Conservapedia:Conservapedian mathematics/Another Open Letter to Ed Poor
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[edit] Another Open Letter to Ed Poor
Ed:
I see that you have blocked my friend and colleague DiEb. There's essentially no one left. I'm not going to contribute further. This is just an impossible place to work. I can not figure out what your vision for educational math and science articles is, or how you plan to get there, but it obviously doesn't include the 6 people named above, or DiEb.
I have done a huge amount of looking around at the various math articles, during my recent sabbatical and since then. I'd like to share my observations, and suggest how you can make things better.
A recurring claim, both here and, especially, at that other site, is that you are an ignoramus and a bully. I don't agree. After very careful reading of your edits, it is clear that you do know the material, and do have good judgment (see my comments above) about pitching it correctly to the target audience.
- Sorry, I'm going to have to violate the civility policy, and I'm going to say things that could be considered to be characterizations of your motives. I'm also going to say unpleasant things about Foxtrot. I apologize for this, but that's the way it has to be. You can block me or not—I won't be back.
I believe that you have good ideas, but you also have a tendency to bully people, and you let the latter interfere with the former. You could have done so much, but the bullying side of your internet/wiki personality (I have no idea what you are like personally; we'd probably get along fine) kept getting in the way. This is particularly sad in view of the fact that you have so much wiki experience here, at WP, and elsewhere. You could have made the educational offerings superb.
There are many places where you were on the right track, with good ideas and making good comments, and then you needlessly blew someone away. You could have just discussed the issues on article talk pages and user talk pages, encouraging people to write articles consistent with you vision. And, as I have said before, your vision is good. There was a recent case ([1]) in which you did offer helpful advice and guidance. Why didn't you do more of that, and less bullying?
There are many other places where you could have made constructive edits, or given constructive advice to others:
- Series (I discussed this above; you could have looked at it.)
- Fundamental Theorem of Calculus (ditto)
- Gradient (ditto)
- Radioactivity (Can we stop the bickering, reversions, and blocks, and restore the article, and go from there to make it a high quality article?)
- Natural Logarithm (ditto)
A good example of things going wrong is the Line segment article. I completely understand, and agree with, what you wanted. But "I suspect sabotage"?? There was no sabotage there! Nor was it, as Foxtrot claimed, a misplaced parenthesis. I was a serious misunderstanding, by Foxtrot and others, of the distinction between the geometric concepts of a line or line segment, and the arithmetic/algebra/calculus concept of what the real numbers are and why we call them the "real line". You knew that, and I knew that. You could have straightened out the mess. You could have taken Foxtrot aside and expressed your concern. Or you could even have asked me (writing assignment!) to fix it. I was busy cleaning up his mess (and it was parody) at boolean value. I knew about the line segment problem, and was going to get to it.
By the way, I notice your recent statement that you scored in the 99th percentile in the math SAT.
- There's no point in saying that; on the internet people can't check such things, so statements like that just come across as foolish bluster.
- A better way to impress people, and the only way that works on the internet, is to write well. "By their fruits ye shall know them." It took me a while to figure out that you can write well. Others never saw that, and considered you ignorant. You could have shown your positive side.
- I hope you can appreciate that many of the 7 of us also scored in the 99th percentile. As well as the advanced math and physics achievement tests, AP calculus and physics, MAA competition, Putnam competition, GRE, oral exams, thesis defense, etc.
Getting back to constructive things you can do, and that you are going to have to do without anyone's help, I would suggest that a good place to start would be to look at Foxtrot's contributions and his planned agenda. Sorry for the personal remark, but he is not a good writer at all. His center article is just garbage. And his boolean value edit was, well, "Father of logical truths"?
Then finish the Limit_(mathematics) page that DiEb and I were working on. You'll see that I did the "limit as finite X is infinite" section, but didn't get to the "limit at infinite X is finite" section. Then explain convergent sequences in terms of that. Then go to the Series_(mathematics) page (another real disaster) and connect the two concepts. Be sure to give a very careful explanation of the distinction between, and connection between, a sequence that converges to a number, and a series whose partial sums comprise a sequence that converges to a number. Then clean up the material about convergence criteria—it's full of errors and not explained well in any case.
While you are there, you might want to introduce the remarkable (to high-school students) fact that a series made up of rational numbers can converge to an irrational number. Use the fact that non-integral square roots are irrational—the thing from the ancient Greeks. (I wrote up a draft of this section a couple of weeks ago, but it will never see the light of day.) And that you can define the real numbers this way. (You and I know that as the construction by Cauchy sequences.)
While on the subject of defining the reals, go over to the Dedekind cut part of Real analysis and fix up all the errors there. It's a disaster.
Oh, and you might want to restore and fix natural logarithm and radioactivity. Just do it.
Well, that's it. Good luck. Try to play "good cop" more, OK?
I won't be contributing any more, so you don't need to block me. You are invited to show restraint.
SamHB 23:32, 26 August 2008 (EDT)[1]
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ [http://www.conservapedia.com/index.php?title=User:SamHB&oldid=505580 User Page as August 26, 2008 23:40
