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Indian Mathematician Takes Shot At Proving Riemann Hypothesis
First time accepted submitter jalfreize writes "Indian Mathematician Rohit Gupta (known by the moniker @fadesingh on twitter) has announced an online workshop which he intends to 'conclude by attacking an important problem in front of (the participants), in public view.' The problem is the Riemann Hypothesis, first proposed in 1859. Rohit outlines his approach based on quasicrystals first outlined by Freeman Dyson. His audacious plan, coupled with this recent news about quasicrystals, has kicked up a storm of interest in the Indian twitterverse."
Indians and math? Who said Indians can do math.... /epic troll
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Hot proof action! In public!
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Ramanujan said the goddess Lakshmi read the answers to him out of a book.
I won't hold my breath waiting on the proof.
But I certainly wish him the best.
There are thousands of proofs that begin with "Assuming the Riemann Hypothesis"
starting off with the first hint of such with your very own post too! very clever
This seems interesting but details are hard to find. All I can ascertain is that the fee is 4900 INR (~110 USD). The start date appears to be Oct 19th, but there's no estimate of the schedule except a listed end date of May 5th 2016. There's similarly no information about the delivery format. If anyone has more info, please post here.
...the only place you'll soon be able to afford medical care. :-P
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Looks like someone is trying to curry favor with the mods.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
He will talk about quasicrystals and the Riemann hypothesis, not lambda calculus.
Two of the major problems (Fermat's Last Theorum and the Poincaire Conjecture) have been cracked in recent times. A third major breakthrough is not impossible, particularly in a nation that has produced some superb minds in the past.
True, India has developed a bad reputation as a result of the call centers and the crappy software engineering, but that's like dissing the engineers developing the PCI Express and HyperTransport specifications because GM can't make a decent car or Bank of America can't provide anything remotely close to service. The subjects are wholly unrelated and you can draw no conclusions about one from the other. (India still runs a better train service than Amtrak, though that should not be considered credit to either.)
Mathematics doesn't require advanced infrastructure and is better done in peace with no distractions.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
As an American-born Asian Indian, I know the pain of real racism. But a lot of what people like you consider to be "racism" has absolutely nothing to do with actual racism, and in fact has nothing to do with race at all!
It's understandable why many people in Western nations have a bad opinion of Indians, especially when technology or science is involved. No, English-speaking Americans won't be happy at all when they call some tech support line, trying to get help with a critical problem, only to have some guy who speaks English horribly answer. It's worse when this fellow lies and claims that his name is "Steve", although it's clear from his heavy accent that that is not likely his name.
It also won't help the reputation of Indians when the aforementioned tech support calls don't actually resolve the problem, and are instead extremely tedious follow-the-script time wasting sessions. It's even worse for those of us who dealt with good, American-based tech support in the past. In the 1980s, I knew I could call a tech support hotline and get somebody who knew English and who knew the product, and I'd usually be off the phone with the problem resolved within 10 minutes. That has never happened since the major push to outsource call centers to India and other third-world countries.
For those people who have had to deal with off-shore outsourcing software developers in India, there'll be a whole new set of horrible experiences to recount. Whether it's the shitty quality of the software they produce, or whether it's the lies about the current progress, or whether it's just the overall ineptitude, it's almost never a good experience for the Americans.
Even the typical college student will likely have had to deal with an Indian professor or professor's assistant who speaks in a way that cannot be understood, or otherwise is unable to properly teach or assist with the course material.
So it should be clear why many Westerners don't hold Indians in high esteem. When the only interactions go extremely badly for the Westerners, all of the time, it's no wonder that they won't respect Indians, and won't want to deal with Indians. Making incorrect accusations of "racism" won't help the situation, either. Doing so totally ignores the root cause of the problem, which isn't race, but rather an endless stream of awful interactions.
Riemann Hypothesis Takes Shot At Crushing Indian Mathematician
The Riemann Hypothesis (known by the moniker @unsolvable on twitter) has announced an online workshop which it intends to 'conclude by attacking an important mathematician in front of (the participants), in public view.' The mathematician is the Rohit Gupta. The hypothesis outlines its approach based on previous failed attempts, conserved in quasicrystals of the tears of previously broken mathematicians. Its audacious plan, coupled with this recent news about quasicrystals, has kicked up a storm of interest in the Indian twitterverse.
