
Is math a socialist plot? - zck
http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_02_10.html
======
akadien
One of the saddest things about America at this point in history is how so
many people are ignorant and damn proud of it.

~~~
moserware
I don't think it's proud of being ignorant, but rather an anti-intellectual.

Geoffrey Canada (a guy who's doing some great work as CEO of the Harlem
Children Zone) had an interesting comment during an economic competitiveness
summit on a similar trend:

"There is a sense in this country that in my belief is anti-intellectual.
There is almost a case to be made against smart people and that has penetrated
I think from the top leadership in this country right through the ‘hood’ where
people look down on folk who are academically prepared gifted and we’ve gotta
change this culture, America is fascinated by whether you can drink a beer.
That’s not, that should not be the qualification for a president. A president
ought to be able to lead the nation in a direction where young people aspire
for the kind of genius that’s around this table."

"Smart" people have sometimes done mean things and deserve some of the disdain
they get, but I'm just disappointed how much social value is placed on silly
things like excessive beer drinking which leads to popularity and thus what
some young people aspire to do because intellectuals are seen as irrelevant
and dull.

I think there is some connection between this perception and lower desire by
students to want to enter into math and computer science... right at the point
in history where such skills are in demand.

(p.s. video of summit where Canada made the comment:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z7_A-rkOjA> )

~~~
jerf
'"Smart" people have sometimes done mean things'

Trivializing it like that will help hide the true situation from you. Look
back on the twentieth century. Find the five largest slaughterings of human
life. Intellectuals claiming to be in the service of high intellectual ideas
will show up in at least two of those (Stalin's farm purges, Mao's political
purges). Hitler's purge would be debatable, though I'm willing to agree that
simply fancying oneself an intellectual is not the same as being one. Some of
the other largest slaughterings that don't make the top five, but still
involve hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths, have intellectual roots.

That's just one example of the problem, I could go on. But those examples
alone are sufficient to establish my point.

While it's true that America's distrust of intellectuals has blurred into a
distrust of learning, there is a kernel of truth there. Intellectuals have a
great failing that has cost millions their lives and caused misery for
billions more, which is trusting their beautiful theories too much, even when
reality is smacking them across the face with the fact that the theories are
wrong or not working. (For the love of Pete, some "intellectuals" still study
Marxist economics as if it has some sort of bearing on reality! Studying it
for historical reasons is one thing, but not as if it's real.) Distrusting
intellectualism is not a sign of irrationality; in fact I'd go so far as to
say too strong a faith in intellectualism is rather the irrational position.
If the 20th century taught us anything it is that reality is irreducibly
complex and the beautiful-but-invariably-oversimplified theories beloved of
intellectuals can not possible capture reality, but this lesson doesn't seem
to have filtered out of the mathematical domain very well.

The problem is that to really understand what's going on you have to detach
"learning" from "intellectualism". I like learning, I distrust intellectualism
and still see no overwhelming reason to start trusting it.

We're in the middle of one failure of intellectualism even as we speak, as the
global warming consensus falls apart; I don't know what truth will replace it
but I feel very confident it will be much more nuanced. That came close to
beggaring the entire world in the service of an intellectual theory. And more
quietly, IMNSHO we're in the middle of the intellectual dietary consensus
falling apart. And if I'm right about _that_ , you can chalk up tens of
millions of premature deaths and hundreds of millions of people in unnecessary
fat misery into intellectualism's column, in the service of the simple-but-
wrong theory that the body can be modeled as just a passive rubber bag.

That's hard to get across to a large mass of people, of course, and easy for
it to get blurred. But if you don't understand this, you won't understand the
real reasons for the anti-intellectual strain of American thought. It isn't
just "we hate dem dare learnin' folk", which is just an excuse for not
understanding.

~~~
crux_
It seems you are conflating (intentionally?) "intellectual" with "ideologue".

Also, what can this following sentence possibly be but doublethink?

> Distrusting intellectualism is not a sign of irrationality; in fact I'd go
> so far as to say too strong a faith in intellectualism is rather the
> irrational position.

(What is intellectualism if not a deep faith in rationality itself?)

~~~
rntz
I think he's trying to make the point that influential idealogues, more often
than not, _are_ intellectuals.

I'd like to note that, even if they are correlated, this does not in itself
show that there is a causative relationship between intellectualism and
dangerous ideology.

~~~
crux_
I don't think jerf drew any distinction between intellectuals and ideologues
at all, not even in an attempt to argue for causation -- it's generous of you
to assume he did.

To rephrase the grandparent comment's line of reasoning in a more sarcastic
way: "Wildfire kill Ogg family! All fire bad! Ogg anti-fire!"

------
pmichaud
The point he made, which I think was central to the piece, was that our math
education system specifically is totally broken. He makes that point very,
very well. If you want to read just that, start reading around the "Who is to
blame?" segment, or a couple paragraphs before that (for context).

