Ironically, most engineered bridges have been built using equations which assume that sin(θ) = θ. DO WE LIVE IN A WORLD OF TRUTH, OR DO WE LIVE IN A WORLD OF LIES WHERE "CLOSE ENOUGH" IS "GOOD ENOUGH", I ASK YOU GOOD SIR?!
>Apparently his thesis is uhh...special
[Indeed](https://trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1803&context=utk_graddiss).
Check theorem 1.1.1.
Is it just me or is this entire paper just JL reproducing double-counting arguments from other sources? Like, we get it, you qualified for USAMO once. I'm like 60 pages in and this is all just boring unoriginal shlock. I know high schoolers who could produce better work in their sleep.
It was a while since I did intro math and I had to google it to be sure he copied the binomial coefficient correctly from the textbook. But wow he sure did copy that right. Into a PhD thesis.
This is well-known to the point that proving it in a PhD thesis comes off as a joke. It's not clear why anybody would think that this is a good way to approach proof- or paper-writing.
The latter. The proof isn't complete enough to be rigorous, but the fact he's trying to prove is basically trivial at this level. If the reader is able to fill in the gaps then there's no need for the theorem in the first place, so nobody benefits from his inclusion of this theorem. If there were substantial results presented later I would legitimately assume that it's a joke to lighten the mood during his defense, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
And shouts to my discrete math comrades! Give me those finite difference arguments all day.
I know it is well known, he says “well known” as part of his Proof in the Theorem 1.1.1 in his thesis linked in the comment I responded to.
Is that 4-line proof for nCr *he has written in the linked thesis* correct is what I’m asking. I’m not saying that this is some fancy unknown formula.
>You'll have to forgive James, he is an idiot. We trained him wrong on purpose, as a joke.
--The Dissertation Committee, probably
Now if you'll excuse me
*goes to corner and weeps quietly to Rocky Top*
I think Jimmy's first rant started here: https://twitter.com/ConceptualJames/status/1289224924335345664
Basically, he thinks woke people are ruining Western Civilization by saying 2+2 can equal anything, like 5.
Then, a stats PhD student shows up, and begins pointing out there are lots of ways to make 2+2=5, even without redefining each number to mean "cat" or whatever. Also, Jimmy has a PhD in math.
Jimmy is totally not mad, and begins posting about it for 2+ days, definitely not mad.
I wish. I think it's an old meme from back in internet atheism heyday. Google images for "if the bible said 2+2=5". Don't know why he's talking about it now.
FWIW, I'm pretty sure this guy initially drew on Moldbug for his critiques on postmodernism. He's basically a cousin to rationalists.
/u/literallyanscombe Am I remembering this correctly? Pretty sure you made the connection.
I enjoy dunking on Lindsay as much as anyone else but lets not
pretend that saying “2+2 is not always equal to 4, see, if you use base
3, its equal to 11” or writing about rounding errors is a smart answer
in any way. When Lindsay says that “postmodernists” deny 2+2=4, the
right answer is to ask him who the fuck hes talking about, not trying to
make a “Big” point out of the fact that sentences change their meanings
when you change the meanings of their words.
Yep, while it is fun to see CJ be dunked on, (and Carr's twitter is funny) the math isn't the central issue, the central issue is CJ making up bullshit about a postmodernist boogyman, helping with creating another satanic panic.
And CJ is clearly a bad faith actor anyway. (He is now going on a 'the left won't debate me' and finding stupid excuses to not debate any leftwinger who says 'sure, I will debate'. Molyneux did the same trick for years). E: this is [getting embarassing (already was)](https://twitter.com/classiclib3ral/status/1289650545293062144)
The statement by Carr that got Lindsay's ire and attention was Carr saying that if somebody said 2+2=5, his reaction would be to ask what axioms and definitions he was using, not to bemoan the death of "western civilization".
I've already lost too many brain cells to this dumbass discourse to dig up the tweets but this
>his reaction would be to ask what axioms and definitions he was using, **not to bemoan the death of "western civilization**
implies that that wasn't the first tweet in the argument.
The first tweet was Lindsay throwing out to the world some nonsense about 2+2=5 and the death of western civ. Carr QT-ed that with the above. HTH. HAND.
Oh to be clear, James is as hysterical as ever (and it's always a sight to behold). I'm just surprised at how many people are uncritically accepting the anti-james position, and for a very specific reason:
James' entire rhetorical strategy revolves around constantly making up outrageous lies about other people without elaboration, like claiming that "postmodernists" think arithmetic is racist or that 2+2 is not 4. Now, the *worst* possible thing you can do is to just uncritically run with his framing of the issues and then try to prove that this false opinion that he just invented and attributed to you is *actually* true, if you squint hard. The result is exactly the days-long conversation we just had to see, with the terrible arguments I mentioned.
