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Probably if you spend enough time and effort you can find something political in, say, the mathematics papers written by any given university research team on a
by Gravityloss 7y ago
Probably if you spend enough time and effort you can find something political in, say, the mathematics papers written by any given university research team on any given year. But if a politician advocates for teaching that Pi is exactly three, in my opinion that's on a whole different level.
Your post advocates for false equivalence, in a somewhat indirect manner. We get to "all science is politicized". And then the muddling of the waters is complete.
- bluGill 7y agoWhat value is in that mathematical papers though? Most of it is correct within itself, but useless for anything real world and always will be. There is only so much labor we have as society. We need to make choices as to what we do. If everybody was willing we could dedicate society to just math. People can sleep under their desk at work, eat the mass produced cafeteria food, never watch sports, just work eat sleep. A lot of mathematicians could be funded with the leftover money (remember they are living the same life so their cost of living is tiny - more than half our population could produce more theorems). The above is obviously Reductio ad Absurdum. However it brings out the point: we as a society have already decided math isn't the most valuable thing. We are already drawing limits, the only question is where.
- kaitai 7y agoMathematics is surprisingly useful. You've used your credit card online -- where'd that encryption algorithm come from? "Useless" math. You've booked a flight online -- where'd that schedule come from? Uh, math again: all that optimization, those traveling salesman problems. Right now I'm doing all sorts of work studying risk in financial networks, studying public health, all using math that was considered "pure" just 20 years ago. Actually, at the moment I'm looking up papers on the tropical geometry of deep learning. Certainly I realize society has decided math is not the most valuable thing, which is why I'll be seeking to do "machine learning" instead in the next year or so, rather than education & research (useless for anything in the real world!). I'm sure I'll add more to humanity when I'm optimizing for ad clicks :)
- bluGill 7y agoI didn't argue all math is useless. I argued a lot of it is
- jonhendry18 7y agoSomething may look useless now, but turn out not to be useless. Something might be useless now, but further mathematics based on it might be worth billions.
- physicsyogi 7y agoIt can be difficult to predict whether a given research topic will be useful or not in the future. It's easy when something is developed with an application in mind. It can be far more difficult for "pure math". There are plenty of examples of math that we don't have an application for today becoming very relevant in the future. For example: - Fast Fourier transform (Gauss discovered and didn't publish it b/c he thought it wasn't very useful. Others rediscovered it later.) - Number theory was considered useless for a long time, now it's used for cryptography
- commandlinefan 7y ago> We get to "all science is politicized" No, just the science that's fashionable to politicize. You can't pretend that this article isn't at least more biased than the people they're supposedly warning us about.
- jonhendry18 7y agoThe Trump Interior Department abruptly canceled a study into coal mining's effects on the health of nearby residents. An Interior Department official explained the decision this way: "Science was a Democrat thing"