Math is White Privilege...

OK, let me restate my question: What does IQ have to do with literacy?

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You can't do an IQ test if you aren't literate. Krw doesn't really understa nd what literacy means - he regularly accuses people who post here of being illiterate, when you can't participate in a text-only group if you aren't literate.

He may be misusing the term to suggest that the people he disapproves of ha ven't read the books he's read (and taken seriously) but that is a sub-lite rate usage - the sort of mistake people make when they don't fully understa nd the meaning of the words they use (and krw's understanding is sub-standa rd).

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Whilst it is true that there is some subjectivity in the *interpretation* of matters such as Quantum Mechanics, e.g. is it Copenhagen, Many Worlds, Bohmian, Ensemble, Relational, Transactional etc...this particular poor example of a math educator, is absolutely out to lunch. Math is based on, essentially, arbitrary *definitions*, and non debatable logical deductions.

1 + 1 is 2, is essentially, because the operators and numbers have been defined that way. The fact that math has relevance to the real world, sometimes, is just a nicety.

-- Kevin Aylward

On a sunny day (Wed, 25 Oct 2017 05:14:03 -0700 (PDT)) it happened Billy the Slowman decided to emit the following not quite random character string:

I like string theory, not because I understand it, which I don't, but it predicts 10^500 universes with different laws of physics, which I agree with...

-- Kevin Aylward

- SuperSpice

It makes it interesting but is also one of string theory's biggest failings, in that you're then left with the further important question "Ok, so why are we here now in _this_ universe thinking about those

10^500 other ones?" And you can always fall back on the anthropic principle which is okay as far as it goes except for the fact it's not science.

A theory which predicts everything isn't a "theory of everything", it's a theory of nothing.

Quite an interesting podcast.

I remember back in 2000 discussing Islam. I knew nothing about it. I was way too focused on my atheist bent, oh its just another religion I though, just like a lefty. I just didn't understand that Islam was different from any other religion. It all changed when I met my 3rd partner. An Iranian atheist, whose 1st husband was executed for being an atheist in the 1979 revolution. I decided to research what Islam was all about. As I noted, its a political ideology with religion as window dressing. Muhammad was a military commander. Its that simple. That's the core of what Islam is about. To force its view on everyone else. It is inherently incompatible with western democracy and freedom. Period.

-- Kevin Aylward

- SuperSpice

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So is Christianity. Modern European history is mostly about getting out fro m under theocratic lunacies. We've worked out how to let fundamemntalist Ch ristians demonstrate the sincerity of their religious mania without letting them mess up the rest of society (though the American aren't quite all the way there yet) and we can neutralise fundamentalist Muslims just as effect ively (though they too have their Timothy McVeighs).

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Conversely, one of Wittgenstein's criticisms of Whitehead's and Russel's Principia Mathematica was:

"It purports to reveal the fundamental basis for arithmetic. However, it is our everyday arithmetical practices such as counting which are fundamental; for if a persistent discrepancy arose between counting and Principia, this would be treated as evidence of an error in Principia (e.g., that Principia did not characterise numbers or addition correctly), not as evidence of an error in everyday counting."

The axioms are arbitrary but usually the reasons for making a particular choice from a set of arbitrary axioms is non-arbitrary.

It's based on arbitrary definitions, non-debatable logical deductions (provably true), and provably unprovable logical deductions, of which there's an equally large set of as compared to the size of the set of provably true deductions.

On a sunny day (Thu, 26 Oct 2017 20:53:00 +0100) it happened "Kevin Aylward" wrote in :

Seriously, many years ago I had a go, and started reading up on the math needed (it was specified on their website) and then gave up, as there must an 'Universe' where all you needed was addition to solve it. I watched travel-agencies for a holiday trip to one, no luck so far.

Maybe I should add an extra dimension... to travel-agencies. Or take a boat, you may get lost however:

having SSB radio would have helped.

