From: Yash (yashk2000@yahoo.com)
Date: Fri Jan 18 2002 - 19:12:18 MST
I'll let you and others reconsider: see my answers below
Yash.
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-virus@lucifer.com [mailto:owner-virus@lucifer.com]On Behalf
Of L' Ermit
[Yash] 1. Repeated quotes from unreliable third parties distorting the
source
[Hermit] Substantiate this, fuckwit. Point to a "reliable source" seeing as
every source on the Internet appears to be "unreliable" according to your
assertion.
Yash: One of your first posts was from a guy's website whom you were quick
to denigrate as being related to Maharishi. Substantiated. This way of
thinking is still a fallacy because what third parties decide to do with the
source material cannot be reason enough to dismiss it or the ideas contained
therein. (cf. the Kepler and Astrology analogy).
2. Refusal to give the source material a full read before jumping to
conclusions.
[Hermit] I've now wasted my time reading the whole thing, just to be able to
stop your whining. You owe me a couple of hours, as my opinion was
strengthened by rereading it. I am more convinced than ever that it is a
meaningless hodgepodge of basic arithmetic and spiritual crap. Now what,
fuckwit?
Yash: Good. That should have been the first necessary step if you were a
serious searcher. But we've now had ample evidence of your obvious bias. So,
the subject of the matter was: I want to build the same kind of thing into a
new language. Since then I have revised my stance and I want to do the same
in English. I wanted to discuss how we could go about doing that using the
same kinds of notion as in that book. If you are serious about this and are
willing to discuss without your prejudices then I'll be glad to consider
your ideas and suggestions. We can now speak on a certain term of equality.
You've really read the whole text of Vedic Mathematics, haven't you?
You do realise that all this time, you made several claims without even at
least reading the source material as Mermaid pointed out to you, which would
have been the first step a proper 'scientific searcher' would have
undertaken, do you? Maybe you are lucid enough to realise that now that you
have read the source material, you are more credible in discussing it, and
you are more capable to do so. I'm not asking you to agree with everything,
just to give a fair consideration to arguments, ok? I also have my own
reservations about the text.
And you do realise that if only I had use the terms "Steganography",
"mnemonic techniques", "memorisation", "encryption", and you didn't have
such apparent prejudices and dogmatic beliefs we would not have needed to
come to all this and we could have engaged in a more valuable discussion
earlier on. You would also be welcome to join if I do a new list if you are
serious and want to contribute positively (the idea about he list subject
matter is precising itself day in day out). I have no axe to grind with
either of science or religions, nor with you for that matter. But I didn't
expect such strong prejudices to arise on this list, especially because the
discussion about memes itself is so open-ended (this is also in response to
Blunderov who said that the example I gave was a red flag to a bull).
But I don't mind, this helped me hone my own research as well as my
analytical and argumentation skills.
John L. Casti:
Paradigms Lost (Images of Man in the Mirror of Science) - ABACUS, 1989. ISBN
0 349 10544 8
CH.1 FAITH, HOPE AND ASPERITY, Belief systems, Science, And the Invention of
Reality.
pp.51, 52:
"These tales...serve to underscore the sometimes dramatic influence that the
social component of science plays in establishing what we take to be the
scientific "truth" of the moment....
One of the pioneers in studying these social determinants, at least inside
science itself, is the sociologist of science Robert K. Merton, who in 1942
identified a small set of what he termed [italics] norms characterizing the
scientific enterprise. Roughly speaking, in modern terms, we can give
Merton's norms as:
...
. Universality: Claims and arguments should be given weight according to
their intrinsic merits alone, and should not depend upon religious, social,
ethnic, or personal factors surrounding the individuals who make them. In
short, there are no privileged sources of scientific knowledge."
And it's not a waste of time. The fast maths do work. Have you tried them?
The mnemonic system is also interesting. The arithmetic underlying many of
the complex calculation is also interesting.
3. Dismissing said source material because of alleged misappropriation and
misuse of same by the third parties in 1.
