Remember the March for Science?

 April 22, 2017.  It has been nearly four years, and the date will likely go unremarked by history.  We have so many dates, and history, it is said, is just one damned thing after another.  Names and dates.  The last thing we need is one more day/week/month to commemorate a thing anyway.  Yet for the moment, I find myself thinking about April 22, 2017, although to be honest, I did have to check the date.  My memory is far from elephantine.  Yet I do remember the march.  And the signs.  Oh, the glorious signs.  You can go do a Google image search, if you like, but I shall simply quote from a few of my favorite (things), as I look forward to summertime.*

    "I can't believe I'm marching for facts."

    "So bad, even introverts are here."

    "The good thing about science is that it is true whether or not you believe in it."

That last one was a quote from Neil deGrasse Tyson.  Proper attribution, like science, is important.  One may note that it is a play on Philip K. Dick's famous definition of "reality," which is both fine, and apt.  And we shall return to it.

Why did the 2017 March for Science happen?  Well, there were actually a lot of protests in early 2017.  The Women's March got the ball rolling.  Why?  Trump.  A lot of people recoiled from Trump.  Among those who recoiled most intensely?  Nerds.  There is little more inimical to a nerd's existence than an anti-intellectual.  In April of 2017, Trump had yet to stare unprotected at a solar eclipse, tell people to inject bleach, or draw on a NOAA map with his Sharpie-o-lyin', but he did call climate change a Chinese hoax (and lie about that during a debate), among other insanities.  How bad was Trump?  So bad that, as the sign said, even introverts were marching.

And all of this brings up an interesting point about partisanship and ideology.  Academia skews left, yes, but no president, presidential candidate, or political figure has ever been as disrespected by the world of the literate, the world of science-- not the same!-- as Donald J. Trump.

There is a history of anti-scientific thinking, anti-scientific policy and anti-scientific propaganda within the Republican Party, from opposition to addressing climate change, to denial of evolution and a pre-Scopes mentality about biology education.  If you are reading a professor's blog, you likely know that the reason we have new COVID variants threatening our recovery is evolution, but the same people who deny evolution are the ones who refuse to wear masks.  Gee...

So yay for science!  And this is all a left-right issue, right?  Um... you know I wouldn't be doing this if it were that simple.

Yet for the reasons previously stated, there has historically been a reluctance within the scientific and engineering community to affiliate with the Republican Party or the conservative movement, and that reluctance transformed into an unusual form of activism that was out of character during the Trump administration.  Trump and science just didn't mix.

He couldn't even figure out that his new branch of the military should have been called fucking Star Fleet!  How hard is this?

Anyway, I could blather about how the STEM community ranges from left to libertarian, but seems to be missing a right flank, but you get the point, and Trump brought the division between Republicans and science to a head.

So where are things now?  Is the Democratic Party the party of science?  Is the left the side of science?  To be sure, any voter making a decision on the basis of the question, "which candidate is the candidate of science?," should have voted for Biden.  Yet strange things are afoot within the left.  And I find myself looking for a new March For Science.

Depending on your attention, you may or may not be aware of what is happening to education policy, how teachers are being trained, and how teachers are being told to teach.  This, however, matters.  Long term, this matters.  What matters, in particular?  Math.

Before I get to that, though, I'm going to get on one of my soap boxes about systemic racism in our educational system.  This is real.  It would be easy and tempting to look at some of my commentary on "wokeness," and categorize me as reactionary.  Nope.  The world has just gone crazy.  Systemic racism is real.  Our debate about it is what has gone haywire.

Let's define our terms.  Systemic racism occurs when there is a system that creates racially disparate impacts regardless of whether or not any one individual holds racially hostile views.  Many of those skeptical of the "antiracist" movement, like Glenn Loury, look askance at redefinitions of "racism" that move away from the individual, but as an elections scholar, I find the concept necessary.  Why?  Election law.  There is a history of election laws passed to be racially neutral on their face, but with the intent of creating racially discriminatory impacts.  The doctrine of disparate impact is how we address those kinds of Jim Crow policies.  It comes from election law.  Maybe you're reading a bit about this kind of stuff now.

