About six weeks ago, Ne’Kiya Jackson and Calcea Johnson gave a talk at a meeting of the American Mathematical Society in which they presented a new trigonometric proof of the Pythagorean Theorem. This was remarkable for two reasons—trigonometric proofs of this theorem were once thought to be impossible, and the two students were teenagers still in high school.
Even though I’m a pretty standard liberal, I like to dip my toes into heterodox waters to challenge my priors....which inevitably leads to Charles Murray. I keep trying to see what they think exonerates him, but I keep coming up underwhelmed. So for better or worse it’s good to hear that you come away with a similar impression.
I was wondering how I knew the name Charles Murray…
Charles Murray is the author of The Bell Curve, a book which has done much to popularize pseudoscientific race essentialism.
Stephen Jay Gould (an actual evolutionary biologist, unlike Murray) wrote The Mismeasure of Man specifically for the purpose of debunking The Bell Curve.
I’m not really sure why I should trust Murray on anything else, when his most prominent work can be charitably called a misunderstanding of statistics (and uncharitably, a nefarious manipulation of data to reinforce his own preferences for racial hierarchy).
I understand the Know Your Enemy argument you put forth, but why read Charles Murray when there’s plenty of thinkers out there producing correct information to learn about?
The law of sines relies on the definition of an angle, which is the arc length of a unit circle using the metric space defined by x^2+y^2=r^2, which is in effect the pythagorean theorem. This makes the law of sines not independent of the Pythagorean Theorem
There is an interesting issue of whether we should be readily spreading the idea of essentialism in areas such as IQ even IF it is true. There may be a good argument to suggest that while we need not hide information we should not necessarily look to remove the friction involved in understanding outcomes supporting the essentialist view by simply putting it in the form of a simple conclusion of the average capacity of group A being higher than that of Group B.
The friction in having to go through research and potentially come across such findings on the greater relevance of other factors when it comes to "lifetime success" and may help avoid to some extent the negative impact of the information being shared in its distilled form.
I'm mindful that this may smack of a sort of elitism regarding what information should be disseminated and how ,but I think it could be likened to not teaching students advanced chemistry without informing them of how some chemicals may be explosive.
This line of thinking makes axiom of anti-essentialism a better solution regardless of the truth of proposition that differences in group outcomes are not essential to the groups.
Even if all of the above is nonsense, the axiom of anti-essentialism of course makes great sense from a policy perspective because there is little benefit in looking for differences that we can't really address unless we have already achieved utopia where all groups have maximized their "essential" potential.
Thanks you for the interesting write up. Wishing the best for the young brilliant mathematicians.
Even though I’m a pretty standard liberal, I like to dip my toes into heterodox waters to challenge my priors....which inevitably leads to Charles Murray. I keep trying to see what they think exonerates him, but I keep coming up underwhelmed. So for better or worse it’s good to hear that you come away with a similar impression.
I was wondering how I knew the name Charles Murray…
Charles Murray is the author of The Bell Curve, a book which has done much to popularize pseudoscientific race essentialism.
Stephen Jay Gould (an actual evolutionary biologist, unlike Murray) wrote The Mismeasure of Man specifically for the purpose of debunking The Bell Curve.
I’m not really sure why I should trust Murray on anything else, when his most prominent work can be charitably called a misunderstanding of statistics (and uncharitably, a nefarious manipulation of data to reinforce his own preferences for racial hierarchy).
I understand the Know Your Enemy argument you put forth, but why read Charles Murray when there’s plenty of thinkers out there producing correct information to learn about?
You'd like this Substack of mine on Euler and God: https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/abnn-x-therefore-god-exists
The law of sines relies on the definition of an angle, which is the arc length of a unit circle using the metric space defined by x^2+y^2=r^2, which is in effect the pythagorean theorem. This makes the law of sines not independent of the Pythagorean Theorem
There is an interesting issue of whether we should be readily spreading the idea of essentialism in areas such as IQ even IF it is true. There may be a good argument to suggest that while we need not hide information we should not necessarily look to remove the friction involved in understanding outcomes supporting the essentialist view by simply putting it in the form of a simple conclusion of the average capacity of group A being higher than that of Group B.
The friction in having to go through research and potentially come across such findings on the greater relevance of other factors when it comes to "lifetime success" and may help avoid to some extent the negative impact of the information being shared in its distilled form.
I'm mindful that this may smack of a sort of elitism regarding what information should be disseminated and how ,but I think it could be likened to not teaching students advanced chemistry without informing them of how some chemicals may be explosive.
This line of thinking makes axiom of anti-essentialism a better solution regardless of the truth of proposition that differences in group outcomes are not essential to the groups.
Even if all of the above is nonsense, the axiom of anti-essentialism of course makes great sense from a policy perspective because there is little benefit in looking for differences that we can't really address unless we have already achieved utopia where all groups have maximized their "essential" potential.
Thanks you for the interesting write up. Wishing the best for the young brilliant mathematicians.