Hello everyone! Welcome back! I know it’s been a while since the last time I posted something on my blog. That’s just because I’ve been reading lots of books and thinking about a lot of random interesting things, as usual for me. I hope you’ve all been having a great year/month/week/day/etc, as always! Don’t let my busyness make you all forget that I care! I always seem to be biting off more than I can chew! 😄🍴🍛
Anyway though, as those of you who have been following me are well aware, the first book I ever published (Unified Logic) made a nice splash when it was released back in 2018 and became a #1 New Release in its category for a while. The majority of actual readers of the book have responded positively and constructively to it, especially the ones who took the time to really think about it carefully and to question their assumptions and who shared their thoughts with me by email. Thanks for that! I love hearing a diversity of opinions! The more people are willing to be honest (with both others and themselves) the better for all of us! 🌎🤝
Indeed, as long as any negative comment about my work comes from an honest, constructive, and ethical place then I am generally glad to receive it, and even in cases where I continue to disagree with something I still appreciate the effort and time that went into it!
Disagreements also should however (as always) be made in “good faith“, such as by exercising basic due diligence and not (for example) by posting a review and/or sending hate mail after 15 minutes of skimming or having already decided in advance to interpret everything in the most negative possible light or just mindlessly mirroring the negativity of what someone else said without doing any research whatsoever yourself, etc.
The problem though is that some comments and reviews I receive contain blatant misinformation, misrepresentation, and lies, often objectively and easily disprovable, including even things that exist nowhere in any version of my book (and that I have never said or believed in any context) and also even things that some people literally just imagine (falsely) as being things they think I’d say or believe (usually to create a strawman). I also get some spam, among other problematic things.
🚀👽 A Note from the “Future”: So… uh… I ended up going off on a long freewheeling (but interesting) tangent here (a specialty of mine, as my readers well know 😆), so if you’re short on time, click here to skip to where I explain exactly which parts of which specific reviews of my book contain misinformation, dishonesty, and/or bias-motivated hostility and where I also discuss a few other related things. I’ve provided some concrete evidence and direct quotes that objectively disprove some of the lies. Negativity itself is not the problem. There’s even a 1/5 review which I voted as helpful on my own book’s page, as I’ll discuss. If you want more context and are interested hearing more of the full picture, history, drama, and context surrounding Unified Logic though (which I do recommend reading if you have the time) then just read on from here. It is about 10 extra pages worth of text though, so you know.
I don’t know about you, but I personally don’t think that criticizing imaginary aspects of a book that you haven’t actually read should be treated as legitimate criticism. Such things are pure slander (technically libel in this context, but I’ll use the terms interchangeably). It’s like the digital equivalent of randomly punching an innocent person in the nose just because you don’t like the way their face looks. 😒🤕
To engage in such practices is to act in “bad faith” (also known as sophistry). Such rhetoric (convincing as it may very often be, unfortunately) cannot ever serve as a valid way of discerning truth or falsehood. Indeed it was my strong dislike of sophistry and blind and unquestioning adherence to traditions (even within logic and math, where you may not expect much of it!) which was a big part of my inspiration to write the book! I wanted to fight back against such things, to make the world a better place! 🩹🏥
These kinds of things have been an issue from day one when I first posted an advertisement for the book on Reddit (a massive and very diverse online discussion forum) targeting the math subreddits (subreddits are Reddit’s categorical discussion groups) and a few other related subreddits and was greeted within a matter of minutes with several private hate mail messages to my Reddit account, most of which consisted of people either mocking things that I’ve never said (things which they were just blindly assuming based on their own prejudices) or just straight up hurling personal insults at me and making malicious and very petty attempts at causing emotional harm, all of which incidentally contained little to no logical or evidentiary substance and no real effort or merit.
This small group of people on Reddit had already condemned my work as trash within mere minutes and some were already pretending as if they had read it, despite this requiring a reading speed much faster than what is humanly possible for actually understanding any book. So, either those Reddit users were all super-human readers or they were simply liars looking for an excuse to attack and demonize someone so that they could feel better about themselves by comparison, as is standard bully behavior. Which sounds more plausible to you? 🤔
This experience put me off so much that I quickly just gave up on even attempting to talk to any of the people on Reddit and moreover I stopped using my Reddit account entirely for about 2 or 3 years as a consequence. I’ve only just recently returned within the past few weeks. The toxic/unethical people have mercifully long since stopped directing their attention at my account. It looks like I also deleted and blocked their stuff, and had to reset my account when I logged back in after so long, so I don’t have any of that old stuff to quote anymore.
However, regardless of the harassment, I regret not standing my ground more instead of simply abandoning the platform out of sheer exhaustion at the prospect of dealing with some of these very maladjusted people. I was prepared to face legitimate criticism, but in contrast I was honestly shocked by how pervasively toxic and disconnected from reality most of the negative part of the attention was.
The mob mentality and the willingness of so many people to just attack a complete strawman based on nothing but their own prejudices and fantasies about ideas that differ from the traditions they are familiar with in any way whatsoever was just frankly amazing, in a bad way. I really wasn’t expecting it. 😮
Most of them didn’t even have the faintest clue what they were talking about! There’s a world outside of high school math and introductory calculus people! I promise you that it exists! Open your eyes! 🤣😅
For example, a very common pattern among the negative criticism is not even remotely understanding how axiomatic systems work and how in higher level math you can actually choose your axioms (i.e. your starting assumptions, upon which everything else is built up by logical deductions) however you want as long as you remain internally logically consistent.
There isn’t just one valid set of axioms in logic and math! There are indeterminately many such systems, each with their own set of consequences! The one you learn in high school (and also, for most people, in college) in the traditional education system is just one of them.
People are actually free to decline to use that system whenever they feel like it to see what might happen as a consequence of doing otherwise. I did that in Unified Logic and I even said so up front. Mathematicians do such things all the time. It’s basically standard practice for exploring new possibility spaces. It’s like the most basic thing a person needs to understand about higher-level math. Which is why it is pretty alarming and frustrating that things that are based on not understanding this point are the most common substantive criticisms I receive… 😤🙄
Anyway though, putting that aside, there is also the fact that there is somewhat of an oppressive subculture of ostracizing and defaming many people (e.g. in math: finitists, especially on Reddit) who refuse to endorse and submit and contort themselves to the arbitrary unjustified whims of the most dominant views on a handful of very tricky, exceedingly nuanced, and highly questionable concepts such as the nature of infinity, the ZFC axioms, completeness, etc. It creates quite a chilling effect, since few people (e.g. me) are willing to speak up based on first principles in such a climate and most just end up conforming probably mostly out of subconscious social fear or else simple lack of imagination.
I suspect that’s a big part of why a lot of research is so utterly trivial and banal in content. For research to be anything more than that you often have to be much braver than that, and doing that often means attracting some really nasty attention and malevolent will. I know that from personal experience, having lived it myself. 😠🚧😅
(And by the way, many of these people also have a lot of vested interest in denying any contrary evidence you present, since admitting any differing view whatsoever could easily potentially cast doubt on their own work and research. Math is full to the brim with such chains of interrelationships (i.e. dependencies whose removal would invalidate or cast doubt upon many results, like a giant Jenga tower). The more unusual a view is then, the more people it likely threatens and hence the more likely those people are to engage in sabotage tactics, misrepresentation, gatekeeping, hostility to intellectual diversity, and denialism.)
Indeed, people can be so terrified (consciously or subconsciously) of being socially ostracized by the group that they often only ever feel comfortable making extremely tiny and insignificant claims (one sees this all the time), in research papers that almost nobody will ever read, and which move the field forward almost not at all.
A culture and climate of fear like that (the dark underbelly of academia) doesn’t lend itself well to intellectual honesty, and the unfortunate truth is that such things are just still very common in society, even in the fields that are supposed to be “above that” kind of thing, evidently. It pains me to say that, but it seems to be reality as best I can tell.
It’s not like I enjoy being harassed and misrepresented of course! 😑😢🥺
For my part however, I believe in seeing the world honestly and through my own eyes and trying to reason as much as possible from first principles instead of just letting proofs by intimidation dictate what I think and what ideas I explore and what I say. If I have to choose between (1) being honest in expressing the truth as I see it and (2) conforming to groupthink to avoid the pain of ostracization, then I will pick the side of truth and authenticity (1), not the side of fear and social perks (2). 💪👨🔬🔬
Someone has to make that choice. That’s the only way things ever truly move forward. More people have to be braver about how they express themselves and more willing to say things as they truly see them and to question even the most popular assumptions that other people (or themselves) make.
But more than that, people need to become more OK with making potential mistakes! To do otherwise is very stifling. Consider, for example: If person A publishes 100 ideas and 50% of them end up being true, whereas person B publishes 10 ideas and 100% of them end up being true then person A has still created 5x as much value for society as person B (assuming the ideas are all about equal value and that all the bad ideas are eventually detected, to keep things simple here).
Survival of the fittest will filter out the bad ideas over time. With how diverse people are, most errors will be caught eventually as long as dissent is not suppressed. Notice that not suppressing dissent, rather than censoring wrong ideas upfront, is actually the more important factor for progress here. That’s how the landscape of ideas should actually be: simple, natural, decentralized, autonomous, and pragmatic.
The alternative (upfront perfectionism and oppressive authoritarianism and gatekeeping in the realm of ideas) is in contrast utterly suffocating, antithetical to intellectual honesty, and just all-around very counterproductive. The basis is upon which censorship of ideas rests is thus mostly a distorted myth that originates from misplaced fear and not considering more effective alternatives, not real merit.
I’m frankly sick of the notion that the mere existence of a body of popular dominant ideas should somehow rob all people across the world of any real rights to think for themselves or to express their own thoughts in whatever form they see fit. Why must the nuances and subtleties and degrees of magnitude of things be so often steamrolled over and treated so coarsely?
Why must people so often be verbally bludgeoned and insulted and condemned as Pure Evil™ the moment they step outside the “standard view” of anything? What does that kind of coercive and abusive way of doing things actually accomplish? Many people seem to think that hurting people and forced homogeneity of ideas is somehow a necessary part of peer review I guess. Odd that… I must have missed that memo when I read about hypothesis testing… 🎓😜
And don’t get me wrong here: I’ve regrettably been randomly cruel to other people too at various times in my life. Everyone has. I remember years ago I left a really disproportionately harsh review on a book I had read (yes, I realize the irony). A couple years after that though I deleted it because I realized that it had been inappropriate and unproductive.
Hypocrisy is essentially impossible to completely avoid while still being human, but that’s OK! A very important lesson in life is that it is OK to be broken or flawed, as long as you act with benevolence and authenticity in your intentions. That’s actually a much more healthy attitude I think than expecting perfection or demonizing or condemning anyone (whether others or yourself) every single time they accidentally do something inconsistent. The spirit with which someone acts is far more important than total consistency is. Everything in human life is a work in progress. The broad strokes matter most.
In essence, here’s what I think is the right way: As long as one honestly strives for evidentiary and logical integrity and a spirit of benevolence and generosity (i.e. intent to do good and to be fair) then acts of free exploration of ideas should never be seen as a bad thing. Fresh new ideas are good! Some survive and some don’t and that’s just fine. That’s how it goes.
But suppressing those ideas ability to exist and to be heard, through spiteful and disingenuous means (i.e. without a spirit of benevolence and generosity) and thereby effectively encouraging groupthink isn’t productive in contrast. It’s suffocating and tyrannous and simply counterproductive. Censorship like that doesn’t help expand people’s perspectives. It’s just bias and cruelty masquerading as righteousness. It’s not a constructive way of operating. There’s no need for it. There are better ways.