It's all based on an equivocation anyway: there are, to be sure, algebraic structures where, say, 1+1=0, but if you want to be strict about it, the element designated by '1' in Z2 is not the same as the element designated by '1' in the integers (in a very precise, set-theoretical sense), and the equivocation would seem much less convincing if we generally referred to the elements in Z2 with totally different symbols. Now, Kareem acknowledges this when he says that it all depends on your definitions, which is true, but then you're not really talking about the same thing anymore.
And that takes me back to my point: instead of trying to find some roundabout way in which the silly statement that Lindsay attributed to you could be seen to be kind of true (but not really), why not just say "No Lindsay, nobody believes that, and until you can substantiate your claims, please fuck off". Because otherwise, you're just playing into his hands, and no matter how well you argue, you'll always come out looking bad, because he framed this issue *deliberately* to make you look bad. I consistently see people treating Lindsay and his friends way too charitably, like the guy who runs the enter the void podcast who tried to have a reasonable discussion with Helen Pluckrose just for her to piss in his face. People need to wisen up to their rhetorical tricks and the way they sabotage ordinary dialogue.
Tbh, this is a pretty standard failure more of scientists, they can't properly deal with bad faith actors. (And, that is how James and Helen got famous, see the various hoaxes they tried to pull on journals). Of course, this is partially intentional by scientists because science is a lot easier when you don't have to go 'is this motherfucker serious?' every day. They basically have one trick they constantly pull because it works.
Turns out, the downfall of western civilization was the people worried about the downfall of western civilization all along. Funny how that works.
I got some amusement from them saying that they were making a glorious strike in favour of empiricism by making up data.
(I keep hoping that someone will go to the dog park and do the dog-humping observational experiment. What if real data supports the theory they're dismissing? Surely as good *empiricists* they'll be forced to re-evaluate, no?)
>I keep hoping that someone will go to the dog park and do the dog-humping observational experiment
I like discussing this one with fans of the hoax because it was meant to be impossible on it's face (10,000 dogs observed in a year!!), and if you do the math, it's like 5/hour, which is a pretty normal dog park. It may seem tedious and a silly thing to waste time on, but I have a lot of colleagues who do even more animal observational work in a given year. Only doing it 9-5, 5 days a week is weird.
(I also had a guy challenge me with "how you you tell the sex of the dog!?" and I had to answer with something like "By looking? They don't wear pants, and will pee right in front of you.")
Pretty much the entire hoax was premised on "how could they accept this *absurd* paper", and yet all of the empirical papers would have been perfectly valid had they been performed. Neither the hoaxers nor their fans seem to understand how science actually works. (Especially since after Boghossian got in trouble they were like "what's an IRB?")
Late to this, but you all are spot on in this analysis, speaking as a animal biologist. The presumption of good faith is a huge one in particular. If you're not familiar with it, check out the issues surrounding some spider behavioral data published by a guy named Jonathan Pruitt, which has been alleged, fairly convincingly, to have been largely made-up. This work is published in major journals and is very widely cited. The raw data were even made publicly available, as many biology journals are requiring these days.
Peer review of papers DOES NOT detect fraud. That was never its intention, because academics have always assumed that everyone works in good faith so that 'checking my peer's work' simply involved making sure their conclusions clearly flow from their methods and their results, as they present them. Once fraud is in the mix, then peer review requires checking data accuracy.... which is essentially impossible unless the exact provenance of each datapoint is not just recorded, but then traced with chain-of-custody so that a reader can see exactly where it came from. Pretty much the only way fraud can be detected is if the experiment is repeated and different results are found (which can also happen for any number of perfectly above-board reasons too), or if the fraud is laid bare for anyone to see 'by accident'. In Pruitt's case, apparently some of the uploaded excel files still had the formulas written in the cells to demonstrate how the data were faked (when it should have just been a typed-in value).
So when they did their whole hoax thing, they were manipulating the journals on a level that the journals fundamentally don't (and probably never will) check, because of that assumption of good faith. It's such a lazy cop-out.
Oh I totally get you about the rhetorical move. This isn’t the place to get into it but I do understand the motivation to push back on the oversimplified picture of (math/science/history/etc) James forwards even though it is part of clear rhetorical strategy.
I know exactly how to get rid of "2 + 2 = 5" by the way. Have Trump tweet it out and then you people will suddenly angrily insist that "2 + 2 = 4" in the ring of integers and that was what you always believed this whole time.
