I've seen decolonise before, but in the context of removing colonies.
This is about a hangover of colonialism.
To me colony is A-political, whereas colonial applys to the politics.
Taking it further.
I colonise America
I colonise mars
I colonise maths?
What does that mean? We aren't talking about a literal colony, were talking about colonialism. So (De)colonialise is the word the I would make up to describe this.
> a verb-forming suffix occurring originally in loanwords from Greek that have entered English through Latin or French (baptize; barbarize; catechize); within English, -ize is added to adjectives and nouns to form transitive verbs with the general senses “to render, make” (actualize; fossilize; sterilize; Americanize)
Decolonise to me means depopulate. I originally thought the article was talking about removing people from maths (teachers?)
Elon musk colonises mars.
Elon musk decolonises mars.
Colony is a fairly A-political word to me.
Colonial has political connotations.
So if I wanted to talk about the political elements of the times when colonys were a thing would say colonial. And variations of that word.
As we are talking about politics, it seems that colonial seems to be the better word.
If I wanted to talk about setting off across the Atlantic and setting up a base, I would describe that as a colony, and the continuing process of that would be colonisation. If I wanted to talk about the negative impacts on the indigenous population, I would describe that as colonialism and the process by extension, colonialisation.
Googling around I'm obviously in a minority as far as word usage goes, and I'm surprised I haven't come across this before. It still seems strange how decolonise was the work settled on though.
>Seems like a strange error to make considering the number of times the term is used.
Whether it's an error or not. The same error being made multiple times is to me a normal case. So is a single error. An error being made sometimes is rather what I would call surprising.
If you know something but make a mistake it's likely a one-off error. If you don't know something you will make the same error many times until someone alerts you to the situation. Both very likely cases if you ask me.
Whereas if you have N mentions and ~N/2 are wrong, then that is the most unlikely case. Since you'd either have to forget what you know half the time, or you would have to make a sloppy mistake half of the time.
This is a charity asking teaching establishments to follow its recommendations. They are perfectly within their rights to ignore this. Nothing very sinister going on.
I don’t think the parents of college students are super involved in college curriculums, but I could be wrong. If this “usually” happens, can you point to some actual examples?
If there's one thing academics at British universities are more scornful of than third parties trying to dictate their curriculum, it's parents of students sticking their noses in.
If there is a group organising to reduce the quality of education, that is a concern. People probably want to sign up for their maths degree to learn about maths.
It’s funded through taxes. It’s a badly disguised front organisation. It’s about as independent from the government as Transport for London.
> We are funded through a number of channels:
membership fees from higher education providers
contracts and agreements with the UK funding councils and organisations to which QAA reports annually
private contracts, consultancy and business development work in the UK and internationally
statutory fees from providers for work on behalf of the regulator in England
fees and maintenance charges paid by providers of higher education seeking educational oversight for immigration purposes as required by the Home Office.
They hide how the various funding streams tot up, presumably to maintain the incredibly thin veneer of a pretence they’re not a government body.
> The financial statements consolidate the results of the charity and its wholly owned subsidiary on a line-by-line basis. The financial statements are prepared in sterling, which is the functional currency of the group. A separate Statement of Financial Activities (SOFA), and income and expenditure account, for the charity itself are not presented because the charity has taken advantage of the exemptions afforded by section 408 of the Companies Act 2006. As required by the Charities Accounts (Scotland) Regulations 2006 (as amended), a cash flow statement for the charity is included.
Yes, but the Spectator is a rag than enjoys painting the failings of modern Britain as the result of "woke left", rather than far more systemic problems around our inability to plan or innovate in the long term.
Britain as the result of "woke left", rather than far more systemic problems around our inability to plan or innovate in the long term.
Have you actually read The Spectator? I don't want to defend them too much, since I'm not a huge fan, but they publish all kinds of stuff about Britains "inability to plan or innovate" and criticising the government on that.
edit: That's not to say that they haven't also published a lot of articles blaming everything on the "woke left"
Anyone who thinks this is a valid idea should stop using chairs, speaking English, and using eating utensils, because those are literally products of colonialism (in the Americas). Some civilizations where more advanced than others hundreds of years ago... wow, what a cruel world... welcome to Earth.
> Neither is a colonial power by any reasonable definition.
Beg your pardon? If a colonial power is a country that expanded by force in lands that were not ethnically theirs (and I can't really think of a meaningful definition that would single out European powers between the 16th and early 20th century), then ancient Egypt and the (Eastern) Roman Empire are definitely colonial powers.
> I can't really think of a meaningful definition that would single out European powers between the 16th and early 20th century
>> the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically while forcing its own language and cultural values upon its people.
Ancient Egypt and the Roman empire weren't colonial powers by this definition. I do not know a lot about China, but Sinicisation seems to fit colonial markers, so the first empire to really colonize should be chinese? The Umayad Califate in some sense too, but I think i'm missing the idea of "pressure" and "force" in the definition.
> acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically while forcing its own language and cultural values upon its people
off the top of my head, both Roman Britain and Roman Egypt fit this one perfectly. The "exploitation" wasn't purely negative, just like the exploitation of colonies by Britain or France wasn't purely negative, but it was still exploitation.
Even for stuff that most people would think of as "core" Roman territory like modern day France and Northern Italy initially went through this. The settlers were often ex-military and enabling them to settle was a big part of how the roman military rewarded its soldiers
> Ancient Egypt and the Roman empire weren't colonial powers by this definition.
Latin was originally spoken in a small part of central Italy. By 400 it was spoken in all of Italy, Gaul, Hispania, the North African coast, substantial parts of what is modern Germany and the Low Countries, Dacia (Romania) and was no doubt still spoken in Britain. That happened through conquest, not voluntary accession.
> Ancient Egypt and the Roman empire weren't colonial powers by this definition.
You obviously have no knowledge of Europe/North Africa/Asia Minor Antique Era; your definition is perfectly accurate for both the Egyptian and the Roman empires (and many others, from the Assyrians to Hittites through the Persians, the Greeks [ever wondered where the “pont” in “pontus region” is coming from?] and the Carthaginians).
> full or partial political control over another country
The definition of an empire.
> occupying it with settlers
Exactly what the Romans did in Gaul, Germania, Dacia, Illyria, Hispania, Anglia, Magna Graecia, Sicilia, Batavia, Helvetia, Thracia, Egypt, Judea, Mauritania, etc. You should know that gifting a plot of land somewhere in the Empire to veterans to compensate them for their service was both a way to motivate them and spread Roman culture and way of life.
> and exploiting it economically
Wars were among the big sources of slave labor.
> while forcing its own language and cultural values upon its people.
Spoiler alert: the “Roman” in Gallo-Roman is not endogeneous, and nowadays romance language share the same ancestor language for a very simple reason. And if everywhere from London to Benghazi and Porto to Ankara is covered in Roman ruins, it's not because aliens put them there.
And the story is exactly the same for the Egyptian Empire: Syria, Kush, Nubia, Lybia and Canaan are not the cradle of the Egpytian dynasties.
> so the first empire to really colonize should be chinese?
The first empire to really colonize is probably dating back to before there was writing to remember its name.
> The Umayad Califate [...] missing the idea of "pressure" and "force"
Ah yes, of course, Christian Spain voluntarily got incorporated into the Califate, and the famous battle they had with the Franks in the middle of France was but a playful tourney... sweeping military expansion is a major characteristic of the Umayad caliphate.
Yes, Egypt and Rome and Byzantium were empires. “Colonial power” in common parlance almost always means a European nation using naval superiority and tech imbalance to extract wealth from distant colonies.
By your definition, almost every native civilization of the Americas is a colonial power. Something has gone awry. (I’m not certain what “lands that were not ethnically theirs” means absent the doctrine of terra nullius, which also postdates any ancient empire.)
“Colonialism in the modern sense began with the "Age of Discovery", led by Portuguese, who became increasingly adventuresome following the conquest of Ceuta in 1415. . .”
At some point, if one needs to twist and turn and restrict a definition until it fits an arbitrary target, it is at best useless by overfitting, at worst driven by ideology more than anything else.
Such a manipulation only leads to absurd situations, such as the famous Greek or Phenician colonies, from Marseille to Carthage through Odessa, not being classifiable as colonies anymore. Or the Russian colonization of Siberia not being a colonization anymore.
Talk about ‶European overseas invasions″, ‶European transcontinental settlements″ or whatever, but please don't hijack a word that has been used with a much wider meaning for centuries.
> Chairs were known in ancient Egypt, the fork in Byzantium. Neither is a colonial power by any reasonable definition.
Egypt extended as far south as modern Sudan at various times. They ruled over people of different cultures and languages for hundreds of years. During the New Kingdom period Egypt extended as far north as modern Syria.
The Byzantine Empire did in fact contain many nations, which were not in any sense equal. The Greek speaking Roman Christians ruled over Dacians, Illyrians, Isaurians, Cappadocians, other Anatolians.
If having an empire doesn’t make you a colonist what does?
He probably means Windsor chairs, the construction and design of which are superior to all other chairs, full stop. They were perfected in the workshops of Philadelphia in the 1700s. They are the pinnacle of chair design and construction.
What the Egyptians (and following cultures) had were benches. Until recently, a chair with a back was a luxury item. It wasn't until the Welsh stick chair, where a poor Welsh farmer during the off-season first crafted himself a chair from the sticks in his hedge, or the Windsor chairs that followed, that common folk had access to such technology.