The nuances and degrees of magnitude in life matter immensely. You have to take in the full picture and feel it. Fixating on minutiae at the expense of the nuanced and cohesive flow of the whole is often oppressive and often misses the point. Whether a small thing is the deciding factor in something varies greatly. Sometimes things work like that, and sometimes not. Context matters. 🖼🧐
Ironically, there’s a pretty high chance that someone reading this who has an ulterior motive to be hostile towards me will say something like “See, here’s Jesse being hypocritical and evil! In his book he said X, Y or Z viewpoint isn’t justified [e.g. untestable religious ideas, an erroneous or sloppy math idea, academic groupthink, etc] and hence isn’t really taking in and feeling the whole with a spirit of generosity!”, etc…
Such argument is largely disingenuous and is sophistry though. A spirit of generosity doesn’t mean that one treats everything as equal and valid. It just means authenticity and seeing the whole with unbiased eyes instead of misrepresenting or distorting things. Degrees of magnitude and nuance must be respected if one seeks to judge things accurately. That doesn’t mean that criticizing anything is forbidden. Criticism itself is fine. It’s the integrity of how you do it that matters.
You can always look at practically anything and say “Ah ha! Gotcha!” on some specific narrow point but that largely means very little when taken out of context. For example, every programming language has flaws, but if you dismiss each one entirely the moment you identify a single flaw in it then you’ll never get anything done at all. In contrast though, a single contradiction in a logical argument can easily destroy it beyond repair, but even then it depends on if a repair can be easily made. It is also easy to be wrong about what is or isn’t a contradiction or paradox, especially if one doesn’t understand how arbitrary axioms can be. See? Context changes everything.
Similarly, if you find out some random celebrity said something racist 10 years ago and then use that to destroy their lives then that is likewise a crippling, toxic, and grossly out-of-proportion way of behaving. These kinds of things are all related like that: These are the kinds of behaviors that tend to create a pervasive chilling effect that sucks the joy out of life, disconnects people and potentially synergistic ideas from each other, and hinders the ability for real progress to ever happen. Society has been suffering a lot from this kind of thing lately. It helps nobody. 😨🥶
The difference between the forces of oppression and the forces of liberation throughout human history has often been the spirit of generosity in considering new ideas and in questioning existing assumptions. That’s one of the most defining traits that allowed science to come into existence and it’s important to actually respect that rather than just giving lip service to respecting it.
In a sense then I guess you could say that sufficient kindness is a prerequisite to scientific honesty and to human progress! This doesn’t mean one can’t sharply oppose things (many beliefs and behaviors are counterproductive after all, and strong criticism of them can be very appropriate in context, especially if it respects the nuances), but it does mean one should act with grace and with a respect for intention that falls within the margin of error of human dignity, wholesomeness, and diversity. 🥰
Sometimes the kindest thing you can do is to oppose something (e.g. obvious racism, beliefs that spread irrational thinking, needless cruelty, war, etc)! Kindness thus doesn’t just mean being nice to everything and everyone and every idea. My book for example has a few sharp criticisms of some things, but that alone is not actually sufficient to imply that the book is unkind (although that hasn’t stopped a minority of people from demonizing me though!). Similarly, people should of course be free to criticize the book. The only thing I truly have a problem with is misrepresentations and distortions and other kinds of unjustly harmful behaviors.
Indeed, in recent years there’s been a strange tendency to conflate kindness with a kind of mindless acceptance of everything, as if anybody who is willing to criticize any existing norm or belief system whatsoever must automatically be Evil™ and must be demonized, condemned, censored, and destroyed. This seems especially true on social media, where people often seem to have far more interest in bullying and fake virtue signaling than in any kind of genuine empathy or respect for the truth whatsoever. 😅
Such things create a very toxic and very random and arbitrary kind of social climate unfortunately. Behind the mask of righteousness is mostly just suffering and oppression. The majority doesn’t need to terrorize the minorities’ views in order to protect itself, yet that is exactly what these kinds of punitive social media driven groupthink anomalies really are: the tyranny of the majority. One can see this all over the place. Popularity isn’t merit though, and intimidation and empty mockery isn’t an argument. Fallacies and cognitive biases abound, as usual unfortunately.
Many of the people who’d most benefit from a better grasp of hearing a truly different and distinctive approach are also the same whose minds are too wrapped up in biases and assumptions to see that same materially clearly enough to judge it with any real accuracy. Such is life though. All human beings live their lives at least partially hypocritically and erroneously. Nobody is ever born with The Truth in their hands, nor will they ever be. Incomplete information guarantees that. One can only do one’s best and do what one can to move things forward. And yet, hypocrisy always has degrees of magnitude, and it is important to make an honest (though inevitably imperfect) attempt at minimizing it.
Creativity often requires facing hostility. And moreover, the more different and distinctive an idea or a piece of creative work is, the more chance it has of attracting that hostility too. And so, it’s unsurprising that I’ve faced some of that from a sizable minority of readers.
I’ve known that for a long time, indeed since long before I began writing my first book. Why then have I decided now to write this article and share these thoughts?
Well, I’ve fairly often encountered advice for authors that one shouldn’t ever criticize or respond to other people’s critiques of one’s work. Some even say that one shouldn’t even read people’s comments on one’s work!
This is strangely one-sided and unimaginative advice if you really stop and think about it, yet often recommended nonetheless. It’s like a debate where only one side is allowed to speak after the other side gives their opening remarks. Why would that ever be a good way to do things? (Actually think about it. Don’t just assume things based on what the “norm” is. Think from first principles. Questioning assumptions is the most reliable path to greater truths.)
Indeed, for 2 to 3 years since the release of Unified Logic I’ve followed this advice in the vast majority of cases, being essentially silent, and responding mostly passively and non-specifically otherwise. For 2 years or so I also didn’t even really read any comments on my book, and so I remained mostly unaware of their contents. However, I’ve recently broken that habit, and by doing so I have realized how wrongheaded and counterproductive following that very common “never read or respond to reviews (etc)” advice for authors actually was.
Doing so has allowed misinformation and slander to grow much larger than it perhaps could have if I had been proactive about fighting back. I also noticed that I was actually more subconsciously anxious about what could be on my product review page before I recently started looking at it again. Passivity generates anxiety.
In other words, the very popular advice that was supposed to help my state of mind and maintain professional appearances only actually made both worse. It backfired. Anxiety was disproportionately amplified. Not only that, but allowing blatant and easily disprovable lies to stand unchallenged only harmed my professional image.
Following that advice was pure lose-lose. Thus, in reality: Doing nothing whatsoever to stand one’s own ground is neither professionally nor mentally healthy. It’s actually just negligent, weak, and irresponsible. This is just as one would expect if one was thinking from first principles instead from context-oblivious conformity and groupthink.
To make an analogy, it’s like allowing trash to accumulate in a restaurant’s parking lot just because you’re too afraid that making any effort to pick it up might offend the litterers who left the trash there. Reviews and comments that are made malevolently (not honestly and constructively) should be counteracted.
Avoiding all such confrontations was (and is) extremely disempowering and not just that but also ethically and intellectually backwards. These kinds of popular censorous items of advice seem like they actually mostly just encourage a kind of learned helplessness and mob rule. I trusted the advice, didn’t question its assumptions (as is so often the path to falsehood, injustice, and suffering, as with so many ideas), and so I’ve suffered the consequences.
Never responding to any opposition will inherently tend to support the status quo and people who agree with the majority (since they have much more existing support already anyway) and to harm dissenting and minority views. Not allowing a dissenting voice to respond stacks the deck against the dissenter. This disconnects the conversation from merit and allows randomness and stagnation to dominate the outcome instead.
Thus, all the above in consideration, it is now my position that as long as one’s response to things is approached in a constructive way, with wholesomeness of spirit (even if imperfect, as all things are), then it is actually better to respond where there is sufficient ethical reason in doing so, so that things like misinformation and slander are counteracted, instead of allowed to grow unimpeded like weeds, slowly poisoning and corrupting the garden of human thought and of society over time.
And what is human knowledge but a garden of ideas? A good garden must be attended to lovingly and diligently, not neglected. Otherwise, the garden will worsen over time and cease to provide value nearly as well. One sees that happening often in some aspects of society, in the natural course of history and such. Standing one’s ground constructively on principle is essential for moving the future towards better outcomes.
So, that’s what I’m going to be more proactive about doing going forward now. I’m not going to let misinformation and distortion stand uncontested, at least not when I have sufficient time in my priorities to constructively oppose it.
I’m simply going to do what intellectual integrity and genuine care for the state of the world demands that I do, which is to act towards the greatest good as best I can, while handling and minimizing my own biases as best I can see. That’s all any person can ever do.
This is essential. Bias comes from so many different places, both from within and without, and so you can seldom ever be sure if you’re the biased one or if others are. Both sides of that equation are equally dangerous. That’s why it’s so important to be intellectually honest and to not allow oneself to be intimidated or misrepresented or demonized or censored into silence and yet also (simultaneously) to try one’s best not to do the same to others and to remain constructive.
There’s always a nuanced balance to be struck. Good-natured commentary should be allowed to proliferate, but bad-natured commentary (e.g. blatant lies, misinformation, etc) should be opposed. Not opposing misleading information is itself negligent and hence immoral. A one-sided conversation is antithetical to the pursuit of truth. Bad-natured reviews should never be granted immunity from criticism. It should be a two-way street. One has an ethical duty to fight back against malevolence. No author should ever bar themselves from counteracting false claims.
So, that’s what I’ll do here: make my best efforts to balance the myriad different considerations and consequences. Perfection in these regards though, is impossible, as always. So, as one must always do if one wishes for a world of abundant empathy and of truly being seen by others, one must strive for magnanimity and a reasonably graceful and nuanced kind of acceptance of human nature, while still trying to move forward in the places where one ought to. Such is life. Such is the adventure.
Reviewing the Reviews
We’ll start with all the simplest and smallest reviews first I suppose, since that won’t take long and such cases are very clear and very easily countered. This will enable us to make a lot of progress quickly and will provide more breathing room for our later focus on more substantive matters.
(Oh, and if at a later date new reviews appear that also contain issues that should be addressed, then I may list those on this page too and update the page accordingly, when/if I get around to it.)
The reviews will each be listed with the author’s username, star rating, and date of publication. The headers for each review on this page will be color-coded on a spectrum according to how constructive they appear to be. Specifically:
Reviews that seem to be made mostly or entirely in “bad faith” (e.g. containing obvious misinformation, lack of even basic due diligence, malicious or hateful intent that isn’t based in merit, spam, inappropriate self-promotion, conflicts of interest, etc) will be colored red. In contrast, reviews that seem mostly to be in “good faith” (e.g. an honest attempt to wrestle with the material, no obvious signs of excessive bias or malice, etc) will be colored green. And, finally, reviews that have mixed qualities will be colored orange.
Not all reviews may be covered. I may include a brief catch-all for those cases.
Let’s begin:
todayamerican rated 1/5 on June 6, 2020
Review title:
Read this book instead.
Review contents:
[nothing but a raw text link to a different book on Amazon]
This review is nothing but pure spam, obviously. It links to an obscure competitor’s book, one that currently doesn’t have even a single review. There’s a very high chance that todayamerican is actually the author of the linked book (or someone acting on their behalf) and is trying to parasitically grab some of the traffic from my page and direct it towards their own page.
Notice that this review contains no substance whatsoever. It doesn’t even cite a single reason for why the reader should get the other book instead. And, regardless of that (i.e. even if the review had more content), it is also very inappropriate, unprofessional, and unethical to try to steal traffic from someone else’s page like this.
I pay for regular advertisement of my book(s), so this person is actually essentially stealing from my advertising funds. This person is thus a thief in effect.
And, to make matters even worse, after advertising fees and Amazon’s cut, my book often doesn’t even break even, since I price it so low compared to other technical books of similar size (as a kindness to my readers), so it’s not like I have the budget to spare for this kind of parasitism either.
For example, for the total profit for 2020 I actually made a net loss. Reviews published in 2020 containing spam, slander, and misinformation likely caused that. Indeed, the book has such a poor margin of profit that it is borderline charity, and always has been, even during the best times. The audience is niche and hard to reach and hence expensive and mostly unprofitable. I still wrote the book though, even so, because I saw it as my duty to try my best to make a real difference in the world.
The reviewer also appears to be engaging in search keyword manipulation.
The link they put in their review appears to contain search code in the URL designed to make it seem to Amazon’s search engine that the person using the link is finding the other person’s book organically by searching for terms related to both my and their book (e.g. “division by zero”). This is a “black hat” SEO trick essentially. It gradually corrupts search data by giving the algorithm fraudulent origination information each time someone uses the link. It manipulates ranking.