I had an Indian professor for a couple of math classes (ring theory and group theory) back in the mid 1970s. I had no difficulty understanding his accent - it was the mathematics that gave me difficulties.
Geology - it's not rocket science; it's rock science
And the mods would like to have a little chaat with him.
I have great respect to mathematics. Itâ(TM)s one of the few disciplines left were bs doesnâ(TM)t fly (for long), unlike, for example, economics and political science.
This is a cheap publicity stunt, nothing more. Mathematics is not dancing with the stars or what not. This is a serious scientific problem a century and a half old. If you make a mistake in your âoeproofâ, the public wonâ(TM)t be able to notice. He hopes to be able to publicly claim success, even if his solution will be disproved later (with much less publicity). The proper way to do this is to publish your proof in a peer-reviewed journal and wait to see if other mathematicians find a flaw in your argument. His approach is cheap, unscientific publicity stunt.
I got bored this afternoon and did the proof a few different ways. Unfortunately, the details won't fit in this comment box.
Well, it looks like yours is the first...
Hey, the Foldit programmers were able to model protein structures for Foldit players to solve that even the most advanced computers couldn't.
Perhaps a quasi-crystal simulator that one can manipulate and this create mathematical solutions? (Not a mathematician so dunno if that's feasible)
That's sure not my experience with Indians. So what if someone on a call center doesn't know jack? Most of them here in the US don't either.
The Indian students here at the university I work at have always been excellent and fun to work with. (My fave joke from one of them: "The British gave us bureaucracy. But we PERFECTED it.")
WTF is an Indian twitterverse?
We won't be having naan of this around here!
Ice Cream has no bones.
Rohit Gupta: "I have a truly marvelous proof of the Riemann Hypothesis which this TV show is too short to contain. But at least I know I proved it."
---
Sometime in 1989 or very early 1990, I called Samna for help with their Ami Pro product. I believe it was bundled with a runtime of Windows 2.something. I was calling from Poland, no less, and, perhaps surprisingly, I had a legally obtained boxed product (smuggled from abroad). Not only did they agree with my bug report, but in about two weeks I've received a set of floppies with an updated version that had the bug fixed!! I will never forget that experience. I wish they weren't acquired and could independently develop their product. As I recall it was a rather easy to use editor.
I probably still have those floppies somewhere...
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Why would you do that? Are you interested in racism? Are you doing a research paper? Are you a racist?
I'm just curious why you would say such a thing. As you say yourself, such comments are not funny. So why the great interest? Are you making a list with a plan to wreak revenge on those who post racist comments?
Most people, when confronted with anonymous racist comments would just ignore them with disgust or mod them down if they had mod points. I'm not sure a "great interest" in racist comments is really healthy, fiannaFailMan. Better to focus on the good in man than the bad.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The Riemann Hypothesis is roughly the following: There's a function defined by zeta(s)= 1 + 1/1^s + 1/2^s + 1/3^s + 1/4^s... You can make this function make sense for any complex number as long as it has real part greater than 1. However, this series does not converge for s less than or equal to 1 1. However, it turns out that this function has what is called an "analytic continuation" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_continuation. Essentially it is possible to make a function on the complex plane that is smooth (in the sense of being infinitely differential), and agrees with this function everywhere. This function is known as the Riemman Zeta Function. The only caveat is that one cannot give a sensible definition for the value at s=1. (Essentially as s gets near 1, the value of the function goes to infinity).
It turns out that the behavior of zeta is deeply related to the prime numbers because of another way of writing the above series as a product over the prime numbers. So for example, a major triumph of 19th century math was showing that this function was not zero anywhere on the line with real part of s =1. This implied an approximate estimate for the size of the nth prime number called the prime number theorem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_number_theorem.
The Riemann hypothesis is a much stronger claim about where the zeta function is zero. It turns out that it is very easy to show that the zeta function is zero at every negative even integer. These are the trivial zeros, There are other, more difficult to locate zeros. The hypothesis conjectures that these zeros all lie on the line with real part equal to 1/2. That is, every zero is of the form 1/2 + it where t is some real number. If this is true many nice things will follow.
