My first and last message here

[Phi for All]

OK, well, when I get a little more time I will look at more of Johnny5's posts. The two threads that I saw looked like he was staying clear-headed and responding rationally, with mathematical arguments.

A big part of why he was clear-headed and rational here is because we are well-moderated and don't put up with crap. Please visit Sciforums and see what a different, disturbed individual he is. Over there he is condescending and downright rude. And in one thread he has mentioned his monumentally vast intellect 11 times as proof of his observations, so I don't think he's being sarcastic. After 2 days they are referring to him as "Jackass" and "Oh Great Advanced Intelligence". They are openly laughing at him and ridiculing him.

 

Our Experts worked with him pretty patiently for 3 months.

 

I feel sorry for the guy.

[Thomas Kirby]

OK, but I'm not going to start kicking him around. I'm allergic to that stuff.

[Thomas Kirby]

Never mind what they are calling him over at sciforums, but Johnny5 really is being quite annoying over there. I'm tempted to joke that he's like me on a good day, but no, not really.

 

I have got to get more control over myself and my rhetoric. Would anyone believe how consistently bad my experience has been with science forums? Some of the people I have run into are nasty enough to be the cause of someone like Johnny5 or Macm. They should know better and they wear their misconduct like a badge of pride. I mention this as a possible cause because there are people out there who drive me absolutely gosh-darned crazy. I am WAY too susceptible to that. So is the possum who just dragged a yellow grocery bag into the closet and is trying to make a nest with it. (Kidding about susceptibility, not kidding about possum. I have pictures.)

 

I owe a lot of apologies, to Phi in particular, and you've been more patient with me than I have deserved. I shall try to be a more positive contributor now.

 

I do have to comment that there is one other forum I have visited today in which the moderators seem to act like crackpots. In my humble opinion, it is possible to be a crackpot for mainstream science just as easily as it is possible to be a crackpot for the fringe or for totally out there.

[Severian]

I think the moderators of these forums have a moral responsibility. People who are genuinely interested in science come here to ask questions, and often don't know much about the subject they are asking about. They are not at a level to be able to tell who is an expert and who is not. That is why the 'expert' tag was introduced. It is the moderator's responsibility to ensure that any really bad science (not so much minor errors, but real flaws of understanding) are visibly challenged so that any casual readers do not go away with wrong ideas. We do not want SFN to become a "crackpot" site.

 

Now, Johnny5's problem was that he believed himself to be an expert when he very clearly was not. Therefore, no matter what the logic of the argument presented to him, he would continue to insist that his original idea was correct, and would spam the thread until the person opposing his view gave up out of sheer exhaustion. I personally just stopped posting in his threads. What should the moderators have done? Should they just have followed him about, closing threads which got out of hand? This was what they originally did, but the mods have a finite amount of time, and it is better spent doing something else.

 

Johnny5 really didn't contribute anything to this forum, and I support the decision to ban him. If he wanted to learn about physics, he should have asked questions and discussed topics in a modest and moderated fashion, instead of going on egotistical rants.

[Thomas Kirby]

Well, it is really true that I didn't see enough of what he said to make the judgement that I did.

[YT2095]

No problem, it happens to us all at one time or another

[Thomas Kirby]

Now I have to admit that things seem to have changed. There have been several forums where I was mistreated. The administrators acted much like Johnny5 does, introducing inanities and keeping the "crackpot" mentally off balance while he tried to present his case using real facts and figures. Here, it seems like the administrators bend over backwards to give the other guy the best possible chance to state his case.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

ScienceForums has a history of tolerating certain crackpots for quite a long time before they were finally banned.

 

Adam, Zarkov, etc.

[mezarashi]

I probably write to defend Phi a bit on this ban, although personally I don't believe in permanent punishment unless the user engaged in an act to physically harm the boards (i.e. flooding, denial of service attacks, spam). I've seen many of Johnny5's posts and some of them did bring up interesting topics to think about.

 

I read the mentioned thread that was mainly an exchange between Johnny5 and mattgrime. It appears to me to be Johnny5 challenging mathematical conventions and being thwarted time and again for each and every one of his "intelligent proposals". There was nothing ground-breaking about what he said. Doing neat tricks to how you write numbers on paper and interpretting their meaning is great, but it in the end it doesn't prove anything useful... it's a matter of convention. Yes, the proposals were somewhat logical and civil, given that you ignore a great deal of mathematics and don't think through it thoroughly. But being proven wrong every time clearly shows otherwise.

 

Now I don't want to generalize, but I've seen many users respond similar to what Johnny5 has done on that thread. I would say it's basically trying to be egoistical and in some way prove the experts wrong and show that they are right, rather than constructing any meaningful point. He consistently brings up new points when the old points are shown to be wrong. Reading such threads make me feel awkward.