So, naturally, I didn’t include the actual link text above.
This review is very malicious and has zero merit.
Bob rated 1/5 on September 22, 2018
Review title:
Defective Product
Review contents:
This book is difficult to read on the Kindle app for iPad. The pages do not scale to fit the screen, but you must scroll up and down to read the page. None of the font settings work and therefore it is my opinion that this is a defective product. I cannot speak to the quality of the content because it is too annoying to bother reading.
This is actually on one of the most common kinds of misleading reviews my book receives: reviews where I am accused of the book having “defective” or “poor” formatting but where the reality is that the reviewer hasn’t done even basic due diligence and isn’t aware that not all books on Amazon have reflowable text.
In fact, Unified Logic actually has exceptionally good formatting compared to most technical books (e.g. math, programming, etc) on Amazon. The reason is because Unified Logic uses a strictly fixed format very similar to how PDFs work. The format and layout of each page is set in stone and can never change no matter what device it is read on. (And yet, even on phones the book is actually still fairly readable, although users with poor eyesight may struggle.)
This means that (unlike most technical books on Amazon), Unified Logic will (unless Amazon changes something) never suffer from the wild text formatting glitches, shifting illegible math formulas, tiny unreadable rasterized images, misplaced diagrams, unreadable jumbled up tables, or very poorly formatted code blocks that so often ruin (and render nearly unusable) so many technical books that don’t use a fixed non-reflowable format.
The reviewers would actually be thanking me for going the extra mile (and suffering a huge royalty profit penalty, by the way) to make the book non-reflowable if they had the slightest clue what they were actually talking about. 😤🙄
Unified Logic would be nearly impossible to read if it was made reflowable. I know because I tried that (with great effort and multiple days of attempts) before I published it. It is physically impossible to make the book reflowable and still have it be readable and reliable. I’m doing you a big favor by not doing that.
Amazon seems to prefer the reflowable format though regardless, even though that format actually often severely degrades the quality and readability of many technical books. Indeed, I’ve many times even had experiences where technical books that used to be readable on my Kindle app (books that use Amazon’s “recommended” reflowable format) have gradually become much less readable over time (and in some cases almost illegible and unusable).
For example, programming books that are more than a few years old often have code blocks that don’t put indentation or newlines at even remotely the correct spots, making what would be easy to read into something very hard to read (e.g. putting a huge block of code on a single slurred together line, wrapped as if it were just prose). Similar things happen to math books that try to use the reflowable format too. Reflowability consistently ruins most technical books.
Any time Amazon releases even the slightest changes to how their text reflowing format and algorithm work then any reflowable technical book can be instantly ruined by it. Not only that, but the publishers and authors very often end up never having time to revisit and repair those books, thus effectively robbing the customer of their purchase. 😮😔
Unified Logic never suffers from that problem. You can be assured the book will always keep a readable format that will never butcher the content.
The trade-off is that Amazon’s system greatly inflates the file sizes of books with a fixed format (even though it shouldn’t, if it were designed better, like actual real PDFs) and so I end up taking a huge penalty in file size download royalty fees as a consequence of insisting on a fixed format for the sake of my readers.
(The real PDF consumes only 3-4 mb of space, whereas Amazon’s version consumes more than 20 mb… and they charge a massive royalty penalty per mb, one that far exceeds the actual cost of data delivery by probably at least a multiple of thousands.)
It’s more important to me though that people can read my book in a comfortable and reliable format in perpetuity than to maximize my profit , and so I willingly absorb that huge profit penalty for the sake of protecting my readers. That’s why so few publishers do it probably. They let greed decide, instead of compassion and empathy for the reader and respect for their rightful property.
And what do I receive in compensation for the great personal expense of doing so?
I receive reviews and comments like this, each falsely accusing me of creating a “defective” or “poorly formatted” book all because of a minority of readers who never think to consider that maybe there’s a good reason why the text reflowing ability might be disabled in a massive and complicatedly formatted technical book filled to the brim with formulas, tables, special features, and figures.
I’m tired of being punished severely and mercilessly for going out of my way to be kind to people and for making sure they don’t get exploited. 🤕😓
I’m basically being penalized for nothing more than other people’s lack of awareness of the situation, despite the fact that I am actually taking a huge profit loss in perpetuity to protect all of my readers from ever losing access to a readable version of the book you bought. Give me a break guys, please… 😥🥺
Amazon Customer rated 1/5 on September 28, 2019
Review title:
Poor formatting
Review contents:
Poorly formatted. It's extremely wordy, which wouldn't be a problem if kindle formatted it properly and I could read it.
This review has the same issue as the above one does (Bob’s review from September 22, 2018). My perspective on this review is much the same as for Bob’s, except I’ll make one additional comment:
This review says that the book is “extremely wordy”, but it is not like this fact is a secret given that the book is 800+ pages long and has a large amount of technical content (in addition to its other easier to digest content). This is clearly labeled on the product page. I also even explicitly warned readers about the length, verbosity, and frequent tangential discussions in the book’s introduction very clearly, in advance, specifically to address this. Yet people still fault me for it.
Is it the janitor’s fault if people ignore a “beware of slippy floor” sign and then fall? ⚠🚧🤕
Is it fair for anyone to ever expect an 800+ page technical book to not be wordy? Think about that. This reviewer’s complaint is pretty much self-contradictory when put in context. No such book could ever not be “wordy”, realistically speaking, unless it was riddled with wasteful whitespace. My job in the book is pointing out and remedying self-contradictions, not manifesting them in physical form, which in contrast would be impossible. 🤣
JJ rated 2/5 on March 26, 2019
Review title:
A rambling, divagating exercise in hubristic thought…
Review contents:
This is a wordy book, thick as a telephone book, and ramblingly verbose…
My perspective on this review is mostly the same as for Bob’s and the other similar review above. Also though:
Did you know that “divagating” means tangential? This exact point (the presence of a high proportion of tangents in the book) is something I very explicitly and clearly warned readers about in the introduction. The book intentionally explores many different useful and interesting tangents from the main line of the content as it progresses. I even explained why I did that: because doing so unearthed an enormous volume of hidden gems of insight that arguably ended up being potentially worth even more than the main thrust of the book. I tell readers right up front in the intro that the book is very “bushy” in this sense and has very many tangents in it.
This is like if someone told you that some ice cream was chocolate flavored, you bought some, you tasted it, and then you got mad that it was chocolate flavored because you actually wanted vanilla. I literally told you that the book would be exactly like this and that I did it because it ends up uncovering lots of useful insights into a diverse variety of things that way.
The reason why I rated this review as orange instead of red though (i.e. as a mix of good and bad faith content) is because about half of the review feels like it is really just about saying that I am arrogant (e.g. “hubristic thought”), which is fair enough because it is the reviewer’s opinion and hence subjective and not something I can label as misinformation really.
I even wrote an article a while back about how I think both arrogance and humility are equally counterproductive and that people should instead strive to be their genuine selves without distortion. It’s unsurprising then that my efforts to live and embody that would come across as arrogant to some people, since striving to be neutral (neither arrogant nor humble) about one’s own ego inevitably will often seem (falsely) arrogant relative to a “humble” perspective.
Finally, I found it a bit ironic that JJ focuses on painting me as arrogant when JJ so often goes out of their way to use many obscure thesaurus words in their reviews on Amazon, something which most people see as being an arrogant and unempathetic way of communicating, and something which I in contrast make a lot of effort to avoid or remedy (when possible) because I care about my readers and am not trying to impress them with my mere vocabulary but only with the actual contents of my thoughts. I think JJ should be allowed to use an abundance of thesaurus words if he wants of course though, and that we shouldn’t actually make assumptions about why JJ chose those words. I’m just pointing out the irony and the potential hypocrisy of it.
floridian321 rated 1/5 on March 4, 2020
Review title:
Stick with a regular logic book
This is a long one and so I’ll be covering the review’s contents piece by piece with quotes from specific parts of the review. I will be addressing almost all of the points made in the review, because there are honestly a huge abundance of problems in it.
Importantly, this review is also probably the most malicious and bad faith review of all of the reviews, which is unfortunate considering that it is also the negative review currently voted most helpful (as of October 2021). It has achieved that status almost entirely by misrepresenting and deceptively demonizing both the book and myself.
The review relies upon a variety of forms of sophistry (i.e. misleading rhetoric, fallacies, biases, etc) and even includes some outright blatant lies. It’s goal is primarily to harm and not to inform. I’ll be going into detail about why that is, in addition to discussing some other (more subjective) problems with the review along the way. The author clearly has some kind of personal grudge against me and wants to hurt me as much as possible. Let’s begin:
This book is 800+ pages long but lacks an index. When was the last time that you saw a non-fiction book this big without an index? Hmmm … You'll have to navigate using the table of contents. Good luck.
— floridian321
The biggest reason why the book lacks an index is simply because CreateSpace (now merged with Kindle Direct Publishing) had a maximum page count limit for books which was around 800 to 900 pages. The book is also hugely diverse in the subjects it covers. Any attempt to create an index for the book would have increased the book’s page count by hundreds of pages, thereby causing CreatSpace/KDP to reject the book. It was thus literally impossible to publish the book on Amazon with an index.
As for when was the last time I read a non-fiction book without an index, I’d say that was at least a few times per year every year for the past 10 years. I literally just bought one of the most popular WordPress books last week and it has no index. Most non-fiction books are actually gradually moving away from using indices. Most searching of non-fiction book content is now increasingly done digitally.
In fact, that’s why when I set up the book on Amazon I enabled the option for giving all readers who bought the paperback a free copy of the ebook, specifically so that they could easily search it digitally and read it on all their devices. I’ve never disabled the free ebook option for paperback purchasers, so it should still be active unless Amazon got rid of that feature across their whole site. (The hardcover version in contrast is printed by IngramSpark and there’s no provided way to give out free ebooks for it.)
I’ve tested that the search function in the ebook works well too, and indeed it is vastly superior to any index.
Given that fewer and fewer people use indices now, the inclusion of them in paper books is also now unjustifiably harmful for the environment. Those indices often constitute a large percentage of technical books’ page count when included, and since those parts are seldom actually used they therefore waste a ton of paper and therefore do a lot of damage to the environment. So, one could argue then that it is not just archaic but actually immoral to include indices in books anymore, given the state of the environment and climate change.
This reviewer is also insinuating that you’ll have a hard time navigating the book without an index when this actually isn’t even close to true. I went to great pains to ensure that literally almost every single reference to any part of the book from any other part of the book always includes an exact page number whenever it is mentioned. These page numbers are all updated programmatically using the pageref command in LaTeX code to guarantee they are never wrong.
The table of contents is also extra detailed. It is very easy to navigate the book, especially with the free ebook that is supposed to come with every paper copy. I can’t control unexpected changes made by Amazon though, if/when they happen. The book is also mostly intended to be read linearly, from front to back, further reducing the relevance of this reviewer’s complaint about the lack of an index even more.
The review most likely just wants to scare people by making it sound like the book will be tedious to navigate, when in reality it really isn’t. I’ve done everything in my power to make the book easy to navigate. I can’t control Amazon though.
(1) There are lots and lots (and lots) of definitions. None are in proper form, i.e., A =df B.
— floridian321
There are indeed lots of definitions (~200) because it is necessary given the huge scope of subject matter the book covers. That part is true. Most of the rest is not.
Firstly, there is no real “proper form” that a definition must adhere to, contrary to this reviewer’s dictatorial claim. There are various different conventions that exist, but there’s no substantive reason to require that one conforms to those conventions. Only the logical and evidentiary substance of what is communicated ever matters, and in that respect my book communicates its intent very precisely and effectively.
The form for definitions (and related content) I chose enabled a very clear, natural, and flexible way of explaining things. Nobody on this entire planet has the right to dictate how other people are allowed to express themselves in their writing and in their thoughts. As long as logical integrity and evidence is present, the format of one’s writing is arbitrary and irrelevant to the merits.
