User:Arthur Rubin/Carl Hewitt

Inserting comments which are not presently appropriate in any particular article but might easily become appropriate as comments to Carl Hewitt, Godel incompleteness theorems, or potential Direct Logic or Inconsistency robustness articles. Some comments might be appropriate even in discussion of WP:RS or WP:IRS


 * My feeling is that DL will never be generally accepted, but that's not important. As far as Wikipedia is concerned, all we need to know is that it is not only not generally accepted, but not generally considered interesting, at the present time.
 * As an aside, though, we know that DL proves its own consistency; it being "inconsistency robust", might it also prove its own inconsistency?
 * As a further aside, I recall a theory of certain "objects" in finite geometries, for which there were a number of papers published over the course of 5 years, before the final theorem was proved: there are no such objects. Just because something is interesting doesn't mean it exists.

As for conference proceedings being considered reliable sources in computer science, I'll accept that, unlike all other fields, they might be reliable as a unit, with respect to the publisher. In all other fields, the conference would request talks and/or papers on specific topics from experts in the field, but the proceedings would consist of the papers submitted by the authors, with some minimal copyediting. I have one published proceedings of a logic conference where one of the published papers is seriously mistaken, to the point that a review should have caught the error. As the author was an expert, we could still use it until a refutation was found; some editors insist we should use expert material until a refutation is published. I am not of the opinion that we should use material known to be incorrect, even if nominally reliable, but some editors are.

As for videos being an accepted method of publication in computer science, I think this is a bad trend which might lead to the elimination of "computer science" as a scientific field. The argument that they should be considered an accepted method of publication is appropriate only in guideline talk pages, but is a bad idea anywhere. Perhaps, when inconsistency robustness becomes practical, it could applied to such videos, but it is extremely rare, that even a well-done scientific video fails to include inconsistent information.