Math is Racist - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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Provision of the two UN HDI indicators other than GNP.
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By Hong Wu
#14850993
http://www.dailywire.com/news/20113/pea ... exit-modal

In a joint statement released last year, two organizations, TODOS: Mathematics for All and the National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics (NCSM) said "social justice" is "a key priority in the access to, engagement with, and advancement in mathematics education for our country’s youth.”

"[A] social justice stance interrogates and challenges the roles power, privilege, and oppression play in the current unjust system of mathematics education — and in society as a whole," reads the lengthy missive.

NCSM and TODOS went on to assert that, historically, math has perpetuated "segregation and separation" since "mathematics achievement, often measured by standardized tests, has been used as a gate-keeping tool to sort and rank students by race, class, and gender starting in elementary school.”

"Citing the practice of 'tracking,'" notes Campus Reform, "in which pupils are sorted by academic ability into groups for certain classes, NCSM and TODOS argue that 'historically, mathematics and the perceived ability to learn mathematics have been used to educate children into different societal roles such as leadership/ruling class and labor/working class leading to segregation and separation.'"

The SJW-talk here is so thick I could barely understand what they were trying to say in some of these quotes.

This "math is racist" meme has been coming up with increasing frequency over the years. On the one hand, it's widely known that people of above average intelligence find subjects like trigonometry challenging, as distinct of course from the small segment of any population that has a talent for math. On the other hand, it's also an open secret that large numbers of kids are allowed to cheat their way through highschool so that the numbers will show less racial disparity. One problem is that public schooling doesn't end until the 12th grade (in China and other east Asian countries, it ends at 9th grade for those who can't do math well enough and that helps to avoid problems like these) but I digress. The real question is how people can claim that math is racist with a straight face.

As I understand it, letting kids cheat their way through classes probably makes you feel bad. But if you required everyone to actually know the material, you'd look like a racist and that must be absolutely terrifying in a western public school right now. So the way they try to resolve this is they go through ideological revolutions (and by revolution I mean the revolving kind) and one of the stops on that circle is to conclude that "math itself is racist, not me."

What is probably happening here is if they accept that some people just aren't very good at math on average, it would trigger them because they'd start thinking that racism is justified, which probably requires a presumption that we can't just leave other people alone even if they are worse at math on average. I find this final conclusion to be a little strange since the days of colonialism and so-on have been over for a long time, as such it probably doesn't matter if the averaged whites and Asians are better at math than the averaged blacks and so-on. Even so these conniptions apparently can't be stopped. Sad!
#14851102
The site, Daily Wire, has its own section on Snopes and is run by Ben Shapiro, a showboat that makes money every time he can make rightwingers feel like the precious little victims they keep whining that they are.

NYT wrote:These publications and commentators aren’t embracing the kind of real debate that they pay lip service to on campuses; they are spoon-feeding screeds to their right-wing readers. They are telling them that their most deeply felt beliefs about the world and about their fellow Americans are not only factually correct, but also morally righteous. Often, that means reinforcing ideas about race and gender shaped by bias more than fact, while simultaneously claiming to be the last redoubt of objective journalism.
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By MistyTiger
#14851447
Racist math? That's funny.

Math is not glamorous. It is just a subject that most people find dull.

But yeah, so many people cheat to succeed. It is sad but people just care about great results regardless of how the results are created. The process should matter more than the results.
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By johndogooder91
#14853071
@The Immortal Goon,
While it's true that these kind of newspapers quote what it's convenient for them and take out of contexts things, it's not less true that many post-modernist social scientists and 'associations' claiming to study 'structural oppression' (among other esoteric ghosts :D ) have gone too far and each day they become more and more utterly ridiculous :?:
#14853363
johndogooder91 wrote:@The Immortal Goon,
While it's true that these kind of newspapers quote what it's convenient for them and take out of contexts things, it's not less true that many post-modernist social scientists and 'associations' claiming to study 'structural oppression' (among other esoteric ghosts :D ) have gone too far and each day they become more and more utterly ridiculous :?:


I would argue that the right has embraced this kind of post-modernist nonsense while most academics have finally let them go.

Since the Daily Caller feels like this is a bad thing that someone feels like math has been used to justify racism (it has, but this is irrelevant to any kind of discussion as so has the sun and dirt) we enter a feeling-feed-back-loop of postmodernists proclaiming their own truths instead of what is actually and verifiably true.

At least the Daily Caller picks up a few bob in encouraging this kind of Victorian-fainting-couch style discussion I guess.
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By 59 More
#14853369
@Hong Wu

Are white people on the right such cucked that they restored to post shit topic on things that will never affect their lives or society or even the school board of said topic? Do need something to stroke their tic tac dick egos?
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By ThirdTerm
#14853378
"Citing the practice of 'tracking,'" notes Campus Reform, "in which pupils are sorted by academic ability into groups for certain classes, NCSM and TODOS argue that 'historically, mathematics and the perceived ability to learn mathematics have been used to educate children into different societal roles such as leadership/ruling class and labor/working class leading to segregation and separation.'"


