mathematical nonsense

Otherwise well-meaning but less well-pedigreed people have been telling the conspiratorial-prone like Kevin that demagogues like Peterson were babbling frauds their whole lives. Naturally it only served to convince them further that they were really onto some hidden truth.

Sometimes there's wisdom in the crowds.

I thought that had to be some kind of elaborate April fool thing, but apparently it's not.

I downloaded the first of the "strides". It contains the following quote:

“Elsewhere, I have argued that the practice of school mathematics in the US regulates the child by privileging: algebra/calculus over geometry/topology/spatial reasoning."

Now I'm looking for someone to strangle in preference to tearing all my own hair out.

Sylvia.

I've never met anyone who was proud of being bad at math. You must hang with a different crowd.

We like to do math in our heads at whiteboards. I'm very good at it. People are shocked.

There was a technique called "Lightning Empiricism" about this. It's described in one of Jim Williams' books. It's more like using a slide rule than a calculator, getting pretty close by basically guessing. Getting something right to within 10 or 20% can be very useful. Or even 10:1.

snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote: ====================================

** The remark cited has nothing to do with being "proud". It's just a piece of self effacing bullshit. ** Got good at that in high school and uni in the late 60s and early 70s. Cos a slide rule was all I and most others had. Mine was a Faber Castell " Elektro 1-98 " - like this:

HP35s had just appeared and were a tad expensive, even if part of a buying group.

BTW Still got my Elektro in case all else fails:

..... Phil

This is America, George, you're almost equally as likely to find an academic opposed to the idea of "gender studies" in principle on the faculty of a university gender studies department, as you are to find a left-wing zealot.

It's not one big happy band of brothers in academia, even in fields like that.

Have you never heard of a conservative who's opposed to the idea of public housing being appointed as director of a public housing department in the US? Are they all managed by communists? The state's sure not going to save any money that way...

If the radical left had nearly as much power in America or its educational system as wingnuts like to imagine in their minds, I think both of them would already be very different places.

That left-wing academics publish documents of this type from time to time does help to keep old ladies clutching their pearls, and helps to keep thousands of younger men (who never learned anything from their math classes, either, if they ever had them) with their fingers on their triggers, looking around for a yoga studio or college campus to shoot up, having been well-trained to believe that right now is truly the last days, just seconds before their whole world collapses into a true hellscape of equitable math and gay pride balloons.

And wouldn't that be just faaaaaaaaaaabulous!

I was in the yellow aluminum Pickett slide rule faction. We had immense contempt for the bamboo boys. Well, I got the Picketts free. I had a friend who, I think, stole them.

I still have my first HP35. It cost $400, about as much as my Honda S50 motorcycle. The 35's had the best keyboard ever.

I have several HP 32S2's, which are pretty good. I guess there is an Android phone app that's a decent RPN calculator.

Quick estimations are still useful. Like, is that resistor going to get hot from that pulse? Will the capacitance of that chip affect the transmission line? If it's orders of magnitide away from mattering, sloppy math is good enough.

The majority of the population has no feel for physical magnitudes or basic math or physics. But they manage to make coffee and drive and paint their hallways and hit baseballs and not fall off cliffs.

It's sort of amazing.

None of this requires counting things, intrinsically. That you can take mathematics derived from the ability to count things and apply that to the physical process of hitting a baseball in retrospect doesn't mean that the process of hitting a baseball required counting anything to begin with.

Cats judge distances and make jumps successfully all the time, they don't have any mathematical ability and never will. Mostly successful:

You can train a neural network to drive a vehicle around and not hit objects. The neural network isn't doing any math. The computer that the neural network is running on is mapping input data to output effects and computing numerical results of executing functions on their inputs, it's not doing any math, either, the math to solve the problem of object avoidance was already done by the person who programmed it.

Maybe someday they'll build a robot barista who comes up with a unified field theory in its spare time. It wasn't even trained for that!

Why? You have a Pentium II for a brain this isn't shocking information to most here, at least.

Something like 50% of the population is functionally illiterate; how can they be expected to do math at a high school level if they can only read at an 8th grade level.

Why do you make up hate-USA nonsense when the Internet is available?

Breitbart does publish a lot of right-wing nonsense. It is aimed more at the Cursitor Doom level of gullible idiot, but John Larkin is almost as gullible. =

Right-wing parents gullible enough to take Breitbart seriously probably make even worse mistakes. At least they will only mess up the private schools they send their kids to.

want to rename it because Franklin owned a couple of slaves; later in life he was an active abolitionist.

There are left wing idiots as well as right-wing idiots. They tend to have less money and are correspondingly less dangerous.

The ones that are silly enough to listen to you might.

tripping as a profession.

A profession is something you can do for money. Guilt-tripping doesn't sound as if it would pay well.

And Breitbart thinks that this is what is going on? That takes a lot of imagination, and no grasp of reality at all.

Because the internet is available, you could have checked whether the claim was nonsense - and it isn't.

You hate the US so fiercely that you want it to stay stuck in it's current unimpressive state - which isn't all that bad. Japan does better - average score 296 - and Finland, the Netherlands , Norway and Australia take you down to 280. The US is eleven countries further down - at 270 - and sits between Germany - also at 270 - and Austria at 269. France, Spain and Italy do significantly worse (262, 252 and 250).

Clearly, you could do better, but if complacent twits like you choose to ignore the problem, things aren't gong to get better.

US functional literacy is around 20% according to:

Significant, but certainly not 50%. One must be careful of assumptions...

John

Stats are in here, though there are different interpretations of what constitutes "8th grade level" when making international comparisons. I believe Level 3 is around a "high school" level.

"U.S. performance is weak in literacy, very poor in numeracy, but only slightly below average in problem solving in technology-rich environments"

This was the OECD's take on it. The US has been a member of the OECD since 1961.

"Functional literacy" is a somewhat ill-defined term I admit, what level of literacy do you need to be "functional." a 5th grade level? 8th grade? Beats me.

It's helpful to compare what "Level 2" is in reading vs what Level 2 is in math to a get a sense of equivalence, maybe:

"Level 2" in math are grade-school tasks.

That is to say, like 5th grade-level tasks.