Yeah but in context of colonialism, it was the Europeans who brought these things over to the Americas. The point is it was a long time ago and everyone today is a product of history good and bad. Trying to change math is silly when so many other aspects of modern life exist because of this history.
From the article there is no suggestion that important mathematical methods discovered by colonists should not be taught or employed. What appears to be called for is increased acknowledgment that the people who discovered them also, in some cases, held morally reprehensible views.
So a better analogy would be, if you think this is a valid idea, then you should be aware that the people responsible for chairs, eating utensils and the widespread use of the English language may also have had reprehensible views.
Do we really need to be aware of that? Maybe, maybe not. But regardless, it's a lot less dangerous or absurd than what you're suggesting.
> What appears to be called for is increased acknowledgment that the people who discovered them also, in some cases, held morally reprehensible views.
And this is irrelevant at best, stupid at core and dangerous at worst. Learning stuff is what matters in an educational institution, not moral judgement of the one who discovered each bit of current knowledge.
First of all, that's no reason to not talk about/teach it.
And second of all, there are degrees to it. Not every bit of medical knowledge was obtained by vivisection and Mengele-style experiments on "undesirables".
> First of all, that's no reason to not talk about/teach it.
There are a finite number of hours in the day and week: what do we spend them on?
If you want to learn the history of science/math, take a history course. If you're in a science/math course presumably your goal is to learn those subjects, and not history.
What if a student wants to learn mathematics, but feels alienated because so many of the results are named after stale old white men, some of whom oppressed their own ancestors, and no one seems to acknowledge this? I'm not saying we should rename the results, but showing a modicum of awareness and sensitivity can do wonders for bolstering students' confidence.
> What if a student wants to learn mathematics, but feels alienated because so many of the results are named after stale old white men, some of whom oppressed their own ancestors, and no one seems to acknowledge this?
Who did Euclid or Pythagoras oppress? Leibniz or Newton? Pascal or Laplace? Euler or Gauss?
Liebniz wasn't much better: "Leibniz’s early views were no more savoury; ‘barbarians,’ whom he considered ‘beasts’ (see Perkins, 111), could be destroyed in order to civilize them." https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-leibniz/
Obviously not all mathematicians espoused problematic views, but it's worth demonstrating sensitivity to this aspect if it broadens the appeal of the subject.
I think it's both. There seems to be an effort to change the methods as well because I guess it was made for the wrong target audience. It all seems based on a different epistemology, that reality isn't objective but rather a social construct, therefore it's inherently moral and needs to account for all the injustices of the world. The reason this is sinister is because it's implicitly trying to teach people that objective knowledge does not exist.
In the linked statement there are exactly two mentions of decolonisation.
Firstly on p6:
> Values of EDI [Equality, Diversity and Inclusion] should permeate the curriculum and every aspect of the learning experience to ensure the diverse nature of society in all its forms is evident. MSOR providers should reflect on their curricula and processes to ensure that no group is disadvantaged or othered; for example, decolonising the curriculum can involve explicit reflection on the history of MSOR knowledge generation, as well as reflecting on how delivery or admission practices might adversely impact on certain subgroups within the student cohort. EDI aspects of student engagement and achievement should be monitored and actions formed to ensure equity.
Then on p. 7:
> the curriculum should present a multicultural and decolonised view of MSOR, informed by the student voice. Where possible, it should present the work of a diverse group of MSOR practitioners. Students should be made aware of problematic issues in the development of the MSOR content they are being taught, for example some pioneers of statistics supported eugenics, or some mathematicians had connections to the slave trade, racism or Nazism. Students should be educated in general EDI matters and also those that are specifically elevant to MSOR, such as the need to consider diversity in data collection
and analysis.
I sympathise with the idea that this isn't particularly relevant to the content of mathematics. But I see nothing in the above that suggests social constructivism or challenges objective knowledge.
The problem is stemming from undermining the subject of math as a thinking tool, logic and all that. It's being done by talking about things that are not really math, as if it were math.
> for example some pioneers of statistics supported eugenics, or some mathematicians had connections to the slave trade, racism or Nazism
That's really a form of history, maybe social history or science history. At best it's mixing subject matters and potentially depriving people of learning math, and at worse it's pushing this ideology that has to see everything through the lens of oppressor and oppressed (not saying it's never useful, but the ideology seems to pushing itself into every corner of society and distorting everything it comes across).
> What appears to be called for is increased acknowledgment that the people who discovered them also, in some cases, held morally reprehensible views
Every one in history held morally reprehensible views the Wigs, the Nazis, the Commies every one.
If we spent all day reading about all the morally reprehensible things that where done in history we would never do any maths as we would be doing history. Obviously there is more history than can be known so what is the point?
Let's say for the sake of argument Euclid owned a slave. Does that invalidate any of the derivation of geometric proofs from the 5 postulates in Euclid's elements? No. Ok. Does inserting an acknowledgement that Euclid owned a slave just before the QED of each proof provide any helpful or useful context for geometry? No. Ok. Are we better off if everyone tacitly moves away from ever learning or touching classical geometry in order to not have the connotation of "slaver maths" following them around? No.
You seem to have missed the core idea of math and science, and confused it with one of those other human endeavors subject to being in and out of political favor. So allow me to clarify. Science and math, above all else, is an ideological commitment to the premise that truth does not derive from authority. The validity of Euclid's elements does not derive from Euclid carrying a certain clout in a mathematical establishment of prestige. Relativity did not supplant Newtonian physics because Albert reached a certain level of control within the ranks of the Royal Society. Pointing out the views and beliefs of scientists and mathematicians which have since fallen out of favor maybe detracts from their respectability, but their work wasn't built on the authority of their institutional respectability in the first place.
The goal of this part of the guidelines is not about invalidating anything in the body or content of mathematics, but rather adding inclusiveness to the teaching of mathematics. I can appreciate the idea that this could broaden the reach and appeal of mathematics education. I can well imagine that a student with an ethnic minority background is put off from taking a course that appears to have been developed and passed down from people who look a lot like (and in some cases were) the people that oppressed his own family. Reacting by dismissing this feeling and saying "you shouldn't care about that, maths is just cold logic and rationality" will only put them off further. But showing sensitivity to the context and saying "we acknowledge that some of the figures in the history of this subject are problematic, nevertheless the knowledge they discovered is useful" may make them reconsider.
Will it actually work out that way? I don't know for sure, but I don't dismiss it as quickly as many people here seem to.
I mean I think it helps put things in context. It sort of feels like you’re lied to if you’re told all the good things about Euler and can grow up idolizing him and not know that IRL he was a piece of shit.
The goal of this is to be able to act as moral gatekeepers similar to what we see religious leaders do. Anybody who positions themselves as arbiters of morality (past or present) can be discounted immediately. Morality changes across time and cultures, so anybody seeking to impose their morality standards today can be ignored like the loons they are.
Nobody cares if the person who invented the chair, tortured puppies in their free time. It doesn't change the history of the invention, nor the utility of it. It's just a way for unimportant, unaccomplished people to farm digital reputation through virtue signaling.
> [...] that the people who discovered them also, in some cases, held morally reprehensible views.
If people fail to understand that a person who lived 2300 years before our time must have held quite a range of views that we would today consider totally abhorrent, then that's not a failure in the teaching of mathematics but of history - or maybe even a failure to use common sense.
The problem is, I think the people behind that mean well - they really do. But, unfortunately, in a mindcuffs echo chamber kind of way that is removed from the rest of society. Of course, you could argue that this description fits the early stages of any grassroots movement. However, I think this is not grass roots at all - at this point, it's a loud minority.
And whether you agree with their position or not, I think, the woke movement is not proceeding very strategically. Granted, so far their approach - which basically boils down to "lots of pressure" - has been admirably successful. Yet, I don't think it's going to be sustainable. I see a real risk that the tide might be turning and a backlash will happen when the pressure gets too much on those that feel pressurized. This could destroy a lot of successes of the woke campaign, which could be avoided if those pushing these ideas tried to be appear less confrontational, matter-of-factly, and aggressive.
For instance, instead of presenting a proposal like the one hand at hand "top down" - which now meets a predictable opposition - it could be a more successful long-term strategy to get all of the affected people into the same boat first, and then move forward with strong support, rather than dropping suggestions for what appear like radical changes.
I suppose, though, that one reason this latter strategy hasn't already been pursued in some fields is that the opposition, like in this article, just immediately makes more sense, which then leaves little hope to get the changes implemented.
> For instance, instead of presenting a proposal like the one hand at hand "top down" - which now meets a predictable opposition - it could be a more successful long-term strategy to get all of the affected people into the same boat first, and then move forward with strong support, rather than dropping suggestions for what appear like radical changes.
But this isn't a "top down" proposal to change everything. This is a 30 page document by an independent rankings agency that mentions "decolonisation" twice, both in sentences which advise mentioning the historical context of certain mathematical developments (congratulations, your lecture mentions in passing that Spearman came up with his rank correlation coefficient in part to justify his horrible racial hierarchy theories, but it's useful for other things too. Curriculum decolonised!) which I suspect some lecturers have been doing for years. Some people are going to disagree no matter what the change is and how it's suggested.