Sam Harris is a thoughtful guy, sometimes the podcasts are too dense. (I'll have one on while I'm testing something, and find that I loose the thread of the conversation without constant attention.) Re: Islam, I'm mostly ignorant, Sam recommends connecting with the moderate elements, but not painting all of them with the same 'tolerant' liberal brush. Which is where I was ~one year ago.

Anyway I'm mostly just apologizing for thinking you were some wacko- islamophobe.

Sorry, George H.

Oh for the liberals who still think Charles Murray ("The Bell Curve") is a racist Sam H. has a nice conversation with him too.

I've always figured that in at least one of those 10^500 universes, the laws of physics ruled out the possibility of multiple universes, then poof, all the rest disappeared.

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Charles Murray isn't a racist. He just tells Republicans what they want to hear, making it look as if he is producing scholarly discourse, but the sch olarly bit is subordinate to getting the right - not-too-to-the-right - mes sage to keep his audience content and buying more of his output.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

It's not that Charles Murray is a racist, I couldn't possibly make that call, it's just that the work has been thoroughly debunked by many other scholars as being bad science at best and outright fraud at worst.

Yes, yes, I'm sure they're probably all "leftists" with an "agenda." If the only "correct" response to such a book is to nod sagely and agree it's all true and any other response means you have an "agenda" well, what can you do.

If you don't (possibly) mind having your mind changed go listen to the pod cast. Here,

It's not a comfortable truth for liberals, but your 'intelligence' is ~50% inherited. There are lots of other studies that have shown that now, it's really not at all controversial any more. (Maybe you think his book is about something else?)

George H.

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It has been a long time since I read The Bell Curve , but I seem to remember that while Blacks may have a lower mean IQ , there are a lot of very high IQ blacks. It other words you have to judge individuals.

Dan

Dan, I've read several books by Murray, but not the Bell Curve. But I think it's like a lot of 'intelligence' related things the left get's all bent out of shape about. There is some difference (in say math ability between men and women, or some area where women excel more than men. (language?)) but the difference is much less than the standard deviation, so there are plenty of female mathematicians.

The left wants to believe it's all nurture, but that's just not true. There will be less outrage if they can ever digest that fact.

George H.

I don't think it would be an "uncomfortable truth" for me personally. Clearly intelligence has something to do with genetics, just about every characteristic that makes up a person does so it would be hard to believe that raw IQ was somehow divorced from the situation. The "~50%" figure is so specific however that it has the ring of pseudoscience. I find it pretty difficult to believe that in the social sciences anything like that could be nailed down as precisely to write some kind of broadly-applicable numerical percentage.

However the natural followup question would be "Okay, so let's say everything you write is true. So what if it is? So what if blacks, on average, score 5 points lower on standardized IQ tests than whites and this can be directly linked to their genetics. What does that have to do with the price of potatoes?"

Not only do you have to prove that the discrepancy is non-negotiably related to genetics, which is a hard enough task, you also have to show non-negotiably that most of what is evil and wrong with society springs out of having a lower IQ, and most of what is noble and true springs out of having a higher IQ. Or people will wonder what _is_ your point.

Because it's completely naive and ludicrous to believe that if only everyone were 5 points smarter on average all the problems of religious strife, violence, poverty, and so forth would magically go away. I haven't listened to Sam Harris' stuff at all (I will, some) but from an outsider perspective this stuff sounds a lot like the "we can and need to breed better humans to fix stuff!" fashion of pseudoscience, and we have been down that road.

Nonsense, clearly genetics exist and there's no getting around that. It's just that we (well I don't at least, I can't speak for everyone) don't spend so much time obsessing about whether intelligence or math ability or driving skill or the standard deviation in women's verbal ability in 9th grade or what have you is 39% nature and 61% nurture, or

47% this and 53% that.

It feels like non-productive navel-gazing at best and leaves one scratching one's head as to why one would obsess on a topic so furiously that AFAIK has never been of much benefit to anyone outside of academia. What's the goal, here.