This is from Harvard, the “most prestigious” university in the United States. This is the kingmaker university that mints the political, social, and business leaders of this country.
Have you ever thought to yourself, "How do I know that 2+2=4? Why isn't it 2+2+5?" PhD student @kareem_carr talks about numbers and abstraction with @PopMech https://t.co/UIo4MJsgqO @HarvardGSAS
— Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (@HarvardChanSPH) August 30, 2020
Well, I have a Ph.D. in engineering, and I can tell you that no it fucking doesn’t.
Kareem Carr is a biostatistics Ph.D. student at Harvard and thought it was a good idea to defend this absurdity and Popular Mechanics – the once good but now Woke magazine – thought it would publish this bullshit.
In his original thread, Carr points out some simple, but provocative truths about the world. “Our numbers, our quantitative measures, are abstractions of real underlying things in the universe and it’s important to keep track of this when we use numbers to model the real world,” one tweet reads.
That is gobbledygook. Numbers are quantitative, the measure things exactly. Sometimes we round those numbers for convenience but that doesn’t change what we are actually measuring. If we come to a conclusion that results in 2 + 2 = 5, then we made bad assumptions and rounding errors.
Saying that if you put a chicken and a fox together and the fox eats the chicken so you have 1 + 1 = 1, that assumption is so extremely and model so extremely simplified that it should be rejected.
“There’s a need for this sort of thinking, because we’re basically turning everything into data,” Carr tells Popular Mechanics. “Because we’re turning more and more domains into data, it’s becoming more and more important. If we’re going to be a world that’s just in apps, we need to be sure these things are working how we think they work.”
That is a world in which every assumption is wrong, every approximation is way off, and our data is useless.
Carr hasn’t said anything really controversial here, unless just saying mathematically nuanced things is inherently controversial on Twitter. The idea that the counting numbers—whole values only, excluding fractions and decimals—are somehow “naturally occurring” is a common fallacy among people who aren’t trained in math or, say, human development.
More fucking gobbledygook. 2 + 2 = 5 is an absolute integer statement. There is no nuance to add to it. Trying to nuance this into being correct is mendacious bullshit. Popular Mechanics then decided to highlight this asshole as an example of this.
I can state with absolute certainty that this is not an example of 2 + 2 = 5. This is 2.5 + 2.5 = 5, which is correct. Ignoring the half of a machine in each factory doesn’t make one magically appear out of thin air.
I understand why this is being praised as deep thought and written about by Popular Mechanics. A couple of months ago Popular Mechanics wrote an article about tearing down monuments.
The editors at Popular Mechanics have read 1984 as an instruction manual. First, they advocated for memory-holing our culture through iconoclasm. Now they are pulling the quote “In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it,” and making it real.
Harvard, as the kingmaker institution wants to put us in a position where when one of their graduates says something this ridiculously wrong, we just obsequiously accept it.
The University that we have been told to show total respect for the infallibility of its students and professors has teamed up with the most popular STEM magazine for the popular culture, to turn Orwell’s absurdity into reality and use pseudo-scientific jargon to convince us that what we know is wrong.
I know I’m not supposed to advocate for violence, but God damnit, shit like this makes that very, very hard to do.
Just because a person is educated, it doesn’t make them smart. 🙂
For Frack’s sake, we learned by fourth grade that you can’t add 1 chicken + 1 fox and get 2 “something or others”. These freakin’ Ph.D.s are dumber than a fourth grader? Or do they just assume anybody reading them is that dumb?
The fact that 2+2=4 is a characteristic of our universe. It was designed that way.
So what’s their point? When they talk about an IQ score or some other psychobabble tests, are they saying the numbers aren’t integers or aren’t precise enough to be useful? Doesn’t everybody know that?
And the guy who talks openly about 2.5 machines then goes to 2+2=5 sure comes across as an attention whore. That’s the weakest argument there is.
Lecture mode on:
Carr is right in the last comment, but for the wrong reasons.
IQ, and other psychological scales, are typically ordinal measures. They tell you one score is more or less of some hypothetical variable, but not how much. IQ 150 is not twice IQ 75, it’s just “ way more.” Sometimes, with a lot of work, we can create interval scales ( like Fahrenheit or Celcius thermometers) so we can say differences are equivalent, but ratios are still meaningless. 100 degrees F is not twice as hot as 50F. It wasn’t until Kelvin that we had a meaningful zero for temperature and thus a ratio scale. Note that 0 K is theoretical, too, or was when he proposed it.
The rest of Carr’s writing is “ angels dancing on pinheads” nonsense, of course.
And yes, I have a Ph.D., too, and friends who are engineers.
Lecture mode off.
In defense of the “angels dancing on pinheads” — the intent of that argument wasn’t to ascertain a precise number, but whether there was a finite number or not. Because if only a finite number of angels can dance on the head of a pin, then by implication they take up space and are physical beings.
The Byzantines were arguing about the nature of the divine, and had way more interest in seeking truth than any Marxist.
At least when Blackadder tried to teach Baldrick that two beans plus two beans made four beans, Baldrick had the excuse of being a stupid peasant.
I’ve used this example before and will continue to do so. Would you drive across a bridge designed by someone who believes 2+2=5 or that Pi (used in many structural calculations) equals 3.0? Not unless you have a death wish.
Would you hire an accountant who believes $1+$1=$1? Yeah. I know AOC (with a degree in Economics) believes that $2 billion + $2 billion = $5 trillion, but she appears to have a mental disorder.
You’d absolutely hire an accountant that believes $1+$1=$1 because you make 100% profit while showing loss 100% of the time lol.