>clear rhetorical strategyJames' entire rhetorical strategy revolves around constantly making up outrageous lies about other people without elaboration, like claiming that "postmodernists" think arithmetic is racist
Yet claims such as these have clearly already been made by woke intersectionalists:
[https://www.newsweek.com/smithsonian-race-guidelines-rational-thinking-hard-work-are-white-values-1518333](https://www.newsweek.com/smithsonian-race-guidelines-rational-thinking-hard-work-are-white-values-1518333)
This is well in keeping with a book like radical feminist philosopher Andrea Nye's *Words of Power*, which quite seriously pins the Holocaust on "male" logic. (She has a website and it presumably runs on "Nazi" logic. How awful!)
There were already **NUMEROUS** examples of **PRINCIPLED** exceptions to ordinary integer arithmetic or other ordinary math before "2 + 2 = 5" ever showed up and, as far as I can tell, James Lindsay never stirred that shit up but was responding to that nonsense. You could have picked modular arithmetic or Boolean algebra but, instead, the hill you chose to die on for great woke justice was pulling a page right out of *1984*.
I don't even adhere to the philosophy of formalism in mathematics but even granting it *arguendo*, "2 + 2 = 5" is nothing more than abusing it to push woke *Deutsche Physik*. Take "2 + 2 = 5" and shove it.
Kareem Carr’s twitter was the optimal mix of insightful stuff and
data science / statistics shitposter and now he’s also dunking on James?
Count me in!
I like how the image implies Lindsay coined the phrase “ideas have
consequences”, rather than it being the title of one of the most famous
works of intellectual history of the past half century
Ha! I didn’t notice you in here until I re-read the thread whilst sipping a late night drink just now
Been enjoying your interactions with Matlock on twitter lately
Kareem Carr is mostly being very pleasant about all this, but this
tweet digs in just a little bit:
“Why is it that as soon as somebody on Twitter says”I care about
facts and logic” it’s a sure bet that the rest of their tweets will be
99.9% ad hominem?”
Correction: I'm having more fun arguing that the Grievance Studies dog park paper would've been a reasonable and interesting paper if the data in it hadn't been made up:
https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/i2tfsu/whats_up_with_people_debating_22_5_on_twitter/g0bzje8/
I’m late to this thread, way late. I have a MS in statistics and a BS
in math/stats. Lindsay is indeed being a dumbass. He’s either
disingenuously missing the point or doesn’t understand. The PhD
candidate is taking an extreme example of rounding error or more
precisely measurement error. This is a fairly well known issue in stats.
Further as a mathematician Lindsay knows you can define a number system
any which way you want (theoretically) as long as you’re consistent and
it’s well defined. Mathematicians do it all the time. It’s not “woke”
math. It’s literally been been done for the entire history of
mathematics.
Imagine if we did engineering, but badly? Wouldn’t that be terrible? This scenario is somehow the fault of postmodernism.
James Lindsay is a little out of our wheelhouse, but I’m leaving this up cuz he’s a massive dumbass and I cannot get enough of making fun of him.
I enjoy dunking on Lindsay as much as anyone else but lets not pretend that saying “2+2 is not always equal to 4, see, if you use base 3, its equal to 11” or writing about rounding errors is a smart answer in any way. When Lindsay says that “postmodernists” deny 2+2=4, the right answer is to ask him who the fuck hes talking about, not trying to make a “Big” point out of the fact that sentences change their meanings when you change the meanings of their words.
Kareem Carr’s twitter was the optimal mix of insightful stuff and data science / statistics shitposter and now he’s also dunking on James? Count me in!
I like how the image implies Lindsay coined the phrase “ideas have consequences”, rather than it being the title of one of the most famous works of intellectual history of the past half century
https://imgur.com/a/tzntRru apparently Bayes’ theorem is postcolonial
Kareem Carr is mostly being very pleasant about all this, but this tweet digs in just a little bit:
“Why is it that as soon as somebody on Twitter says”I care about facts and logic” it’s a sure bet that the rest of their tweets will be 99.9% ad hominem?”
I think this is the comment where I made my most sensible contribution to the debate:
https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/i2tfsu/whats_up_with_people_debating_22_5_on_twitter/g0at5wc/
…and this is the one where I had the most fun:
https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/i2tfsu/whats_up_with_people_debating_22_5_on_twitter/g0bwy0c/
I’m late to this thread, way late. I have a MS in statistics and a BS in math/stats. Lindsay is indeed being a dumbass. He’s either disingenuously missing the point or doesn’t understand. The PhD candidate is taking an extreme example of rounding error or more precisely measurement error. This is a fairly well known issue in stats. Further as a mathematician Lindsay knows you can define a number system any which way you want (theoretically) as long as you’re consistent and it’s well defined. Mathematicians do it all the time. It’s not “woke” math. It’s literally been been done for the entire history of mathematics.
A whole army of nerds defending 2+2=5. Get out of your mom’s basement.