Dear All,

I just thought of sharing with you all that Professor Johnstone, in his "Sketches of An Elephant", appears to be blind to the moral of the 'four blind men and the elephant' story (from which he borrowed the title of his book).  I have written to him, but didn't receive any reply.  I also shared my manuscript in which I spell-out his faulty reading of the story, but didn't receive any reply.  Sometime later, I published it: Gandhi's Satya: Truth entails Peace.  Having benefitted from his helpful answers to a number of my questions (e.g., subobject classifier, Yoneda lemma, universal element, natural transformation) over the years, I find it puzzling that it can be impossibly difficult to admit a minor misreading (or contest it).  This is all the more shocking in the context of Grothendieck insisting that Professor F. William Lawvere keep all the mistakes that Grothendieck made in his feverish writing (see pp. 7-8 in FAREWELL TO AURELIO).  Also, Professor F. William Lawvere wrote to me quite a few times that he made a mistake in one of his earlier emails during our quarter-century correspondence.  But, Professor Johnstone is in the good company of Nobel laureates like Kahneman.

I could be wrong, but given the prevailing vigilante-mode of moderation and editorial decisions, one way to document dissenting voices is to submit to a major journal and as soon as you get a manuscript number submit to an archive (we can't find fault with moderators/editors, but give them enough reason for approving for which they have to answer).  I remember reading John Maddox's editorial, accompanying Hoyle-Narlikar steady-state universe paper, in which he openly stated that he, as the Editor-in-Chief of Nature, decided to publish the steady-state universe paper without external review because he felt, given the popularity of Einstein, it would be next to impossible to get a fair review.  Now it all seems to have gotten worse, with editors begging pardon for removing, without informing the authors, published unpalatable online comments in the name of publishers' decision to reformat the journal (e.g., https://disqus.com/home/discussion/cell-press/dialogue_across_chasm_are_psychology_and_neurophysiology_incompatible_neuron/, https://disqus.com/home/discussion/pnascomments/opinion_compound_risks_and_complex_emergencies_require_new_approaches_to_preparedness/).  On a related note, one of my coauthors' paper questioning one of the gazillion mistakes of Einstein wasn't allowed to be uploaded to the physics preprint archive.

Summing it all, dissent is difficult (and not invariably correct 😉

Thanking you, yours truly, posina

p.s. i thought of suing Cambridge University for being party to cultural misappropriation (but i remembered losing a silly lawsuit i filled against my university, so I had to let go off the millions I could have bagged in compensation for the emotional trauma induced by Professor Johnstone's misreading 😉