Most people who have thought about this question believe that it is true. There's a lot of evidence for it, such as the fact that literally billions of zeros have been located on this line, and the fact that it can be shown in a certain sense that almost all the non-trivial zeros lie near the 1/2 line. We also know that in a certain sense a positive fraction of the non-trivial zeros need to lie on the line (one needs to be careful here with what this means since there are infinitely many such zeros).
There are a lot of current attempts to prove the Riemann Hypothesis, and some very serious mathematicians think that the quasicrystal approach might work. Right now there are a lot of different approaches, including some which connect the hypothesis to certain claims in quantum mechanics. However, at this point, despite the many attempts there are a lot of weaker claims that we can't prove that we'd expect to prove before the Riemann hypothesis. It turns out that all the non-trivial zeros need to have a real part strictly between 0 and 1. But we can't even prove what essentially amounts to the worst case scenario, that there are zeros arbitrarily near the 0 and 1 lines. I expect this to be dealt with well before the full Riemann hypothesis is proven. There are other weaker hypotheses that are implied by RH that one would also expect to be proven first. So far the quasicrystal approach sounds promising but has had very little in the way of actual fruit. But this may just be that it is a relatively new set of tools and they need to be carefully developed. Overall, I'd be surprised if this project works simply because even if a quasicrystal approach eventually proves the full result it will require so much stuff to happen before hand.
If you can prove the Reimann hypothesis, do it, collect the $1000000 millennium prize and then millions more in speaking deals, chaired positions at top universities etc.
If you can't prove the Reimann hypothesis, charge $10 a head for people to watch you talk about quasicrystal nonsense.
The point being if he actually had any legitimate chance at doing this, this is not the format he would choose.
I don't know about the help desk situation but I have worked on a lot of development projects that had Indian nationals on the teams and they were not lacking neither intelligence or skill. I could be an anomaly because most of the Indians that come to the US have most probably demonstrated their abilities at home and go to the US for better paying jobs. This is especially noticeable when they are sponsored by the companies that end up working for. I have also been in situations where the sponsoring company actually facilitates green card process for those wanting to stay. This is not a cheap process and all the sponsoring companies require is that the developer agree to work with for the company for a set length of time to prevent paying for green card processing and then having the recipient bail whens it's complete. I have also surprisingly encountered this with Canadians. I once worked for a Canadian based consulting company that worked exclusively with US based companies and I was the only American on the payroll. And over 80% of those I worked with received their green cards. I remember the people I was working worrying about their work visa's and green cards and thinking to my self that "your Canadians what the hell do you need visa's for?". Intelligence is not dependent on geography. Intelligence is distributed equally across regions and races. The problem is that some of those intelligent people reside in countries where they do not have access to the necessary resources or resources to nurture their intelligence.
He's doing this to raise money for research. I don't think he expects to solve it 'live on TV infront of a studio audience'. It's more like an opportunity for others to be educated about the Riemann hypothesis.
"legally obtained boxed product (smuggled) from abroad"??!!!
Perhaps it's not only the Indians who have trouble with English.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
It was legally obtained in the sense of copyright law. The "smuggling" was perhaps a misused figure of speech. It ceased to apply in mid-89 :) I do have a bunch of machines that were truly smuggled in spite of COCOM embargo etc, though :)
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Doesn't tikka your fancy?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
and i have no idea what the hell they are saying. wicked smash innit? thems Cockney barrow boy spivs theyis!
but i can understand almost any Indian i hear speaking English.
i actually understood most of that.
why can't people like you write the wikipedia math articles?
...when he has a wardrobe malfunction, and we see an elaborate tattoo of Riemann and the zeta function on his naked body as he pours kerosine over himself, and he strikes a match and shrieks the final step of his ingenious proof while engulfed in flames!
As an Irish-born Irish Irishman, working in England, I guess I don't get the same kind of racism but I still get hit with racist slurs and jives quite regularly! But I actually kind of like it because I don't WANT to be English and it's nice to be slightly different. The first time I ever spoke to an Indian person was after I moved to England (There just aren't many foreigners in rural Ireland) but we employ quite a few Indian university graduates and they are fantastic people! I wouldn't get too caught up on racial stereotypes, the Irish ones are fun to play up sometimes, and I'm sure it's the same for others.
