User blog comment:Ecl1psed276/BM2 Analysis - A Summary/@comment-30754445-20180709051740/@comment-30754445-20180712005155

I'm not "angry" about this.

I just think it is surreal, and there's also some frustration. It's almost as if the people here just don't care about whether they're making sense... which would be fine with me if it were true.

The problem is that it isn't true. People don't come here to waste their time writing nonsense. They come here because they are genuinely interested in creating large numbers, and want to explore and make real contributions. They're just grossly underestimating how difficult this goal actually is.

Remember Jonathan Bowers' & operator? Or the rise and fall of BM1? These are the consequences, when you try to skip the step of formally defining and carefully justifying everything you're doing. When you look for such short cuts, the result is a completely untrustworthy mess.

Now, I'm all for having informal explanations in addition to the formal work. We definitely need those too (as Hyp Cos' incomprehensible formal definitions of DAN attest). But no amount of informal explanations can replace an actual thorough analysis.

Speaking of which:

On what grounds do you say that C(1;0;0) is equivalent to a standard weakly compact OCF?

There are only two ways to justify such a statement: Either you carefully show that there's a 1-to-1 correspondence between your notation and some standard "yardstick" (like Deedlit's OCF). Or you demonstrate that C(1;0;0) is a Pi-3 reflecting ordinal (either by showing it directly somehow, or by showing that C(1;0;0) cannot be proven to be well-founded in "KP Set Theory+Pi3 reflection")

Please be completely honest: can you do either of these things with any degree of confidence?

(yes, I'm aware that I'm imposing neigh-impossible requirements here. That's exactly my point: googology at these levels is hard)

By the way:

A few weeks ago, I've made a little survey and asked some of the more knowledgable people here to give the highest recursive ordinal they are comfortable working with. With the exception of Deedlit and Hyp Cos, nobody mentioned anything higher than Mahlos.

And even these two people (who are, by far, the top Grandmaster Googologists here) have immense trouble when it comes to actually using these ordinals to analyze/create actual notations.

Deedlit got as far as weakly compact cardinals, with the next article in his series on hiatus for several years now. Hyp Cos' analysis of his own notation also breaks down just a little bit beyond that point. He has two completely different guesses as to how his notation proceeds from there, and openly admits that they are nothing more than guesses.

These facts impressively demonstrate just how monumental the challange here is. So yes, I firmly stand by my statement that most people here have absolutely no understanding of the powerful concepts they are attempting to wield. And yes, when someone casually throws these huge ordinals into an "analysis" without explaining why or how, they are being foolish.