Examples of actual "top down" proposals in the culture war come from government ministers insisting that the National Trust shouldn't be referencing Churchill's position on India in its Churchill exhibitions lest it paint him in a less-than-heroic light and threatening to make university funding contingent on universities hosting particular speakers. For some reason HN is convinced that student petitions and consultation documents are a more egregious abuse of power though...
> As one example, one such diversity course at Kent university requires all students to affirm that ‘sex is, in fact, a diverse, multi-expressive form of identity and a full spectrum.’
Correct, there are multiple continuous quantifiers which we can use to determine sex and therefore it is a multimodal distribution.
Isn’t that in itself imperialism? What if the student was from the Islamic world, which google tells me, believes sex to be binary as a cosmological statement.
Saying sex is "diverse" isn't forcing the affirmation of a single view. I agree with you, there are cultural conceptions of sex that we need to consider - which increases the amount of conceptions of sex! Which single view am I enforcing? If you're against the enforcement of a single view, what would you prefer here?
Mediocre/bad article. It's mostly a rant against decolonisation in general.
The actual treatment of why this mostly does not apply to maths is very thin.
And there actually is a problem with the notion of mathematical truth: Not within mathematics itself but in its transfer to sociological questions. Here, simply presupposing that concepts can be defined with a universal meaning and statements have a universal truth is simply not true. Mathematics is not advanced enough to discuss these matters properly. (So: New notions need to developed)
Since most readers here have a background in programming, here's an analogy of what the issues are: Sociology is about distributed systems. And these are more complicated. For example thinking about time in distributed systems requires quite a lot of non-trivial tech (vector clocks, etc). It's even more complicated for sociological notions.
But in general, I agree: The topic mostly does not apply to maths.
But should that technology even be a part of mathematics? Different fields/applications will have different needs so I would imagine that these critical discussions should be part of each field and its methods. Eg: physicists don’t go around blaming math because specific physical systems need different models.
With "mathemathical technology" I'm not taking about software but actual mathematics.
And no one is blaming maths.
If physicists realize there's something missing, they develop the maths they require. Or they ask their maths friends to do it. And it might happen if enough people care to pull it off. Same applies here.
(But it's not very likely since most sociologists are not very educated in mathematics)
> mathematics itself but in its transfer to sociological questions
> Sociology is about distributed systems.
You make the argument that sociology is its own thing that can't be conflated with math which I think every one agrees with, isn't that the premise of the article?
Sociology has its time and place and thats in sociology, just like Math has its own time and place Math.
Yes and no - The underlying issue that prompted me to bring up the lack of adequate mathematical tools to discuss sociological notions is the following:
Mathematical truth and logic is often used as a gold standard for universal truth. And it is then often used as a straw argument to simply push away complex and uncomfortable questions. (A hyperbole of such a misguided line of reasoning would be "Software is just maths/logic and therefore pure and we so don't need to think about sexism and other social issues in sofware engineering.". A more nuanced version would be parts of the article we are discussing.)
But the "default tech" when thinking about mathematical truth (for example predicate logic) is in itself biased towards universally definable truths: A given predicate is universally defined a-priori.
There's no tools for things such as conflicting definitions and speakers positions in predicate logic: In reality, different actors in a discussion might not agree on what even they are talking about.
Take as an example the often discussed statement "White people can not experience racism". If you try to naively approach this with the toolset of universally definable notions you quickly realize that it can not be true (assuming a definition of racism that is not in itself skewed).
But there is a lot of things going on here: Who are these white people? Is the statement "This person is white" even based on a well defined predicate (Hint: It's not)? Etc etc.
And so: If the only logic in your toolset is predicate logic, it's hard to grasp sociological issues.
The problem is that at least in my experience, people who are trained in mathematics are generally rather aware of the limitations of models. I find that it's mostly practitioners of other disciplines (sociology, economics, sometimes also CS, etc.) who cargo cult mathematics without understanding it deeply enough.
That said, I'll agree that it sometimes feels like there's two types of people, the ones that think everything is amenable to rigorous and objective reasoning and the ones that think nothing is. But it's important to realise that both these modes of reasoning are important. For example, a mathematical proof can show that there exists no perfect voting system under some reasonable definition of "fairness"[0], but the theorem itself cannot decide whether that definition of fairness is really the one we care about.
But it's one thing to say that "there are more modes of reasoning than ones that lead to objective outcomes" and quite another to say that objective facts play no major role in our society and that getting people to understand that you can't always bend reality to your preconceptions isn't incredibly important.
I am not sure if I agree. This is a debate that isn't really related to diversity since people have asked things like how mathematics became so successful in other sciences like physics.
I guess you could apply that questioning to sociology. You could ask why some groups are more prone to crime than others using a statistical test. You could maybe use data to try to reason about sociological questions. It might turn up some ugly results. Or maybe people could ask why standardized scores differ between groups and instead of concluding there must be a difference in the test takers, they conclude the mathematics on the test must be at fault. So where it is convenient people question the validity of mathematics itself.
But on the other hand when someone tries to quantify diversity statistics and says there are too many white men who are CEOs or there is a black-white wealth gap, it seems like mathematics is perfectly legitimate. Should people watching the populations of white people be reminded that their statistical techniques are incorrect because they haven't been 'decolonised'?
Of course it's a very deep topic in the philosophy of science, foundations of math and logic, and philosophy of mathematics to ask about what math really is and where it applies but that's not what is being done here when there is talk of decolonisation.
The point of sociology, like all the humanist sciences (even languages) is to change the world, not to study it. The highest good in social sciences is social change, and methods to achieve it. You're applying positivist ideas to non-positivist sciences.
For humanist sciences truth is a tool in service of a higher, moral goal. Just like lying is another tool. Both are to be used, and whether some claim is true or false is not nearly as relevant as whether it can change society. For languages truth is irrelevant, after all you're studying fiction. Fiction is mean to convey "higher truths", which can in practice be anything from amusement to outright deception.
Often people in these sciences go further and go for outright postmodernism, which disputes that truth and falsehood even exist at all. It's just a matter of perspective.
This is a great example of precisely what I find problematic about applying logic in a simplified way.
In itself the argument seems valid. But it relies on assumptions that are (at best) highly debatable:
First, the author of the post assumes that the definition of the humanities he presents is universally true (carried by everyone). It is not: I never heard of it before, and I don't agree with it. To me it's just part of a taxonomy of how departments in universities are partitioned.
Second, even under the assumption that this definition was universally shared, the argument presupposes that this definition would then also fully determine the actual praxis. Which I highly doubt.
Third, the point about lying is just a bunch of fear mongering BS.
In this world view it is not insulting to suggest non-Europeans prefer ‘other ways of knowing’ to rationality and science.
This reminds me of that "racial sensitivity guide" that told employees punctuality and logical objectivity were "white expectations" not to be applied to persons of color.
In New Zealand the school chemistry and biology syllabus has been decolonised and now invokes the concept of mauri, or life force, to give the atomic theory a new spiritual dimension.
I went to high school and college so deep in the bible belt you could put an empty Coke can to your ear and hear banjo music and our textbooks still didn't have anything like that bullshit.
" In the 17th century, philosophers were remarking (in Latin, the universal language!) about how Descartes from France had more in common with Leibniz from Germany than either of them did with the average Frenchman or German. Nowadays I certainly have more in common with SSC readers in Finland than I do with my next-door neighbor whom I’ve never met."
The crux of the issue/problem. Distribution is non-uniform and very chunky. At this point I am convinced that if there exists natural 'types' of mindset and behavior, they cross cut (far less intrinsic) ethnic and cultural boundaries.
yeah, rationality and science are already here, but they're not evenly distributed yet. Starting to think that they might not ever be evenly distributed.
Can you link the source? My google search of "punctuality and logical objectivity were "white expectations" not to be applied to persons of color" didn't find any exact matches so I'm curious which guide you're referring to.
The user “causi” might as well delete it. The whole premise of their top-level comment was characterizing a “racial sensitivity guide” of which they have no adequate recollection, and cannot provide evidence that it even existed as they described.
A more cynical person might say they’ve injected a red herring into the thread, wasting others’ time.
Fair enough. I think a lot of these concerns are based on misrememberings and misunderstandings. I think it would have been helpful to mention when you posted the link that you had misremembered it, though.
>The framework recommends eight times that teachers use a troubling document, “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction: Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction.” This manual claims that teachers addressing students’ mistakes forthrightly is a form of white supremacy. It sets forth indicators of “white supremacy culture in the mathematics classroom,” including a focus on “getting the right answer,” teaching math in a “linear fashion,” requiring students to “show their work” and grading them on demonstrated knowledge of the subject matter. “The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false,” the manual explains. “Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuates ‘objectivity.’ ” Apparently, that’s also racist.
It's funny how every single conversation about this stuff spends most of its time debating whether its really happening and almost no time on the actual content of the ideology being pushed.
The phrase "punctuality and logical objectivity (were|are) "white expectations" not to be applied to persons of color" does not appear anywhere in that image, nor does any assertion of the kind.
It's just a (somewhat stereotypical - "bland is best," really?) list of the aspects of Western culture which the author believes derive from "white culture." It doesn't even present these points as negative.
If one were to criticize it, one could point out the degree to which many so-called "white cultural" ideals were founded on a religion not created by white people (Christianity) and non-Judeo-Christian (Greek and Hindu) philosophy and ideals. The European cultural complex didn't arise in a vaccuum.
