I won't take criticism that's based in you just not understanding what people are saying.

When did I, or Rota, ever say anything about this straw man you keep bringing up about differential equations funding the entire mathematics department?

Emphasis added.

[quote=G.C. Rota]
The sophomore course in differential equations will never be reformed. It will die of natural
death, and it will be replaced by several shorter courses that will deal with realistic aspects of
differential equations. It is to be hoped that these new courses will be taught by mathematicians
rather than by engineers: the budget of any mathematics department is entirely dependent on
the number of engineering students enrolled in our elementary courses. Were it not for these
courses, which engineers generously defer to mathematicians, our mathematics departments would
be doomed to extinction.
[/quote]

You keep bringing up the single course of sophomore differential equations. Why? I assumed it was because you didn't read carefully. Maybe I was wrong. But you keep bringing this up for some other reason.

You may have other reasons for wanting to talk about this, but I am not sure what they have to do with anything I've written here or what Rota wrote.

tl;dr: what part of the phrase "our elementary courses" do you not understand? This includes all of lower division calculus.

You may not like me calling it a cash cow, and I wouldn't presume to know if it really is, but everything you wrote in response to Rota's suggestion that it is hasn't convinced me at all.

I don't see why I should pay attention to the parts of what you've written that were spuriously introduced into the conversation as a part of a mistaken assumption about what I or Rota had said.

Also, can you empathize a bit with me here in my frustration here, without the personal attacks? Not that they particularly bother me, but I really do regret pressing this point if it is making you so angry.

Really, this should be simple, and I think we should treat it as such.

I mean, I could be wrong. Maybe I did make the straw man argument you seem to be attacking, but lost track of it? If so, I should never made it, and I would take full responsibility for the misunderstanding if that is the case.

It wasn't a straw man because I didn't say it with any intention of trying to debate you or Rota. This is again what I mean: you're seemingly incapable of understanding that I made a rhetorical point about funding without it somehow being an attempt to refute or work against your logic.

What I was saying at the time was, that one course is not necessary for mathematics funding. Literally, that's all. If calculus was cut entirely from math, then yeah, we'd be ****ed. But calculus won't ever be fully cut from math. But elementary differential equations? No department's existence hinges on that course. It might suck to lose that one course, but we could live without it.

In other words, let it go to the engineers, or let us mathematicians deal with it. It doesn't matter to me.

When I first posted that point I wasn't attacking anything. That's what you're. not. getting.

This is philosophy-speak for "I am wrong". Thanks.



I ask you again: when did anybody in this thread ever say this except you?

Because if you can't find it, then your insistence on pressing that point earlier in the discussion before we got into all this meta stuff is a classic straw man.

The meta stuff came as a result of me suggesting that perhaps you arrived at this straw man as a result of a failure to read. I could be wrong about that.



So you agree with Rota. And presumably you agree with me, since I never argued this straw man about all funding coming from ODE's.

You wrote something in response to what was written in the essay in order to contradict it based on a completely incorrect reading of it.

I'm glad to have set the record straight, but surely we could have arrived at this without so much consternation!

Anyway, what I'm hearing from your recent posts is that you aren't trying to argue anything anymore, but just wanted to make rhetorical points all along.

I guess that means there's no point in talking about this, since I am arguing against somebody who doesn't have anything he is willing to defend, other than his right to make such and such rhetorical point, regardless of the scrutiny it might come under.

But forgive me for wanting to set the record straight when said rhetorical point was made based on a misunderstanding of a piece of of writing I cited, in the service of tacitly dismissing it. I mean, you can accuse me of wanting too badly to protect Rota from the accusation of having said something wrong, but when such a dismissal is based on a sloppy interpretation, should it really be so complicated to nip that in the bud?

I'm not getting it, because a dismissal (based on a sloppy interpretation) is an implicit attack on its merit. Unless what you are saying is that you don't want to call it an attack simply because you don't feel like defending it (and how can I blame you).

Unless if you think I understand all "lower division courses" to mean just elementary differential equations, which I don't, then your reading is an obvious misinterpretation of my post.

But since you're clearly unwilling to admit a mistake, and keep lying about it, I don't think any further discussion is going to be important. If you want to participate in ****head debate, take it to 4chan where you belong.

OK, I'll respond, but really man, can you stop with the personal attacks? Your impatience is showing; you really ought to take a step back and think about the possibility that you might have made a mistake here.

This is the crucial straw man. If you can admit that you were straw manning me here, we can end this discussion.

To my knowledge, there is nothing in this thread said by myself or by Rota that would justify the following statement by yourself:



Who exactly are you refuting here when you lead this with a "but, no"? Is this just another rhetorical point you made disguised as a tacit dismissal of what I wrote? Because to my knowledge, I never made the argument that funding for mathematics "depends on one single class".

Forgive me if I presumed that this tacit dismissal was based on a misinterpretation of what Rota wrote. I mean, can you blame me, since you got a bunch of other details about it wrong as well?

For the interest of putting this **** to bed, yes. It was a strawman.

