Comment by AlanYx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AlanYx | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>This is my best guess about the line of thinking that motivates these "no advanced math" policies.

You've explained the thought process of the "reformers" fairly well, but there is another additional element that's important as well: a sizeable contingent of people believe that advanced math itself is intrinsically bad or negative. Usually this is either because math is fundamentally exclusionary in some core way, or because it's somehow inextricably tied to ways in which equity-seeking populations are oppressed, or used as a tool of oppression.

O'Neill's Weapons of Math Destruction is so popular in academic circles partly because it plays to this mindset.

This viewpoint dovetails with some of the points you've highlighted, for example many believe that everyone is equally capable, but the reason they're not all getting competitive scores with good shots at college is because advanced math (being intrinsically negative/evil) is ruining it. So in their view it is rational to get rid of it, replacing it with something (the data science course) that's not advanced math.

For these people, the goal is not to improve equity by getting everyone up to speed in advanced math. It's to bypass it.

> the reason they're not all getting competitive scores with good shots at college is because advanced math (being intrinsically negative/evil) is ruining it

I ... I don't understand. This is literally the craziest conspiracy theory I've ever heard. Here's the thing: if a shadow cabal of lizard-people were actually using space lasers to mind control everyone into thinking the Earth is round so we never discover their hidden evil lairs at the edges of the flat Earth, or what have you ... if any those wacko theories were actually true, it would actually represent a terrible evil that humanity should fight to overcome. Such a plot might even make a decent movie. But this? Advanced math? What? Math is conspiring against humanity? I cannot even fathom a B-movie plotline where that holds together at all. No suspension of disbelief makes this make any sense. Math!?

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but the objections are not typically phrased in the type of language you're using.

A typical example is something like this, from Louie (J.Res.Math.Ed. 2017):

>Through the lens of the culture of exclusion, students who appear mathematically gifted are viewed as intelligent, whereas others are myopically perceived as “slow,” “remedial,” and “special needs.” These perceived differences are used to justify stratification such that the culture of exclusion in mathematics education shapes access to intellectually stimulating learning opportunities, prestigious educational programs, lucrative careers, and high-status identities. Furthermore, because ability categories are mapped onto other socially constructed categories, the culture of exclusion is both a product of and a tool for the maintenance of racial, gender, linguistic, economic, and other hierarchies.

It is at its core a form of anti-intellectualism, that is true, but often emanating from other intellectual ideas from the academy.

Okay, have these guys seen how people who are really good at football are treated? And all those guys who are great at guitar keep getting all the chicks, goddammit!

There's no reason to think that mathematics has any more of a "culture of exclusion" than any other field of study, vocation, or sport.

Sounds like a classic case of bullying tactics in picking soft targets.

Well, haven't you noticed how the DIE cult is already all over entertainment? Sports teams kneeling down because of "oppression" and pop culture being absolutely dominated by sex and violence propaganda? Specially those being produced targeting the "minorities".

It's a brave new world.

I don’t know. I have met plenty of people during my life who didn’t like math. Would they vote to remove Calculus from high school curriculums, if they believed it would level the playing field? Yes, and without blinking.

>> Such a plot may even make a decent movie.

A “plausible” one, yes. Incidentally, have you noted how movies don’t ever have any actual hard science, and they never require mathematical thinking on their viewership? The same can be said about fiction in general. I bet our culture-makers would vote in-masse to suppress math from whatever curriculum they could.

> movies don’t ever have any actual hard science, and they never require mathematical thinking on their viewership

Um, no, I haven't noticed that. In fact I've seen "this movie is based on hard science!" as being a generally positive selling point for movies, especially sci-fi. I also don't really understand your point: movies and pop novels generally do well when they require very little thinking of any kind. They don't require musical thinking or spatio-temporal thinking or logical thinking or kinesthetic thinking or intrapersonal thinking either. Nor do most of our passtimes. That does not make them anti-intellectual.

> our culture-makers

Who?

There is a world of difference between a selling point and the actual thing, but I would be delighted to be proven that there are movies where the viewership requires hard science to understand the plot.

> that does not make them anti-intellectual

Math is old, and therefore, a vital aspect of human culture. By purposefully producing something that “does better” by excluding math, we are effectively doing our darn best to push math out of our collective thought. If doesn’t matter if we call that “anti-intellectual” or “junk-food-for-the-mind.”

> By purposefully producing something that “does better” by excluding math, we are effectively doing our darn best to push math out of our collective thought.

Strongly disagree, and in fact imo movies that are "junk food for the mind" serve a valuable purpose. The mind requires rest in order to digest new information, and so if we were constantly being reminded to "remember your math!" it would likely become very fatiguing very quickly. Being able to disconnect while still being entertained effectively allows your mind to rest. It's not as good as sleep, but it's better than never stepping away from your math homework to allow it to sink in.

At it's very foundation liberal ideology cracks pretty badly if "Everyone is born equally capable" is false.

But the only way to make people equal is to sabotage, sabotage and sabotage. And, of course, if parents have the means, this won't work. This is just robbing a lot of lower class kids from any chance of getting higher, just because not everyone will make it.

That's stupid.

Of course sabotaging kids is also slightly cheaper, and creates the need for more administrators, the ones making these decisions, to decide exactly what is "equitable".

I suspect that 'liberals believe "Everyone is born equally capable"' is a strawman. I hang out with pretty liberal people and no one actually believes anything like this. Interestingly, the article actually lists out a more nuanced, realistic version of this idea (with a link to research):

> But whatever you think about the morality of this idea, it simply will not work. The reason is that the strong hereditarian hypothesis is wrong; practically all kids are educable, with the proper investment of resources.

And we're talking about high school educational attainment here, not world-class achievement. To use a fitness analogy, not everyone has the anatomy to be a world-class deadlifter. But pretty much everybody can get to deadlifting 1x/1.5x their (healthy) bodyweight with some training.

> I hang out with pretty liberal people and no one actually believes anything like this

There is a broad streak of illiberality running through left-leaning Americans who call themselves liberal. At its core liberalism maintains not that everyone is equal in every way, but that virtually everyone is equally capable of flourishing if given the same opportunities.

Liberalism must believe that since its unit of measure is the individual, not a faction or state.

If someone who calls there’ themselves liberal doesn’t believe that I’d like to know what they think liberalism is.

Usually no liberals actually will echo that line, or even are aware of it. But the very philosophy dictates that it must be true. And ask them the difference between a checkout clerk and an MIT grad, and they'll tell you it was all about opportunity.

It's also why liberals have a very strong anti-science approach to fields like behavioral genetics, while falling over themselves to praise the social sciences.

The entire point of liberal ideology is to gather a variety of viewpoints because we accept that everyone is not born equal. That doesn't make some people better than others, they just bring different skills to the table.

No, we accept that everyone is born without equal opportunity. Its a key difference.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com