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Spot the error or shut up. If Ramajuan would write a paper himself he could only cite some rather obscure mathematical encyclopedia, he still uncovered wide are

by stiff 13y ago

Spot the error or shut up. If Ramajuan would write a paper himself he could only cite some rather obscure mathematical encyclopedia, he still uncovered wide areas of mathematics unknown to his contemporaries. There might be one Ramajuan for 100 000 cranks, but it still sucks to dismiss someones work based on the fucking bibliography...

ColinWright 13y ago
> Spot the error or shut up. That's not really how it works. I'm deciding whether it's worth my time trying to understand this. If it's really the breakthrough it purports to be, I can expect there to be some deep ideas and difficult tricks - I expect this to take both time and effort. To decide whether I'll bother I apply several heuristics, many of which are well-known and informally documented. If the first page or two just seems like obvious stuff, or is subtly nonsensical, then I won't bother. But I am certainly concerned that he doesn't cite any other significant work at all. More, the claims toward the end are rather, well, indistinct. It's doing very well against the ten heuristics in this blog post: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=304 http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=304
- raverbashing 13y ago
  Well, the best heuristic is finding a mistake, and if it's a crank there should be several.
  - ColinWright 13y ago
    It doesn't always work like that. Sometimes a paper is, after enough trying to understand what's going on, simply nonsense. It can be hard work wading through pages of unmotivated and apparently random definitions, trying to find some sense, only to have it completely fall apart. There aren't always obvious mistakes. Sometimes it makes sense locally, but not globally. Taking an early assessment can help enormously in avoiding time-wasters.
- stiff 13y ago
  OK, but I would love for those heuristics to focus on assessing the content of the paper, not the reputation of the author, his peers and quotations etc. You can get some vague impression of what's going on in this paper in some 30 minutes, there are many parts that seem strange (he says for 4-stage graphs one can manually verify that his "prooving algorithm" is correct and uses this as an assumption later in his proof), so I would love to hear something about that.
  - ColinWright 13y ago
    The heuristics I apply go well beyond the ones given in that post. In this case I have taken on board the fact that so many references are just to his own earlier work, and that work is old enough that it should have made a bigger splash. That's a clear indication that this is not likely to be correct, so I'm looking for mistakes, I'm not looking for deep ideas. And I'm not finding deep ideas. I spent 10 minutes getting a feel for the approach, and I'll come back when I have another 10 or 15 minutes to spare, but it's really, really not looking good.

by stiff 13y ago

ColinWright 13y ago

> Spot the error or shut up. That's not really how it works. I'm deciding whether it's worth my time trying to understand this. If it's really the breakthrough it purports to be, I can expect there to be some deep ideas and difficult tricks - I expect this to take both time and effort. To decide whether I'll bother I apply several heuristics, many of which are well-known and informally documented. If the first page or two just seems like obvious stuff, or is subtly nonsensical, then I won't bother. But I am certainly concerned that he doesn't cite any other significant work at all. More, the claims toward the end are rather, well, indistinct. It's doing very well against the ten heuristics in this blog post: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=304 http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=304

raverbashing 13y ago
Well, the best heuristic is finding a mistake, and if it's a crank there should be several.
- ColinWright 13y ago
  It doesn't always work like that. Sometimes a paper is, after enough trying to understand what's going on, simply nonsense. It can be hard work wading through pages of unmotivated and apparently random definitions, trying to find some sense, only to have it completely fall apart. There aren't always obvious mistakes. Sometimes it makes sense locally, but not globally. Taking an early assessment can help enormously in avoiding time-wasters.
stiff 13y ago
OK, but I would love for those heuristics to focus on assessing the content of the paper, not the reputation of the author, his peers and quotations etc. You can get some vague impression of what's going on in this paper in some 30 minutes, there are many parts that seem strange (he says for 4-stage graphs one can manually verify that his "prooving algorithm" is correct and uses this as an assumption later in his proof), so I would love to hear something about that.
- ColinWright 13y ago
  The heuristics I apply go well beyond the ones given in that post. In this case I have taken on board the fact that so many references are just to his own earlier work, and that work is old enough that it should have made a bigger splash. That's a clear indication that this is not likely to be correct, so I'm looking for mistakes, I'm not looking for deep ideas. And I'm not finding deep ideas. I spent 10 minutes getting a feel for the approach, and I'll come back when I have another 10 or 15 minutes to spare, but it's really, really not looking good.