Jesus, I could announce the same damn thing - can I be a Slashdot headline too?
Your post seems to suggest that a Slashdot headline is somehow important... Care to elaborate?
Perhaps I'm trolling, perhaps I'm not.
Anyone remember Geraldo Rivera's live TV special to open Al Capone's vault? This reminds me a lot of that.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
I tend to get sloppy using my phone to make comments. I'm one of those who shuns text messaging on the premise that if I need to talk to someone I already have a phone in my hand that does not require typing. My miniature keyboard skills suck. The best I can hope for is that I can get my point across even with atrocious grammar and misspellings.
I worked at RSA Security for several years, during the period in which they outsourced several of their minor products (e.g., ClearTrust) to HCL Enterprises. I worked directly with their teams on occasion, and they were fast and correct. It wasn't particularly cheap, though likely somewhat cheaper than a North American dev center.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Lassi what the trolls come up with
Thank you very much for Indian Mathematician information
Hmm. Race has always been defined by physical appearance, and in this respect, this is a very diverse place. Physically, culturally, and linguistically (the main 'determinants' of 'race'), it's heterogeneous enough to overwhelm even an Indian like me. There are practical problems too, as a journey of about a 100 miles in any direction here more or less results in you not being able to communicate anymore, except through English, which not many speak outside metros. Diversity is it's greatest strength as well as it's greatest weakness (just like the world). The south of India is dominated by non-Indo-European languages. 'Race' is one of those concepts which is apparently irresistibly powerful, but which even the slightest logical scrutiny shows to have been purely a delusion and devoid of any substantial meaning.
No more pun jabs please.
It looks like someone is still trying to complete their Perplex City card set! :p
Hence 'race' doesn't exist. Well, only in the mind of the beholder. You could be stepping on some unknown sore bit of mine and I could call you racist. Or I could be clear and tell you not to do that specific thing.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
It may not have been available in Poland, or even Europe. Lots of technology items were like that in those days.
Used to be commonplace with console games - small businesses could buy them abroad and sell them locally (known as "grey imports"). Bought legally, paid all the taxes, but sold against the marketing strategy of the company. If you had a relative who just happened to be going on holiday to the USA/Canada/Japan, you could usually bribe them to bring some things back for you.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
It's was just a joke. Having been in the IT industry for a long time and having many friends and colleagues from Eastern Europe, I know how things used to be.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
"Registration: You can contact me directly by email (fadebox AT gmail ) for payment or any other details, or just go to this online ticketing facility I'm using called DoAttend if you have decided to join. You don't have to register at DoAttend as a user, the site will take you to the payment gateway directly. I am also accepting sponsors and private donors if you wish to contribute more than the workshop fee. Once you register, you'll be added to the mailing list in a couple of days. "
http://fadereu.posterous.com/knk103-the-crystals-of-mt-zeta
To be fair people can't be blamed for having that viewpoint though, as it's one that's been as much cultivated as a result of ignorance as it has Indian government and companies themselves.
The issue is that when India was making it's drive for companies to use it's outsourced call centres it's government and companies were making the case that all the staff in them were well trained highly skilled graduates. When customers get on the phone to them however it was not just an issue of language barriers, it was a lack of simple basic logical thought- for example, when I phoned Dell about a laptop that just wouldn't power up the guy at the other end insisted I must give him the error message on screen before he could do anything, and despite me trying to phrase it in countless ways that you wont get an error message if it wont turn on he continued to insist such that I had to hang up and get through to another person who at least managed to get past that point and handle a return.
So whilst yes I agree much of it is "they took our jobs" kind of ignorance, let's be honest, who can blame people for thinking Indians are stupid when their only experience with them are people are are extremely stupid and who they've been told time and time again are India's highly skilled graduates? That leaves one to draw the conclusion that India's education system is a complete joke and a degree in India is completely worthless so when we're told you can have highly skilled Indian graduates it's no better than getting poorly skilled Western dropouts.
But in reality it's probably something else than that- it's probably simply that the companies in question like many companies are using the cheapest possible staff they can, and which probably aren't actually graduates, or if they're obligated to be, are given some fake degree certificate.