The concept of disparate impact is important.  Tricky, but important.  We have a long history of laws intended to create disparate impacts while being racially neutral on their face.  We need to focus on impact in order to avoid the impossible problem of mind-reading when it comes to policies that are race-neutral on their face.  Systemic racism, therefore, is a critical concept in the law, and in political science.  I cannot fathom discussing American politics without the concept of systemic racism.  I rant about wokeness and the excesses of wokeness, not because I'm a Trumpist, but because the excesses of wokeness create a separate array of problems for us to address.

But before we do, let's address an example of systemic racism in the educational system.  You know how schools are funded, right?  Property taxes.  That means we get not one, but two examples of systemic racism.  First, you have the historical legacy of redlining and related policies, reducing the property values in predominantly African-American neighborhoods, and second, areas with high concentrations of black people have lower property values on the market because individually racist white people don't want to live around black people.  So, lower property values.  Hence, less funding for schools, and the kids get fucked, but not in the redneck Florida way, and even though I'm going to criticize the fallacious reasoning of wokeness, that was the only offensive thing in this post, but if you're nitpicking for offensive jokes on this blog... really?

Anyway, I honestly don't understand how our school funding mechanisms pass constitutional muster.  Fuck the judges.  This is bullshit.  I've ranted about it before, I'll rant about it again.  This is some real systemic racism, in addition to being stupid, and fucking over poor white kids along the way.  Stupid and vile in every way.

So that's systemic racism.  Or, an example of it.  Now, here's where things go haywire.

The state of Oregon is under scrutiny right now for its application of this document, "Dismantling Racism In Mathematics Education."  I strongly encourage you to read it if you want to understand what is happening to the profession of teaching.  Teaching matters.  Schools matter.  Learning matters.

Math matters.

What is this document?  It is a document instructing teachers on the proper method of mathematics instruction.  The proper method being the "antiracist" method.

Math is orthogonal to race.  Remember that Neil deGrasse Tyson quote from the March For Science sign?  Yeah, right on Neil!  Also, he's black, and whether or not that matters... um... it shouldn't.  The point is that it doesn't.

So here's what I'd like you to do with that document.  Do a search for the word, "objectivity."  It occurs four times.  I would note that the authors of the document would not like the fact that I am counting the occurrences of a word.  Why not?  Well, for the same reason that I am noting it.  Every time they use the word, "objectivity," in the document, it is in a pejorative sense.  Don't do X, because X reinforces "objectivity," (their emphasis), and that's white supremacist.

What?, you're thinking?  (Probably.  I doubt anyone who buys into this stuff would be reading my blog.  I'm just some schlub, shouting into the void, and not worth hate-reading.  Go hate-read someone who matters, if that's your thing.)

Remember the origin of this school of thought.  Postmodernism.  Postmodern philosophy rejects the concept of objectivity.  This document comes from critical race theory.  Critical race theorists derive their view of the world from postmodernism, so they reject the concept of objectivity, but more than that, they assert that the idea of objectivity is a white supremacist construct.

Yes, really.  That's why every use of the term, "objectivity," in that document is a pejorative.  Consider this gem of a passage:  "The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so.  Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict."  (Their emphasis.)

Yes, you read that correctly.

The first time I read this, all I could think was "the Sokal affair."  Back in 1996, a physicist named Alan Sokal submitted a total bullshit manuscript called, "Transgressing the Boundaries:  Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" to a joke of a journal called Social Text.  (Social Text doesn't think it's joking, but that's kind of the problem.)  You should be able to guess from the title of that manuscript that it was nonsense.  It was.  The point was to see if Sokal could submit a nonsense article to a postmodernist bullshit journal and get them to accept it, because they have their heads up their asses.  Yup.  Behold, the first paragraph.  Buckle up, it's gloriously bad.

