The Story of John Gabriel — The Man, The Myth, The CRANK!

[1] Mathematics is no stranger to cranks, like physics and biology are no stranger to them (e.g. consciousness fanatics in physics and irreducible complexitists in biology.) But we are met with one particular, explicit example of a crank — John Gabriel, or, JG. In this blog post, we will try to dissect his profile.

[2] We have a lot to unpack. I will, for the sake of non-redundancy, say that a very large majority, if not all of his mathematics has already been debunked at length. I will pick up where the debunkers of his left off and cover more of his general persona/recent acts.

[3] John recently uploaded a video where he toyed around with the LLMs Claude and Gemini. This is a great opportunity to discuss LLM sycophancy and general unreliability/instability. John praised Claude and discounted Gemini for praising him blindly and actually correcting his course (or so it seems) respectively. As for the case of Claude, it generally seems more pliable in terms of gassing up people with unearned praise, and “backing up” the “theories” of its users. See r/LLMPhysics for example.

[4] From what I see, the majority of the posts are made with Claude and ChatGPT in particular, which hints to me Claude reacts with more sycophancy in response to the same amount of push than Gemini does — something that would be exactly up JG’s alley.

[5] In the video I linked in [4], he uses a classic piece of his pseudo-mathematical babble as cannon fodder, something which you can look to the links in [2] for a refutation of.

[6] ***Oh god……….sigh……**This certainly is…something. Uh huh. Do you see what I meant in [5]? This is an example of that. He used ChatGPT, an LLM known *for being incredibly sycophantic and destructive to draft an essay about how his life is comparable to Newton’s…? Nope. Let me tell you why.

[7] They’re not even close, because JG is a crank who sits in front of his computer all day recording videos about pseudo-mathematics that’s almost as disgustingly wrong as what Terrence Howard says, and Isaac Newton was a visionary whose ideas redefined the entire world, and whose legacy will continue to bring awe to and inspire countless people. That’s the difference between them. And oh god, the corny, extravagant action music to top it all off…

[8] Onto another video JG has made. He created a “test” of his own, likely inspired by John Baez’s CI. A score of 50 and he would declare you an “incorrigible mainstream mathematics crank.” The video is here. The “test” of sorts is just an exam sheet of basic statements that are unilaterally accepted by real mathematicians. There’s nothing to go over here. I’m just gonna say I have a perfect 50 and move on.

[9] Now we finally get to JG’s cult of personality, which is frankly the most disturbing part of his shtick. He has a small but devoted fanbase of people who regularly tune in to watch his drivel. It’s genuinely disturbing to think there are more than 2 people who think John is a legitimate genius, who are likely just as far gone as he is.

[10] I can’t stomach to write any more of this. I have to take a break from this dude for now. Maybe 1–2 more blogposts will come in December when I’m feeling like covering him again.