So yeah I agree it's not fair to generalise Indians are stupid, but the Indian government itself deserves much of the blame for cultivating that viewpoint by claiming that some of the most stupid people you'll ever have to talk to are the country's best and brightest, when that simply isn't true.
Race doesn't exist in the same sense as subspecies doesn't exist. In other words, it exists. And "racism" isn't about recognising the existence of race, it's about making unwarranted assumptions based on race. Sticking your head in the sand and pretending that race doesn't exist is playing into the hands of the racists because it leaves them unchallenged (claiming that race doesn't exist is so ridiculous that it's no challenge to them). Yes, it's a human construct with fuzzy boundaries, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist any more than it means that "love" or "law" doesn't exist.
Oh, by the way, I and my family were forced to move to a different town in the 1990s because of threats of violence from far-right organisations and from so-called anti-Nazi organisations who considered that mixed-race marriages were still crossing the line.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Subspecies is a biological discriminant for different populations of a species that could mate, but in practice, don't. Mating, in many species, is a process that involves exactly the right place, colours, odours, rituals and whatnot. This is a condition that humans don't suffer: we stick it in anything that moves. Your argument would hold up if there were no Lenny Kravitzes or, for that matter, me. Hence, race does not exist.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Subspecies is a biological discriminant for different populations of a species that could mate, but in practice, don't. Mating, in many species, is a process that involves exactly the right place, colours, odours, rituals and whatnot. This is a condition that humans don't suffer: we stick it in anything that moves. Your argument would hold up if there were no Lenny Kravitzes or, for that matter, me. Hence, race does not exist.
Your argument would hold up if a) there were no mules, and b) it wasn't a non sequitur anyway. Perhaps you missed the rest of my posting, the bit about social constructs being real?
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
No, mules are not a subspecies; they cannot procreate - their parents have different amounts of chromosomes even. Admittedly, in biology, the differences between species and inter-species are not a hard line, but in some cases rather blurry, but my point stands: 'subspecies' and 'race' don't compare (which, I think, was your point). So don't muddle the argument with mules.
'Race' is a commercial qualifier in the industry of breeding cats, dogs and horses. 'Subspecies' has a (scientific) definition as I outlined a few posts above. 'Race' was subsequently 'promoted' to 'sound scientific' in the 19th century by various dubious people in order to promote their apartheid-agenda, but that's all that there's to that. It has since been tried and abandoned by academia (and good riddance - just like 'ethnicity').
'Race' would only apply to humans if somehow breeding were controlled (which the dubious people mentioned above, tried as best as they could to establish) - but we're just not wired like that.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
"Perhaps you missed the rest of my posting, the bit about social constructs being real?"
You're right. I missed that. But then, that would be your *only* point (because your biology points don't stick very well).
Well, I've got to say, it *is* a point. But my question with regards to this point is always: what consequences does the 'race as a social construct' carry ? Wherein lies what we accept ? I mean, it used to be that you couldn't say or do nasty things about or to people who weren't 'white'. But you can't make laws like that anymore - there's all these people producing all these children that are of questionable origin after all - we don't control the breeding anymore ! So, we have to be more clear, dare I say it - more *scientific* about it.
Well darn - there is no scientifically acceptable definition of 'race' !
I mean, if 'race' is a social construct, can I then 'black' on mondays only and white on the others ? It works for religion. And are redheads a race ? Is Obama white ? And if not, why not ? And if it is not about self-identification, but only about the identification of others, is it bad if I call someone who identifies as black, white ? And if it is about treatment of other people based on 'racial characteristics', then what are they ? Colour ? Size of nose ? Is there a chart for that ?
How ridiculous would it be if there were a chart for that ?
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
"Perhaps you missed the rest of my posting, the bit about social constructs being real?"
You're right. I missed that. But then, that would be your *only* point (because your biology points don't stick very well).
Well, I've got to say, it *is* a point. But my question with regards to this point is always: what consequences does the 'race as a social construct' carry ? Wherein lies what we accept ? I mean, it used to be that you couldn't say or do nasty things about or to people who weren't 'white'. But you can't make laws like that anymore - there's all these people producing all these children that are of questionable origin after all - we don't control the breeding anymore ! So, we have to be more clear, dare I say it - more *scientific* about it.
