Perhaps I’ve simply been misreading John, and he’s been intending to say “I have some beliefs, and separately I have some suggestive technical results, and they feel kinda related to me! Which is not to say that any onlooker is supposed to be able to read the technical results and then be persuaded of any of my claims; but it feels promising and exciting to me!”.
For what it’s worth, I ask John about once ever month or two about his research progress and his answer has so far been (paraphrased) “I think I am making progress. I don’t think I have anything to show you that would definitely convince you of my progress, which is fine because this is a preparadigmatic field. I could give you some high-level summaries or we could try to dive into the math, though I don’t think I have anything super robust in the math so far, though I do think I have interesting approaches.”
You might have had a totally different experience, but I’ve definitely had the epistemic state so far that John’s math was in the “trying to find remotely reasonable definitions with tenuous connection of formalism to reality” stage, and not the “I have actually demonstrated robust connection of math to reality stage”, so I feel very non-mislead by John. A good chunk of this impression comes from random short social interactions I’ve had with John, so someone who more engaged with just his online writing might come away with a different impression (though I’ve also done that a lot and don’t super feel like John has ever tried to sell me in his writing on having super robust math to back things up).
John has also made various caveats to me, of the form “this field is pre-paradigmatic and the math is merely suggestive at this point”. I feel like he oversold his results even so.
Part of it is that I get the sense that John didn’t understand the limitations of his own results—like the fact that the telephone theorem only says anything in the infinite case, and the thing it says then does not (in its current form) arise as a limit of sensible things that can be said in finite cases. Or like the fact that the alleged interesting results of the gKPD theorem are a relatively-shallow consequence of the overly-strong assumption of G.
My impression was that I had to go digging into the theorems to see what they said, only to be disappointed by how little resemblance they bore to what I’d heard John imply. (And it sounds to me like Lawrence, Leon, and Erik had a similar experience, although I might be misreading them on account of confirmation bias or w/e.)
I acknowledge that it’s tricky to draw a line between “someone has math that they think teaches them something, and is inarticulate about exactly what it teaches” and “someone has math that they don’t understand and are overselling”. The sort of observation that would push me towards the former end in John’s case is stuff like: John being able to gesture more convincingly at ways concepts like “tree” or “window” are related to his conserved-property math even in messy finite cases. I acknowledge that this isn’t a super legible distinction and that that’s annoying.
(Also, I had the above convos with John >1y ago, and perhaps John simply changed since then.)
Note that I continue to think John’s cool for pursuing this particular research direction, and I’d enjoy seeing his math further fleshed out (and with more awareness on John’s part of its current limitations). I think there might be interesting results down this path.
(Also, I had the above convos with John >1y ago, and perhaps John simply changed since then.)
In hindsight, I do think the period when our discussions took place were a local maximum of (my own estimate of the extent of applicability of my math), partially thanks to your input and partially because I was in the process of digesting a bunch of the technical results we talked about and figuring out the next hurdles. In particular, I definitely underestimated the difficulty of extending the results to finite approximations.
That said, I doubt that fully accounts for the difference in perception.
For what it’s worth, I ask John about once ever month or two about his research progress and his answer has so far been (paraphrased) “I think I am making progress. I don’t think I have anything to show you that would definitely convince you of my progress, which is fine because this is a preparadigmatic field. I could give you some high-level summaries or we could try to dive into the math, though I don’t think I have anything super robust in the math so far, though I do think I have interesting approaches.”
You might have had a totally different experience, but I’ve definitely had the epistemic state so far that John’s math was in the “trying to find remotely reasonable definitions with tenuous connection of formalism to reality” stage, and not the “I have actually demonstrated robust connection of math to reality stage”, so I feel very non-mislead by John. A good chunk of this impression comes from random short social interactions I’ve had with John, so someone who more engaged with just his online writing might come away with a different impression (though I’ve also done that a lot and don’t super feel like John has ever tried to sell me in his writing on having super robust math to back things up).
John has also made various caveats to me, of the form “this field is pre-paradigmatic and the math is merely suggestive at this point”. I feel like he oversold his results even so.
Part of it is that I get the sense that John didn’t understand the limitations of his own results—like the fact that the telephone theorem only says anything in the infinite case, and the thing it says then does not (in its current form) arise as a limit of sensible things that can be said in finite cases. Or like the fact that the alleged interesting results of the gKPD theorem are a relatively-shallow consequence of the overly-strong assumption of G.
My impression was that I had to go digging into the theorems to see what they said, only to be disappointed by how little resemblance they bore to what I’d heard John imply. (And it sounds to me like Lawrence, Leon, and Erik had a similar experience, although I might be misreading them on account of confirmation bias or w/e.)
I acknowledge that it’s tricky to draw a line between “someone has math that they think teaches them something, and is inarticulate about exactly what it teaches” and “someone has math that they don’t understand and are overselling”. The sort of observation that would push me towards the former end in John’s case is stuff like: John being able to gesture more convincingly at ways concepts like “tree” or “window” are related to his conserved-property math even in messy finite cases. I acknowledge that this isn’t a super legible distinction and that that’s annoying.
(Also, I had the above convos with John >1y ago, and perhaps John simply changed since then.)
Note that I continue to think John’s cool for pursuing this particular research direction, and I’d enjoy seeing his math further fleshed out (and with more awareness on John’s part of its current limitations). I think there might be interesting results down this path.
In hindsight, I do think the period when our discussions took place were a local maximum of (my own estimate of the extent of applicability of my math), partially thanks to your input and partially because I was in the process of digesting a bunch of the technical results we talked about and figuring out the next hurdles. In particular, I definitely underestimated the difficulty of extending the results to finite approximations.
That said, I doubt that fully accounts for the difference in perception.