This reviewer (floridian321) is being very authoritarian and misleading here. The comment is worded to cast doubt on the integrity of the ideas in the book, but in reality the most trivial and petty details of exactly how the text is written is utterly irrelevant to anything that really matters whatsoever.
This is analogous to a teacher flunking a student’s entire final paper based on nothing more than whether or not the Oxford comma (comma before “and”) is present. This is some toxic and absurdly frivolous nonsense. It’s real “grammar nazi” level criticism. The reviewer is actually just treating their own personal convention preferences as if the integrity of all arguments in logic and math live or die by mere adherence to those personal conventions. This clearly can’t be true. The reviewer is really just throwing an authoritarian tantrum about the fact that different conventions than his/her own are allowed to exist.
We can't tell what concepts are taken as primitive (undefined) and are used to define other concepts. Are all the concepts necessary? I have no idea. How are they related? With all the verbiage thrown around, it's impossible to tell.
— floridian321
On the contrary, the book actually does make it clear which concepts are primitive whenever that is relevant. Indeed, the text actually goes to great lengths to examine the concepts from multiple angles to demonstrate their nature and connections with other concepts and how they relate to each other in intricate detail. In fact, I’d say the text does this even more so than most texts do. That’s why the book is so long!
Most texts on logic and/or math just spew out technical gibberish and never make the connections clear at all. They leave seeing most of the connections as “an exercise for the reader“. Indeed, sometimes it feels like many (most?) mathematicians are almost allergic to clarity and have more interest in sounding smart than in ever actually communicating to the layperson. Unified Logic in contrast is designed with true empathy for the reader in mind when illustrating the exact nature of concepts and how they fit together and interrelate. If you’re sick of such needless obscurity, then you’ll likely appreciate the much fresher and more natural approach I chose.
(2) The fallacy of ad hominem is explained on page 599. Evidently, the author thinks he is exempt from it. There are lots and lots (and lots) of examples of it in the book.
— floridian321
Oh the irony… The reviewer whose review has the most irrelevant personal attacks and the most needlessly hateful tone of all the reviews is accusing me of ad hominem fallacies…
Not only that, but floridian321 is making this accusation in a way that all but proves that they don’t understand what an ad hominem fallacy actually is. Criticizing someone does not in itself constitute an ad hominem fallacy, otherwise all forms of criticism would always be ad hominem. Clearly that can’t be true though.
An ad hominem fallacy happens when an irrelevant personal attack is used to dismiss the credibility of an argument instead of addressing the actual substance of that argument. Attacks on someone’s character designed to cast someone in a bad light in order to get other people to not consider that person’s ideas are ad hominem. Which… is exactly what much of floridian321’s review is clearly designed to do…
Epistemology, for example, is dismissed as a "waste of time." Tell it to Descartes, Hume, Kant …, Jesse.
— floridian321
An example would be the above quote, where floridian321 is putting words in my mouth by cherry picking a tiny quote out of context to try to make me look evil. He’s very much misrepresenting me here. The original context changes the implied meaning greatly, so of course floridian321 made sure to cut all that out.
Firstly, in stark contrast to floridian321’s insinuation, Descartes, Hume, and Kant are actually all people I greatly and openly respect! I even quote Hume with admiration in the book! Maybe if you believed in the concept of searching ebooks digitally like us modern human beings instead of only by index then you could have found it. Here: 🤣
consider the following apt words of David Hume: “If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask: Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”
— Jesse Bollinger
And as for the “epistemology” quote, that part gets even better! When you see what I actually said in context you’ll be amazed at how obviously insincere and deceptive floridian321 is actually being here. The misquote occurs in a footnote. First though, here’s the passage being footnoted from:
In order for a claim to be considered scientific it must be falsifiable, which is to say that it must be possible to prove or disprove the claim in principle. Philosophical idealism claims that reality is a figment of the mind, but there is no way one could ever test this claim. In contrast, realism keeps us focused on only the testable aspects of reality. The pursuit of untestable claims is fundamentally a futile endeavor and always will be.
In the pursuit of knowledge it is important to not get sidetracked by claims that are inherently impossible to resolve or ultimately meaningless. Some philosophers are often fond of endlessly debating epistemology2 and arguing that we in some sense “can’t really know anything” because of a lack of certainty about any higher realms of existence that we are unaware of. For example, we might all be part of a computer simulation, etc.
— Jesse Bollinger
And here’s the actual footnote, the source of floridian321’s nasty cherry picked misquote:
2 Epistemology is “the study of the nature of knowledge”. More cynically though, in practice it often ends up just being “the study of how to waste time asking pointless existential questions instead of doing real science”.
— Jesse Bollinger
Notice that I never even said that epistemology was always a waste of time. I only said that it often ends up leading people to chase fundamentally unanswerable and untestable questions, such as claims that are religious or semi-religious in nature for example, hence leading to distraction away from real science. This is undeniably true. Never in the book do I ever condemn Descartes, Hume, or Kant or anything like what floridian321 is trying to deceive readers into thinking I do.
The only real goal floridian321 has here is to make reader’s think I’m evil and/or incompetent so that the readers won’t consider (or even read) any of my arguments directly. In other words, the spirit of floridian321’s review is primarily one of hate and (very ironically!) ad hominem.
Specifically, it seems fairly likely to me that floridian321 took personal offense at my discussion of how religious-like untestable claims have no place in logic and are inherently intractable and hence worthless for purposes of logic. Religious people often feel threatened by that point, since it goes so straight to the heart of the matter.
I even warned about this in the the intro to the book (e.g. how some religious people are likely to get offended). Indeed, this may be part (or even all!) of why floridian321 seems to have an axe to grind with me, for all I know. Unsurprisingly, highly religious and/or authoritarian readers (two groups that often overlap) tend to care far more about attacking “heretics” (like me) than about pursuing the truth freely.
And also, for the record, insulting or sharply criticizing someone isn’t necessarily (or even usually!) ad hominem. Theoretically, I could call floridian321 an “uptight hateful prick with no regard to the harm he/she causes other people”, for example, and that would still not be ad hominem unless I used it to try to discredit an argument to which that insult was irrelevant. Mere criticism is not ad hominem. Anyone who thinks that still has more studying to do.
The fact that there are many things I criticize in the book thus likewise does not in any way imply that there are “lots and lots (and lots) of examples of [ad hominem fallacies] in the book”, contrary to what floridian321 claims! This reviewer just doesn’t even remotely understand what they are talking about.
(3) The author admits that what he calls "transformative logic" is closely related to the standard distinction between syntactic and semantic consequence, which has been well understood for more than a century. Why reinvent the wheel?
— floridian321
The ideas I wanted to express in my book were in some ways fundamentally incompatible with the existing notation options that I had found and considered using (e.g. syntactic and semantic consequence). If I had reused one of the existing systems then many ideas I wanted to communicate would have become impossible to express (especially in the optimal form). Using a different system also prevented any conflicts with other people’s notations and hidden assumptions.
Transformative logic wasn’t some redundant “reinventing the wheel”. It was simply necessary, to communicate my thoughts accurately and effectively. The reviewer’s petty complaint here is analogous to claiming that every programming language ever created is “reinventing the wheel” no matter how they differ in purpose or expressiveness or behavior or clarity in context.
It’s the kind of toxic attitude that would make progress in how we express ourselves and communicate always impossible. I couldn’t have written the book at all without making a clean break from the existing systems and their many unwanted assumptions and already baked-in associations. I even explained that in the book, but floridian321 conveniently doesn’t mention that!
Moreover, if I had tried to reuse those systems then I would have been forced to adhere to the underlying assumptions on which those systems were based, which would have eliminated the point of the whole endeavor since then I’d have ended up with conclusions that merely mindlessly adhered to the status quo instead of differing substantively from it.
Which, seeing as floridian321 repeatedly shows signs of authoritarianism and a desire to not ever allow any deviations whatsoever from his/her own preferences on how anything should ever be communicated, is unsurprising since doing so would have made it so that the status quo would have automatically won, regardless of merit. It would gag all dissent essentially, making it so that only the currently dominant group would be allowed to decide what kinds of thoughts other people are allowed to have or to say. By banning differing language, differing thoughts are (in effect) also banned. That’s likely floridian321’s real goal: censorship of dissent.
What next? "I don't understand how calculus, relativity theory, evolution … work, so I'll invent me own."
— floridian321
This is mostly a combination of a slippery slope fallacy and an outright lie and blatant misrepresentation of who I am and what I stand for. It is just yet another deceptive character assassination attack by floridian321. There are things I said in the book that directly contradict this insinuation and objectively prove it wrong.
For example, as I thought I made clear in the book, when approaching a “division by zero” point by infinitesimal steps (as in a limit-based approach such as in calculus) then calculus’s answer is correct. I never denied that. It’s only at the “undefined” exact point of division by zero that I gave a different answer, which is not the same point as one slightly to the left or right. (I also have a finitistic view of infinitesimals, such that they are often not equivalent to infinitesimally adjacent approximations.)
I understand calculus just fine thank you, and I’ve even used it in professional game development environments! The notion that I don’t understand how limits work is just a flat out lie. It is based purely on the malice-addled imaginations of a few people who are already looking for any possible excuse to attack me and are not willing to even attempt to engage honestly with what the book actually says.
In fact, this insinuation here about “not understanding calculus” reminds me very much (almost as if spoken by the same voice) of some of the hate mail messages I received on Reddit within just a few minutes or hours of posting an ad for the book on Reddit, right after its initial release, where some people were pretending to already understand what my argument was despite it being physically impossible for them to have read the book even remotely adequately by then. There hadn’t even been enough time to skim the book by then!
The Redditors who attacked me back then were literally just making up whatever they wanted to imagine that I believed, usually according to some random blind pre-exisiting prejudices they had against finitists or other non-conformist viewpoints. This is what made me stop using the site entirely for 2-3 years. They just would assume whatever they wanted, with no connection to reality whatsoever, and would then systematically harass me. They were very clearly bullies and wanted to do everything they could to harm me as much as possible. Truth clearly wasn’t their goal, nor perhaps even on their radar in some cases.
Every time I read floridian321’s review I get the same feeling. I would almost bet money that he/she was one of those Redditors, who still has an axe to grind with me and posted this review in vengeance for me calling out toxic behavior in the 2nd revision of the introductory section of Unified Logic. It has that same kind of mob-like hostile misinformed vindictive reek to it.
Furthermore, I also went out of my way in the book to express my love for (standard!) evolutionary theory a few times, including for example a great thought exercise involving cellular automata that really does a good job of illustrating why evolution’s truth is pretty much inevitable. Here’s a direct quote of me gushing about my love of evolution:
Ask yourself this: If John Conway’s Game of Life already has enough in it to support any arbitrary artificial intelligence program that could ever be conceived, then how in the blazes could the real universe, whose rules are vastly more complex and rich than the rules of John Conway’s Game of Life are, ever manage to not spontaneously evolve life? So you see, just as I said, the idea of a universe without evolution would actually be far weirder than one with it. This is not difficult to see. All it takes is a bit of intellectual honesty and experimentation and it quickly becomes glaringly obvious.
Evolution denialists need to wake up and face reality. The spontaneous emergence of beauty and complexity from simple rules is the norm. It is not some kind of absurd notion. It is extremely common. It can be easily observed, measured, tested, and proven. There is nothing implausible about it. It is proven fact. Life evolves just as surely as the sun rises in the sky each day.
— Jesse Bollinger
There you go. Literal direct proof that floridian321 is just flat out lying about me yet again, right there in black and white. Not only that, but there’s hilariously even a footnote where I directly tell the reader to consult a biologist for real info about evolution instead of getting it second hand from me. Here it is:
16To be clear, some species evolve very slowly because their natural selection process has become very stable, but they still do evolve nonetheless. As for why evolution itself is true, there is so much overwhelming evidence that I daresay it would be fair to say that evolution is even more strongly confirmed than the laws of gravity are. This of course doesn’t stop bigoted anti-intellectuals, uneducated people, clergy, and the brainwashed masses from spreading misinformation to the contrary. Read some biology books. You wouldn’t trust someone who never studied electricity to be your electrician; likewise, you would be a fool to trust what anyone who hasn’t studied real biology well has to say about it.
