Timeline for Most important results of the year - appropriate or not?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
10 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jan 10 at 22:14 | comment | added | Christian Remling | @fedja: I closed my MSE account after a similar incident with a question that I had answered: a perfectly clear question that would have been well above average quality on MO got closed because of the same silly policy "you only stated your question, but didn't say what you have tried and you didn't invent some fake motivation." The general phenomenon is of course well known (instead of addressing the real problem, invent imaginary ones and "fight" those). | |
| Jan 10 at 21:52 | comment | added | fedja | @ChristianRemling And when I said that MSE needed more policing, I certainly did not mean this: math.stackexchange.com/questions/4840714 An engineer with rusty memory about mathematics comes to MSE for the first time in his/her life seeking help, posts an absolutely clear math question directly relevant to his/her work, and gets sacked by the MSE police in no time. A shame and disgrace, IMHO, especially taking into account all the junk that usually floats there. | |
| Jan 7 at 3:34 | comment | added | fedja | @ChristianRemling You are absolutely correct. The amount of policing should be proportional to the square of the deviation from the ideal to keep things at bay, so MSE does need more severe policing now. But, IMHO, there should not be a big positive term in that equation. Also the noise there is not of the type of occasional free discussion of controversial topics, but of the type "I cannot add 2 and 3, please help me". I vote to close such posts on MO immediately too (though I usually give the poster some hint in a comment when doing so) | |
| Jan 6 at 21:45 | comment | added | Christian Remling | This sounds reasonable enough, but there is also the "slippery slope" concern. To make this more concrete, let's consider MSE as a warning to us here. I believe it was at some point in the (distant) past a moderately or even perfectly reasonable site. It may have transitioned to its current status as a HW factory with noise/content ratio $\simeq\infty$ by a process that was at all times following the principles from your first paragraph. Or, more succinctly, principiis obsta. | |
| Jan 5 at 21:22 | comment | added | fedja | @DavidWhite I didn't mean the obvious spam, rudeness, etc. Read what I wrote in the beginning of my answer.I also always encourage editing for clarity, comments, and votes and do that myself all the time. Even migrating is fine with me. What I object is immediate closing just for the sole reason of being off topic in somebody's individual judgement (including but not limited to declaring the question "not of research level* without being able to solve it oneself). That is purely snobbish behavior IMHO and, yeah, I tend to criticize it quite harshly when I see it :-). | |
| Jan 5 at 21:02 | comment | added | David White | I disagree with your first comment. I think experienced users DO have an obligation to try to keep the site "on topic" and that's why we flag spam, vote for migrating posts to MSE and academia, edit, leave comments, and vote on others' posts. By your logic, one should never downvote or vote to close, because one could simply ignore the offending question. | |
| Jan 5 at 18:22 | comment | added | fedja | @DavidWhite But I agree with you that we all need to learn to be a bit more tolerant and polite to each other when strongly disagreeing, myself including :-) | |
| Jan 5 at 18:20 | comment | added | fedja | @DavidWhite To be driven away by occasionally seeing discussions and quarrels you are not obliged to read and participate in and can easily just ignore (they are never too many in the general stream to cause real irritation) or because some other people (harshly) criticize you for prohibiting them doing what they like without making you any real harm except telling that you can't control everything is one thing and to be driven away by the direct closing of the discussions you want to participate in and by policing the content of your posts or the posts you like is quite another. | |
| Jan 5 at 17:49 | comment | added | David White | I really like this answer (and, indeed, many of your contributions). But, I do want to add that vitriol directed at those who object to such "popular but clearly off-topic" questions will also drive good people to leave the site, as pointed out by Elizabeth: meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/5818/…. And, such vitriol seems common, from a wide segment of users. | |
| Jan 5 at 16:34 | history | answered | fedja | CC BY-SA 4.0 |