There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists, who continue to reject the notion that the disciplines concerned with social and cultural criticism can have anything to contribute, except perhaps peripherally, to their research.  Still less are they receptive to the idea that the very foundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt in the light of such criticism.  Rather, the cling to the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook, which can be summarized briefly as follows:  that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in "eternal' physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative knowledge of these laws by hewing to the "objective" procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method. 

It keeps going like that.  Does this sound familiar?  This kind of sneering contempt for science and objectivity?  The thing is, Sokal was doing it as performance.  He was playing a prank on a bunch of postmodernists, to see if they had enough intelligence to see through the scam.  They didn't.  Of course not.  He played to their biases by bashing the concepts of science and objectivity, while adding piles of nonsensical blather that the reviewers didn't understand because they couldn't understand, not just because it wasn't their discipline, but because it was intentionally meaningless.  Behold, the intellectual emptiness of postmodern academics.

And now, we have a document being circulated for mathematics instruction which reads like the Sokal prank.  Poe's law in action.

Yes, math is objective.  It is, in fact, the only discipline that is purely objective.  Why?  It is the only discipline built upon formal proofs, and I detest misuse of the word, "proof."  I'm not going to bother elaborating here, because it is not worth my time to write.  I doubt the authors of that document know the meaning of the word, "proof."

Why does it matter, though?  Well, I'll nitpick momentarily.  It is not that there is one and only one way to solve a problem.  In fact, part of the beauty of math is that there is usually a set of ways to get the one and only one right answer.  I actually spend nights laying awake marveling at the beautiful symmetry of that.  What matters is the objectively correct answer.  What happens when you don't get that objectively correct answer?

If you are building something, it doesn't fucking work.  The consequences of that will vary.  A program that doesn't work, in the case of computer programming, a building that falls down in the case of architecture... medicine that kills.  Take your pick.  Do your math wrong, get the objectively wrong answer, and get a bad outcome.

In math courses-- yeah, I teach 'em-- we give partial credit for getting steps right along the way, but making objective mistakes such that the final answer is wrong, but you cannot get full credit with the wrong answer.

Do you want to drive a car built by someone who thinks that getting the right answer is unimportant because objectivity is a white supremacist construct?  Do you want medicine researched and produced by such people?

Seriously.

Climate change.  The big issue of our time, as we move forward from COVID.  Do we want to handle this with research led by those who reject objectivity and think that getting the right answer doesn't matter, because that's white supremacist thinking?  How many people will die if that's the way we go?  And... where will they live, geographically?  Think that one through...  You want a race angle?  There it is.  Climate change will be worst for Africa, India... lots of non-white populations, and we need correct math if we want a chance of handling this.  (I just picked up Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry of the Future.  Expect a post on that.)

On April 22, 2017, we had the March for Science to push back against anti-scientific thinking.  When it came from the right.  Now, science is gettin' it from both ends.  Cockamamie conspiracy theories from the right, and postmodernism from the left.

Yet we don't see agitation against the postmodernist ideas being pushed into our schools.  This is telling, and troubling.  Math matters.  Getting the right answer matters.

We are all staring down the barrel of climate change catastrophes, plural, as in, climate change is here, it is happening, we are observing the consequences, and they are bad.  We can't address this stuff without science.

Without math.

Without understanding that "reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away," as Philip K. Dick said.  Or as adapted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, "the good thing about science is that it is true whether or not you believe in it."

Hey, remember when the left used to cheer for this stuff?  I'm still on Neil's side.

And of course, some music.  I considered some Theo Croker from his album, Afrophysicist, but instead, let's go with Bernie Worrell, "Revelation In Black Light," from Blacktronic Science.  One of his weirder albums.

*Yeah, I know Coltrane didn't write "My Favorite Things," but he did it best, and the third track on the album was a brilliant cover of "Summertime."  And the scary thing about Coltrane is that he put out so many great albums that it wasn't his best album.