Bad Logic
goodmath | May 3, 2010 A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.
There's no shortage of stupidity in the world. And, alas, it comes in
many, many different kinds. Among the ones that bug me, pretty much
the worst is the stupidity that comes from believing that you know
something that you don't.
This is particularly dangerous for people like me, who write blogs like
this one where we try to explain math and science to
non-mathemicians/non-scientists. Part of what we do, when we're writing our
blogs, is try to take complicated ideas, and explain them in ways that make
them at least somewhat comprehensible to…
goodmath | October 28, 2009 Another chaos theory post is in progress. But while I was working on it, a couple of
comments arrived on some old posts. In general, I'd reply on those posts if I thought
it was worth it. But the two comments are interesting not because they actually lend
anything to the discussion to which they are attached, but because they are perfect
demonstrations of two of the most common forms of crackpottery - what I call the
"Education? I don't need no stinkin' education" school, and the "I'm so smart that I don't
even need to read your arguments" school.
Let's start with the willful ignorance.…
goodmath | June 24, 2009 One of my pet peeves about people and math is that most
people don't really have a clue of what math is. I've been writing
this blog for something over three years, and by the standards of
a lot of people, I've almost never written about math.
Yesterday, my son's kindergarten class had a picnic. On my way home,
I was listening to the local NPR station, which was interviewing some
crossword puzzle writer whose name I cannot remember; I will therefore refer
to him as "crossword-boy". (It was not Will Shortz; Shortz is much smarter than the
guy they were interviewing.) At one point, they…
goodmath | August 21, 2007 A bunch of readers, and one commenter in another thread, have all hit me with a pathetic
monstrosity of a purported proof of God. Several have even been misled by the URL where the
dreadful thing is posted, thinking that ScienceBlogs have picked up a creationist. Rest assured, this bozo and his blog have nothing to do with our beloved ScienceBlogs (note the "S"); it's just some jerk who wants to try to capitalize on our reputation.
If you want to find the original page, you can go to "scienceblog.com" yourself and find it. I'm not going to link to this slime - his blog name is an attempt to…