 

On another point, I don't wish to undermine the intellect and scientific/mathematical capabilities of the users on this forum as I know that many are capable indeed, but some users are just preconceptually stubborn. They have high ambitions like proving great theories wrong when they don't even understand the theory in the first place. If you want to prove something wrong, you should atleast first understand what it is you're trying to prove wrong. Although these ambitious threads get alot of attention and add some spice to the forums, they can easily get dragged and eventually redundant. I would prefer threads on interesting consequences of proven theories rather. If they truly had a ground-breaking theorem, they should be in the academic community talking to their university professors, rather than here where only a handful of experts in the field exist. Sometimes they come to me as a hoax, and when you they fail to give up after being denied time and again, it is simply time to go.

[Newtonian]

It is apparent from the very first post that Johnny 5....oops i mean thomas kirby are one and the same person.I find it astonishing that nobody has realised this including my good friend Phi.

To be fair to everyone,i did not see sufficient justification for a permanent ban.Though we may all agree/disagree with decisions they are best left to actual moderators.Otherwise we end up with a membership voting system,and seeing how this is Blikes site.I do not think it prudent when he is paying for it.

 

In my opinion Phi is the best moderator we have at SFN,he sets high standards without ego and not one to act without thought or feeling.I strongly feel that his posting in this thread was not required.It was a decision from all admin/mods and should be left at that.

[ed84c]

Blimey, im away for a few weeks, and SFN decsends into anarchy..............

[YT2095]

yes indeed ed, I don`t know how we managed without your stabilising influence on us mere mortals </sarcasm>

[Dave]

I feel that I should probably chip in here, since a lot of this falls under my purview. However, a lot of what I want to say has already been mentioned. I would just hope that people understand that this was by no means a "spur of the moment" thing - after all, Johnny5 racked up in excess of 1,500 posts at his stay on SFN. Whilst he did make some interesting points on a variety of topics, in general his posts were all about proving some established theory or concept wrong - that is not what these boards are all about.

 

It is apparent from the very first post that Johnny 5....oops i mean thomas kirby are one and the same person.I find it astonishing that nobody has realised this including my good friend Phi.

 

I and other mods have already checked this; without meaning to cause alarm of offense to Thomas Kirby, it is something we do quite a lot. However, there is not one iota of evidence to show that they are "obviously" the same person. Please don't make unsubstantiated claims in public; if you wish to raise an issue with someone, do it in PM.

[JohnB]

Here, it seems like the administrators bend over backwards to give the other guy the best possible chance to state his case.

Exactly right Thomas. I came here because a complete fruit loop was complaining on another forum about how he was treated. I came, I looked, and saw he was a fruit loop so I stayed.

 

Many science forums I've seen are dedicated to science, this one is not. This one is dedicated to the scientific process. A slight but important difference. All posters are judged by the evidence they present, not the idea they espouse. There are many experts here in many fields and I have yet to see one of them say an idea was stupid "because it is", they will always explain what is wrong with the idea.

 

Enjoy your stay here, you will find the mods extremely tolerent of diverging ideas.

[Lance]

Keep in mind that a lot of ban-able posts get removed, and thus many times we don't see the reason people get banned.

[Thomas Kirby]

I've read numerous of Johnny5's and MacM's posts and they go nowhere. Not only can I not see the point of what they do, I can't see what point they see in it.

 

There is something about it that is persistent and purposeful, like the sabotage of other forums that I have seen. This sabotage was perpetrated for the express purpose or ruining an open forum. It is the first time I have seen it done by people from the "crackpot" side of an argument. To be honest, it's usually the mainstreamers. One of the latter type of miscreants is hanging around but reading his posts gives me the impression that he's not doing that job anymore. No, I will not name him.

 

It just goes round and round and round. One year they are being the moderators attacking people who are open-minded. The next they are pretending to be the open-minded people and giving them a bad reputation. I've seen the two-pronged attack too, where moderators allowed a goon squad to act like total kooks.

 

Johnny5 and I are the exact same mental type, except that when I speak on a topic, I will bring in a lot more real science with references. I will be as concise as I can, pack real details into my presentation, and I will, as I urged him and MacM to do, get to the point.

[YT2095]

I think you`ll find the Moderator/Admin of This site are pretty wise to those sort of tricks, not that we haven`t been tricked in the past (thats how we learn), the perps don`t usualy last long though.

all in all, we`re a pretty savy bunch

[Thomas Kirby]

Well, most of what I'm going to do now is read and understand Dave's tutorial on calculus.

[TerrysID]

From my experiences with forums, most problems arise (discussion generally deteriorates) when participants do not know how to do hypothesis negation or hypothesis substitution properly and/or continually. (The best science debater I know, by the way, is Chemist [he knows me, so I may be biased] on the NYT science forums.) Terry. ;#)