Also that many of those bullet points seem to be so vague as to be universal. For instance, I doubt white people alone recognize the existence of cause and effect, respect for authority or patriarchy.
But the general premise - that the constructs of white culture (to the degree that it exists, which itself is debated) are considered default in American society, as a function of white supremacy reinforcing that default on all races and suppressing cultural variance in the name of conformity to a white-derived normativity - is correct.
Its the only society, that integrated large scale the best of other cultures, leaving behind some of the worst in all cultures. Japanese culture, Indian culture, european cultures it all went into the melting pot and was accepted, aprreciated and cheered on. That happened nowhere else on that scale, except as a remimport from america, and its very insulting to insinunuate that the rejected cultural pieces were rejected out of racism. The truth is, lots of other cultures have horrible bits and pieces, that were washed out of the blending for a very good reason. This very debate, would never be had, in a majority of countries around the globe.
Which makes it all the more incredible, that the "host" operating system culture of the melting pot is attacked and a attempt is made to "regulate" cultural blending. Its a majority vote system, without a need for regulation. The good thing goes in ("Yoga" as a sport, meditation system), the bad stays out (insane cults, backwards religous practices that are abanduned in all religions). Nobody needed to facilitate or control that, but a sparse, neutral stove and a pot.
The people vote, with there feet, there wallets and there actions. Unemployed commisars, race-warriors and revolutionarys are free to form a line for unemployment checks.
European cultures (if we're talking about the US) were never, and still aren't, accepted by indigenous people, much less cheered on. Africans were brought over as slaves and had all connections to their heritage and culture removed, Asians were harassed, sterotyped and made an underclass. Many immigrants had to change their names to "Americanized" versions at Ellis Island, especially Jews.
Yes, a lot of progress has been made in regards to cultural integration in the US, but that progress has been due to attempts to "regulate" cultural blending, rather than in spite of it. The US has had to be forced time and again - often with persistent struggle and at times violence - to live up to its stated ideals. Even today, the most prominent political movement across the US and Europe is explicitly Eurocentric and xenophobic, seeing immigration as a threat to cultural integrity and civil society and multicultural and multiracial integration is at best harmful, at worst impossible.
Are you American? As a foreigner it seems to me that america is incredibly culturally integrated and open compared to virtually anywhere else. People in my home country wouldn’t put up with a fraction of what Americans put up with.
What “hoarding of power?” Sonia Ghandi, who moved to India at 18, was president of India’s biggest political party for 30 years, but was never able to run for Prime Minister because she was born in Italy. Meanwhile the daughter of an Indian is vice president in the US. The US has got to be one of the few countries in the world where the country’s founding people no longer hold a majority of the political power.
Your one example is terrible, because the US would have prevented Sonia Ghandi from being President too for not being born in the country. Harris was born in the US.
If you believe the anglo-saxon majority no longer holds the majority of the political power in the US, ouf.
Anglo Saxons are distinctly a minority in the US, both in population and power. The last two Presidents had primarily German (Trump) and Irish ancestry (Biden). The House speaker has Italian ancestry, while the Senate majority leader is Jewish. On the Supreme Court there is a single Anglo Saxon.
> were never, and still aren't, accepted by indigenous people, much less cheered on.
This is simply not true. The natives embraced a lot of aspects of European culture. Nearly all developed métis cultures and deep commercial trade. Most of the initial treaties were ones of friendship and alliances.
Go visit a native museum, they want to preserve their culture, not expunge it from European influence. They hate wokeness and mass immigration too, by the way.
Attacking mathematics and science is part of the playbook for collectivists. Objective truth is the enemy of propaganda. Propaganda is the means to control belief, which is required to control behavior, which is required to centralize control of economic activity (people's behavior) and redistribute resources.
Therefore the idea of the existence of objective truth (2+2=4) must destroyed and subverted in order for the "goodfact" to be swallowed.
I just finished The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek, and he lays this out fairly well as a strategy of totalitarian regimes, or groups with totalitarian impulses. (Chapter 11, I believe)
I'll admit to not knowing my history well at this point, but wasn't mathematics and the sciences rather important to socialist countries? Now I don't doubt that ideology will have been injected in certain instances, but at least in mathematics and physics that's a bit harder to do and hence there were quite a number of accomplished mathematicians in the USSR.
Even beyond the natural sciences, this seems to have been somewhat the case. I remember my uncle, who is as unabashedly anti-communist as it gets, once showing me a grammar of some minority language written in the GDR and commenting, almost with admiration, that "back then, they invested a lot of resources on things like that".
Yes, the Soviet Union was actually quite enlightened on the science front, and they were especially good in teaching Mathematics and elevating talent. Just compare a soviet era math textbook to its “western” counterpart, the former is much more in-depth. Also, they were famously anti-religion, putting science above it.
That can't be, unless one subscribes to a highly racist view of the world. Concepts like "objective, rational linear thinking" are not anything to do with "whiteness" and to even suggest it is, is really quite profoundly insulting to everyone who isn't white.
>Concepts like "objective, rational linear thinking" are not anything to do with "whiteness" and to even suggest it is, is really quite profoundly insulting to everyone who isn't white.
Yes. As I spent several short paragraphs saying exactly just that, and in agreement with that premise. "The constructs of white culture" to which I referred do not refer to the specific items of that list, which I explicitly disclaimed and criticized in my comment.
I probably should have been more specific, precise and exact in my wording and not assumed that people would have put forth more than the minimum effort for a comment that goes against the HN zeitgeist, but I suspect I could have posted an entire essay and no one here would have bothered to actually read all the words. Mea culpa.
I did read it. You attempted to disclaim the specific claims of the poster whilst also arguing its premise was correct, but the premise of "white culture" (which does not exist, no debate needed) being functions of "white supremacy" that "suppresses cultural variance" is just nonsensical racist gibberish from the US left. Slowmovintarget has it right - we've seen this sort of thing before except with "the rich" or "capitalism" being used instead of "whiteness".
These are not the constructs of "white culture." That's merely the straw-man label adopted by the propaganda poster. This is just basic anti-capitalist, collectivist nonsense, with "whiteness" being the scapegoat instead of "the Jews" or "the rich."
Like im white and canadian, which is basically the same culture as america, but like a quarter of these seem specificly american to me.
And a bunch seem rediculous to apply as "white culture". Like that your intent matters when it comes to morality. I can appreciate that different cultures fall differently on the spectrum between outcome vs intention, but i highly highly doubt that white people are the only ones who give primacy to intention.
The white people value rationality part seems straight up racist.
Absolutely these people are American centric. They aim to convince everyone that USA is uniquely evil and having people look into what humanity has really been up to in any other location or time period would completely discredit their goal.
Similar for communists. Don’t bother asking them for a historical track record of that idea.
If you want examples finding them will not be hard. Scroll down to find the infographic from the National Museum of African American History & Culture. It has points on work ethic, future orientation and time that fit fine with what you’re responding to.
While others covered the guide part, I just wanted to note some context about punctuality. In case people didn't know, this is actually very culture-dependent. For example in Australia, guides organising meetings with
people from indigenous mobs sometimes refer to the meetings as running on "black man's time" . Essentially it means that the community comes first for them so when they have something else to do, it takes priority. The local person may turn up an hour late, or not at all, and it's not seen as lack of respect from their side.
Very interesting, cause that’s a reasonable explanation for that alternative norm.
Ultimately, if we’re gonna ask what norms are good we should have some cost function we are trying to optimize and ask for norms that encourage it to go up. Totally reasonable for different people to have different ideas of the good life and get different norms following that.
Any international business has training for these kind of cultural differences.
For example, when and if you refer to people by their first name or more formally with full titles for example. Whether working long into the night means you're dedicated or inefficient.
These are not right or wrong as such, they're just culture, but if you blunder into the situation assuming that everyone has the same culture, then someone bluntly telling you what's wrong with an idea can seem intentionally aggressive and rude, or someone trying to politely say no might seem vague, or worse, be taken as tacit agreement.
>The framework recommends eight times that teachers use a troubling document, “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction: Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction.” This manual claims that teachers addressing students’ mistakes forthrightly is a form of white supremacy. It sets forth indicators of “white supremacy culture in the mathematics classroom,” including a focus on “getting the right answer,” teaching math in a “linear fashion,” requiring students to “show their work” and grading them on demonstrated knowledge of the subject matter. “The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false,” the manual explains. “Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuates ‘objectivity.’ ” Apparently, that’s also racist.
The sister comments showing that the “racial sensitivity guide” was actually a random infographic that didn’t even remotely imply what you said it did made me curious so I looked over the New Zealand syllabus, too.
I can’t see anything whatsoever indicating they teach the existence of a non physical life force. What I do see is some use of te reo Māori which I expect, like any language, will influence the way that students learn chemistry. That doesn’t necessarily sound like a bad thing to me, especially given it’s one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s official languages.
It has become a common belief that it is the duty of New Zealand schools under the Treaty of Waitangi to integrate Maori culture into students' learning. This belief is talked about in this article, which is a very informative article about the current state of Tikanga Maori in New Zealand: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/447962/the-schools-walki.... It is clear that Tikanga Maori is being implemented in many of the science class rooms of New Zealand.
If you’ve not seen it, I present to you the lyrics to the song “All Star”, by Smash Mouth - translated from English to Aramaic, then back to English:
There was one who said unto me that the universe was going to cause me to tremble,
That I am not the sharpest cutting implement in the storehouse.
