[b]Jordan Ellenberg
There is real danger that, by strengthening our abilities to analyze some questions mathematically, we acquire a general confidence in our beliefs, which extends unjustifiably to those things we’re still wrong about.[/b]
Either that or mistaking the either/or world for the is/ought world.
If you do happen to find yourself partially believing a crazy theory, don’t worry—probably the evidence you encounter will be inconsistent with it, driving down your degree of belief in the craziness until your beliefs come into line with everyone else’s. Unless, that is, the crazy theory is designed to survive this winnowing process. That’s how conspiracy theories work.
Just out of curiosity, who designs them?
We tend to teach mathematics as a long list of rules. You learn them in order and you have to obey them, because if you don’t obey them you get a C-. This is not mathematics. Mathematics is the study if things that come out a certain way because there is no other way they could possibly be.
Next up: we tend to teach ethics as…
Math gives us a way of being unsure in a principled way: not just throwing up our hands and saying “huh,” but rather making a firm assertion: “I’m not sure, this is why I’m not sure, and this is roughly how not-sure I am.” Or even more: "I’m unsure, and you should be too.
Hint, hint, Mr. Objectivist.
Excellence doesn’t persist; time passes, and mediocrity asserts itself.
Well, unless you’re in the Coalition of Truth.
Mark Twain is good on this: It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others.
That sound you hear is Ayn Rand spinning ferociously in her grave.