13 ms·

Is math a socialist plot?

87 points by zck 17y ago

hristov 17y ago
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 17y ago
  Fair enough, but the article only talks about Sam Stein.
chasingsparks 17y ago
"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 17y ago
  "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."
- 10ren 17y ago
  I skimmed down to that part and stopped. If you did, and are still reading, my ploy was successful. Your ploy was not successful. A pity, because judging by the number of comments here, it may have been interesting.
astine 17y ago
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.
- yummyfajitas 17y ago
  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. If the author has never heard this term before, it suggests the accusation is correct in his case.
- lolcraft 17y ago
  Happiness, whether consisting in pleasure or virtue, or both, is more often found with those who are highly cultivated in their minds and in their character, and have only a moderate share of external goods, than among those who possess external goods to a useless extent but are deficient in higher qualities. - Aristotle Of course, Aristotle was a bourgeois (i.e. not proud of being ignorant) and his opinions should be taken with a grain of salt.
- mquander 17y ago
  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.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
_delirium 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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.
akadien 17y ago
One of the saddest things about America at this point in history is how so many people are ignorant and damn proud of it.
- hristov 17y ago
  Yes, that is rather depressing, but I should mention that it is not only an American problem. You can find pretty much the same dynamic in most other countries. In fact I am sure that in many other countries the lack of education is an even bigger problem.
- moserware 17y ago
  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 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z7_A-rkOjA )
  - nazgulnarsil 17y ago
    OTOH we have the issue of smart people thinking they have carte blanche to dictate the correctness of other people's preferences.
fexl 17y ago
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 17y ago
  Heh, I always get down-modded for saying bad things about the use of force.
  - steamer25 17y ago
    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 17y ago
      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 17y ago
        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.
pmichaud 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    '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.
shaunxcode 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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_Soviet_Union#Cybernetics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressed_research_in_the_Sovi...
thaumaturgy 17y ago
Is there a (developed, or developing) country in the world right now with a healthy respect for education and intellectualism?
- plinkplonk 17y ago
  "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.
  - tokenadult 17y ago
    Both India and China would fit I think. I think China's intellectuals need to show more spine in demanding intellectual freedom in discussions of national policy before I would credit China with a healthy respect for education and intellectualism. It's still not clear whether authority and stability or truth and freedom are the paramount values in China. I think all people everywhere ultimately learn to cherish freedom, but some places have more grass-roots demand for freedom at present. In this regard, India compares very favorably to China at the moment.
  - eru 17y ago
    Turkey also seems to have some respect for education.
    - eru 17y ago
      (At least people seemed to be quite keen on sending their offspring to university when I lived there for a few months in 2008. I guess it could also be more of a status symbol, though.)
    - btilly 17y ago
      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.
chubbard 17y ago
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 17y ago
  >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 17y ago
    >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.

87 points by zck 17y ago

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 17y ago
Fair enough, but the article only talks about Sam Stein.

chasingsparks 17y ago

"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 17y ago
"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."
10ren 17y ago
I skimmed down to that part and stopped. If you did, and are still reading, my ploy was successful. Your ploy was not successful. A pity, because judging by the number of comments here, it may have been interesting.

astine 17y ago

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.

yummyfajitas 17y ago
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. If the author has never heard this term before, it suggests the accusation is correct in his case.
lolcraft 17y ago
Happiness, whether consisting in pleasure or virtue, or both, is more often found with those who are highly cultivated in their minds and in their character, and have only a moderate share of external goods, than among those who possess external goods to a useless extent but are deficient in higher qualities. - Aristotle Of course, Aristotle was a bourgeois (i.e. not proud of being ignorant) and his opinions should be taken with a grain of salt.
mquander 17y ago
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.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

_delirium 17y ago

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 17y ago
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.

akadien 17y ago

One of the saddest things about America at this point in history is how so many people are ignorant and damn proud of it.

hristov 17y ago
Yes, that is rather depressing, but I should mention that it is not only an American problem. You can find pretty much the same dynamic in most other countries. In fact I am sure that in many other countries the lack of education is an even bigger problem.
moserware 17y ago
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 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z7_A-rkOjA )
- nazgulnarsil 17y ago
  OTOH we have the issue of smart people thinking they have carte blanche to dictate the correctness of other people's preferences.

fexl 17y ago

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 17y ago
Heh, I always get down-modded for saying bad things about the use of force.
- steamer25 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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 17y ago
      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.

pmichaud 17y ago

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 17y ago
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 17y ago
  '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.

shaunxcode 17y ago

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 17y ago
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_Soviet_Union#Cybernetics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressed_research_in_the_Sovi...

thaumaturgy 17y ago

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

plinkplonk 17y ago
"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.
- tokenadult 17y ago
  Both India and China would fit I think. I think China's intellectuals need to show more spine in demanding intellectual freedom in discussions of national policy before I would credit China with a healthy respect for education and intellectualism. It's still not clear whether authority and stability or truth and freedom are the paramount values in China. I think all people everywhere ultimately learn to cherish freedom, but some places have more grass-roots demand for freedom at present. In this regard, India compares very favorably to China at the moment.
- eru 17y ago
  Turkey also seems to have some respect for education.
  - eru 17y ago
    (At least people seemed to be quite keen on sending their offspring to university when I lived there for a few months in 2008. I guess it could also be more of a status symbol, though.)
  - btilly 17y ago
    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.

chubbard 17y ago

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 17y ago
>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 17y ago
  >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.