She had the appearance unto me as a stupid one,
With her finger and her thumb
In the frame of a Greek gamma upon her forehead.
Behold, the years begin coming, and do not cease from coming.
Fed unto the axioms, and I fell upon the earth and ran.
It was not acceptable if not to live for the sake of pleasurable things.
Your brain increases its wisdom, but your heart increases its stupidity.
A great amount to do, a great amount to see,
Therefore, there is no difficult problem if we take the streets of the backside.
You will not know if you do not go.
You will not shine if you do not glow.
Behold currently! You are entirely a star child! Begin your power! Go! Laugh!
Behold currently! You are a master of the music! Begin your singing! Acquire your wages!
All that sparkles is gold!
Comets alone shatter the frame!
>The framework recommends eight times that teachers use a troubling document, “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction: Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction.” This manual claims that teachers addressing students’ mistakes forthrightly is a form of white supremacy. It sets forth indicators of “white supremacy culture in the mathematics classroom,” including a focus on “getting the right answer,” teaching math in a “linear fashion,” requiring students to “show their work” and grading them on demonstrated knowledge of the subject matter. “The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false,” the manual explains. “Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuates ‘objectivity.’ ” Apparently, that’s also racist.
> “The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false”
Stop. Right. There.
Where do they get this "unequivocally false"? That sounds like they think they have something "purely objective" in... sociology, maybe? They're using their "purely objective" sociology to judge the objectivity of math, and finding math to be non-objective.
That's insane. These people should be barred from math and sociology.
"While some mathematical skills and concepts build off each other, the forced construct of linear teaching
reinforces objectivity. A prime example is how matrices is considered a precalculus standard, even though the
only math skill needed as a prerequisite is arithmetic. This is highly detrimental to students because they are
systematically deprived of knowledge they could access due to false constructs. Math teachers have internalized
the sequences that have been predetermined by standards and textbooks, rather than sequencing learning based
on (pre)requisite knowledge. In general, teachers teach math like a ladder rather than a web."
> has been decolonised and now invokes the concept of mauri, or life force, to give the atomic theory a new spiritual dimension.
Uh, last I checked, Euro-centric biology or chemistry didn't involve talking about Wille zum Leben or élan vital. Why does 'decolonized' science need to get involved with this totally unscientific woo?
I've definitely been taught about a few of the early ideas around biochem. Alchemy, will to live, the misunderstanding around ether in physics, the various conflicts around how life begins, and probably others I forgot. You don't learn "the unscientific woo", you learn the historical context of how we got to the current understanding.
You missed the point. Yes, it's unscientific, (well, not entirely - the attempts given knowledge at the time were very scientific, claims of success weren't) but the historical context about how chemistry evolved is still valuable. The whole idea of why it didn't work is scientific information.
We didn't learn alchemy. We learned about alchemy.
...okay, forget all the physical and chemical knowledge you have that was discovered after the year 1300 and propose a better method to learn how to produce gold. Where would you even start?
Sometimes surprising and interesting things happen when you experiment. Maybe goat piss with hair of a virgin seems weird, but burying shit in your backyard for awhile, digging it up, and mixing it with burnt wood seems pretty odd too when you think about it.
It seems to be missing sulfur, but otherwise - yep.
If memory serves, one of the big reasons for Britain’s naval supremacy for a long time was their discovery and exploitation of large deposits high-quality of saltpeter in India. Before that, they had “saltpeter plantations” with rows of organic waste soaked with human an animal urine and left to dry in the sun. Before that, it was groups of the King’s men going around the countryside and scraping the stone foundations of buildings and cemetery monuments.
My point exactly; people really like to equate "unscientific" with "turned out to be wrong". Chemistry is such a huge field that it's a small miracle we managed to figure out at all, no small thanks to Boyle who actually introduced the very concept of chemical elements.
With an incomplete knowledge of chemistry that wouldn't necessarily be an irrational experiment. For example, urine was a common source of uric acid in pre-modern times. When applied to copper it would produce verdigris. It might be a reasonable hypothesis that whatever allowed urine to change one metal might indicate that it could change other metals into gold.
You don't perform a scientific experiment because you know what the result will be. You perform the experiment to find out what the result is. That's how science works.
That is perfectly scientific. It becomes unscientific is when people pretend it worked, or that they'd ever seen it work.
Materials science follows in the footsteps of the alchemists, keeping alive the grand tradition of mixing random stuff together to see what happens. They too are frequently mixing things together in the hope of getting specific outcomes - usually it doesn't work.
Science is about how people deal with evidence. There wasn't any reason to think that gold couldn't be produced by mixing stuff together in the days when alchemy was popular. After all, a bunch of other substances could be made by mixing things, and it is obviously possible to mix liquids and get solids.
Biology is to tell one's way of living, we've used the word for so many centuries we forget that the roots "bio" and "logy" are Greek unscientific woo.
This article makes a point but we should be careful to see what was actually going on there. It's possible that the concept of mauri is introduced in the historical context of biology precisely together with élan vital and Wille zum leben and in the same terms.
Or maybe not. I suspend judgement until I hear both sides.
To be fair there’s something to this. My dad told me a story of meeting a Danish person in Bangladesh (where we’re from) who observed that, given my dad’s fastidiousness about punctuality and standing in line “he probably didn’t fit in [there].” I tell my kids we got kicked out of our home country because “your grandpa couldn’t stand people showing up late to everything.”
(to the degree that “race” is a definable thing to begin with…)
I was born and raised in a Southern US state, and moved to the East Coast for a job in my 20s. On my first day I showed up at 7am because I wasn’t given a start time. The next person arrived at 9:20am. I was later told “we start at 9”.
Where I’m from, showing up twenty minutes after the “start time” for a job without excuse or apology would have a decent chance of getting you fired on the spot.
Both places could definitely be described as “white” - and for that matter, it’s even more pronounced now that I’m working mostly for California companies. Working hours are at best a suggestion.
The western people should really lean a chapter from China. Chinese took it a great humiliation for losing the Opium Wars and for being "invaded" (by their own words) by multiple countries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Yet, the Chinese didn't seek ridiculous terms like "decolonization of science". Instead, their moto is know your shame and you will have courage. So, their education systems kept telling students that Qing lost to the modern civilization and therefore they should learn from it. They kept telling students that Chinese was left behind in the last century because they fell behind on science and political systems. They paid great respect to modern science. They made it clear that there was no "Chinese medicine" versus "Wester medicine"[1]. There is only modern medicine and ancient medicine. Famous scientists are household names because they show up in textbooks, in popular science books, in bed stories, and in state-owned media. Nobel laureates are treated like demi-gods in China.
Compared to Chinese, some people in the western worlds really do not know how to respect the great civilization pioneered by the west.
[1] I was talking about the official message. Large number of Chinese people still believed in Chinese medicine
Exactly. They produced one Nobel laureate a year for the past 10 years. They could compete with the US on manufacturing. They have a working democracy. And by the way, democracy was created by western elites, no? Shall we call it white-supremacy and go back to the primitive social structures? And Japanese didn't lose their culture identity. Heck, they've been exporting their culture. They didn't even need to translate their language. We say Tempura instead of deep-fried shrimps. T
> I went to high school and college so deep in the bible belt you could put an empty Coke can to your ear and hear banjo music and our textbooks still didn't have anything like that bullshit.
I can honestly say that I do see a “spiritual dimension” to a lot of things that are accepted science. I can’t imagine trying to get that into a textbook.
Science is about objective reality. Belief is by definition subjective, so it can’t be “science”. If it’s not science, it shouldn’t be in a science textbook.
If you want to teach it, teach it in world religions, theology, anthropology, or philosophy. If you have to, make an essay on the topic part of “language arts”. Just don’t try to dress it up as “science”, because it’s not.
> In this world view it is not insulting to suggest non-Europeans prefer ‘other ways of knowing’ to rationality and science.
What other ways? Can we all agree that there is only science or no science? What possibly can I learn from "other ways"? Case in point, what can I possibly learn from aboriginal maths, as advocated by the Seattle school board? Do they offer insights that I can understand category theories better? Do they offer insights so I can speed up my matrix multiplication? Do they offer insights so that modern mathematics can be easier to understand to undergrads? On the other hand, we didn't admire Ramanujan because he came from an "oppressed country" but because of his ingenuity in developing amazing math insights. Is that so hard to understand to the left?
Can we just make peace that western culture was incredibly lucky and admirable that they invented modern science, and other cultures should catch up? What's wrong with admitting that some culture contributed more to civilization and some culture could only play cargo-cult science?
For those unfamiliar - The Spectator can occasionally be an interesting read, but their business model is generally far closer to "push all the right-wing buttons" than to "objective and factual information source".
The Spectator also has a 'house style' of being as provocative as possible. I often find that even when they're arguing for something I ostensibly agree with I come away disagreeing with them because of how they have chosen to present their arguments. That being said, as much as dislike their style and sometimes their politics, they're a solid journalistic outlet and I would not accuse them of making up facts (even if they might not always present said fact in the most neutral light)
I'd accuse them of making up facts. It's not a "Elvis kidnapped by Aliens" style supermarket tabloid but famous liar, and journalist repeatedly sacked for lying, Boris Johnson was the editor.