— Jesse Bollinger
So much for floridian321’s insinuation that I would be willing to just make up my own evolutionary theory… The actual text of the book proves that my perspective is the opposite of what floridian321 wants potential to readers to believe it is. That’s because floridian321’s only actual goal throughout his entire review seems to be to harm me, not to consider anything I say honestly.
Furthermore, the additional insinuation that I would make up my own relativity theory is also based on absolutely nothing. I mention relativity only once in the book, briefly, using it only for an example of the fluency heuristic in that it is easier to convince people that classical mechanics is true than to convince them of relativity. Here’s the relevant passage:
For example, it is much easier to convince someone of the truth of Newton’s classical mechanics than to convince someone of the truth of Einstein’s relativity, even though relativity is technically more accurate according to the expert consensus of physicists. The fluency heuristic can create a situation where an easy to understand argument with less supporting evidence is more convincing and believable than a hard to understand argument with more supporting evidence.
— Jesse Bollinger
Thanks for demonizing me yet again based on nothing but your own made-up lies floridian321! You’re clearly so much more of a wholesome person than me, just as the tone of your review constantly implies! Who would protect all these poor innocent readers from my evil wrongthink if not for you, so valiantly guarding them against the demonic imaginary version of me that exists only in your own hate-addled mind? Sheesh… 🙄
When will floridian321‘s carefully engineered barrage of sophistry, bias, bullying, misinformation, and emotional manipulation end? Answer: not yet. Here comes some more:
(4) The author thinks that objects, rather than statements, are true or false. No kidding. Thus, a spoon is true because there are spoons and unicorns are false because there aren't any unicorns. Why do we need to say that objects have truth-value? I'll let you read the author's explanation for yourself. It's a howler. Anyhow, "the statement that there are spoons is true" will do just fine, as we don't need to say that "spoons are true because there are spoons." Evidently the author hasn't heard of Okham's razor.
— floridian321
Yet another gross misrepresentation of the book’s content, one that yet again conveniently leaves out all the parts that would easily discredit it.
Let’s start with the easiest and most amusing counterpoint. It’s a howler. 🤣
Here’s me literally defining Occam’s Razor in the book:
The fitting fallacy is closely related to two important scientific principles, namely Occam’s Razor and the principle of falsifiability. A great many arguments that contain fitting fallacies do not satisfy at least one of these two principles. However, some arguments which nominally satisfy both Occam’s Razor and the principle of falsifiability are still fitting fallacies. What are Occam’s Razor and the principle of falsifiability? Well, Occam’s Razor is a rule of thumb (not a universal law) which says that among multiple competing explanations for something the explanation that makes the fewest arbitrary assumptions is the one most likely to be correct. Every additional assumption that you add on to a theory is another way for that theory to be proven wrong. Thus, the more arbitrary assumptions a theory makes the higher its chances of being incorrect are.
— Jesse Bollinger
Notice also that (unlike floridian321) I actually know how to spell Occam’s Razor. The only three common variants are “Occam’s Razor”, “Ockham’s Razor”, and “Ocham’s Razor”, none of which are what floridian321 wrote. Hmm… I wonder if that could be because floridian321 seems to mostly only be pretending to have any experience with Occam’s Razor…
The answer to that question too is evidently yes! Because (as you will see) floridian321 is actually using the term to mean the opposite of what it actually means but doesn’t realize it! 😆
Why? Well, the theory of mine that he/she is criticizing actually is ironically an example of reducing the number of assumptions required for a theory of truth to be formulated, and hence Occam’s Razor (which again isn’t even a universal law!) would actually lend credit to my side of the argument if used, not to his/her side.
You see, the theory in question actually depends on a simple thought experiment, which is that if no entities (e.g. people) capable of making statements existed in a universe then there would still have to be things within that universe that would nonetheless be true, even though nobody is around to say so. Obviously that has to be true, right? Any sane person can see that.
Well, that is the argument that he is misrepresenting here in order to make it sound ridiculous to potential readers. The real argument I make in my book (if you actually read it, unlike what many/most of my most toxic critics do) is clearly far more well-founded than that. Notice how critical this point is and yet floridian321 leaves all mention of the basis of the idea entirely out of the review.
How convenient an omission since that’s the most important part of understanding it! By omitting that though, it sure does make it a lot easier to mislead people!
I went to great lengths in the book to discuss exactly this point. It’s not like I was unaware of the surface-level weirdness of the claim nor was I unaware of how dumb it would sound at first glance. Here’s me introducing it:
The question “Is the spoon true?” would be considered to be nonsensical gibberish by logicians. Just because you can string a sequence of words together doesn’t make it a meaningful or well-defined expression. If truth is strictly a property of statements, then a spoon can’t be true, because a spoon is not a statement — a spoon is an object.
This all sounds perfectly reasonable of course. It seems illogical to say that a spoon is true, doesn’t it? Our common sense and intuition immediately suggest to us that it would of course be absurd to assert such a strange notion as a spoon being true. This all seems to confirm our tentative definition of truth as “statements that correspond with reality”.
— Jesse Bollinger
And here’s a further elaboration of the tricky nuances involved in thinking about these concepts correctly (“universe O” is a universe where no beings capable of making statements exist, whereas “universe S” is a universe where statements do exist):
Here is the crux of the thought experiment though: Aren’t all the statements that Aristotle made during his walk true in both universes, regardless of whether he said them or not? If truth were indeed strictly a property of statements, and if objects could not have truth values (as is the current implicit assumption), then wouldn’t it follow that universe O has no truths?
Under our current definition of truth, there would be nothing in universe O that could ever hold a truth value. We have now arrived at a dilemma. On the one hand, it seems unreasonable to think that the mere absence of statements in universe O would somehow make it lack any form of truth. On the other hand though, the only way universe O could ever have any truth values would be if objects have truth values. This directly contradicts our intuitive common sense notion that truth is “statements corresponding with reality” and that asking questions like “Is the spoon true?” is somehow nonsensical. What is true of universe S must also be true of universe O, with regards to all of the aspects in which they are identical
— Jesse Bollinger
See? It’s not even remotely a dumb perspective, in stark contrast to how floridian321 is so very dishonestly portraying it. Assigning truth to objects instead of to statements is actually very clarifying and the resulting system it supports actually has a much stronger basis for truth than one that depends on the unnecessary existence of statements. Truth does not require that people can talk about it to still be true. Think about that. This actually ends up being critical for addressing the liar’s paradox, among other things. It is a very nuanced philosophical insight and must be treated very carefully (as in the book) in order to be properly conveyed.
Unified Logic uses an existential system of truth, one where whether or not the objects we refer to actually exist and have the properties we claim they have is the basis for truth. Designing the system that way prevents statements from becoming referentially tangled up with each other in ways that lead to self-contradictions, paradoxes, and confusion. Nothing about that is nonsensical. It is actually less nonsensical than the alternative (standard approach) is. The book discusses that at great length, illustrating a multitude of different consequences of it.
The axioms of Unified Logic are fundamentally different from some parts of how the current dominant models behave, and so it is impossible to accurately analyze Unified Logic using the same assumptions as are currently dominantly used in some parts of logic and math (e.g. classical logic) because much of the whole point of the book is that it intentionally and consciously denies that those assumptions are true and then goes to great length to illustrate why and what may follow from it.
These repeated claims that Unified Logic doesn’t fit X, Y, and Z criteria of some standard theory are thus utterly irrelevant essentially, yet that clearly doesn’t stop a minority of blatantly incompetent and uninformed people from systematically harassing me on the internet and trying their best to unjustly demonize me.
Learn what an axiom is and stop trying to dictate other people’s thoughts! 😑
Anyway though, let’s continue our exploration and debunking of yet more of floridian321’s deliberate misrepresentations and impenetrable rigid-mindedness:
(5) Georg Cantor's contributions to set theory are given short shrift--more ad hominem language. The author thinks George Boole should get the credit. Kind of late in the day to be arguing about this, Jesse.
— floridian321
No. Not “more ad hominem language”. Just more of floridian321 having little to no clue what he or she is talking about, as usual.
As I illustrated earlier in this article, floridian321 clearly doesn’t even understand what ad hominem means. Criticizing someone in itself does not constitute ad hominem. Criticism is only ad hominem if the criticism is irrelevant to or unrepresentative of the argument being criticized, such is if someone deliberately misrepresents someone’s argument in order to suppress or harm it or if they try to imply that someone’s unrelated character traits somehow discredit the actual substance of that person’s argument. In other words, ad hominem is exactly what most of floridian321’s review is riddled with.
As for why I cited George Boole as probably actually being more deserving of the credit, I based this argument on (1) a direct quotation of Boole’s published work where Boole is very clearly describing the basic operators of set theory combined with (2) the fact that Boole was older than Cantor and his work predated Cantor’s. This is an objective fact.
How is it “short shrift” to argue based on the dates of someone’s published work and direct quotation of that work that those ideas therefore came before someone else’s work for the purposes of proving origination? It’s very obviously not. It’s an entirely intellectually honest argument to make.
Since floridian321’s only real goal seems to be to harm me and to suppress my ideas though (out of whatever petty vindictive grudge he has against me), he conveniently chooses to omit all of this though (since including it would’ve obviously instantly discredited him).
Furthermore, as for floridian321’s statement that it is “kind of late in the day to be arguing about this”, this statement is basically implying that any argument that doesn’t adhere to an already existing dominant or longstanding belief system is automatically wrong, regardless of the evidence it presents. Remember: I literally cited a direct quote where Boole described set theory before Cantor did!
What the reviewer is really saying here is that popularity and/or how long-lived a belief is stands as the final authority on truth. This attitude is really just authoritarianism, traditionalism, and/or an appeal to popularity fallacy. This is how a priest thinks, not how a scientist thinks! Yet floridian321 has engineered his/her rhetoric to (sadly, very effectively) deceive readers into thinking that he/her is the one protecting intellectual and scientific integrity. It is so backwards that it is absurd!
Uninitiated people though, unfortunately, won’t catch this very blatant deception though, since they can’t see that I cite Boole’s original work directly in historical context as evidence. Nor can they see the very clear explanation I gave for exactly why this long-standing false belief about the origins of set theory has lingered for so long (which was of course conveniently entirely omitted by floridian321):
So if Cantor’s theory is so esoteric and impractical, whereas Boole’s theory is so groundbreaking and useful, then why is it that Cantor is the one credited with founding set theory? Well, there are a number of likely contributing factors. One of the most influential contributing factors though was probably intellectual elitism. Over time, much of the mathematics community has unfortunately become tainted by a sort of toxic fondness for “non-triviality” and “purity”, i.e. by a fondness for complexity for complexity’s sake regardless of any consideration of tangible merit.
Despite the fact that Boole’s work was what allowed the study of logic to finally break free from syllogistic logic, and the more than 1000 years of intellectual stagnation that accompanied it, later logicians and mathematicians likely viewed Boole’s work as too simple and therefore too “trivial” to deserve the credit for founding set theory. It was only after Cantor’s publication of his theory of transfinite numbers that mathematicians finally came to view set theory as “non-trivial” enough to merit crediting anybody with founding it. In other words, Cantor’s work tickled mathematicians’ egos more than Boole’s work did. Thus, Cantor was unjustly credited with founding set theory.
Another point to consider is that set theory is a branch of logic and, if you think about it, logic is really about studying the underlying laws and principles by which valid inferences can be made. Yet, if you look at Cantor’s theories, you will notice that they are not even about the laws and principles of valid inference. They are about properties of infinite sets. Therefore, Cantor cannot possibly be the founder of set theory.
— Jesse Bollinger
Anyway, here’s the next part, where floridian321 yet again (as usual) misrepresents me:
Anyhow, one of the "arguments" against Cantor's theory (p. 126) is that "Ludwig Wittgenstein opposed it." This is simply false.
