Science OS

Is there another kind of conjecture that children can make? Is not all conjecture made by children childish by definition?

More precisely, a NeXTStep machine. This system later became Mac OS X..

thatsthepoint.jpg

This is where the end began.

Actually, there is. Nothing prevents that a sufficiently smart and sufficiently educated kid or something like a young von Neumann would be able to formulate some mature conjecture about any topic. Nothing prevents Poincaré's conjecture from coming out of a child's mouth, but it's exceedingly unlikely. So there must be a difference between a "childish conjecture" and a "conjecture made by a child". That difference however, lies on the degree to which that particular conjecture is able to yield existing information to produce a conclusion and the degree of sophistication of that conclusion. The issue with kids is that since they don't usually have particularly good inferential skills and are usually either misinformed or completely uninformed about any given topic. So most of their conjectures are of the "back of the knee (maybe)"-tier.

Now, with all that in mind, telling someone to fuck off because they've said something stupid because they're misinformed about a narrow field of experience or because they didn't think about it is to be exceedingly cranky about it. So I think overreacted a bit to someone - not being an engineer. If that's enough reason to ban someone or tell someone to fuck off, might as well close this site. Heck, might as well close down the internet. Everyone is misinformed or didn't think properly about some topic, so they're bound to make a stupid comment about it. There's no point in getting rustled over it.