Meritocracy started in Britain in the early 20th century to undermine aristocratic dominance perpetuated in the country, imitating China's examination system. Until then, those from wealthy aristocratic families could take up government posts without taking exams. In China, the system of competitive examinations for recruiting officials dominated education from the Song dynasty onward and the West caught up with the East, which was a great achievement. Math is actually a liberating force, offering educational opportunities for pupils from working class families.



Every year students in India vie for places at the nation’s premier science universities. The colleges are known collectively as the Indian Institutes of Technology, or IITs. Across the country, hundreds of thousands students take the entrance exam. But only a tiny handful — about the top two percent — are accepted.

One math tutor, Anand Kumar, has had amazing success getting his students in, despite the fact that many come from extreme poverty. In this report, I visit the Ramanujan School of Mathematics in Patna, Bihar, in north-central India, and tell this teacher’s extraordinary story.
By foxdemon
#14853460
MistyTiger wrote:Racist math? That's funny.

Math is not glamorous. It is just a subject that most people find dull.

But yeah, so many people cheat to succeed. It is sad but people just care about great results regardless of how the results are created. The process should matter more than the results.



I agree. Math is basically just slogging away and learning the basics then building on it. Lots of practice, just like exercise.

A better idea than PC nonsense might be to take the basics approach to heart and not advancing students until they have mastered each step along the way. That’s what they are doing in Chinese education these days and it seems to be working. Even if the British are interested.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/mar/13/chinese-teachers-bring-the-art-of-maths-to-english-schools

But the students do need to learn to respect their teachers. This results in discipline which is needed for the practice, practice, practice bit. By making teaching math a PC issue, it is setting students against the institution, which isn’t going to facilitate a culture of respect for teachers. I think the PC approach will retard math education while fostering animosity in the community and then requiring a manipulation of results to achieve a contrived outcome.
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By johndogooder91
#14853522
The Immortal Goon wrote:
I would argue that the right has embraced this kind of post-modernist nonsense while most academics have finally let them go.

Since the Daily Caller feels like this is a bad thing that someone feels like math has been used to justify racism (it has, but this is irrelevant to any kind of discussion as so has the sun and dirt) we enter a feeling-feed-back-loop of postmodernists proclaiming their own truths instead of what is actually and verifiably true.

At least the Daily Caller picks up a few bob in encouraging this kind of Victorian-fainting-couch style discussion I guess.


Well, in my impression, the main characteristic of post-modernism thinking is not the way of presenting arguments, but the choice of subjects of study. Humans have always used flawed arguments to defend their a priori held opinions (primarily based on personal interests and cultural backgroud rather than rationality). Both left and right have donde this, I believe. I actually think that this way of tribal-based thinking is in human nature, but that's off topic.

Consequently, this kind of right-wing newspapers are designed for the majority of public, who don't really mind not being completely objective, just like The Guardian on the other side of the political spectrum.
But I think that engaging in post-modernism is more about the choice of topics of study, like structural opressions. The way of reasoning is less important.

The Right mainly argue that post-modernism is non-sense in itself by just looking at the subjects they study. I mostly agree with this. I don't really care how clever some charlatan can be in arguing about how 'math is racist' or how it has 'perpetuated racism', I just think that statement is incorrect since the beginning, hence impossible to 'prove' and unworthy of any attention and public funding.

I obviously believe that rationality and objective, unbiased thinking are very important ir order to achieve truth and knowledge, but if the choice of the topics of study is biased since its inception and follows a political (and subversive) agenda, then there's no point trying to play the rationality card :hmm:
#14853559
@johndogooder91

My field is history, and in the most basic sense there was some sense in the first step to postmodernism. For instance, if one were to study the British Raj, instead of using sources only legitimized by the British state, finding sources from the Indians themselves that weren't official makes some kind of sense. And this was, for all I dislike about postmodernism, something of a useful trick. The idea that an unfounded rumour, an ad, graffiti, etc could be useful in informing us was what led to this kind of postmodernism.

Further, there is some valid criticism that modernism has a tendency toward totalitarianism in some form. Whether it's Victorian social norms, Stalinist conceptions that the party can never be wrong, Hitler conceptions that the racial dynamic as established by experts must be seen through--whatever.

The issue becomes that the replacement with postmodernism was shit. Instead of simply encouraging new sources of information to be brought into the "official" sphere of history, it also brought in how we interpret these sources from an emotional instead of an objective manner.

Far from totalitarianism, postmodernism's tendancy is toward chaos and ignorance. There are no experts, there is how you interact with material. Since you're so special there is no training that you need to do with it, your interpretation is just as valid as someone that has spent his life studying it.