— floridian321
Firstly, the claim that Ludwig Wittgenstein never opposed Cantor is not false. No person with the slightest clue of the history and controversy surrounding Cantor’s theories would ever claim that. One of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s most famous quotes among mathematicians is one that is very clearly and obviously casting intense doubt on Cantor’s theories! The quote occurred in the context of a dialogue with Hilbert. Here’s the exchange between them, featuring a quote straight from Wittgenstein’s own mouth:
David Hilbert: "No one will drive us from the paradise which Cantor created for us." Ludwig Wittgenstein: "If one person can see it as a paradise of mathematicians, why should not another see it as a joke?"
Does that sound like Wittgenstein never opposed Cantor’s theory to you? 🤣
I can’t believe the gall of this reviewer sometimes. When will the lies ever stop?
Furthermore, as if that’s not enough, at no point do I ever use Wittgenstein’s (or anyone else’s) beliefs about Cantor’s theory as any kind of evidence against it. Popularity and citations of famous people’s subjective opinions never constitute evidence! At best, such citations give one reason to pause and consider one’s view, given that such citations indicate that some significant thinkers have doubted the idea. That was all I cited Ludwig Wittgenstein for (alongside citing many other more authoritative people). Wittgenstein’s opinion was never claimed to be evidence. It would be foolish to cite opinions as fact in such a shallow and unsubstantive way.
Here, in contrast, is the actual passage from the book, on page 126:
Cantor’s theories were the subject of much controversy and were opposed by at least several other notable mathematicians, and also by some people outside of the mathematics community.
Leopold Kronecker, Henri Poincaré, Hermann Weyl, and Luitzen Brouwer were among the most prominent mathematicians to oppose Cantor’s theory. Outside of mathematics, the famous philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein also opposed Cantor’s theory. In addition, many logicians and mathematicians who lived before Cantor’s time held views that likely would have stood in opposition to Cantor’s views. For example, both Carl Friedrich Gauss and Aristotle would likely have not viewed Cantor’s use of infinity as acceptable, because both believed that infinity could have at most a potential existence and thus that infinity could only ever be approached but never actually reached.
Cantor’s theory of infinities is one of the beloved darlings of the mathematics community. It’s one of those things that puts sparkles in the eyes of many mathematicians. The idea that some infinite sets could contain a larger number of elements than other infinite sets is so counterintuitive that it’s shocking. It’s the kind of thing that makes a great story, and since the dawn of history people have always loved a great story. It’s like the mathematics equivalent of a campfire legend.
However, just because something makes a great story does not make it actually useful, nor does it even make it meaningful. You see, one of the problems with transfinite numbers is that it is physically impossible to ever actually construct one. Not only that, but it is also impossible to ever find a practical real-world application for one. In other words, transfinite numbers cannot ever generate any tangible external value for our fellow human beings. They are, in effect, worthless.
In stark contrast, George Boole’s foundational studies into the basic properties of sets and how they interact with each other are profoundly useful and indeed one can scarcely even open one’s eyes without seeing examples of the tangible value those theories have generated for humanity.
— Jesse Bollinger
Notice how the real text has a totally different tone and nature than floridian321 wants you to believe. See how he/she conveniently omits all the most critical information and then blatantly lies by implying that Ludwig Wittgenstein’s arbitrary opinion is the entire basis of my opinion? See how in reality I mentioned Wittgenstein’s view only in passing, and only as random interesting trivia? This is obvious from the text. Never is this frivolous trivia ever used as an argument, contrary to what floridian321 claims.
Do you think a legitimate reviewer, one whose goal is respect for the truth and providing accurate and useful guidance for potential readers, would ever behave so deceptively and unscrupulously?
Anyway though, relatedly, here’s the next part of floridian321’s review:
The objections to infinity (p. 126 again) are just plain silly. Sorry Jesse, you had this coming.
— floridian321
The objections I pose to infinity are anything but “silly”. In reality I gave multiple direct logical arguments for my finitistic position at various points, which collectively provide yet another demonstration that floridian321 is deliberately and maliciously misrepresenting me. For example, here’s a nice succinct footnote where I summarized one of the biggest problems with sloppy use of the concept of infinity:
Briefly, for example: Cantor’s diagonal argument is only possible by assuming the existence of “complete infinities”. However, by mathematical induction, no amount of adding new elements to a set can ever make the set reach a complete infinity. At every moment the set remains finite, no matter how long the process is performed. Allowing “complete infinities” can thus be argued to be self contradictory, a violation of mathematical induction, and hence nonsensical. Completeness and infiniteness are actually inherently incompatible properties, contrary to popular belief. Groupthink currently prevents progress though, unfortunately.
— Jesse Bollinger
Basically, no amount of repeatedly adding any finite number of objects onto an existing finite list of objects can ever make the list become infinite, and thus the popular notion that “complete infinity” is somehow a trustworthy concept is thus actually very questionable and doubtful. The notion that you can just say a list “continues forever” and hence that “infinity exists” is not well-founded, despite how popular it is. The leap from finite list to infinite list cannot just be waved away. There’s no real justification for it.
The idea of a complete infinity dominates and persists primarily for social reasons, not for logical ones. Self-perpetuating feedback loops (e.g. the huge popularity of the idea of complete infinity, suppression of dissent through incessant baseless ridicule to ensure alternatives are never widely considered, massive conflicts of interest due to tons of research papers’ validity (and hence also many/most mathematicians’ careers) depending on it, etc) are what actually appear to keep things that way. The prolific use of “complete infinity” throughout so much of math is also the source of many bizarre conclusions that very blatantly make little to no real sense (e.g. the Banach–Tarski paradox) to anyone who hasn’t yet been sufficiently brainwashed or browbeaten by the dominant infinitary dogma.
Finitism is actually a stricter mathematical theory than theories that accept “complete infinity” are. That means that finitism actually has more credibility because it makes fewer baseless assumptions. Because finitism is a minority view though, it is often systematically suppressed and smeared by people in power in the mathematics community, despite it actually having a more philosophically careful foundation. Nobody has ever created a real infinite object for example, and “complete infinity” also has a very strong tendency towards creating an abundance of esoteric nonsense that is (unlike strictly finite ideas) impossible to derive any real-world value from.
What’s actually “silly” here, floridian321, is that you seem to think that the mere fact that you hold a popular opinion somehow magically entitles you to the right to dismiss all opposing positions, no matter how much reasoning and evidence they are presented with, based solely on a kind of pompous indignation at the notion that anyone would ever dare to question the status quo.
Tradition is not evidence, floridian321. The mere fact that someone’s view differs from a tradition that you just randomly happen to hold does not constitute a sound and reasonable basis for dismissing and ridiculing their arguments. So, here I am, systematically exposing the underlying baseless and toxic nature of your fraud–riddled review, with an abundance of direct quotes that undeniably prove beyond any doubt that you have malicious and deceptive intent. Sorry floridian321, you had this coming.
(And remember, again, floridian321, that none of this text here is “ad hominem”, because none of it is irrelevant to the point or maliciously unrepresentative, unlike almost everything your review claims about me and my book, in stark contrast.)
Anyway, here (mercifully…) is floridian321’s final point. Naturally, it is yet another shameless misrepresentation of my work:
(6) Speaking of giving credit where due, because there is no index I have no idea whether Frege is given proper credit for developing modern logic, specifically, the correct theory of quantification in first-order logic-- the function-argument correlation and stacking quantifiers, which broke away from two thousand years of Aristotle's syllogisms.
— floridian321
And so, of course, as expected, here’s me literally giving Frege credit, at least three different times in my book:
In fact, long ago, logicians set out to attempt to reframe all of mathematics in terms of pure logic but ultimately failed to do so. This movement was known as logicism. Gottlob Frege, Richard Dedekind, Bertrand Russell, and Alfred North Whitehead were historically some of the main proponents of this theory.
— Jesse Bollinger
modern classical logic as we know it today took shape mainly through the work of George Boole, Augustus De Morgan, and Gottlob Frege during the 19th century (i.e. approximately between 1800 CE to 1900 CE). However, many modern logicians and mathematicians probably wouldn’t immediately recognize the older notations as classical logic, unless they are already sufficiently familiar with the history.
— Jesse Bollinger
In contrast to Boole’s notation though, Gottlob Frege used a notation for logic that would likely be even more difficult to recognize for those only familiar with the modern notation. Frege invented a rather peculiar and quirky notation for logic which he called his “concept script”. The notation used branching connected lines and roughly resembled a left-justified tree diagram or electrical circuit diagram with symbols for logical variables attached at various points.
Frege’s notation was too unwieldy and eccentric and is now extinct in modern usage. That’s natural selection for you though. Awkward and wasteful systems tend to die out and get replaced by more graceful and efficient alternatives over time. However, notation aside, Frege still made some major contributions to the axiomatic treatment of classical logic. Frege is also well-known for his attempt at deriving all of the laws of arithmetic from purely logical principles, in his book series Grundgesetze der Arithmetik.
— Jesse Bollinger
Plus, I already explained why there’s no index for the book. The biggest reason was that the page count was already almost the maximum of what CreateSpace (now merged with KDP) allowed, and hence adding an index was literally impossible to do. Indices are also seldom used in the modern era, waste tons of paper (harming the environment and thus also endangering humanity), and digital text search is far superior anyway.
(Also: When publishing the book on Amazon I set the available options to give free ebook copies to all paperback purchasers, but I’m not sure if that still works. Amazon changes things unexpectedly and often doesn’t tell us authors.)
Furthermore, floridian321’s crediting of Frege with “[breaking] away from two thousand years of Aristotle’s syllogisms” before Boole is also mostly wrong. It’s not even hard to check either. The reason why floridian321 is saying that is probably because in the book I gave Boole the most credit, so by trying to assign it to Frege instead floridian321 is trying to undermine me by making readers think I don’t understand basic historical facts.
I’m not the one who doesn’t understand basic historical facts though.
Here’s the lifespans of George Boole and Gottlob Frege:
George Boole: 1815 to 1864
GottLob Frege: 1848 to 1925
Boole published his work (in ~1847), which introduced a new system of reasoning with sets (i.e. set theory long before Cantor), which then replaced the proceeding ancient syllogistic logic of Aristotle, long before Frege did (in ~1879). Frege played a very important role in logic’s development too of course (I gave him high praise multiple times!), but Boole was earlier and I think more important in setting the momentum rolling. Boole was also more relevant in the context of the set-based existential theory that Unified Logic focuses on, which is why Boole is mentioned at greater length. Frege is still given plenty of due credit though, as directly proven above.
As usual though, floridian321 is just outright lying. He/she is just insinuating whatever seems most likely to harm me, regardless of if any of it has any connection to reality. This is a classic example of a “bad faith” review. It is almost pure slander.
—
That covers floridian321’s review of my book. We are almost done now.
There’s just one more important point that needs to be made, which is that floridian321’s bias actually extends far beyond my own book. How do I know this though? I know because I found evidence of it in one of floridian321’s reviews of someone else’s math book. (I had a hunch that floridian321’s highly biased and toxic attitude was probably not isolated to me, but was probably a personality pattern.)
The book in question is The Math Myth: And Other STEM Delusions by Andrew Hacker.
floridian321 begins by ridiculing the book just for having a chapter in it whose length (11%, as a percentage of the whole book) differs from what floridian321 thinks it should be. He/she wants more of the kind of content found in that chapter and then condemns the fact that the remainder of the book is focused elsewhere, framing the criticism as if having a smaller proportion of floridian321’s own personally preferred content is akin to some kind of sinister attempt at price gouging on the part of the author.
This is despite it being pretty clear in context that the book isn’t intended to focus on that kind of material. In other words, honoring the author’s intended purpose for the text doesn’t seem to matter to floridian321, because he/she seems to think that everyone else’s actions and thoughts should always revolve around floridian321’s very specific desires and tastes, or else surely any person not conforming to that must be worthy of mockery and demonization. Sounds familiar, right?
Anyway though, just before mounting this disproportionate and bizarre attack on the book, floridian321 attributes the following praise to his/herself:
If you're like me and pay attention only to the part where an author offers practical solutions to problems raised
— floridian321
Uhhh… Are we talking about the same floridian321 here? Because, it seems to me like floridian321’s real focus when judging authors is almost entirely on insisting on rigid ideological conformity, but dressing that up like a kind of fake concern for academic and/or personal integrity to make it sound more convincing to the ears of uninformed bystanders.
