Yeah I compiled some info about the 2(8+0)² and 2(8×1)² thing. I’ll put it to him if it ever comes up again. Obviously I failed to extract myself from the discussion; I’m just having too much fun. It’s like a puzzle with this whacky - what the fuck does he actually believe? Or is he just a troll? He’s thought about it way too much to be a garden variety troll.
My guess is it’s actually something a bit more diagnosable. It’s nothing uncommon for someone to interpret many people disagreeing with them as them being persecuted, but as someone with exposure to maths he should have the ability to look at an example in a calculator manual showing how it executes left-to-right and say, “yes, that shows that, but here’s why actually it doesn’t matter.” He should be able to realise that saying “textbooks never say ‘juxtaposition’” is not the correct way, in English, to express “current textbooks never say ‘juxtaposition’”. So I think his rejection is more instinctive, and hence more pathological; he is not actually reading replies in order to understand whether they contain something true or not; he’s reading them to understand whether they agree with him or not.
I dunno what personality disorder or whatever that would fall under but… yikes. He’s like the worst example of the stereotypical teacher who can’t accept being wrong. I never had a teacher or lecturer like that; even the ones who were up themselves were able to recognise when they’d made a mistake and correct themselves. I thought the breed had died out.
BTW from your previous post, the concept of distribution does exist in RPN; you’d formulate the distributive law as:
a b + c × = a c × b c × +
(Where = expresses the equality of two expressions; it’s not being used as a binary operator)
This is just because distributivity is an aspect of the maths, not the notational nonsense he’s cooked up ;)
PieFed
Mog Spawn
Share on Mastodon
Share on Reddit
Share on WhatsApp
Yeah I compiled some info about the 2(8+0)² and 2(8×1)² thing. I’ll put it to him if it ever comes up again. Obviously I failed to extract myself from the discussion; I’m just having too much fun. It’s like a puzzle with this whacky - what the fuck does he actually believe? Or is he just a troll? He’s thought about it way too much to be a garden variety troll.
My guess is it’s actually something a bit more diagnosable. It’s nothing uncommon for someone to interpret many people disagreeing with them as them being persecuted, but as someone with exposure to maths he should have the ability to look at an example in a calculator manual showing how it executes left-to-right and say, “yes, that shows that, but here’s why actually it doesn’t matter.” He should be able to realise that saying “textbooks never say ‘juxtaposition’” is not the correct way, in English, to express “current textbooks never say ‘juxtaposition’”. So I think his rejection is more instinctive, and hence more pathological; he is not actually reading replies in order to understand whether they contain something true or not; he’s reading them to understand whether they agree with him or not.
I dunno what personality disorder or whatever that would fall under but… yikes. He’s like the worst example of the stereotypical teacher who can’t accept being wrong. I never had a teacher or lecturer like that; even the ones who were up themselves were able to recognise when they’d made a mistake and correct themselves. I thought the breed had died out.
BTW from your previous post, the concept of distribution does exist in RPN; you’d formulate the distributive law as:
a b + c × = a c × b c × +
(Where = expresses the equality of two expressions; it’s not being used as a binary operator)
This is just because distributivity is an aspect of the maths, not the notational nonsense he’s cooked up ;)