In the instance from the OP, it is perfectly correct (though irrelevant) that math was used for racism. But if you don't feel like it's irrelevant, then let the coddling begin not just for the person that feels like it's not irrelevant--but the people that feel bad about you feeling like that.

In my observations the high water mark for this garbage on the left has been hit and it's been receding. There were some, like Noam Chomsky, that had always been fighting back against postmodernists. The Marxists were always a modernist ideology, so we never embraced it either. But we were islands flooded with this crap until recently.

Now it seems that the right has picked up postmodernism. It is almost instructive to see the Republican Party fracture and continue to fight against any sense of power to restore individual views of everything regardless of what experts or reality plead with them. Like any other postmodernist, the modern Republican is having a lot of time trusting experts. A revolt against Mitch McConnell, who engineered their victory, for instance.
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By johndogooder91
#14853653
@The Immortal Goon,
what do you think was the main reason why the left abandoned rationalism and embraced an all-emotional, feeling-oriented cosmovision of the world?
Today, almost all left-wing political parties I know (even those claiming Marxism as its foundational Weltanschauung) have fallen prey of this extreme PC-version of reality where only emotions matter. My guess is that it has something to do with democracy and how to attract votes from the lumpenproletariat and the more emotionally-oriented mind of the mayority of females, but I really don't know.
#14853912
The far left I don't think ever really abandoned modernism. The more centrist left probably did so as a result of the end of the war and decolonization. Modernism had come to a horrifying conclusion in WWII, and just after there was really no choice but to live the experiences of other people in colonial settings as they grew more prominent in voice. The result was a certain amount of soul searching, which meant to let go of what one thought he or she knew and try to find another mental orientation and postmodernism provided all of them.

But the left is getting over this, for the most part. A big part in that, I suspect, was the environmental movement in the US where the postmodernism plague was most effective. In this the more moderate left was forced to adhere to science and pivot back to a kind of modernism that could deal with science. After that it's seemed to be a more modernist kind of drive. Things like following the Swedish model because of social sciences and economics.

It's the right that picked up the flag of postmodernism. The relentless tyranny of everyone's feelings. Just because 99% of scientists think that there's global warming doesn't meant that this addresses the feelings of someone that is cold right now. Just because we can measure effective healthcare results in the rest of the industrial world in no way addresses the fact that there's a feeling that people don't like about it.

Now it's bleating emotional appeals to things that are factually inaccurate all the time on the right. I want to slap a Proud Boy or any other hysterical part of the right that wants everyone to know how his feelings are affected by policy or whatever. Look at the facts and cowboy the fuck up.
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By johndogooder91
#14854483
@The Immortal Goon,
I don't buy the usual stuff about 'WWII made humans realise how evil is this world and therefore this explains why...'(whatever the subject wants to explain).
I've seen this argument used for so many different things... :knife:

I think that emotionally-based thinking and emotionally-based culture are specifically designed with a purpose.
The purpose being paving the way for manipulating the masses more effectively into whatever the dominant elites deem fit.

Another issue is that this purpose has its own puppets, i.e. people who actually think that emotions and feelings should drive politics.
But such people have always existed, and everyone ignored them before.
The Press can choose when to ignore and when to make propaganda for any given political system.
For the Press it's very easy to radically change what the people perceive as 'The current idiological norms', so they went for this ones for a reason...

I don't agree that the Left is abandoning this manner of emotio-thinking, I don't see that at all...
By Pants-of-dog
#14854497
johndogooder91 wrote:....

I think that emotionally-based thinking and emotionally-based culture are specifically designed with a purpose.
The purpose being paving the way for manipulating the masses more effectively into whatever the dominant elites deem fit.

Another issue is that this purpose has its own puppets, i.e. people who actually think that emotions and feelings should drive politics.
But such people have always existed, and everyone ignored them before.
The Press can choose when to ignore and when to make propaganda for any given political system.
For the Press it's very easy to radically change what the people perceive as 'The current idiological norms', so they went for this ones for a reason...

....


viewtopic.php?f=28&t=170894&start=960#p14854459

johndogooder91 wrote:You seem to disregard feelings for some bizarre reason.

Rationality is easy, quiet, and serves well its purposes in life. It's actually a great invention.

But feelings and crude passions are the Masters of Rationality. They are the True Drivers of History. Don't ever forget that.


I sense an inconsistency here.
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By johndogooder91
#14854617
I think you must have not tried very hard to see why it's not inconsistent.

Acknowledging the power and importance of emotions, feelings and instinctive bias is not incompatible with thinking that rationality-based action it's the more effective way of acting (if that was what I think, which I'm not sure).
Anyway, this discussion is not ideological, I was not suggesting a course of action.

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