~~~
thaumaturgy
I am somewhat amused by the irony of your comment. :-)

It took only a few minutes to read the article in its entirety, and although
it was maybe a _little_ longer than it could have been, it wasn't bad as is.

So, if even HN readers don't have the attention span for something like this,
then where does that leave us?

~~~
dschobel
'A little longer' is being very generous.

I thought the meandering conversational tone with all of the asides was flat
out tedious.

Which is a shame because it is a very important topic.

------
astine
I can't believe this person has never heard the term 'over-educated' before.
It expresses a populist sentiment which accuses those who have spent too much
time in academia from of not being in touch with the working class.

It implies elitism and a lack of practicality: the 'over-educated' person is
privileged, (how else could he afford such an education?) considers himself
better than the average person and worthy of telling him what to do and how to
live, but has not contributed to society in any meaningful way himself.

~~~
mquander
When I read that headline a few days ago, my interpretation was this: the
study shows that educated people tend to prefer Obama. However, they can't
print that, even if it's true, because it will insult a lot of their readers.
So "educated" becomes "over-educated" which retains some degree of accuracy
and doesn't offend "over-educated" people as much as the other version would
offend under-educated ones.

------
chasingsparks
_"Okay, I admit, the socialist connection was a pretty small part of my essay,
albeit an intriguing one. (It intrigued you, right?) My main reason for
choosing the title I did was to try to ensure that you read through the entire
column."_

~~~
PebblesRox
"This sentence contains a provocative statement that attracts the readers’
attention, but really only has very little to do with the topic of the blog
post."

------
shaunxcode
I do own "Marx demystifies calculus" (not as ridiculous as it sounds nor as
profound) and 3 soviet era math books (published through MIT press
-threadjack: has anyone else wondered if MIT ever felt any heat circa McCarthy
as they did a lot of collaboration with soviet scientists not to mention the
cybernetic work of werner/stafford beer)

~~~
rglovejoy
During the Stalin era and for several years afterwards, cybernetics research
was discouraged as "anti-soviet":
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressed_research_in_the_Sovi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressed_research_in_the_Soviet_Union#Cybernetics)

------
_delirium
Hmm, I was expecting a bit closer of a connection, but I suppose this'll do. A
better "math is a socialist plot" argument, though, could focus on a 19th-
century "scientific socialism" approach to optimizing society and the economy
via central planning.

~~~
javert
Honestly, I feel duped by the title. The title had NOTHING to do with the
article. I don't think it's fair to readers when you dupe them into reading
your article by promising that it is about something different than what it's
actually about.

------
chubbard
His point was math has to become relate able again, and in todays world
everyone (under and over educated people) can relate to software as a way to
solve problems. There are tons of great math problems with practical
application out there. Couldn't agree more with that because that's what drew
me into math was programming and the practical application of that.

He could have said this in a more direct way without all of the asides and
weak socialist plot bait. Clear and concise communication is a mutually
exclusive to math skills.

~~~
pmiller2
>His point was math has to become relate able again

And there's the rub. Having studied math in grad school, I'd say _at least_
99% of mathematics research has little or no connection to anything tangible
in the real world.

One of my good friends is a professor of math, and every once in a while I
make sure to rip on him about being "the world's leading expert in something
nobody gives a shit about," because it's true. There are probably fewer than
10 people in the world doing work that's closely related to what my friend is
doing.

The thing is, (we) mathematicians _like_ it that way. We're proud of the fact
that we choose to work on hard theoretical problems that might not have any
kind of real world payoff in our lifetimes because what we're really doing is
investigating fundamental logical structures.

And, to an extent, part of the reason it's hard to come up with applications
of math to daily life is that the mathematics of daily life has become
invisible. Sure, I can talk about how CDs use error-correcting codes so they
can survive being scratched up a bit and still play, or I can tell (say) my
mom about how Google's pagerank algorithm works to help provide her with good
quality hits when she searches the web, but CD's and Google searches are such
a part of daily life anymore that these things utterly fail to impress. The
"average" person probably thinks mathematics is irrelevant to his or her daily
life because they never studied much of it in school and still managed to get
by without it.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> _And there's the rub. Having studied math in grad school, I'd say at least
> 99% of mathematics research has little or no connection to anything tangible
> in the real world._

I'd be surprised if it were that high a percentage. But, I'd agree with your
statement with one alteration: "yet".

I find your last para quite persuasive but if you compare it to how you might
consider your own knowledge of cardio-pulmonary chemical processes to be
irrelevant to your need to and ability to breathe then I think a Googlers
argument that maths is irrelevant to them still wins.

------
fexl
Math doesn't coerce anybody. People do. Just keep in mind that prices are
discovered, not decreed, and don't send armed men after me for disobeying you,
and we'll get along just fine.

~~~
fexl
Heh, I always get down-modded for saying bad things about the use of force.