[Hermit] Substantiate this assertion fuckwit. Just give the number of the
point which makes this assertion, handily appended below.
Yash: Already done above.
[Yash] 4. Making an incorrect assumption about Pi chronology not warranted
by the facts (no such chronology or claims to antiquity of the Pi encoding
occurs anywheere in the source material, or my posts).
[Hermit] Kindly give the date when you assert the Vedic Shulba and Ganita
Sutras were written (the sources I have give various dates between 800 and
200 BCE), and your claim was "ancient gematric traditions" ["RE: virus:
Weird claims about PI - Ping Yash", Yash, Sun 2001-12-30 04:29] and "ancient
Indian Mathematicians" [RE: virus: Weird claims about PI - Ping Yash", Yash,
Sat 2001-12-29 18:14]. You have not yet responded to how you would define
"ancient".
I never evoked dates for the Sulba or Ganitra Sutras myself. I have quoted
at length Ifrah's dating of the invention of the katapayadi system by
Haridatta which he describes in detail in his work before using the system
in versified cryptograms. So this system was already in use at around the
date mentioned. Nothing magical about all this, as we also saw, through
Ifrah, the versification properties, of Sanskrit and the system, and it's
easy to see that poems, epics and prayers can thus be more easily memorised.
[Hermit] You have also not indicated where the Chronology of PI is faulty
despite repeated requests for you to substantiate your assertions. Fuckwit.
[Hermit] In particular, I would be interested in your source and date for:
gopi bhagya madhuvrata
srngiso dadhi sandhiga
khala jivita khatava
gala hala rasandara
Yash: The very FACT THAT YOU ARE NOW ASKING ME TO PROVIDE A DATE IS PROOF
THERE WASN'T ANY TO BEGIN WITH! You are the one who made a hasty and wrong
assumption by misreading texts about the source material, while
simultaneously refusing to read the original source material. You have been
the one raising the claim of great antiquity of the Pi encoding, and on top
of that you made yet another typical mistake called "SHIFTING THE BURDEN OF
PROOF". Since such claims are by you, you are supposed to provide evidence,
not me. And that piece of erroneous thinking serves only to distract from
what I said about using a new language for effective storage and retrieval.
On several occasions, you have deliberately avoided the issues at hand.
Ruggiero, "The Art of Critical Thinking"
pp.143-145 (Overcoming Obstacles To Critical Thinking)
"AVOIDING ASSUMPTIONS
To assume is to take something for granted, to expect that things will be a
certain way because they have been that way in the past, or because you want
them to be that way. It's natural to make assumptions. Everyone makes them
continually.... You assume, for example,...that the elevator is really going
up when the indicator says it is. Making such assumptions is reasonable,
even if on occasion they later prove to be incorrect.
However, while refining your ideas, it is wise to make no assumptions at
all. The reason for this is not only that unexpected outcomes can cause you
embarrassment but also, and more important, that what you take for granted
you do not examine critically. Assumptions obstruct the refining process.
It would be impossible to list all the assumptions you will be tempted to
make while refining your ideas. However, the following assumptions occur
often enough, and interfere with critical thinking seriously enough, to
warrant special mention:..."
pp. 172-173(Errors Affecting Truth)
"Shifting the Burden of Proof
This error consists in making an assertion and then demanding that the
opposition proves it false. This is an unreasonable demand [note by me: as
unreasonable as to demand the opposition proves it true for that matter, but
it's a simple matter of negating the initial proposition to cover this
example]. The person making the assertion has the burden of supporting it.
Though the opposing side may accept the challenge, it is under no obligation
to do so. Suppose, for example, you said to a friend, "Mermaids must exist,"
your friend disputed you, and you responded, "Unless you can disprove their
existence, I am justified in believing in them." You have shifted the burden
of proof. Having made the assertion about mermaid, you have the obligation
to support it. To overcome this error in your arguments, indentify all
assertions you have made but not supported and provided adequate support for
them. (If you find you cannot support an assertion, withdraw it) [note from
me: most or all of your 20 'points' go in here].
