You think I’m kidding with the above title, don’t you? I wish I was.
A mathematics PhD by the name of James Lindsay decided to play a joke on the Woke crowd. Here is the joke:
James Lindsay, however, is a person non grata for the Woke crowd, and therefore this joke at their expense could not be allowed to stand. Which… lead to them literally arguing that 2+2 can equal 5.
Some of these people are mathematicians. Or claim to be.
It shouldn’t be hard to guess why they are doing this, though.
It gets worse. Much worse.
And it keeps going.
And going. (“science-adjacent”)
Now, let me be the first to remind you that most of these tweets have few likes and less engagement. This is not a widespread or accepted belief.
The idea that there is some higher level of rationality at which the adding of two units to two units gives a result other than 4 units is Woke Academy at its worst.
See Also: Portland Charging Feds for Fence
On a related note:
Some of you may or may not remember when a Florida-based web developer named John Ekdahl tweeted out in 2017 “The top 3 best selling vehicles in America are pick-ups. Question to reporters: do you personally know someone that owns one?”
This innocuous tweet set of a firestorm of outrage from journalists that literally lasted for days. Ekdahl was still getting replies weeks later from journalists still smarting about it. On and on and on the replies came, utterly indignant that the question had been asked. Exactly what was so outrageous about the question was unclear, but the implication seemed to be that the lack of truck-driving-relatives meant they were out-of-touch with the average American. Whether Ekdahl implied it or not, a huge swath of the media took it that way, and couldn’t resist trying to hit back at Ekdahl or else trying desperately to dismiss the significance of not knowing anyone who owned a truck.
The episode even got a writeup in the Washington Examiner. I myself was following it live.
Ekdahl and Lindsay have both managed to strike very precisely at weak points of the Left, receiving huge amounts of incoming flak for their efforts. In Ekdahl’s case, he struck (potentinally unintentionally) at the self-image of journalists as being on the side of the little guy. In Lindsay’s case, however, he struck at the Woke Academy, directly striking their incessantly rabid rage at the continued existence of objective truth in any form.
I mean, it’s easy to claim that math isn’t real when you’re bad at it.
But why are they doing this? Part of the problem is the catastrophic damage that has been done to the entire field of epistemology – the study of knowledge and how its defined. It’s a long and involved discussion that requires a lot of background to get through. In a nutshell, the target is the Aristotelian notion that our knowledge of the world is derived from our observations about it, that reality as we perceive it is a reliable guide to what is. Literally the foundation of objective knowledge itself.
But mostly it’s about perpetuating the scam that is the Woke Academy.
Unadmitted redefinitions and equivocations of terms is what the Left relies on to perpetuate itself. Admittedly it’s quite surprising to see it appear this blatantly, but we know how this works. Marxism is so inherently dishonest an ideology that Marx’s followers were forced to develop the notion of “polylogism” – the idea that people in different economic classes reason in fundamentally incompatible ways – in order to explain away the devastating rebuttals of Marxist theory that were already being published by the time WW1 rolled around, so this is nothing new.
If you’d like to read more, James Lindsay wrote an article about the small firestorm he started.
I’ve been forced by health reasons to avoid following current events, but I seem to be on the mend. I’m going to be doing another piece later this week.
Here’s a preview: imagine someone arguing that Europeans aren’t good at sailing.