Comment on Open thread, 18-24 August 2014

Fri, 22 Aug 2014 12:40:14 GMT

I disagree. It could be a joke, or it could be the result of a kind of "magical thinking" whose perpetrator knows that in principle they're entirely separate concepts but is convinced that the commonality of names must be significant, or it could simply be the result of very shallow thinking -- reading lots of things, picking up key words but not really understanding them. The latter two shade into one another.

I think (but realise I am not sure on what basis, so it may be rubbish) that this sort of failure mode is not uncommon for people with some kinds of mental illness. And I think (but again am not sure why) it's not uncommon among pseudoscientific/pseudomathematical cranks of the sort who send letters in green ink to eminent mathematicians asking them to look at this wonderful new proof that pi = 3 exactly, which also leads to a simple proof of Fermat's Last Theorem and reveals how to travel faster than light.

Discuss