A community for math - Meta

Anonymous 1915

Great. We are agreed :)

user 3.14159 replying to Anonymous 1946

I agree on the first statement but beg to disagree on the second one. Yes, I'd love to see a math community here, ideally as collegial as math overflow, but also welcoming questions of a more moderate scope.

Anonymous 1946 replying to user 3.14159

Perhaps we can return to the topic here? I think it's good to have a math community here. With your math background you may be a good advisor.

user 3.14159 replying to Anonymous 1946

Well, it was my wording, but you separate it from the context. One of your wordings included "bad", I am sure I can quote this in a misleading way, too, but let's not go there, please. But yes, there is propaganda. It started with the statement that LaTeX3 will be ready in the 90ties, and, frankly, I would also call [this article](https://www.latex-project.org/publications/2020-FMi-TUB-tb128mitt-quovadis.pdf) "propaganda" (of course you can disagree).

Anonymous 1946

"propaganda" was your wording (you said "other sites should not be allowed to import their propaganda on this site" bla) not sure why you suggested this when fellow users are talking about starting a math community. Perhaps just stay on topic.

user 3.14159 replying to Anonymous 1946

As I said, that's fine with me. I just do not like to get accused to make things up, which I do not. If you want the facts, they can be found by just looking at some web sites, and I have additional information (screen shots and so on to back things up). If you are not interested in this, this is a very healthy attitude. However, just suggesting that these sites just work great and everyone who says otherwise makes "propaganda" is IMHO not helpful, it just plays into the hands of those sites, which, as we all know, have seen even more outrageous scandals.

Anonymous 1946 replying to user 3.14159

LOL then why you started ranting about other sites and users in the first place. samcarter's suggestion was very good, that that to heart.

user 3.14159 replying to Anonymous 1946

I agree that this discussion is useless, of course I disagree with "rant". If you want facts, just check whether (a) there are moderators who moderate competing sites, (b) if there are moderators on a team with some user, who was among other things responsible for a real mathematician leaving the site, and (c) if the user profile of the highest-reputation user is misleading. If you want details let me know, but kindly try not go into this with the assumption that there are no facts.

Anonymous 1946 replying to user 3.14159

The context is above, in your own post to what I replied to. I understand, you may want to rant while avoiding facts and feedback. So it's useless to continue here. cu

user 3.14159 replying to Anonymous 1946

It is known that if you quote from others without context, you can construct arbitrary sentences. Let us please avoid these exercises. I told you my concerns, you can disagree, but avoid quoting without context, would you?

Anonymous 1946 replying to user 3.14159

What "inappropriate wording" shall I avoid? Is using your wording bad? I quoted “disinformation campaign” and “propaganda” as your words and your accusation to other sites.  What was inappropriate in my comment besites using your phrasing - was it asking for facts? Name it.

user 3.14159

@Anonymous The answer is yes, and I did not ask you for your comment either, and certainly not for the wording. If you are happy with the quality of math.se, that's fine, all I can tell you that several statements there are not entirely correct. My concerns here are not about math.se but tex.se and the dynamics there, which includes several conflicts of interest and their consequences. If you are happy with moderators moderating competing sites and carrying disputes from one site to another, this is your choice, I find it inappropriate. If you find it OK to protect a user just because they are on the same team as a moderator, this is your choice, but again I find it inappropriate.   
  
However, as I stressed, I am really impressed by math overflow.   
  
You can also disagree with me, totally fine, but I'd kindly ask you to avoid inappropriate wording.

user 3.14159

That's totally fine with me. However, this should also mean that other sites should not be allowed to import their propaganda on this site. (And you probably understand that it can be very frustrating to see that completely wrong statements get promoted just on the basis of misleading user profiles or favoritism. After all I also have some math background, and sometimes I just know if, and can prove that, a statement is wrong.)  
  
I am really amazed by the [math community](https://mathoverflow.net/questions/386796/nonconvexity-and-discretization). One fields medalist asks a question that gets answered by another fields medalist. This is light years away from the competitive nature of some of the other sites, where users are too great to ever ask a question, and one repeatedly gets the impression that answers are not at all written to provide information, but just to show off. Maybe some do not want to hear this statement, but in my opinion this math Q & A site is great, and I would be surprised if there was another discipline in which this was possible.

samcarter

New idea: Let's be happy here that we have such nice Q&A sites like topanswers and codidact and let the problems of other sites to the the users of these sites  to sort out.

user 3.14159 replying to topnush

For the sake of the sanity of this site let them do whatever.

topnush replying to user 3.14159

I haven't seen this. Can you give an example?

user 3.14159

There seems to be tremendous support for someone who designs their profile page in such a way that people get misled to believe that they are on the faculty in a math department. It is actually a highly nontrivial achievement to get a faculty position in a math department. I cannot understand why people worship one person who likes to mislead the public rather than thinking about the effect the behavior of this person has on those who work hard to be really on the math faculty. This is very disappointing to me. I really think that these disinformation campaigns need to stop, and people need to think whether those whom they almost blindly follow deserve to be worshipped at the expense of those who are making solid statements.

user 3.14159 replying to topnush

I think this is very hard to establish in a useful way. If you look at https://math.stackexchange.com, this is open to everyone (which does not mean that everyone is friendly) but there is also quite an abundance of low-quality answers. I think that you would need a different model of Q & A site with a "refereeing" system in which some volunteer experts reject wrong posts. However, I am not sure if it will be easy to find competent volunteers who want to spend their time on this.

topnush

something for college/university students basically and other people at that level

user 3.14159 replying to topnush

That's correct. Maybe you should clarify in your question what kind of math community you want to establish.

topnush

it is really only for professional mathematicians

topnush replying to user 3.14159

yes. However they don't like amateurs

user 3.14159

@topnush, re: [your question](#question), I think https://mathoverflow.net is actually reasonable given that it is belonging to the SE family. They do have real mathematicians participating, and actually even really good ones, e.g. https://mathoverflow.net/users/6074/peter-scholze is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Scholze, I think.

topnush

thank you

topnush

got the confirmation email and have logged in!

topnush

I am receiving emails from this site

topnush

(checked spam)

topnush

I just tried resend confirmation but I haven't received anything yet

Monica replying to topnush

Hello again.  We believe this problem is now fixed.  At your convenience, could you please try again?  If it's still saying your email address is taken, try the "resend confirmation" link.  Thanks!

Monica

An API (related to email) that we depend on changed.  We're working on a fix as I write this.  I apologize for the inconvenience.  Thanks for alerting us to the problem!

Monica replying to topnush

Hello!  I'm sorry you ran into a problem.  I've passed the error code on to the developers with DB access to see what they can find.  There was an email-related problem elsewhere last night that was fixed, so if you're willing to try again, I'd appreciate it.  Sorry for the hassle!

samcarter replying to topnush

I pinged Monica from Codidact in the Tavern, maybe she can help

topnush

I tried to sign up and it gave me error 62a3d2f2-0bb8-47da-b643-0afdfe4ec9f5 . I tried again and it said my email address was taken so I can't. Not looking too good currently :)

samcarter

@topnush, re: [your question](#question), Maybe you could have a look at https://math.codidact.com/ ?

0 Answers