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Recently there was a brouhaha on the Twitters about 2+2=5 that went viral and, unfortunately, political. The argument is that post-modernists are trying to tear

Recently there was a brouhaha on the Twitters about 2+2=5 that went viral and, unfortunately, political. The argument is that post-modernists are trying to tear down mathematics as a "white supremacist social construct" and trying to say that "2+2=5" is as valid an answer as "2+2=4". Which sounds pretty bad, so I looked into it. The original Tweet thread was a math nerd who jokingly, and not incorrectly, illustrated how it was mathematically possible for 2+2 to sometimes be 5. The argument may have been weak, and some people may not have found it convincing, but it was a mathematical argument, meant as a joke for a small Twitter audience. Through the Twitter telephone, many retweets and steps later, the original argument - considered, funny, valid, perhaps weak - somehow transformed into "2+2=4 is a mere social construct, and 5 is a valid answer" - which, yes, would be a disturbing trend if that were actually the argument. Thus the unduly passionate took up "2+2 is 4 not 5" as a political rallying cry. People I otherwise respect as rational began tweeting this. It became complicated because there are always people who believe dumb things, like "mathematics is merely a white supremacist social construct", and as always with the unduly passionate, extreme opinions are held up as examples of dangerously typical. The author of the original thread was bullied by a mob. It's complicated even further by the existence of an actual replication crisis in academe, in part driven by post-modern ideological pressures; there is actual loss of academic freedom even for the tenured. But the lesson at the end of the day, to my mind, is that articles about whatever goes on over at Twitter, such as this one, such as this my post here, are always going to involve mobs of people being shitty, because the nature of the medium. Maybe they are as inevitable as "mobs of people are gambling in Las Vegas"