> We also rate them Mostly Factual in reporting, rather than High, due to misleading articles and a few failed fact checks regarding climate change.
One random sample, which Boris admitted was a lie:
> The Spectator - which he was editing at the time - printed an editorial saying the tragedy was “no excuse for Liverpool’s failure to acknowledge, even to this day, the part played in the disaster by drunken fans at the back of the crowd who mindlessly tried to fight their way into the ground that Saturday afternoon.”
> Smearing Liverpudlians, the editorial added: “They see themselves whenever possible as victims, and resent their victim status; yet at the same time they wallow in it.”
> An independent report and the 2016 inquests ruled there was nothing to suggest fans’ behaviour contributed to the disaster.
> In 2012 Mr Johnson apologised again, admitting claims about football fans' behaviour were a “lie”.
Partly agreed. I am not accusing them of making up facts, but of slanting things far beyond any reasonable "objective and factual information source" standard.
(Note that I am so old and centrist that I still believe journalists should care about society being relatively cohesive and peaceful, with a good long-term future. The Spectator both obviously believing otherwise and being very closely tied to Britain's (currently ruling) Conservative Party...that strikes me as a pretty bad sign.)
The Spectator is an insanely right-wing tabloid rag, run at one time by failed former Prime Minister Boris Johnston, who said that Muslim women in burkas looked like letterboxes and called black people "picaninnies with watermelon smiles".
If anything at all is objective, it's mathematics. Anyone can verify if the statements are true, independently. Granted, some of the statements are massively complicated, so not everyone can do it reasonably fast; however when you state something, typically you need to prove it.
I (naively) thought this protected this particular discipline from "modern politics" or whatever we want to call this insanity that is spreading. I worry that we might reach a place where people believe that 1+1 is not exactly 2, it is dependent on the emotions of the person uttering the words, akin to the current discussions of male/female, genders, pronouns and so on.
It looks weird even typing this, but I am sure someone in 19th or 20th century would say the same thing about the current state of what is a man, what is a woman, who gives birth.. things that are so obvious that but yet disputed.
I don't understand what can be done about people legitimately believing insane things. I have no doubt that they believe what they are saying. We ought not to fund it with tax $ at least.. disappointing.
> The QAA’s benchmark document that defines the common mathematics curriculum has grown in length by 50 per cent in just three years, but not because of any radical shift in the nature of the mathematics. Instead there has been a been a decision to introduce teaching on diversity,
Just like the communists forced Marxism upon everyone, and Nazi Germany did the same thing to their youth. I expected Math would be the last place to be infected with this, but it has happened. We'll see how much it spreads.
> Activists also have statistics in their sights. One academic review of school statistics textbooks ‘with a theoretical framework of queer theory and critical mathematics’ notes disapprovingly that ‘pregnancy was used frequently in problems involving females/women.’
Cannot be distinguished from pure comedy. What a reality we are living in.
When I first watched Interstellar, I thought the scene where the school official talks about how the moon landing was faked was a bit outlandish but nowadays it seems like something that could happen in the next 10 years.
The application of mathematics is, however, not objective.
To use your last sentence about statistics, how you choose to handle variables, how they're put into regression models, and how those results are interpreted all have potentially subjective and cultural aspects to them.
As someone who works on mathematical and statistical models for a living, there's plenty of opportunities for subjectivity, from how methods are applied to what questions are considered important.
> The QAA themselves don’t explain what decolonising means.
Presumably this is a good thing, given the complaint:
> But by requiring that all subject areas include these topics, the QAA is homogenising university teaching and diminishing true diversity of thought.
The 'sinister attempt' here is literally just advice to have a bit of a think about this stuff when you're covering areas where it might be relevant, like the history of mathematics; and to consider the diverse needs of your students. An academic who chooses to follow that recommendation has huge scope to determine how they do so.
The rest is just baggage Armstrong is bringing to it, and is very much his problem.
I think this sort of thing is overstated to provoke political outrage
and distract from the real socio-economic disaster unfolding in higher
education. It's certainly one minor symptom, but only a small example
of how we've lost our way on a much grander scale.
> It is easy when you work at a university to roll your eyes at this
sort of thing and play along.
But that's not what happens. You roll your eyes, smile and then
blatantly and insubordinately forget about it. No one ever follows
up. No one cares, except that one over-worked bullshit compliance
officer whose softly-worded "advisories" get tactically directed to
spam.
Most people are already sensitive enough to teach incorporating a rich
cultural history and awareness of "colonial values" (expeciallin maths
which is practically a history of India, Persia and China), since it
is precisely the bad sides of those values that are harming our own
institutions today.
People in British universities have more important stuff on their
plate at the moment, like dealing with a massive crisis in student
disaffection, debt, and mental health problems, lecturer strike
action, recruitment problems...
> You roll your eyes, smile and then blatantly and insubordinately forget about it
Do you realize that this is exactly the kind of thing that happens when an extremist and very active minority tries to push its ideas on the silent majority?
The examples in history are abundant and often the outcomes were not very pleasant.
Except in this case they're a mild and moderate majority trying to
preserve the institutions and educational prospects of their students
that are teetering on brink of crisis.
I would say that in the next couple of years we'll see 20% of British
universities go to the wall, either as bankruptcy or takeovers, a
tragedy directly attributable to mismanagement by failing to focus on
core priorities.
When it comes to standing up for my students, most of whom have come
places like Sri Lanka, Nigeria and Ghana and even Somalia (where
they're literally starving to death), and who have gambled their
family life savings on the one smart son or daughter (up to £25,000)
I'll take on the "extremist" role of defending them with pride. I hope
you'd have the courage too.
No doubt, Kathleen Stock is a far more courageous woman than I.
But there are different ways to fight battles. Instead of
confrontation I don't even need to nudge my students to focus on what
is important, for us to safely ignore well meaning do-gooders and
direct all our energies into doing actual good. My strategy is
letting them become the change I want to see in the world - despite
indignant moralising from the sidelines that we are using "white man's
maths" to stop black children starving.
This week I am working with three women, all obviously > 140 IQs who
are the daughters of farmers in Africa. This is their big hope to
bring independence to their countries through agriculture and
AI. We're using machine learning to identify crop pests and select
seeds. That mean using mathematics.
But while I am teaching them segmentation and pattern recognition in
OpenCV I shouldn't have to worry every day that the department may
close, the professors are laid-off and I'll never get to see these
girls take back from the colonists what I think the world owes
them. Why? because academics can no longer focus on doing their job,
well and in good faith. The only dignified response is to smile and
get on with your project regardless.
True that. I would say further that, these 'woke' activists who attack women like Kathleen Stock are precipitating the end of their movement.
People not well-versed in the ins and outs of gender critical feminism versus trans privileges activism just look at all these masked and balaclavaed males making a huge scene, shouting abuse and threatening violence, and just see a gang of men bullying women who speak up.
That these males have bespoke gender identities that apparently make them all marginalized and vulnerable doesn't really register when they're spitting in women's faces and calling them cunts.
> I think this sort of thing is overstated to provoke political outrage and distract from the real socio-economic disaster unfolding in higher education
This is prima facie evidence of the socioeconomic disaster you speak of. Colleges flush with money blowing hundreds of thousands of dollars on DEI training and commissars.
Funny story, telling people that "whiteness" is to blame for everything doesn't improve mental health problems or student satisfaction.
Yes! I'd love to do math, but we're two lectures in, and the professor is still making land acknowledgments... Very satisfying.
> Funny story, telling people that "whiteness" is to blame for everything doesn't improve mental health problems or student satisfaction.
this may be a very controversial opinion, but i think a lot of this "whiteness is to blame" is for (usually upper managerial-class) white people who want to feel better about themselves without actually having to do anything truly substantial to alleviate these basic problems
> I think this sort of thing is overstated to provoke political outrage and distract from the real socio-economic disaster unfolding in higher education
Here in USA corporate world
it’s very clear that a significant fraction of those into this are “woke washing” over their other bad behavior. Here is the recipe: (1) Stab your employees in the back with one hand to save 100M then (2) donate 1M with the other to a worthy demographic then (3) incessantly talk about your donation ao ensure people stay focused on what really matters here.
Some girls I went to university with were expelled and effectively had their medical careers ruined at 19 because someone (without their knowledge) filmed them singing a Kanye song at a party and not sufficiently self-censoring. They were on track for med school and never came back to formal education, the DEI student group that lobbied the school for their expulsion was certainly happy though. This was back in Ontario where we now consider the province to have a doctor shortage, ironically.
People can be ghouls and will absolutely use frameworks like this to bring down their peers, I’ve witnessed it with my own eyes.
The story you tell is a sad case of bullying and victimisation.
But before you draw any conclusions from it, do watch "The Lives of
Others" and research into what happened in the former East German GDR
after the wall fell and the Stasi files were opened.
You see, the thing about "witch hunts" is this: It depends who is
holding the torch. And time waits for no man.
In 1992 the files were incomplete paper records. Today, the actions of
those teachers and students who colluded to destroy the lives of the
girls are still on a server somewhere, indexable, cross referenceable,
timestamped. Waiting.
What those bullies had better pray for, is that Dr. Martin Luther King
was wrong. Because if the arc of history does tend toward justice....