Well darn - there is no scientifically acceptable definition of 'race' !
I mean, if 'race' is a social construct, can I then 'black' on mondays only and white on the others ? It works for religion. And are redheads a race ? Is Obama white ? And if not, why not ? And if it is not about self-identification, but only about the identification of others, is it bad if I call someone who identifies as black, white ? And if it is about treatment of other people based on 'racial characteristics', then what are they ? Colour ? Size of nose ? Is there a chart for that ?
How ridiculous would it be if there were a chart for that ?
The point is that people do discriminate on a set of physical and social characteristics that they constrict as "race", which means that race exists. The fact that it is hard to define the boundaries is irrelevant -- that's a form of the sorites fallacy.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Why did you ask the question twice? Why the repetition? Why the redundancy?
I'm curious why you would ask such a thing. So why the repetition?
To answer your question, I'm getting my retaliation in first against the racists. The casual racism of /. has been fascinating to me for a while. I find it interesting that such an educated readership can sometimes get some fundamental stuff so horribly wrong, but then I suppose engineers are known to have a few people skills missing.
Your implication that only racists can be interested in racism is one of the more bizarre assertions I've seen around here.
I once wrote a journal post here denouncing the trend on /. for filling threads up with unfunny curry jokes and poking fun at Indian accents every time the word "India" was mentioned. It was almost as if the (mostly American) readership of this site couldn't believe that those dark skinned people in another country were actually capable of anything technically advanced or challenging like us white people, and the condescending attitude seemed to be that all that remained was to make fun of their physical appearance/accents/local cuisine etc. It was childish, tiresome, and racist.
So I'm engaging in what you might call a "conscience raising" exercise. I'm setting a trend where racist comments are met with disdain in the same way that lighting up a cigarette on a plane would nowadays. When enough people react with disdain, we change what is and is not socially acceptable. I am therefore ding my small part to change peoples' attitudes and combat racism. So to answer your strange question, no. I'm not a racist.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I'm glad. We're all glad.
That's an interesting twist on the phrase "consciousness raising exercise". I like it. I hope you don't mind if I use it.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The point is that people do discriminate on a set of physical and social characteristics that they constrict as "race", which means that race exists.
Except neither those characteristics can be defined, nor the maliciousness proved. Which makes it arbitrary, and therefore rather useless. Except that there are laws for it, which makes it scary. Because arbitrary laws are scary.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
The point is that people do discriminate on a set of physical and social characteristics that they constrict as "race", which means that race exists.
Except neither those characteristics can be defined, nor the maliciousness proved. Which makes it arbitrary, and therefore rather useless. Except that there are laws for it, which makes it scary. Because arbitrary laws are scary.
You seem to have a naive view of definition. I take it you are aware of the sorites fallacy (aka the paradox of the beard) which shows that it's impossible (or arbitrary) to define whether somebody has a beard or not? But it's ridiculous to tell somebody that they can't say Richard Stallman has a beard because the concept isn't well enough defined.
Oh, and when my wife's manager put in writing that he only wanted white men on his team (in protest at my wife being allocated to his team -- she's not white, and not a man) it turned out to be quite possible to prove racism as well as sexism. By the way, do you think that the existence of intersex persons invalidates the use of the term "sexism" too?
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
By your own reasoning, 'racism' has now been reduced in this discussion to something akin to 'friendliness'. We are all assumed to know what it is, therefore it exists. But we know what 'God' is, but that doesn't make him (or her) existent. It makes 'the notion of God' existent. I'm well aware that there is an existing notion of racism in society. I just think that it is particularly ill-founded.
This is not grasping at straws - we make *laws* that deal with racism. We don't do that for friendliness or beards or God (well, we shouldn't). And with good reason; there are jobs that *require* sexist or racist hiring (casting Othello, or Virginia Woolf, for example) or, for that matter, people with beards. There are people slain because they're Catholic, or red-head, or albino. The fact that we're surrounded by irrational psychopaths, is no excuse for bad law, or stupid societal notions.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Go right ahead. Please do. I insist.
Drill baby drill - on Mars