chrisseaton 6y ago
Lesson is don’t joke or use sarcasm or hyperbole on the internet because you are begging to be maliciously misunderstood.
- tokai 6y ago
  On the contrary - use jokes and sarcasm to root out posers, trolls, and ideologues.
- vsareto 6y ago
  Comedians have a tough enough time doing jokes with face-to-face communication and body language as it's been done for thousands of years. So most of the people on Twitter are already behind them, but then they want to try and do jokes on a brand new human medium that lacks a lot of information from face-to-face communication. And then they get upset that someone didn't get their joke.
drak0n1c 6y ago
Twitter, social media, and now even regular media stories are a game of telephone, with slight misinterpretations snowballing as the minutes and hours go by. People lining up to fight on both sides of accidental straw man theses is a weekly occurrence.
twic 6y ago
There's a bit more to it than that - once reactionaries started saying that 2 + 2 could only be 4, anyone who was woke and knew a bit of maths started brainposting about how actually 2 + 2 could be defined to mean 5 in various ways, and that was perfectly valid mathematics, and the reactionaries were showing their mathematical ignorance - all as a dunk on the reactionaries, not a defence or explanation of the original joke. I'm not sure how widespread this was. I may be friends with an abnormally high number of radical leftists who like abstract algebra. This was all mildly irritating, but the worst thing was when some of them said 2 + 2 could be 5 in modular arithmetic. The whole thing was pointless and stupid. It was perfect Twitter.
Tainnor 6y ago
So, 2+2=5 is true in the ring Z/Z (arithmetic modulo 1) which is just the trivial ring consisting of a single element. It's not true in any of the other modular arithmetic rings. So, it's not particularly interesting. If you move away from modular arithmetic and the numbers 2 and 5 being in any way related to their standard meanings, you can of course redefine them to mean whatever you want (e.g. rotations of a cube or whatever) and then you can make 2+2=5 work. But I suspect no sane mathematician would do that, it would just be totally confusing. It's possible there is some deeper structure out there in which you can reinterpret something like 2+2=5 to be actually useful, though But I doubt it. So in a sense, it's true: You can construe a mathematical world where 2+2=5, but doing so reduces either the whole affair to a triviality (everything is equal to itself), or is just deliberately using confusing notation. I think there's probably an interesting argument in here about how on the one hand languages and structures are man-made and arbitrary (nobody decreed that 2 should be the symbol denoting the concept of two-ness), and yet on the other hand, how once you fix meanings and rules, the mathematics is fixed and not up for debate, and also how just changing standard meanings without good reason would annoy even mathematicians.
- ookdatnog 6y ago
  IIRC the moral of the original 2+2=5 guy's comment was "if someone reaches a different conclusion than you, ask them under which axioms they reached that conclusion." I think that's valuable advice. Note that he didn't say you have to accept their axioms. Clearly working in arithmetic modulo 1 is meaningless in most circumstances, and you can criticize that. But if you're not reasoning under the same axioms, you cannot have a productive discussion.
  - Tainnor 6y ago
    A bit late, but are you referring to this Twitter thread by any chance? https://mobile.twitter.com/kareem_carr/status/1289724475609501697 https://mobile.twitter.com/kareem_carr/status/12897244756095... If so, then the argument he makes is totally braindead. He doesn't even consider special algebraic structures or anything. He's just coming up with the most obvious observation ever: if your mathematical model doesn't match the reality or asks the wrong questions, then the results are worthless. This is probably obvious to any high school student but that's certainly no reason to run around and say that 2+2=5. In any case, there is zero mathematical insight there, he doesn't even make a mathematical argument for it, and the "I am a former mathematician" part only serves to distract from that fact. I could go onto an entire different rant about his infinity argument and how mathematics seemingly haven't figured out how to work with infinity "naturally" (I don't know what he means by naturally, but they certainly have figured out how to work with it precisely), but let's leave it at that.
breakfastduck 6y ago
Twitter is poison. It amplifies meaningless shit into the stratosphere with its trending algorithms, aided by the fact that the largest userbase on twitter seems to be political extremists of both left & right. It's created an environment where making a comment like "mathematics is merely a white supremacist social construct" is now somehow acceptable to the left. The platform literally exists to make things look like they're a bigger deal worldwide than they really are. It's dangerous. I quit twitter a while back - when I was on the platform, all my news consumption revolved around it. I was deeply concerned about the state of the UK and the US because of the constant stream of political propaganda from both sides. Since I quit my brain feels like it's been completely freed of political dogma and I'm in a significantly better mood generally. I've not missed the trending page, that's for certain. The biggest issue is the loss of academic freedom you alluded too, mainly & ironically being pushed heavily by the 'Twitter Left'. Twitter is like a heavily left leaning version of /pol/ these days. I'd like to be clear that I would consider myself on 'the left', to be a progressive person & I am absolutely aware that the extremist cesspit that is twitter does not represent the genuine left, much as it doesn't represent genuine moderates or genuine conservatives. It's the most extreme weaponized propaganda & rent-a-mob tool thats ever existed in human history.
- Akronymus 6y ago
  > It amplifies meaningless shit into the stratosphere with its trending algorithms, aided by the fact that the largest userbase on twitter seems to be political extremists of both left & right. It's created an environment where making a comment like "mathematics is merely a white supremacist social construct" is now somehow acceptable to the left. It is like unleashing a neural net that amplifies whatever it sees in a image but fed with white noise IMO. And then it just keeps on spiraling in on itself.
  - breakfastduck 6y ago
    It scares me how much people on twitter believe that what they see trending on there from the news and other sources is being seen and blown up worldwide when it's not. It's being blown up worldwide ON TWITTER. The vast majority of the world never sees or hears any of it. It causes delusions of grandeur across the userbase.
LockAndLol 6y ago
I learned a while back that twitter is a sludge fest in the abscess of the internet. Any meaningful commentary is drowned out by a deluge of downright bafoonery and willingful ignorance.
int_19h 6y ago
I'd say that part of the reason for such a reaction is that stuff like "mathematx" actually exists - so people don't bother checking when a claim sounds like it's related.

chrisseaton 6y ago

Lesson is don’t joke or use sarcasm or hyperbole on the internet because you are begging to be maliciously misunderstood.

tokai 6y ago
On the contrary - use jokes and sarcasm to root out posers, trolls, and ideologues.
vsareto 6y ago
Comedians have a tough enough time doing jokes with face-to-face communication and body language as it's been done for thousands of years. So most of the people on Twitter are already behind them, but then they want to try and do jokes on a brand new human medium that lacks a lot of information from face-to-face communication. And then they get upset that someone didn't get their joke.

drak0n1c 6y ago

Twitter, social media, and now even regular media stories are a game of telephone, with slight misinterpretations snowballing as the minutes and hours go by. People lining up to fight on both sides of accidental straw man theses is a weekly occurrence.

twic 6y ago

There's a bit more to it than that - once reactionaries started saying that 2 + 2 could only be 4, anyone who was woke and knew a bit of maths started brainposting about how actually 2 + 2 could be defined to mean 5 in various ways, and that was perfectly valid mathematics, and the reactionaries were showing their mathematical ignorance - all as a dunk on the reactionaries, not a defence or explanation of the original joke. I'm not sure how widespread this was. I may be friends with an abnormally high number of radical leftists who like abstract algebra. This was all mildly irritating, but the worst thing was when some of them said 2 + 2 could be 5 in modular arithmetic. The whole thing was pointless and stupid. It was perfect Twitter.