I had once thought that it is ridiculous to suggest that rational thought might possibly be not superior to other forms of thought, until I spent some time as a Buddhist, in Buddhist spaces. Then I saw first hand how rationality is indeed used in a euro supremacist way to smack down anything that doesn’t fit in that framework. Everything from mocking Asian Buddhists as “backwards rednecks” for having traditional views on Buddhism, to even claiming that the Buddha only said the non rational, religious things to placate the stupid people and that really he was a rational philosopher. I’ve seen the erosion and closure of traditional Buddhist spaces in the west in favour of rationalised versions that remove the traditional elements. So I can definitely empathise with seeing the promotion of rational thought as white supremacist. That said, mathematics in the west was always rational, so I don’t see how the decolonisation argument is useful here. Mathematics isn’t an ancient religion like Buddhism, it is rationally constructed
> seeing the promotion of rational thought as white supremacist
I think this is conflating "promotion of rational thought" with chauvinism which can be applied to any viewpoint. You could for instance be a Buddhist chauvinist.
I think something is deeply wrong with our educational system. Many people seem entirely incapable of distinguishing between the most basic concepts. Is it due to poor vocabulary? Just not having the right words or not understanding the meaning of words when trying to express concepts? Is it lack of life experience? Confusing things like white supremacy or violence with acts that don't even come close to measuring up to the real thing? Or is it, as many presume, more nefarious and the intent is to simply burn everything to the ground out of the misguided belief that it will be easy (or even possible) to build a new utopia in the ashes?
Well the point is that it’s different to be a chauvinist when you’re the dominant culture in the world, partly due to colonialism but also global capitalism, compared to being a chauvinist for your minority religion. I’ve definitely met Buddhist chauvinists, but they have far less power outside of a few countries
I have no idea what the relevance of your second paragraph is
It's particularly weird for people to buy the idea that there's something particularly terrifying about the QAA launching a consultation which mentions "decolonising" twice in 30 pages, when the other side of the culture war on universities is being fought by the government threatening to withhold funding.
Not so long ago I was a PhD student in a STEM department. With the amount of DEI and antiracist discussions had during our department meetings, it often felt that I was attending an MBA program designed for HR professionals.
Do I have anything against diversity, equity, inclusion? No.
Did I often wish the department – which was already extremely diverse in age, gender, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, and citizenship status – would focus more on the work of doing good science, facilitating rich academic discourse, fostering cross-institutional collaborations, and driving more translation and commercial ventures? Yes. 100%, yes.
In many ways, DEI initiatives, anti-racist policies, and decolonization aspire to worthy goals. Too often, though, they feel like the product of meme-driven corporate training and consulting firms who charge wholly unequipped professionals with disparate expertise with framing their work with a funhouse mirror of their on-the-ground reality.
I've worked with a couple companies like that... usually it's corporate driven (someone high up saw it at some other company and wanted to show how progressive their company was too)... then they hired someone whose only job was to promote such ideas and slow down work in other departments.
I live in a country that's 99.9% white in a field with 85%+ men. We don't get non-white people, because there are none here, and we don't get women, because there are very few women in such colleges at the first place. Comparing to other countries nearby and the ratio of women in tech colleges there (and later jobs), the only solution would be, to fuck up the economy so hard, that stem jobs would be one of the few ways to lead a relatively normal life, and then girls (who get better scores in hightschools and standardized exams here) would start studying one of those professions (and then probably leave the country).
The same semantic Motte-and-bailey[0] game is being played in other languages too.
In Germany, the job of the "Gleichstellungsbeauftragte" (equity officer, also almost exclusively women) isn't to further "Gleichberechtigung" (equality) but to do the opposite while making it sound fair and unassailable.
Not true. The typical trend is regression to the mean. Germans, Italians, Irish, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Cubans, etc., all came to the U.S. at the bottom and over a few generations achieved equality with the original British founders of the country. The same thing is happening with Latinos today.
That’s not correct. But assuming it is, how far are you willing to go? Skin color? Family education? Neighborhood a person grew up in? Gene defects? There are billions of reasons why two people are not completely equal.
In the end, you need 999 bureaucrats to make sure one person get equity.
One reason why communist countries are poor. Nobody produces things because everybody in working in the administration of equity.
What communist country? And come on, you are mixing up absolutely different things.. Economic left has absolutely nothing to do with this new-wave “liberal” thinking which is pretty much an American thing and is more of a propaganda to be able to point fingers.
Like, how “woke” China is in your opinion? Genociding Uyghurs doesn’t seem too “leftist” to me.
The ironic thing about DEI is that these programs are run by white people who will flip out if you express aspects of your culture that white people don’t find acceptable. I’m a well-assimilated foreigner who doesn’t even have many “problematic” world-views universally accepted in my country, but I still have to bite my tongue when talking about a range of issues, like individual self expression (tattoos, etc.—for some reason white people love that shit.) Just the concept of sitting around talking about our differences is distressing to me as an Asian. My natural inclination would be to talk about the ways in which we are the same to increase social harmony.
Not even "white people" but specifically white anglo-saxon puritans. In many ways, it's just the latest twist on religious fundamentalism - the basic impulse is the same. You're all going to burn in hell if you don't check your privilege and accept Herbert Marcuse as your lord and savior.
There is a better way: don't make the discussion mandatory and pervasive, and certainly don't invent tendentious reasons for doing so. The most likely consequence of doing these things is to persuade otherwise sympathetic people that your concerns are not to be taken seriously.
All the studies I've seen show that "diversity training" simply doesn't work, or even makes people more bias. It seems to exist solely to prevent lawsuits.
Unionization at work, integration in the neighborhoods and schools.
Yet the same people advocating this "decolonizing" nonsense are also advocating segregation. The reason is that they need racism to continue. It is, for them, the axis around which the perpetual struggle must turn. Therefore, we can never acknowledge progress toward stamping out racism, nor permit ideas that help end it (like Martin Luther King Jr.'s notions on color-blindness, which are now vilified under CRT).
I suppose what they really want, although "decolonise" is a very weird word for it, is for teachers to throw in enough information about the biographies behind the big names in math for students to not engage in unreflected hero worship.
A British academic "rolling eyes" at efforts to decolonise their material. Yikes but also typical. Mathematics is a pure subject, and logic itself is not colonial. Of course. But academic institutions do retain aspects of colonialism in their teaching. It's not a wild idea to take a moment and consider how your department may be complicit.
Aided and abetted by putting a veneer of mathematics over the top. That is the important context for the idea of decolonizing math - that it doesn't actually take place in a vacuum.
I deeply oppose the reading of history that judge historical events and persons with today's moral. With that measurement your grandparents would properly hold immoral opinions. Historical context is essential and I hope future generations also apply this when judging us.
Oh but my grandparents do. "Historical context" doesn't make something right. Colonization has always been objectively bad - it decimated and exploited populations and cultures, to name just one of many effects.
Many of said historical events and persons were immoral with the morals of back then as well. Murder has always been bad. Slavery has always been immoral. Genocide has always been bad, but guess what happened when the Spanish invaded the Americas?
Consider Kant's Categorical Imperative.[0] There's an argument to be made that the CI isn't quite perfectly "objective." But then again, it might be as close to such a thing as ethics can get.
A summary of the CI, for those unfamiliar with Kant:
Suppose you'd like to do something. Could you wish that everyone everywhere all the time behaved that way? That is, consider the hypothetical world where everyone everywhere did that thing as often as they wanted, and see whether you like the outcome (or, would prefer that hypothetical world to the one where no one anywhere ever did that thing).
If the world associated with the action you're considering is undesirable from a rational standpoint, then it's literally insane and a wholly despicable thing for you to do it. This is because, if you do it yourself while wishing no one else to do so, then you are considering your own self (or your own family or your own tribe) to be an exception to your own rational assessment of that behavior if everyone else were to do it. There is no rational basis for considering yourself such an exception just because you are yourself. So, don't do that thing.
Kant goes to extreme lengths to show that the Categorical Imperative is not just a nice idea that he dreamed up, but is rather an intrinsic entailment of rationality itself.
So, murder is objectively wrong because the idea of everyone, everywhere, in every time doing it would result in a horrible world that no rational person would prefer to the alternative where no one anywhere ever committed murder. Same with slavery and genocide. They're evil because if everyone everywhere did it, the resulting world would, if examined rationally, be worse than the world where no one anywhere ever did them.
There are quite a few problems with the categorical imperative:
We cannot all do the same things. For example, there are things that adults do that are necessary for the survival of humanity that children should not do.
So your response would be to add more provisions, yet you can always add more provisions, because there are many ways that we cannot be the same. Here's a trivial one: if your name is Bob, you can kill people, otherwise it's wrong. You can replace that with all sorts of reasons why you are justified and others are not. You are not constrained in how you frame it. It's easy to use murder as an example, because we already intersubjectively agree it is wrong (murder is also wrong by definition).
Let's get to an example closer to home for many people: I think it is clear that, using the categorical imperative, not having children is morally wrong because it would end horribly for the remaining aging population. I doubt you'd agree with that. You can only argue that the predicted result is not objective, but which predicted results are?
Also, if I see someone doing something which I don't think is viable on a larger scale, am I to conclude that they're evil, or is the categorical imperative only meant to be applied personally?
Those two things aren't even close to comparable in scale. The Aztecs were truly horrible in ways not seen in Europe for a very long time. That's why Cortez could conquer so much territory despite starting out with basically nothing. The locals were desperate to overthrow the Aztecs and teamed up with the Spanish. The sheer scale of the pointless and arbitrary human sacrifice was horrific.