~~~
steamer25
I agree with your sentiments about force but you were probably downmodded for
not having read the article... The socialism line was admittedly a bait and
switch to get people to read the article.

Also, the commenters cited in the article who originally raised the notion
were probably trolls and/or being sarcastic.

~~~
fexl
I skimmed the article, being knee-deep in number crunching and having already
read an earlier article about optimal parking. The author threw "socialist" in
the title as red meat to bait people into reading. Made me look!

It sounds like a ploy but it hints at something real, namely "scientific
socialism" where certain individuals claim the power to engineer the lives of
others, by force if necessary. As it turns out, force is _always_ necessary,
and this turned much of the planet into a bloody abbatoir during the 20th
century.

Math and science make me humble, not arrogant. Familiarity with distributed
systems, computability, chaos, probability, trade, and the subjective theory
of value have enhanced my appreciation for purely voluntary action, and my
disgust with the top-down application of force.

~~~
anigbrowl
You might want to consider that that things like non-computability and so
forth are relatively recent mathematical discoveries. At the beginning of the
20th century most educated people still believed in a Newtonian universe and
the idea that everything was calculable, cf Russell & Whitehead's _Principia
Mathematica_. Einstein, Godel and others demonstrated that things were not so
cut and dried, but even Einstein had difficulty with the random-seeming nature
of quantum mechanics. The boundaries between linear and nonlinear behavior (in
mathematical terms) remain somewhat obscure.

I suggest that it wasn't rampant intellectualism that caused the 20th century
to be such an abbatoir, but the influence of industrial and technological
change on the ancient human practice of warring with ones' enemies, combined
with new technologies such as motion pictures and speedy photography which
helped to make us more aware of the costs of war.

The US civil war was particularly bloody and gruesome, even though there was
nothing resembling the 'scientific socialism' you decry; one might also point
out that in the Viet Nam war, the opponents of communism had no problem with
dropping napalm and various toxic defoliants all over a country to which they
had no territorial claim in the first place and seemed perfectly willing to
engineer the lives of others by force in the name of freedom.

~~~
fexl
Great point about the evils done in the _name_ of freedom.

I recently spoke at length with an older man who was deeply involved in
Vietnam before the Kennedy and Johnson escalations. At the time they focused
on killing specific communist leaders and training the South Vietnamese --
pretty much low-key guerilla tactics. But after Diem was assassinated the full
military-industrial complex was engaged and they all had a party with Other
People's Money.

True about the US civil war. Slavery was part of it. A burgeoning abolitionist
movement, both in the north and south, threatened the institution of slavery.
Many southerners feared slave revolt ("servile insurrection"), and many
northerners feared an influx of freed slaves. The advent of mechanized
agriculture was also making slavery obsolete. The other part was tariffs. If
the south seceded, the north would be hard up for revenue. Even the governor
of New York was talking about secession, and battles were fought in downtown
Manhattan.

The industrial and technological change of which you speak also made the US
civil war particularly bloody. They fought battles the old way, facing off in
lines, but did it with vastly improved weaponry. That's how you got over
20,000 people killed in a single day at Antietam.

I am very happy to see increased awareness of the perils of force. The 21st
century is bound to be a happier, freer time. (wink ... gulp)

------
hristov
It should be repeated at this point that Ben Stein is an idiot who has reduced
himself to marketing Internet credit protection scams on TV. After he got
kicked out of the New York times (because the Times thought he tried to
associate the credit protection scams with their newspaper) he has really lost
all credibility, and one should not worry too much about what he says.

~~~
mike_organon
Fair enough, but the article only talks about Sam Stein.

------
thaumaturgy
Is there a (developed, or developing) country in the world right now with a
healthy respect for education and intellectualism?

~~~
plinkplonk
"Is there a (developed, or developing) country in the world right now with a
healthy respect for education and intellectualism?"

Both India and China would fit I think. As would Japan. Large chunks of Asia
certainly.

~~~
eru
Turkey also seems to have some respect for education.

~~~
btilly
Turkey's respect for education ends when you talk about some basic historical
facts, or the reality of the opinions of certain ethnic groups in Turkey.

It is kind of like how in the USA we respect science until it challenges the
Bible. Except that the Turkish objections are to more recent events, and is
more likely to result in things like jail time.

~~~
eru
You may be right. And I am glad that I visited Turkey in 2008 and not 10 years
earlier. They have made huge strides but there's still a lot of progress left
to achieve. While I was there they banned youtube several times for showing
silly (Greek) videos that claimed Attaturk (the republics founder) was gay.

However --- what I wanted to say in the first place --- people who can afford
it, delight in sending their children to university. `Hard' (sciencey)
subjects are appreciated.

