Recently there was a brouhaha on the Twitters about 2+2=5 that went viral and, unfortunately, political. The argument is that post-modernists are trying to tear down mathematics as a "white supremacist social construct" and trying to say that "2+2=5" is as valid an answer as "2+2=4". Which sounds pretty bad, so I looked into it.

The original Tweet thread was a math nerd who jokingly, and not incorrectly, illustrated how it was mathematically possible for 2+2 to sometimes be 5. The argument may have been weak, and some people may not have found it convincing, but it was a mathematical argument, meant as a joke for a small Twitter audience.

Through the Twitter telephone, many retweets and steps later, the original argument - considered, funny, valid, perhaps weak - somehow transformed into "2+2=4 is a mere social construct, and 5 is a valid answer" - which, yes, would be a disturbing trend if that were actually the argument. Thus the unduly passionate took up "2+2 is 4 not 5" as a political rallying cry. People I otherwise respect as rational began tweeting this.

It became complicated because there are always people who believe dumb things, like "mathematics is merely a white supremacist social construct", and as always with the unduly passionate, extreme opinions are held up as examples of dangerously typical. The author of the original thread was bullied by a mob.

It's complicated even further by the existence of an actual replication crisis in academe, in part driven by post-modern ideological pressures; there is actual loss of academic freedom even for the tenured.

But the lesson at the end of the day, to my mind, is that articles about whatever goes on over at Twitter, such as this one, such as this my post here, are always going to involve mobs of people being shitty, because the nature of the medium. Maybe they are as inevitable as "mobs of people are gambling in Las Vegas"