Tainnor 6y ago

So, 2+2=5 is true in the ring Z/Z (arithmetic modulo 1) which is just the trivial ring consisting of a single element. It's not true in any of the other modular arithmetic rings. So, it's not particularly interesting. If you move away from modular arithmetic and the numbers 2 and 5 being in any way related to their standard meanings, you can of course redefine them to mean whatever you want (e.g. rotations of a cube or whatever) and then you can make 2+2=5 work. But I suspect no sane mathematician would do that, it would just be totally confusing. It's possible there is some deeper structure out there in which you can reinterpret something like 2+2=5 to be actually useful, though But I doubt it. So in a sense, it's true: You can construe a mathematical world where 2+2=5, but doing so reduces either the whole affair to a triviality (everything is equal to itself), or is just deliberately using confusing notation. I think there's probably an interesting argument in here about how on the one hand languages and structures are man-made and arbitrary (nobody decreed that 2 should be the symbol denoting the concept of two-ness), and yet on the other hand, how once you fix meanings and rules, the mathematics is fixed and not up for debate, and also how just changing standard meanings without good reason would annoy even mathematicians.

ookdatnog 6y ago
IIRC the moral of the original 2+2=5 guy's comment was "if someone reaches a different conclusion than you, ask them under which axioms they reached that conclusion." I think that's valuable advice. Note that he didn't say you have to accept their axioms. Clearly working in arithmetic modulo 1 is meaningless in most circumstances, and you can criticize that. But if you're not reasoning under the same axioms, you cannot have a productive discussion.
- Tainnor 6y ago
  A bit late, but are you referring to this Twitter thread by any chance? https://mobile.twitter.com/kareem_carr/status/1289724475609501697 https://mobile.twitter.com/kareem_carr/status/12897244756095... If so, then the argument he makes is totally braindead. He doesn't even consider special algebraic structures or anything. He's just coming up with the most obvious observation ever: if your mathematical model doesn't match the reality or asks the wrong questions, then the results are worthless. This is probably obvious to any high school student but that's certainly no reason to run around and say that 2+2=5. In any case, there is zero mathematical insight there, he doesn't even make a mathematical argument for it, and the "I am a former mathematician" part only serves to distract from that fact. I could go onto an entire different rant about his infinity argument and how mathematics seemingly haven't figured out how to work with infinity "naturally" (I don't know what he means by naturally, but they certainly have figured out how to work with it precisely), but let's leave it at that.

breakfastduck 6y ago

Twitter is poison. It amplifies meaningless shit into the stratosphere with its trending algorithms, aided by the fact that the largest userbase on twitter seems to be political extremists of both left & right. It's created an environment where making a comment like "mathematics is merely a white supremacist social construct" is now somehow acceptable to the left. The platform literally exists to make things look like they're a bigger deal worldwide than they really are. It's dangerous. I quit twitter a while back - when I was on the platform, all my news consumption revolved around it. I was deeply concerned about the state of the UK and the US because of the constant stream of political propaganda from both sides. Since I quit my brain feels like it's been completely freed of political dogma and I'm in a significantly better mood generally. I've not missed the trending page, that's for certain. The biggest issue is the loss of academic freedom you alluded too, mainly & ironically being pushed heavily by the 'Twitter Left'. Twitter is like a heavily left leaning version of /pol/ these days. I'd like to be clear that I would consider myself on 'the left', to be a progressive person & I am absolutely aware that the extremist cesspit that is twitter does not represent the genuine left, much as it doesn't represent genuine moderates or genuine conservatives. It's the most extreme weaponized propaganda & rent-a-mob tool thats ever existed in human history.

Akronymus 6y ago
> It amplifies meaningless shit into the stratosphere with its trending algorithms, aided by the fact that the largest userbase on twitter seems to be political extremists of both left & right. It's created an environment where making a comment like "mathematics is merely a white supremacist social construct" is now somehow acceptable to the left. It is like unleashing a neural net that amplifies whatever it sees in a image but fed with white noise IMO. And then it just keeps on spiraling in on itself.
- breakfastduck 6y ago
  It scares me how much people on twitter believe that what they see trending on there from the news and other sources is being seen and blown up worldwide when it's not. It's being blown up worldwide ON TWITTER. The vast majority of the world never sees or hears any of it. It causes delusions of grandeur across the userbase.

LockAndLol 6y ago

I learned a while back that twitter is a sludge fest in the abscess of the internet. Any meaningful commentary is drowned out by a deluge of downright bafoonery and willingful ignorance.

int_19h 6y ago

I'd say that part of the reason for such a reaction is that stuff like "mathematx" actually exists - so people don't bother checking when a claim sounds like it's related.