I certainly can appreciate the philosophical questions examining math, our understanding of it, how we use it to measure and quantify reality, and how we know mathematical concepts are true or real, but I’m skeptical that is why these people are actually doing.
I don’t think they are having an academic discussion about the philosophy of math as much as they are saying reality is not objective.
It’s also at best an examination/questioning of why do we call anything anything while ignoring that it doesn’t matter what we call it, it is still representing a fundemental truth or concept that isn’t changed by what we call it…
These over-educated ignoramuses are arguing that the symbols are arbitrary. OK, sure — as long as you don’t care about communicating to anyone or anything, they’re arbitrary. But math is as much about communication as it is about operations and quantities. I could submit a page of random scribbles and claim it’s a generalized method for solving the halting problem — but as the random scribbles mean nothing to anyone else, it’s worthless.
So, sure “2 + 2 = 5” if you redefine one or more of those symbols. But who cares? It misses both the point of mathematics AND the point of the reference. The people pushing that nonsense are being intentionally obtuse in service of their politics.
Two plus two equals four, because those values are inherent in the definition of “two”, “and”, and “four”.
More left wing gaslighting.
What’s “Gaslight Joe” Biden’s take on all this?
It seems like these people are playing fast and loose with language, switching between colloquial and technical definitions at will.
Bring together a fox and a chicken and you’re left with just a fox. Sure. I’m enough of an effete city-slicker that I can’t argue with that. But what your doing isn’t arithmetic addition. You’re feeding a fox and a chicken as inputs into an intuitive model and getting a fox as output. That model is certainly not simple addition, so calling it an example of 1+1=1 is bunk.
It reminds me of a joke “proof” I saw
– two is even
– three is odd
– five is two and three
– therefore five is both even and odd
Self-evidently absurd (unless you’ve drunk the Kool-Aid in gallon lots), but amusing.
This sort of cutesy crap is fine and dandy when you’re just screwing around, but it has no place in serious discussion.
RE: the fox and chicken–
It’s not even 1+1=1. When you feed the chicken to the fox, it changes the nature of the fox. The chicken doesn’t just disappear or become zero, and the change to the fox is difficult to quantify in simple numbers.
1 hungry fox + 1 chicken = 1 full fox. What’s the quantitative difference between the full fox and the hungry fox? About one chicken’s worth. So 1+1 still makes 2, but one is now incorporated into the other.
I remember in statistics class, we were told, “The numbers never lie; they just get misrepresented.” I haven’t yet found an instance where this statement is wrong, and I have more reason to trust my teacher than this doofus I hadn’t heard of until now.
“1+1=1”, as applied to the fox and chicken, is such a misrepresentation-via-oversimplification that it may as well be a lie. But it’s not the numbers that are lying; it’s the person giving them.
All of the “proofs” for 2+2=5 or other such nonsense depend on cheating or lying and assuming that people won’t figure it out.
Things like (4-9/2) = sqrt((4-9/2)^2). This is a false statement. 4-9/2 = -1/2. The square of -1/2 is 1/4. The square root of 1/4 is + or – 1/2. Therefore the statement is false.
Once you get the reader to accept that false statement as true, you can then hide the place where you are able to change the rest of the equation.
I’ve seen the game played with a divide by zero also.
These proofs always depend on playing games with language. 2+2 is in the language of arithmetic. It is symbol manipulations. In the language of arithmetic the answer is always “4”.
If you play a game where the symbol “2” really means “2 and 1/2” then you have cheated because I, the reader, am using the standard definition that “2” means “2”. So when you say “2[.5] + 2[.5] = 5[.0]” you’ve cheated.
That’s what this Harvardite is attempting to do. He is changing the definition of the language in order to be able to “prove” his point.
“1” means fox
“1” also means “chicken”
“+” means putting them together without supervision.
Therefore, 1+1=1 means “a fox put with a chicken results in a fox”
But you and the rest of the world know that “1” means “1” and “+” means addition therefore “1+1=2” means “The sum of the integers 1 and 1 is 2”.
“White Silence is Violence” means “You didn’t say what I wanted you to say, that means you were violent to me which means I can be violent to you back. I’m punching you, you Nazi”
I had this discussion with my lady the other day. I said “Speech is not violence” and she had a horrible reaction and it took her most of the day to figure out. When she was growing up, her mother verbally abused her (note the word abused). When she reported it to CPS, they told her “That’s not violence, we can’t do anything about it.” CPS, in that case conflated “abuse” with “violence” determined that the abuse wasn’t violence and therefore there was no abuse. So to this day, she hears “speech is not violence” as being the same as “speech is not abuse” and considers them the same.
There *is* such a thing as verbal and emotional abuse. It isn’t violence.
Whenever they are changing the language to make a point, they are cheating.
My stock answer when people try to argue that facts are a matter of opinion is to invite them to climb to the top of a tall building, or the Brooklyn bridge, and step off. Go see if gravity is a matter of opinion.
BS from Hahvahd doesn’t bother me nearly as much as the descent into BS of the institution down the street (or down the river) therefrom.
I was sorely disappointed, but not overly surprised, when the faculty accepted Nancy Hopkins’ “I had to leave or I was going to throw up” as an argument against a statement of objective reality from Larry Summers. That was years ago. Now, there’s crap about catastrophic anthropogenic climate change in Technology Review, Richard Lindzen’s presence on the faculty notwithstanding. They can solicit alumni donations from me all they want–they’ll not get a penny until they get back to a worldview ruled by data and science.
And, yes, I’m an alum of that place down the street/river from Hahvahd.
Mathematical relativism? Only in Einstein’s theory of relativity.