of anything about them, or their ideas.

scotty79 8y ago
Freud was definitely a crank. People back then just didn't know any better so they never called him on his bs on the spot. I was interested in psychology in high school trying to understand people around me. I even considered studying psychology. Then somebody gave me Freud to read. The horror I felt when I understood that his "theories" were just the observation of the world but through his deeply disturbed eyes and uniquely bent mind... After that I decided that I don't want to have anything to do professionally with trade that still haven't properly distanced themselves and apologized for ever considering that this Freud guy had some merit. Freud, the father of psychoanalysis. Why not António Egas Moniz, the father of neurology, neurosurgery and psychiatrics.
- gnulinux 8y ago
  I know absolutely nothing about psychology except I read some Freud. I don't have any opinions about psychology, or the nature of psychology, or Freud (tbh I'm not that interested either). But I'm not clear why I'm supposed to believe you more than psychology community. See, I'm not trying to be skeptical, I'm just trying to understand who is crank, and you stating Freud crank doesn't seem to make him crank in my eyes. Am I wrong? Why?
  - scotty79 8y ago
    You are not wrong. You shouldn't believe me over anyone else. I'm just sharing personal experience and opinion. If you want to form an opinion about Freud please do research what psychological community thinks about him and why. Basically, "he was asking interesting questions and giving wrong answers but we remember and value him for the questions." > I know absolutely nothing about psychology except I read some Freud. For me it sounds like "I know absolutely nothing about piloting aircraft except I read some notes of failed inventor that tried to build a flapping wings plane before Wright brothers flew, but noone remembers his name because aviation is not psychology." Or "I know exactly nothing about solar system except I read some Ptolemy." If you are interested in Freud, read Freud. If you are interested in psychology read something way more modern. What I think distasteful is that psychological society didn't distance their trade from Freud enough and in 2018 you were under the impression that reading Freud counts in any way towards learning psychology. And to address your more general point. How can you know if Freud is the crank or I'm the crank without knowing anything about the subject and without any interest in the subject? You can't but it's ok since you have no interest. And if you are pressed against the wall you are safer with opinion of majority. Not even majority of psychological community. Just majority of people. Freud was famous so he can't be that bad.

gcbw2 8y ago

So annoying they didn't link to the full articles, in it's various forms.

your-nanny 8y ago

Just finished reading one of the guys papers. I've read a lot of crack pots, and this guy's paper exhibited none of the typical features (megalomania, nonsequiturs, grandiose claims, complaints about persecution or conspiracies to silence the truth, and. so on). He might be wrong (didn't read carefully enough to reach my own conclusions, and I'm well aware of my own limitations), or he might have gone too far from his own expertise to be taken seriously by the right people, but not a crack pot

n4r9 8y ago

The Oxford physicist mentioned in the article may well be Joy Christian, who has submitted numerous articles to Arxiv giving what he claims to be a violation of Bell inequalities using Clifford algebras. You can find them just by searching Arxiv for his name. I spent some time reading these articles and the various refutations - and refutations of refutations - when I was a grad student, as I wanted to nail down where either he or Bell was fundamentally wrong. I never succeeded, but since Bell's proof was much simpler and understandable, and involved more elementary objects, and had been scrutinised for much longer without any serious flaws forthcoming, whereas Christian's proofs appeared to have some issues under debate, I came away thinking it likely that Christian was wrong. Disappointing that I couldn't find the "central" flaw, if there was one. Sad that a talented scientist should spend so much of their career simply alienating themselves from the community in this way.