What’s extra weird about all this though is that despite so often pretending to be some kind of vigilante protecting the future and dignity of higher level mathematics, there’s actually strong evidence in floridian321’s review that he/she is one of those people who thinks that higher level math skills generally shouldn’t be taught in schools (i.e. that he/she is one of the “When are we going to ever use this?” people). Consider this telling quote, for example:
complicated mathematics will hold back lots and lots of high school kids who only want to go on to "regular jobs" and [who] entertain no notion [whatsoever] that they'll be winning a Nobel Prize for fixing a leaky faucet, getting dovetailed joints to fit properly, and the like.
— floridian321
Isn’t it odd that someone who portrays themselves as a defender of the future of advanced mathematics has such a negative view of any advanced math being taught in schools? Isn’t anti-intellectualism a strange position for such a supposed person to hold? And what’s with the fixed mindset, elitism, and the implication that some kids are somehow inherently inferior to others? That seems pretty toxic to me.
And, that’s not all. Look at what floridian321 thinks is the nature of advanced mathematics:
advanced mathematics -- where everything is by and large decidable according to an algorithm
— floridian321
This is quite a strange claim, because it is essentially exactly backwards.
The most advanced forms of mathematics are among the most likely to not be decidable by an algorithm, because they are often computationally intractable or require very high level and nuanced reasoning that necessitates substantial human assistance and guidance.
There’s also the popular and famous Godel’s incompleteness theorem to consider, of course, which most mathematicians believe in, and which says that for a sufficiently complicated system it can never be decided. For someone like floridian321, who is pretending to be a defender of the integrity of the status quo of math, this is quite an odd stance, since it actually directly contradicts the currently dominant ideology.
(As a finitist though, admittedly, my own view of Godel’s theory is complicated and non-conforming, but that’s a story for another day.)
In any case though, if you still don’t think that something is fishy about floridian321’s pretense of being a defender of intellectualism, check out the following quote:
As to math kids being smarter, well, they're smarter in a bookish sort of way, which is not to say that they have more common sense than the kids who can't figure out the binomial theorem. They probably have less common sense (on average) because they harbor the delusion that a problem either boils down to numbers or it's gibberish -- which in philosophy is called "Positivism."
— floridian321
This is yet more signs of anti-intellectualism, among other things. Notice also that the tone is tellingly that of an outsider looking down their nose at not just mathematicians but all intellectuals, and not just adults but young children too.
floridian321’s review stereotypes all book-smart people as inherently lacking “common sense” and being out of touch with the world (i.e. as “egg heads“), even though in reality “common sense” is actually an independent factor that’s separate from someone’s book-smartness entirely. But, anti-intellectuals who love to hate on the “nerds” still love to use this kind of toxic rhetoric regardless.
Notice also floridian321’s view that positivism (aka arguably the philosophical foundation of most of science and math) is a “delusion”. This seemingly innocent-looking statement actually says a lot about what floridian321’s real loyalties are. It’s kind of a smoking gun that floridian321 is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It means he/she is very likely a fake intellectual.
You see, here’s the thing: Positivism rejects all untestable claims as either invalid or useless, and thus rejects almost all religious claims (e.g. “Does a intelligent entity entirely outside the physical world exist?”) and “metaphysical”/epistemological claims (e.g. “Does the universe exist only in my own mind?”) as being essentially inherently worthless to pursue.
Rejecting positivism is thus one of the most common rhetorical strategies of people who are deeply hostile to science. Basically, the pattern is that some people desperately want an excuse to continue believing in one or more things that are impossible to scientifically justify (such as religion or solipsism) and thus resort to trying to undermine and/or destroy the foundations of science itself. Post-modernism, for example, originates from this same kind of underlying hatred for (and lack of understanding of) scientific positivism.
In other words, this seemingly innocent looking quote gives pretty good reason not just to doubt floridian321’s credibility for judging my book or Hacker’s book, but also for floridian321’s credibility for anything having to do with science or logic whatsoever. It’s also pretty strongly suggests that floridian321 is likely highly religious and/or is very fond of one or more untestable “metaphysical”/epistemological claims. Scientific positivism is largely focused on what is falsifiable (i.e. testable), and that tends to make people who are very attached to irrational authoritarian or religious beliefs feel threatened. Perhaps that’s part (or all) of why he/she hates me so much: because I so sharply and so succinctly illustrate the inherent ill-foundedness of that kind of nonsense very clearly early on in my book.
To make an analogy: Would you trust someone who hates all Italian food to recommend you the best Italian restaurant in town or to rate it?
That’s what floridian321 is doing, in a sense.
And with that, I conclude my analysis of floridian321’s reviews and clearly evident toxic behavior. I think I have sufficiently beaten this dead horse at this point honestly. I do what I have to do to defend myself from charlatans and toxic people though.
It’s unfortunate that it takes so much more time and energy to defend against these kinds of misleading and toxic claims than it does for these people to create and spread them though.
Amazon Customer rated 1/5 on June 23, 2021
I remember seeing this review and admiring the honesty and authenticity of it, despite the fact that it takes a very negative view of my book. When I first saw it, the review had only one helpful vote, but then I also voted it helpful myself, bringing the total up to two. At the time of me writing this blog post, I believe it has three helpful votes now. This review is a lot younger than floridian321’s review, but it is far more deserving of a higher ranking since it is so much more constructive and contains no apparent intent to harm to or deceive. This is a “good faith” review I think, probably.
It seems clear from the tone and content of the review that the reviewer is very likely trying to be honest and trying to engage with the material as best they could manage to.
There’s nothing wrong with a negative review as long as it is not deceptive or malicious in nature. So, I really appreciate this reviewer’s time and efforts in communicating their thoughts! 🙂
That being said, I don’t agree with the assessment the reviewer makes of the book and I will explain why its claims about the book don’t actually stand up to closer scrutiny. There’s a few big issues here. I’ll start with perhaps the biggest one:
The entirety of the criticism contained in this review addresses only the first chapter of the book (pages 19 through 67 of the 2019 revision of the book, 49 total pages of the book, not to be confused with the preface/intro).
I suspect that this is because the reviewer has assumed that if the first chapter doesn’t seem valid then the rest of the book must not be either (like a chain of dominoes falling over). Such things are often true of mathematical proofs, for example, but the book actually has a much broader scope than that and very many things it discusses don’t really depend on the first chapter.
So, since the book is 800+ pages long, this implies that this review only covers about 6% of the ideas contained in the book. It is thus very unrepresentative of the whole and omits an absolutely massive amount of other completely unrelated ideas from all consideration or mention, in a way that is very likely to mislead many readers. The review makes it sound like this tiny fraction of the book is the entirety of it.
This is the only aspect of this person’s review that makes me pause and wonder if maybe the review was made in “bad faith” after all. However, I suspect that the reviewer assumed that the rest of the book wouldn’t hold up and thus probably didn’t actually have ill intentions. I could be wrong though. It could be malicious, potentially. I’m no mind reader. I’ll let you be the judge.
Anyway, the other major problem with the review is that the reviewer clearly doesn’t have a conceptually correct understanding of how the set-based approach to evaluating truth in the book is supposed to work.
The review is conflating and confusing multiple things and is even making a mistake I specifically warned users to be careful of making, which is subconsciously switching back to a traditional statement-based system instead of the set-based system the book uses and thereby invaliding and confusing the results through a fallacy of equivocation. It’s apparent that this reviewer falls straight into that.
Here’s some specific issues, quoted directly from the review:
The author argues that physical objects are the correct bearers of truth (ie truth is not a property of sentences). Based on examples, it seems the author really means that *categories* of physical objects
— Amazon Customer
No, I meant exactly what I said. The objects themselves are the bearers of truth, which also implies that sets of objects are too. What exactly that means has to be addressed very carefully though (as is done in the book) and cannot be skimmed through hastily without destroying one’s ability to understand the very nuanced point being made.
The habits of the traditional view are so ingrained in people’s minds that it is very easy to slip back into them accidentally, but you must not do so to understand it successfully. The axioms of this system of truth are very different from classical logic.
The author doesn't seem to notice that a trivial implication of this theory is that no falsehoods exist (everything is true), since falsehood is that which does not exist, by definition.
— Amazon Customer
OK… So, this is a very important point to understand: The reviewer is actually equivocating here without realizing it. He/she is slipping back into classical reasoning here, even though Unified Logic intentionally isn’t compatible with classical assumptions.
It’s like if a programmer tried to pass C code into a Python interpreter. The result would be nonsense (a bunch of “errors”) and wouldn’t seem to make sense. But it would be wrong to then use this outcome as reason to believe that C isn’t a valid programming language.
That’s the exact same thing this reviewer is doing throughout most of his review. I don’t blame him/her much though, because it is very easy to fall into this trap, since rigidly classical thinking is so ingrained in every aspect of how math is taught and has been taught for centuries. Other choices of axioms lead to different (but still often logically valid) consequences though, and Unified Logic is one such system.
You see, contrary to the reviewer’s implication, it actually is true that only true things exist. When’s the last time that you saw a case where 2 + 2 = 5 or filled your glass with dry water? You can’t think of any times you’ve had such encounters, right? That’s because falsehoods don’t exist. They never can. That’s not an error. That’s the point! It’s objectively and observably true!
In stark contrast though, false statements do exist, but that’s only because those statements don’t reflect an accurate view of what things do or do not actually exist in the logical system under consideration. Truth itself always depends upon existence and actually makes no sense in the absence of it. Existence and truth are actually one and the same thing. False statements are thus just ways of referring to things that fail to actually end up pointing to anything that is real or at least logically coherent.
To conflate these two different things (actual truth/falsehood, which is always about the existence or non-existence of things or properties in a real system) and statements (which are in contrast just ways (possibly ill-formed!) of talking about such systems) is to commit equivocation and thus to invalidate your results. That’s the trap the reviewer is falling into, the exact trap that I warned readers not to fall into.
People who skim or speed read documents though are likely to miss many such warnings and nuances, but every single sentence I write in the book is potentially absolutely critical to the point, as is very common in formal logic and math.
Unified Logic‘s approach in this respect is actually just a way of modelling this objective fact of reality explicitly in the system of reasoning instead of leaving it unexpressible. Making it possible to consciously work with this fact instead of always glossing over it sloppily is necessary in some cases. The liar’s paradox is just one of those cases. Not acknowledging that only true things exist creates a blind spot that leads to subtle errors!
Anyway though, here’s the next problem:
Unfortunately, this definition gives no way to handle negation. What if I say "the chair is not next to the table"?
— Amazon Customer
On the contrary, it’s very easy to handle negation in set-based reasoning (Unified Logic is basically just an extended version of basic set theory). You just negate the set, or one or more of the conditions describing its members, depending on what exact sense of negation you want to express. That’s just standard math.
Basically, the reviewer is getting confused about the relationship between truth and existence again here. The fact that no false objects (e.g. places where 2 + 2 = 5) exist in the universe does not imply in any way whatsoever that logical negation would no longer make sense anymore. That’s what the reviewer’s criticism here is actually based on though. They’ve got themselves tangled up in a big mess of equivocation caused by trying to evaluate a non-classical system of logic using classical rules, thus resulting in an abundance of confusion and incorrect conclusions.
To answer the reviewers question, if you say that the chair is not next to the table then you’re creating a set whose conditions for membership match those criteria. If objects can be found that match those criteria, then the set is non-empty and hence “true”, whereas otherwise it is empty and hence “false”. This part of Unified Logic is no different than standard set theory. You just evaluate the conditions when filling the set. There is no problem here. The reviewer is just confused. That is all.
For his theory to ever judge such sentences true, he needs there to be an object which exists which bears witness to the non-existence of another object. He does not discuss this.
— Amazon Customer
No. There is zero reason in Unified Logic to think that any special object ever needs to exist to bear witness to the non-existence of another object. I’m not sure where the reviewer is getting this strange notion from. It’s a pretty bizarre non-sequitur.
