Another Woke math educator: Math is “white supremacist patriarchy”

_{Denyse O'Leary

August 10, 2020

Intelligent Design}

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Brooklyn College Professor of Math Education Laurie Rubel argued this week on Twitter that the mathematical equation 2+2=4 “reeks of white supremacist patriarchy.” Rubel’s tweet was retweeted and promoted by several academics at universities and colleges around the nation…
Several academics from institutions around the nation chimed in. Harvard Ph.D. candidate Kareem Carr suggested that math should be reevaluated because it was primarily developed by white men.
“People say it’s subjectivism to ask if math is Western. I don’t get that. It’s an objective fact that some groups were more involved in the creation of modern math than others,” Carr said. “They may have been *trying* to make it objective but it’s not stupid to ask if they actually succeeded!”
Tom Ciccotta, “Brooklyn College Education Prof. Claims Math Is ‘White Supremacist Patriarchy’” at The Jewish Voice

Carr apparently believes that the people who discovered theorems in math actually invented them the way a novelist writes a novel.

One of our longtime commenters is convinced that these people are few, unserious, and unimportant. The commenter is mistaken. Eliminating math is a way of eliminating objective standards by which Woke educators may be judged. That’s critical to their survival, as the chaos deepens and student performance worsens.

See also: One of Boghossian’s hoaxers started the Woke on the 2 plus 2 equals five drive? Meanwhile, Lindsay has a blog keeping track of Woke folk and other unfunny crazies, where he says he himself might have started off the 2 + 2 = 5 crazy, intending only to explain to someone how the Woke think.

And then they came for 2 + 2 = 4

and

The progressive war on science takes dead aim at math

Comments

@Marfin Do you really think you can reason with Woke-tards/ evos? These are insane people. Next thing they will say is: 'death and funerals do not exist/ they are social constructs'. Our society has spawned a lot of mental illness. And instead of being treated, these lunatics are now running the asylum. Guess that is what happens when you remove God from the picture, tell people that their lives are useless and promote massive drug consumption.Truthfreedom_{August 12, 2020
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Dave S- if you required 5 of a certain type of tablet to keep you alive , and it must be 5 , 4 just is not enough dosage . Now these tablets come in packs of 2 so you take 2 packs of 2 and hey presto you have taken 5 and you will live , or hey presto there is a lovely service at your funeral. . In the real world 2+2=4 in the world of hypotheticals 2+2= cheese if you want it to.Marfin_{August 11, 2020
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As to:
the mathematical equation 2+2=4 “reeks of white supremacist patriarchy.”
Translation, in today's academic 'woke' circles, apparently the imaginary subjective truth of rampant "white supremacist patriarchy" trumps the plain and simply objective truth of 2+2=4. Or as Chesterton put it,
"It’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense." - G. K. Chesterton 1874–1936 [“The Oracle of the Dog” (1923)]
Of related interest:
As Dr. Vern Poythress stated, “anti-theistic philosophy of mathematics is condemned to oscillate, much as we have done in our argument, between the poles of a priori knowledge and a posteriori knowledge. Why? It will not acknowledge the true God, wise Creator of both the human mind with its mathematical intuition and the external world with its mathematical properties. In sections 22-23 we shall see how the Biblical view furnishes us with a real solution to the problem of “knowing” that 2 + 2 = 4 and knowing that S is true.” https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/one-of-boghossians-hoaxers-started-the-woke-on-the-2-plus-2-equals-five-drive/#comment-709204
bornagain77_{August 11, 2020
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JVL, Mine too, unfortunately. This one is not too hard to understand, though, and is one I find shocking. There exists a specific polynomial P in 9 variables x_1, x_2, ..., x_9, with integer coefficients, such that it cannot be proved or disproved (using ZFC) that there exist integers m_1, m_2, ..., m_9 such that P(m_1, m_2, ..., m_9) = 0.daveS_{August 11, 2020
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DaveS: Indeed. I suppose some other items on this list of statements independent of ZFC would also qualify as “neither objectively true nor objectively false”? Well above my pay grade I'm afraid.JVL_{August 11, 2020
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JVL, Indeed. I suppose some other items on this list of statements independent of ZFC would also qualify as "neither objectively true nor objectively false"?daveS_{August 11, 2020
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DaveS: A more challenging problem: Does there exist a set S such that |N| < |S| < |R| (where N is the set of natural numbers and R is the set of reals)? It's not even clear whether there is an objective answer to this question. Some people believe it will not be resolved, in part because any axiom system which could resolve it is going to be less "intuitively obvious" than ZFC + CH. A famous issue that!!JVL_{August 11, 2020
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I haven't been following this topic, but if you interpret "2 + 2 = 4" in the usual way (say in light of the Peano axioms and standard mathematical notation), then it is objectively true that it follows from those axioms. (This is not to say that "2 + 2 = 5" cannot also be derived from those same axioms, incidentally, but it seems unlikely.) It is a shame that this example is receiving so much attention, as there are accessible examples where mathematics more obviously does carry certain philosophical (and perhaps cultural?) commitments. One example: Dealing with the infinite. Commenters on this blog are split on the truth value of the equation: |{1, 2, 3, ...}| = |{2, 4, 6, ...}|. Some, perhaps most, say that it's true. A few say it's false, and I'm guessing some believe it simply doesn't make sense. I say it's true, but I don't think you can resolve the question using only mathematics. A more challenging problem: Does there exist a set S such that |N| < |S| < |R| (where N is the set of natural numbers and R is the set of reals)? It's not even clear whether there is an objective answer to this question. Some people believe it will not be resolved, in part because any axiom system which could resolve it is going to be less "intuitively obvious" than ZFC + CH.daveS_{August 11, 2020
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One of our longtime commenters is convinced that these people are few, unserious, and unimportant. The commenter is mistaken.
That commenter (and other 'brights') say that they are physico-chemical robots. So I would not take them seriously. The amount of woke-tards is increasing exponentially. Evo/mat 'maths': You have 0 children. You get pregnant and kill (abort) your child. Now you have 'increased' your 'reproductive success'. 0+0 > 0 *Sigh*.Truthfreedom_{August 10, 2020
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Nonsense. Tempest in an irrelevant teapot. Look. The math ESTABLISHMENT has been trying to tell us that math isn't real, ever since Godel. This current attempt to fictionalize math is superficial compared to Godel. People who actually USE math know that it works consistently. Carpenters and cooks and drivers know how measurement works. A cook knows that doubling the ingredients will produce two cakes. A driver knows that he has to drive twice as fast to get to the same destination in half the time. Students who learn math by USING it can't be fooled by Godel or by the wokers.polistra_{August 10, 2020
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