Post #1846799

@zwarich After he tragically passed away, the impact of his misinformation campaign was felt for many years. I started my PhD in the year he died (or the year before?), and it was not until the very end of my PhD that I could even say out loud things like “the syntax of type theory is initial” without people jumping on me and pointing out that a Great Man of Mathematics has said otherwise, and who are we to question it?? It made it very difficult to publish papers on type theory in those days. Some people who knew better just would pay homage to his misinformation, and write things like "Our results depend on a solution to Voevodsky's Conjecture" etc., and I understand why they did it to save their own skins, but this was naturally very damaging to the field. The questions he was raising had been resolved in 1978. I'm not joking. I had to be at war for three years straight. And then all of a sudden, sometime around 2021-2022, the scales fell away and people stopped bringing that shit up. It was kind of anti-climactic for me, but I am grateful now that I can say this shit out loud without getting jumped on.