Also, if you look on that page, I also clarified that there was another straw man hidden in your setup I quoted in my last post. Here was my clarification:

[quote=Reverend Jones]Also, I'm not sure it's accurate to frame this as "mathematicians taking away jobs". I haven't said anything about how I think things should be. I believe that historically, calculus has been taught by mathematicians. Who knows, maybe this has changed?[/quote]

Since we've settled that, I repeat myself:



I'd still interested in hearing a refutation that isn't a straw man, since I presume that's what this discussion is largely about, seeing that it began as a tacit dismissal of Rota's idea (which I am not sure is true or not, but it seems plausible).

In case anybody is wondering how this discussion got started:



which presumably was meant to imply that somehow if engineering departments (and presumably psychology and business and economics) really did assume all responsibility for teaching lower division math, that mathematics departments wouldn't be in financial trouble.

For the record: I have no idea how mathematics departments get their funding. But it seems highly plausible that a big chunk of it comes from teaching calculus, and I don't think this can be dismissed so easily.

I said that so you would stop talking.

Oh, I know. I just wanted to put it on the record that you had forfeited the argument, and to show why your desire to do so isn't so hard to understand, given the weakness of your position. I understand that we all have better things to do.

I mean, if you really had anything, you'd forget about the straw man and provide another argument in its place. But I'm pretty sure you don't have one.

Wait, let me guess: you are going to insult me by saying that the only reason you aren't going to oblige me with an actual argument is that my puny brain is incapable of understanding it. It couldn't possibly simply be... that you're wrong on this one?

Got it.

I will admit that I probably baited you into this argument by starting off extremely hostilely. And for that I apologize.

Having read this thread again, I see now how poorly I came across. And I think this does reflect poorly on me rather than you. So I don't think it's possible in this context for me to say I was "right" in any way. I was so frustrated with you that I missed the number of times you'd conceded that while your initial post may have been in error, you had moved on to other points. But I was skimming in frustration at that point, desperately looking for some logical explanation for why you were still writing so many things that seemed to nevertheless to be about the original point. It didn't cross my mind just how little of the things you were writing had anything at all to do with what I was narrowly focused on, and I wrongly presumed this was simply because you still hadn't read the original passage carefully enough. Also, there were enough things which you were focused on (for other reasons) that looked like they belied some kind of continued misunderstanding (like all your stuff about how insignificant differential equations must be to math revenue compared to the rest of lower division), but which were actually further still removed sub-discussions, completely separate from the original point of departure.

I admit to using the word "cash cow" imprecisely (again, I saw this part of the discussion a distraction). I hadn't given second thought to the connotation. Again, I presumed we were trying to make other distinctions that would have been so narrow in scope that such connotations wouldn't have changed my intended meaning.

To be quite honest, I really think the discussion was going quite well, and we were wrapping it up, and then you made this post, which (in retrospect) just completely confused me about your level of comprehension and what your intentions were here.

In fact, to this very moment, it's still not exactly clear to me why you wrote that last sentence, since it seems to imply far less mutual understanding between the two of us than most of what immediately preceded it.

I guess in the future, a good protocol for communication for me to adopt would be: if somebody says something that makes me go, "WTF????", rather than presume they are actually, really confused, take it merely as a (potentially) confused remark, and use the opportunity to ask for clarification before drawing any conclusions from it.

The weird thing is, in face to face communication this misunderstanding would never have happened, because a simple, "excuse me?" is all too easy to squeeze in verbally. Whereas on here, it's like the sentence is burning into my monitor in all its wrongness, and the only way to vanquish it is to draw as many conclusions as possible from it and then launch a counter attack.

And for the record, no, you weren't trying to make a strawman argument, even if that was my interpretation. Sorry it came to badgering you to spuriously conceding this.

And yeah, there is something seriously wrong with the way I am approaching these discussions. I have written a short essay to myself about this and plan to be more mindful of this kind of thing in the future. You were nothing but polite until I persisted in the accusations.

One thing that I might draw from this experience is that people who argue online are really just attempting to resolve internal confusion through external means.

Of course, the best way to do this is to ask for clarification, and the worst way to do it is to double down, which is what I did.

But this is interesting, because it means that anonymous forms of discussion (you mentioned 4chan) make it all but impossible to do the former (I mean, you will even get people pretending to be OP), so they just go to the latter every time.

I am also willing to accept the possibility that the thing that I got confused by was perfectly fine in context, and that it may have been my fault for misreading it. Though I see no reason to think this as of now, it wouldn't change my mind about anything I wrote (edit: in these last few posts) if it turned out to be the case.

Hey... Perhaps take a few moments to gather your thoughts before you post? That way we don't keep ending with threads with like ~13 posts in a row by a single person?

Brian, you are right. In fact, heeding that advice would also solve some of my other problems as well. I'm sorry guys.

So I tried something new in calculus TAing today. Students were having trouble finding the integrating factor for first order linear differential equations, so I explained why they make sense abstractly, and then I told the students they had to repeat back to me the explanation.

It took a bit, but finally they were able to repeat the explanation of why it's just the product rule. And I think after that, they were able to see why solving them is so trivial.

Goddamn, another math-phobic programming thing.

Also, wouldn't recommend sitting through the video, it's really long and he says little of substance.