Tuesday, July 13, 2021

Contra Woketarianism, Math Is Objective

One of the biggest problems we face in the great Woketarian war is that the other side is composed and led largely by people who don't know much and can't reason well. This means that we're frequently stuck trying to disentangle and explain hopeless bullshit. Trying to do that sort of thing generally puts one at a disadvantage of a certain kind: your opponents can spout bullshit nonstop; it doesn't have to meet standards of cogency; it just has to be alluring and confusing to the right demographic. Spouting bullshit is the easiest thing in the world; explaining what's wrong with bullshit is often difficult and time-and-energy consuming. And it must meet objective standards of cogency. 
   Here's some of their bullshit floating around the web:
























Now, objectivity is already a somewhat difficult topic. It's a complicated concept--in fact, several complicated concepts. And the objectivity of math and logic are notoriously complicated. People who spout bullshit like that in the screenshot above just spout it and move on. They don't know enough to be bothered by the fact that they don't know what they're talking about and aren't even close to being right. They're activists; they want to make people believe that math isn't objective. They couldn't give less of a shit what that means, nor that they're wrong, nor why. 
   Sadly, our peculiar ilk--yours and mine--can't be satisfied just changing minds. We want to know truths, and want other people to know them too, and we won't even be satisfied if we lead others to true beliefs but via invalid arguments...
   But fortunately: we don't have to do everything all at once. I'm not interested in addressing big questions here like In what does the objectivity of mathematics consist? All I want to address right now is a fairly simple--and really irritatingly stupid--error in the above. It's an error that the pomo-prog left makes over and over and over again about innumerable different matters.
Here's a way to summarize it as it appears above:
Well, sure, math is objective...but there are lots of other things that can sometimes abut math in certain ways...and they're not entirely objective...so that means that math isn't objective after all...
Utter bullshit.
It's like: 
You think that facts are objective. But people can use objective facts to fulfill their subjective desires, or they can lie about the facts, or be wrong about them, or use them (e.g. facts about metallurgy) to oppress people...so facts aren't objective after all...
   Here's a clue, you shitheads: something is objective does not entail everything is objective. Objective facts enter into relations with non-objective states. That doesn't make them non-objective.
   And just one or two other things:
   "The...content in which it is thought" makes no goddamn sense. Stop just stringing together words. The content of mathematics is objective.
Also:
   "The context in which math is taught" isn't particularly subjective, you idiots. A context is a collection of background (objective) facts.
   And how has math been used to "normalize" racism? You just say that same kind of shit about everything. Same old cognitive pablum, spit up every time you open your mouths.
   And...well...actually I'm going to stop there. Basically every sentence of that bullshit is bullshit. And then new kinds of "intersectional" bullshit gets produced by their interaction...
   These people usually just make no sense. When they do manage to make a little sense, they usually say something false. They're not smart. They're not well-educated. They are a cult of halfwits convinced that they've got the keys to the universe by reading some other halfwits publishing in education journals.
   They are an embarrassment, and shouldn't be in control of anything--especially education.

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