"
p. 170 (Errors Affecting Truth)
"Avoiding the Issue
...That is the form avoiding the issue often takes: deliberately attacking
the person in the hope that the issue will be forgotten. It happens with
lamentable frequency in politics. The issue being debated may be, for
example, a particular proposal for tax reform. One candidate will say, "The
reason my opponent supports this proposal is clear-it is a popular position
to take. His record is filled with examples of jumping of jumping on the
bandwagon to gain voter approval...." And so on. Of course, what the
candidate says may be true of the opponent, and if it is, then it would
surely be relevant to the issue of whether the opponent deserves to be
elected. But it is not relevant to the issue at hand, the tax-reform
proposal.
Avoiding the issue may not necessarily be motivated by deciet, as the
preceding errors are. It may occur because of unintenional misunderstanding
or because of an unconscious slip to something irrelevant. But it is still
error, regardless of innocence. To check your reasoning, look closely at
each issue and ask whether your solution really responds to it. If it
doesn't make it do so."
[Hermit] Interestingly, I have now discovered the same assertions in "The
Secret Doctrine" by H.P. Blavatsky - which predates "Vedic Mathematics" as
it was first published in 1888. Of course, like "Vedic Mathematics," it is
all mixed up with spiritual crap. Here is the relevant piece:
Yash: I have shown you that the 'spiritual' is not always crap - from
Ifrah's work we can see that there are mathematical treatises and
astronomical works with mathematical data stored in the form of symbols,
verses, that can be of a spiritual nature ever (his timeline of the
different systems goes from the Symbolic representation to Aryabhatta to
Haridatta's katapayadi system in this order).
[Yash] 6. Refusal to consider the works of Georges Ifrah, a world authority
in the history of mathematics, who shows beyond reasonable doubt, that
Indian mathematicians already had invented the katapayadi system of encoding
and have used it it their works.
[Hermit] You quoted him at length. I read the quotations and discovered that
none of thenm referred to the period prior to about 800 CE. We know that
"katapaya" cannot have been in use prior to 684 as it was invented at around
that time. Thus neither Ifrah nor katapaya relate to your "ancient" claim,
and are thus irrelevant to your as yet unsupported and probably
unsupportable claim. Why the fuck should I take them into account, fuckwit?
Yash: and so? What it means to me is that it is probable that the author of
the VM book has been re-using Haridatta's existing katapayadi (the term used
by Ifrah is this, not "katapaya") system to show some examples and has been
inspired by the notion to make his fast maths into a set of easily
remembered rules. That's a viable conclusion. Haridatta's invention is
ancient enough to me.
[Yash] 7. Refusal to consider the VM system as a valid system for doing fast
mathematics as well as what the author says it is: i.e. a mnemonic tool for
remembering all the techniques.
[Hermit] They are simple arithmetic techniques, not particularly significant
mathematics at any time, and which while possibly useful in an age before
calculators or even the abacus or slide rule, they are irrelevant today.
They are clumsy in the sense that many different techniques have to be
learnt, as opposed to the simple techniques used by anyone who still knows
how to perform mental arithmetic.
Yash: Yeah, but you had to learn to do mental arithmetic too. That's not
even a point.
[H]:
As for mnemonics, they were used by all
the early cultures, but are recognized not only as being much less useful
than positional arithmetic, but the world (including India) had to wait for
positional arithmetic to come into general usage before any particularly
useful mathematical techniques - other than geometry and basic arithmetic -
were developed.
Yash: The katapayadi system was used together with positional encoding as
per Ifrah's research. He conclusively details the evidence to support the
notion that the Indians invented the positional system.
See your claims below and show your evidence to support them:
[Hermit] My justification is as follows:
1 "Vedic Maths" made exaggerated (to be kind) claims of accuracy and
significance for early Indian mathematics - claims not supported by any
non-religious affiliated source;
Yash:
<all the rest is snipped - they have already been sent to the list
previously an dyou still haven't provided evidence of all these claims you
mention>
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