A few of my recent posts here appear to have struck some nerves, and I’ve been
\ngetting lots of annoying email containing the same questions, over and over again. So rather than reply individually, I’m going to answer them here in the hope that either (a) people will see the answers before send the question to me, and therefore not bother me; or (b) conclude that I’m an obnoxious asshole who isn’t worth the trouble of writining to, and therefore not bother me. I suspect that (b) is more likely than (a), but hey, whatever works.
\nAnswers beneath the fold.<\/p>\n
\n————
\n**Question**: *Why are you so rude? There’s no need to call people stupid, or idiotic, or ridiculous just because they made a mistake.*
\n**Obnoxious Answer**: I’m rude because it’s fun.
\n**Serious Answer**: There *is* a need to call some people or some ideas stupid.
\nWhen people are writing about things like math and science, I think you can loosely group things into four categories.
\n1. *Right*. Some stuff is just simply correct: good data, good arguments, valid logic.
\n2. *Wrong*. Sometimes people make a mistake and get something wrong. They accidentally miss a step, or misinterpret a piece of data, or misunderstand something. Or they just plain get stuff wrong – they’ve got a hypothesis about how something works, and it turns out to be incorrect. Hey, it happens. In the first case, people aren’t perfect, and we all make mistakes from time to time. And in the second, that’s actually a *good* thing: it’s what science is about, figuring out which ideas are right, and which are wrong.
\n3. *Lies*. Sometimes people deliberately write things that are not true. For example, William Dembski *knows* that his so-called “Universal Probability Bound” is nonsense, but he continues to use it. Lies should be called out as lies, and the liar who wrote them deserves whatever abuse get heaped on them.
\n4. *Stupid*. Some things are just so wrong that they go beyond mere wrongness into an entirely different territory. When someone tries to argue that π=3, or that if there’s a 1 in 1000 chance of being in an airplane crash, then the average victim flew 1000 times – well, that’s not just wrong. That’s *stupid*. And people who write *stupid* things deserve to be called stupid, and to have the stupidity of their arguments publicly ridiculed.
\n—————-
\n**Question**: *Who are you to criticize all of these famous people?*
\n**Obnoxious Answer**: I’m someone who isn’t an idiot.
\n**Serious answer**: I’m someone who isn’t an idiot. Yeah, seriously, that’s it. My entire qualification for writing critiques of famous people.
\nAnd that’s plenty of qualification. Because *wrong* is *wrong*. It doesn’t matter how famous you are, how many letters you can put after your name, how many books you’ve published, how many awards you’ve won, how much money you have, how often you appear on TV, or anything like that. If you say something that’s incorrect, then *anyone* who knows enough to see the error is qualified to point it out.
\n—————–
\n**Question**: *Don’t you feel guilty that publicly mocking people could lose them their jobs, or prevent them from getting jobs\/tenure?*
\n**Obnoxious answer**: No, not at all.
\n**Serious answer**: Folks, this is a *blog*. How much influence do you think a stupid little math blog has on the real world? Do you *really* think that a university committee considering giving someone tenure is gong to have a conversion like the following?
\n>**ProfA**: This guy’s really good. I think we should give him tenure.
\n>**ProfB**: Yeah, you’re right. Definitely a guy who deserves tenure.
\n>**ProfC**: Hey, before we make a decision, why don’t we do a google blog search on him? Oh, look, that geek on Good Math\/Bad Math said he’s an idiot!
\n>**ProfA**: Uh-oh. That’s bad!
\n>**ProfB**: Yeah, no tenure for someone who got criticized by a *blog*!
\nEven assuming (most likely incorrectly) that anything on this blog could affect anyone’s career (other than my own): if the individual in question is writing stupid or dishonest stuff that’s relevant to the work they’d be doing, then *they don’t deserve the job*. If you’ve got a creationist who writes articles about how evolution is impossible applying for a job teaching evolutionary biology, then *they don’t deserve the job*. They’ve disqualified themselves by publicly demonstrating their incompetence. If you’ve got someone applying for a job as a mathematician, and they’ve published articles based on incompetently written, stupidly wrong mathematical arguments: they aren’t qualified for a job as a mathematician. It’s not my fault that they’re incompetent.
\n————-
\n**Question**: *Commenter X is being an asshole. Why won’t you ban him?*
\n**Obnoxious answer**: Because it’s fun watching you get made fun of, you twit.
\n**Serious answer**: I’ve never banned anyone from posting comments on this blog. I hope that I never have to. There are only two reasons that I would ban someone: spam, and being consistently and excessively abusive towards other commenters. Note that someone repeatedly pointing out that you’re *wrong* does not count as being abusive.
\nThat does *not* include being abusive towards me. I’ve put myself out in public as the author of this blog, saying some seriously rude and obnoxious things about people. I don’t think it would be fair for me to get upset and ban people for being rude and obnoxious back towards me.
\n————–
\n**Question**: *How would you feel if someone did a slam job on you like you’ve done to so many people?*
\n**Obnoxious answer**: I’d get down on my knees and cry about how unfair the world is.
\n**Serious answer**: It’s happened. People have picked posts on this blog, and used them to attack me. I’ve been called everything from a good for nothing claptrap nobody to a child molester. Sure it pisses me off. But that’s life. In the end, truth wins out. If what I’m saying is right, then the fact that a couple of yahoos called me some rotten names is no big deal. If what I’m saying is wrong, then I deserve the abuse.
\n—————–
\n**Question**: *Are you really as much of a pencil-necked geek as you sound like on your blog?*
\n**Obnoxious answer**: Yes.
\n**Serious answer**: Yes.
\n—————
\n**Question**: *You’re a stupid obnoxious geek who’ll never get laid in his entire life, why don’t you just shut the fuck up?*
\n**Obnoxious answer**: What does being a geek have to do with getting laid? Don’t you realize that there are some really amazing women geeks out there? Just who do you think they wind up with? Morons like you?
\n**Serious answer**: That’s more of a rhetorical question than a real one, isn’t it? Even so, it’s really quite amazing how often I’ve gotten some variant of this in email from some irate jackass. This is obviously the preferred question for the illiterates out there: I’ve never yet seen a single version without errors in grammar, spelling, *and* punctuation. Come on guys, can’t you get through a single sentence without screwing up?
\n———-
\n**Question**: *Why do you waste time writing your stupid blog, it’s not like anyone’s actually interested in reading it?*
\n**Obnoxious answer**: You obviously read it, and were sufficiently motivated by whatever I wrote to go to the trouble of sending me mail. Why?
\n**Serious answer**: I get more positive mail than negative; there’s an active group of intelligent people posting comments regularly; and I’m consistently getting over 1000 unique visitors every day. So there are plenty of people interested in reading it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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