We would have a statement, which exists tangibly only as a bunch of symbols on a page or as thoughts within our mind (the “syntactic set“), which expresses that a set is empty and hence that its referent objects (the “semantic set”) are non-existent. That (the “syntactic set”) is the only “object” that needs to exist here, but that fact alone is not enough to justify conflating the existence of the statement (e.g. ink on paper expressing an allegedly true logical idea) with the actual existence or non-existence of the real objects to which that statement attempts to refer.
It is critical to not confuse these two things. Statements are not the same thing as the objects to which they refer! This is undeniably and observably true. Yet, classical logic is often riddled with this mistake. The reviewer is making that exact same mistake, i.e. is subconsciously and subtly treating statements as being the same thing as the referent objects. I discussed the nuances of this at great length in the book! Readers need to be very careful about this! ⚠
his theory (as stated) implies that all negations are not true
— Amazon Customer
This is not true! I even give many examples of negations that are true throughout the book!
For example, just take any set that is empty and then negate it and that’s a true negation under Unified Logic, since it refers to objects that do exist (specifically the universal set, i.e. the set of everything).
Basically, the reviewer here is confusing negation with falsehood. Negation and falsehood are not the same thing at all! Not all negations imply falsehood! That’s true even in classical logic. That’s just standard logic and mathematics, to which Unified Logic happens to agree in this specific case. It is not necessary for something to be false for it to be a valid negation of something else! No wonder then that the reviewer is so confused by my book!
And, here’s even more corroborating evidence of this confusion:
since (to evaluate to true) every item in the semantic set is required to exist, negations must generally evaluate to false in his theory.
— Amazon Customer
No. There is no basis for this claim. There’s nothing whatsoever in my theory that implies that negations must generally evaluate to false. In fact, there are many examples of true negations given throughout the book! The reviewer just doesn’t understand that negation and falsehood aren’t the same. Not all negations are false. Negation is an operator not a truth value. Negation and falsehood are not synonyms.
Mostly likely, the unfamiliarity of my stricter approach to distinguishing statements from the objects to which they refer (which in contrast is treated very sloppily in classical logic) caused the reviewer to get confused when trying to reconcile the subtle differences between Unified Logic‘s and classical logic‘s systems of truth.
Immediately thereafter, the reviewer says this:
he misses this implication, and (when he wants) uses special-case evaluation of negations to make them come out true (as he sees fit).
— Amazon Customer
No. I don’t use any special case evaluation for this. My system is just set theory‘s basic operators with some extensions added on and a different way of interpreting the results afterwards (e.g. treating object existence itself (not statements) as the basis of truth). The way things are evaluated is the same basic way that standard set theory evaluates things. None of it is based on messing with results via special cases. My system applies the same standards of reasoning to everything. The results are not being artificially manipulated.
And then he concludes the meat of his review as follows:
This is critical to his resolution of the liar paradox: the sentence in question is "This sentence is false", so he translates it has having an empty semantic set (which he equates with it being false). But, it seems to me, this relies on the same reasoning by which all negations are false in his theory!
— Amazon Customer
This is just the same mistakes from earlier being made again.
Negation is not the same thing as falsehood. Negation is an operator, not a truth value. There are many negative statements that are true! I even gave a multitude of examples in the book, but alas it seems likely that this reviewer stopped reading after chapter 1, since the entirety of his/her review addresses only chapter 1 and mentions nothing else whatsoever. Most likely this was not done maliciously though, but simply pragmatically.
Also, the deeper foundation for the reviewer’s claim here is still based on a view of Unified Logic‘s existence-based truth system that incorrectly conflates that system with how statement-based truth systems behave, in much the same sense that you can’t run C code in a Python interpreter and then expect to get results that make any sense.
This is one of the most common reasons for people not understanding my book: not understanding that the assumptions the book is based on are fundamentally different from classical logic and that you cannot ever judge a non-classical system of logic using classical assumptions. That is standard logic and math: You must always honor the axioms of every system you evaluate, otherwise you are not comparing apples to apples and hence your conclusions are invalid.
Still, the book is not totally not thought provoking. I appreciate the style in which it is written, and the chutzpah of taking on these issues.
— Amazon Customer
Thanks! I appreciate you sharing your thoughts with me and engaging with my work in an intellectually honest way! Negativity is fine as long as it is not misleading or toxic.
Anyway though, that basically covers most all of what I wanted to say about these specific reviews! As you can see, quite a few of the reviews above have some major problems, especially (1) the abundance of reviews that falsely claim the book is defective (simply because those people don’t understand what a fixed format PDF-like document is) and (2) floridian321’s very misleading and toxic review, which can be easily proven to contain an abundance of lies and misrepresentations (i.e. slander or libel) that directly contradict direct quotes from the book, among other toxic qualities.
There are a few other reviews, but I will not cover them each specifically here. This document is already overly long already. I lost track of how long the article actually became over the several days that I worked on it off and on. Sorry about that. Oh well though, no big deal.
As such, I will now conclude with just a few general catchall remarks.
General remarks on malicious feedback
The biggest point that comes to mind now that I’m wrapping up this article, having dissected so many of the reviews in such great depth, is a fact of nature that I’ve encountered multiple times in life: It is usually much easier to destroy or vandalize something than it is to create or purify something.
Look at the difference in word volume, effort, and time between what it probably took for these misleading negative reviews to be written (very little to no effort, most are just a sentence or two, none give adequate context) compared to what I had to do here to capture all the myriad aspects of how exactly the reviews are misleading and to untangle them in a clear and easy to understand way.
This is analogous to the difference between how easy it is to spill a glass of wine on someone’s carpet versus what it takes for the owner of that carpet to clean up the resulting mess and put things back the way they were before.
Except, instead of just dealing with the potential mess that one person could create, I have to deal with constantly being vulnerable to an unlimited number of people, some of whom (like floridian321) may have huge conflicts of interest and may be very motivated to write dishonest and misleading reviews. The book has still primarily received a positive response, but toxic reviews are still very disheartening and have done a lot of harm in terms of turning away potential readers unjustly and probably also encouraging some additional negative reviews among uninformed viewers of the product page (e.g. like self-perpetuating downvotes on Reddit maybe).
There’s also the common advice people have of just not responding to reviews at all to consider. If all the negative reviews were honest and constructive, then that advice could work. Unfortunately though, I have the misfortune (due to writing about a controversial subject probably) of attracting a bunch of deliberately deceptive and malicious attention to me. And thus here I am, being slandered by a minority of readers and online commentators who have no clue what they are actually talking about.
Such is life though, and one can only do what is in one’s control (I’m a big fan of philosophical Stoicism). And so here I am, simply doing my best to defend myself against those parts of what people say about me and my work that are simply flat out wrong and malicious.
Society is often very wrong about the assumptions it makes. Every era of people thinks that they’ve finally arrived at approximately the pinnacle of truth and that thus any weird new idea they encounter therefore must probably be wrong. This is a very ill-founded way of thinking though. Every era of humanity has been proven wrong about this point, and I see no reason why that’s would stop anytime soon. There’s still a lot more to the truth to be discovered! Most people make assumptions way too fast.
This whole experience has really greatly clarified why it is that new ideas in history so often stagnate for so long before slowly eventually breaking through. The social dynamics, prejudices, and gatekeeping behaviors of society make protecting and giving an adequately large enough audience for new ideas is very challenging. New ideas attract controversy, opponents seldom ever play fair, and the person (or people) with the new idea(s) is almost always at a big disadvantage in terms of numbers, status, and influence. Yet, the truth remains what it is, regardless of humanity’s irrational tendencies.
I can only hope that this (and any other actions I may take in the future) will be enough to somehow tip the scale enough towards fairness (and away from mindless conformance to the status quo and to unquestioned traditions and authoritarianism) so that merit, and not merely prejudice and sabotage, will be the deciding factor in which ideas from the book live or die, just as it should be.
Also, I want to point out that I wouldn’t be surprised if some malicious commentator (after seeing this) uses the mere length of the article as a basis for dismissing all the abundant substantive points it makes. They are likely to attempt some kind of irrelevant character assassination, like “Look at how long this article is! The author is clearly unhinged and is a terrible person! No good person could ever possibly write something so long to respond to reviews! Authors should never respond to readers’ claims! Authors must accept all criticism no matter what it is! He must be evil and hence all his ideas must be wrong!” (i.e. an ad hominem fallacy, the real kind) or something of a similar flavor or spirit.
Such rhetoric is very typical of toxic and illegitimate approaches to argumentation though. If this happens, it would be just yet another example of how vandalizing something is so much easier than actually addressing something substantively.
Indeed, there’s an abundance of other kinds of fallacious and biased attacks that some random person (or people) may make. There’s no surprise there. It is ironic though that the kinds of people who do these things are exactly the people who would most benefit from properly absorbing the ideas in the book in an intellectually honest way. It could do them a lot of good to broaden their perspectives more and question their myriad unjustified assumptions more carefully.
Some basic human decency would sure be nice though. I get pretty tired of the barrage of blatant lies and lazy prejudices that constitute like 90% of the negative commentary I receive (so far). I’m not sure if some of these people understand how much writing this book cost me in terms of my life. I gave up a lot to write it (half a decade of my life or more in terms of domino effect, significant derailment of my career, many years of poverty, most of my late 20s and youth, etc), and I did it because I wanted to make a difference in the world. I just wanted make things a little better for everyone by making a real impact by creating and sharing some genuinely new ideas.
Actions have consequences. Bad-natured and unethical reviews cause real harm, not just to the author but to everyone the work could have directly or indirectly helped. The impact is actually huge when you consider all the (essentially unlimited) chain reactions and ripple effects of cause and effect that every action causes.
We as people have a responsibility to make ethical choices as custodians of the future. People should think about that before they act. It’s not hard to adhere to basic ethics in one’s choices. I strive to live according to such principles in how I treat other people in my life and likewise I want to be treated with that same basic sense of ethics from others (e.g. the golden rule). This shouldn’t be so hard.
I shouldn’t have to fight so hard just to not be trampled by blatantly obvious and easily disprovable inaccuracies. I shouldn’t have to suffer for things that I literally haven’t even done, nor for things that exist only in other people’s imaginations. I shouldn’t be punished for other people’s own mistakes and biases as if they were mine.
I ask only for fairness and thoughtfulness and to not be unjustly slandered or sabotaged. You would want the same thing as well, if you were in my position.
General remarks on constructive feedback
To all my supporters, thank you very much! I appreciate the discussions we’ve had over email and also the many very positive 5 star ratings you’ve left for my book. There’s a few people who have also written reviews that express some of the value the book provides and also even some stuff that counteracts some of the misinformation of a few of the other reviews too. I really appreciate that!
I do wish more of my positive supporters would leave text reviews instead of just star ratings (although I still appreciate the star ratings very much!). That would help a lot with counterbalancing the misleading and toxic reviews. It has been pretty unfortunate luck that more of that hasn’t happened yet. It would be very helpful, both for potential readers (to counteract misinformation) and for my personal peace of mind.
It’s pretty hard for me to fight this battle on my own. It would be good if more people would stand up against the status quo and be more openly supportive. I understand the fear some people have of the dominant ideology though. That kind of ambient social pressure makes people more shy about openly supporting new ideas, even when the merit is clearly evident. More people should question more assumptions! That’s how progress happens, not just in science but in all of life! So much is taken for granted without any real justification, when there are often actually many interesting alternatives! My book is just one such exploration!
Anyway though, it has been an honor to have what support you all have given me though, and it is heartening that the positive and constructive readers still outnumber the negative ones. I’m very grateful for what I do have, even despite all the struggles and pain that have come with it. I still believe very much that the truth will win out and that many of the ideas in the book will ultimately make a good impact.
Many people are not falling for the slander! Some people can sense the underlying hatred, toxicity, and insincerity behind it (e.g. floridian321’s highly deceitful review especially). That’s something to celebrate at least! Integrity and kindness still prevails, at least for now, and hopefully forever!
Finally though, regardless of where you stand (positive, neutral, or negative), I really appreciate the time and efforts of everyone who has taken the time to read my book, to think about the ideas, and/or to share their feedback! I hope you all have a great day/night/week/year/etc! 📅😄👋