In maths? Not that I'd recall. I've made plenty of mistakes corrected by people with less education, but don't remember that a person with substantially less education would have made a relevant point that I would have dismissed.
If someone makes a comment on maths that I disagree with, I ask for his/her justification and present my own, at least that's the principle, sometimes I won't bother. Maths is self contained that way, if you know the definitions, you can get by with reasoning.
However, I've several times mistakenly thought that I know some things better than I do, due to superficial studying or mere arrogance. I could dig some cases out from this forum too, but won't bother right now.
So, you and Terx say that education may be hindrance on understanding the opposition's view here, but have you considered this: maybe your lack of education prevents you from understanding the case made against your argument? If you have thought about it, what convinced you that that's not what happening? How did you become sure that you really understood all the arguments presented here?
Some of the things said here aren't easily digested. For example the axioms of the real numbers that I linked to and the epsilon-delta method of proving things, people spend time understanding it. They ask questions, do exercises, get helped... Even after the first course it may take some time to digest the whole picture.
In this thread it looks like many posters just scanned through those posts and deemed them irrelevant. I wish I would have had students who understood not only the axioms of the real numbers, but also all the ramifications of them and the epsilon-delta method from a single reading of a forum post. Unfortunately, I've never come across with one.
What you're saying is very reasonable and here's where you got me:
You find your education to be hindrance all the time? Have you tried to study harder?
No, I know what you meant.
My entire discussion here has only pertained to the meta-argument because
a) that's what interests me
not unrelated b) I do lack the background to debate this equality, so why would I
following b.ii) have had no reason not to accept all the math explanations for the equality.
Your quote above, pointing out that I called my own discipline political economy while also referring to economics as my discipline while drawing a disciplinary difference between the two, demonstrated that you were following the meta argument just fine, too.
1
Here's my invitation to you: in threads where the experts understand something others do not, meet the others where they actually are.
2 Try to understand where they are coming from, instead of having disdain for their twin lacks of understanding and deference. The latter immediate sends of JerichoHill red flags who I have had the fortune of finally gaining the technical skills to find out many times when he was rolling his eyes and saying "because I'm an economist" his actual economics was wrong.
3
When, for example, I had asked a question 3-4 times
and never had it answered by the math people, I make a meta-argument calculation: these people don't know the answer, and might not understand the question. And since it was such an easy question, "yes, it seems that way, but it's still irrelevant" (as I surmised when akka indirectly answered much later) it demonstrated to me a high likelihood that the mathy people were stuck in a much smaller box than was useful for the discussion.
And if there's a lasting discrepancy between experts and others, the argument widens and the others build up more and more of a case, at which point there's more of a meta-argument to follow.
In other words: the longer people aren't met where they are, the less it seems like the experts are actually experts. Thus, the more important it is to be able to "win" the meta-argument to help everyone else get their bearings and stop the
reasonable-sounding nonsense.
I think you will find this amenable since you just did it with me.
1. Indeed economics is a sub-discipline of political economy so the shorthand is something I can casually make to an in-crowd and they'll get it (and you got it too), but indeed what I stated was insufficiently consistent, and you charitably pointed it out.
2. like dutchfire does. He was the only person engaging brennan on brennan's terms and still bringing it back to 0.999... = 1.
3. Yes I understand the radical differences between a math proof and an applied economic assumption. It is the interchangeability of the meta-arguments—the credentialed appeal to one's personal authority with the frustrated disdain—that is similar. That meta-argument is all some of us have to go on until we are walked through another way.