> Murder has always been bad. Slavery has always been immoral. Genocide has always been bad, but guess what happened when the Spanish invaded the Americas?
The mass murder, slavery, and imperialism of the Aztecs was replaced by the mass murder, slavery, and imperialism of the Spaniards. But who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Otzoma?
The issue isn't whether we apply ethics from a relativist or objective standpoint, but that we pick and choose when we do. Right now, Europeans must always be judged by contemporary standards (ironically rooted in the Enlightenment), while other cultures must never be judged.
What irks me more is that we can't have a discussion about the past without people automatically jumping to the conclusion that we are justifying it. An explanation is not a justification unless everything is deterministic.
I guess their point is that we can try to influence people who are from other cultures, e.g. about the value of universal human rights (and I think we should, though which method is the best is debatable). By contrast, we can't really tell a dead person to behave differently because, well, they're dead.
We can, but if we do it without any historical context, then it will mean that basically everyone who ever lived in the past was immoral (and it will most likely also mean that we'll all be considered very immoral by people in the future), and I can't see that being a particularly useful point of view.
People naturally move through time. Everyone, all at the same speed. And in the same.e direction - you can't time-travel back in time. And intent plays no role.
Moving across space: Not everyone, not all at the same speed, not all in the same direction. And intent plays a role (note that it can be someone else's intent that's propelling one of course).
So I'm saying that time and space seem qualitatively quite different. That turns the question of
> Should we apply this logic to time only or space as well?
into one to be further explored with a "why? they're quite different" answer, rather than with a "yeah why not" answer.
My reaction as well. Who are they to tell me my grandparents are perfect! And I'm sure that by the time they're adults, the kids two generations down will think some of my opinions are downright detestable. This is progress.
Comments like his form a pattern, start by saying X publication is biased, then say it's not exactly what's happening, then give you 2 links that arz unrelated and that you won't read becausz you're discussing the issue even if it's not exactly happenibg in that place exactly as reported.
They might also call you racist or antisemitic after you tell them off.
The past year I seriously started thinking about quitting the web, as in only use payment apps and services, everything else feels so bland, you can't talk about anything interesting anymore, and the replies usually feel weird and bland, either I'm going crazy or everyone else is noticing this but not saying anything.
30 years ago that would have been a fair assessment, but no longer.
> The Spectator, once suavely edited, now serves as a fraternity house for Douglas Murray, Toby Young, James Delingpole and Rod Liddle; pummelling Muslims and high-fiving on Brexit, these right-wing bros are to the posh periodicals what Jeremy Clarkson was to the BBC.
> It used to be libertarian, cheeky. Now it’s like the Daily Mail. The difference is, I suppose, that its old spirit came from superiority. Now it comes from resentment and disappointment.
> The Spectator has become a sounding board for resentment, amplifying the catastrophist mentality that has gripped the right in Britain and the US.
Rod Liddle wrote in a 2018 column: "If you are an unpleasant person who enjoys macabre entertainment, wander down to Mile End and watch the women in full burka trying to cross the A11. That’s always good for a laugh."
> A 2021 study by the Muslim Council of Britain's Centre for Media Monitoring that looked at media coverage of Muslims and Islam in 34 publications found that The Spectator had the highest percentage of articles judged "antagonistic" to Muslims, 37.3% of all articles which mentioned the religion, and the highest proportion of articles which the study judged misrepresented Muslims and/or Islam, one in four. The Spectator also had the second highest negative bias of any publication studied, with 10.9% of relevant articles "very biased" (only Christian Today with 11.3% "very biased" was worse).
Whatever Rational Wiki is or is not, the statements they make about the spectator are all backed up by citations (some of which I lifted and inserted into my original comment). You either didn't read the page, or you think that the cited sources and their opinions are "far-left".
I read the page before posting, and (as expected) saw a list of cherry-picked instances which hardly established (compared to the thousands of articles the Spectator has published) a particularly right-wing, let alone far-right tone.
That you have then copied and pasted those links into the comment after I replied, doesn't strengthen the case, or alter the irony (my original point) of using a far-left source to bolster the original silly claim.
> A 2021 study by the Muslim Council of Britain's Centre for Media Monitoring that looked at media coverage of Muslims and Islam in 34 publications found that The Spectator had the highest percentage of articles judged "antagonistic" to Muslims, 37.3% of all articles which mentioned the religion, and the highest proportion of articles which the study judged misrepresented Muslims and/or Islam, one in four. The Spectator also had the second highest negative bias of any publication studied, with 10.9% of relevant articles "very biased" (only Christian Today with 11.3% "very biased" was worse).
It is a fact that the Spectator published an article, "The alt-right isn't all wrong" by James Delingpole in which he defended his "friend and colleague" Milo Yiannopoulos. It is a fact that Delingpole downplayed the alt-right's antisemitism and racism because (in his opinion) it was "confected and insincere". It is a fact that Delingpole cited Carl "Sargon of Akkad" Benjamin's defence of the white genocide conspiracy theory.
> > > A 2021 study by the Muslim Council of Britain's Centre for Media Monitoring that looked at media coverage of Muslims and Islam in 34 publications found that The Spectator had the highest percentage of articles judged "antagonistic" to Muslims
> These are facts, not opinions.
Who is doing the judging of how antagonistic an article is, in the Muslim Council of Britain's Centre for Media Monitoring? People with opinions.
It's subjective, and again, given the source, almost certainly biased against the Spectator's political stances.
>In New Zealand the school chemistry and biology syllabus has been decolonised and now invokes the concept of mauri, or life force, to give the atomic theory a new spiritual dimension. This is because of a central diktat that Maori knowledge must be given equal status to other forms of knowledge, including science. Activists also have statistics in their sights. One academic review of school statistics textbooks ‘with a theoretical framework of queer theory and critical mathematics’ notes disapprovingly that ‘pregnancy was used frequently in problems involving females/women.’
>John Armstrong @johnarmstrong5 ; Reader in Financial Mathematics at King's College London. Also interested in academic freedom and a more sane approach to EDI
You didn't read the article, did you? Is that what "far-right" means now? Things one's too dismissive to look into?
>Some context; the Spectator is now far-right wing
Meanwhile:
>In New Zealand the school chemistry and biology syllabus has been decolonised and now invokes the concept of mauri, or life force, to give the atomic theory a new spiritual dimension. This is because of a central diktat that Maori knowledge must be given equal status to other forms of knowledge, including science. Activists also have statistics in their sights. One academic review of school statistics textbooks ‘with a theoretical framework of queer theory and critical mathematics’ notes disapprovingly that ‘pregnancy was used frequently in problems involving females/women.’
>John Armstrong @johnarmstrong5 ; Reader in Financial Mathematics at King's College London. Also interested in academic freedom and a more sane approach to EDI
You didn't read the article, did you? Is that what "far-right" means now? Things and subject matter experts one's too dismissive to look into?
The Spectator isn't even remotely close to far right, unless you're going to describe the Guardian and BBC as far left. It's a standard mainstream newspaper in the UK that's been around for a very long time.
I recall a time when "far right" was used to describe Nazis. This sort of wolf crying has rendered the term meaningless just like the word Nazi itself, racism, sexism, etc. It doesn't work anymore, people see through it.
The far right is defined by political scientists like Cas Mudde (who focuses on extremism) as being anti-system.
The extreme-right rejects democracy, while the radical right accepts it, but rejects elements of liberal democracy such as minority rights or rule of law.
Obviously the Spectator is nowhere near far right and painstakingly affirms democratic principles. They’re mainstream right if anything.
Frankly I find opinions like yours extremist in themselves - disavowing press publications because of fuzzy accusations substantiated by twitter.
I don't really have much to add except to agree since plenty of others are offended.
The Spectator used to be a respectable right wing publication. Since Brexit and Bojo, it's gone crazy. It's taken the same break from reality we've seen elsewhere in the far right, where people would rather spend time fighting a culture war that is not happening (except where they are making it...) than address any real economic or political issues...
So first of all, I agree that I wish right-wing agitators who suddenly seem to care about academic integrity would be as much up in arms against the dismantling of universities due to economic concerns (which is often driven by the right).
And then, we can certainly debate the amount of historical context that should be included ideally in a mathematics education (although this has no clear answer; some people might prefer it, some people - who don't like humanities to begin with - might be worried to see the subjects they have been traditionally good at "diluted" - and at any rate, how much history helps with understanding mathematics depends a lot on the particular case in question). I do think the history of mathematics is interesting - although I don't think that there is that much ground to cover when it comes to the Babylonians...
But it's still a fact that today's maths teachers are not necessarily equipped to turn half of their mathematics currículum into a historical or sociological discipline.
And it also remains a fact that mathematics as we conceive of it was started by the Ancient Greeks and is tied a lot to our culture and to any culture that was also influenced by the Greeks (which includes the Muslim world and India - indeed in the middle ages, that is where all the progress was made), although some significant results were also discovered e.g. in China.
Weird to see a right wing opinion piece posted on hacker news, even weirder to see the only downvoted comments are ones pointing out the reputation and editorial style of The Spectator. That of being a wordy Dail Mail. Maybe Hackernews has become too mainstream.
I completely agree with what you said - this is clearly a right wing opinion piece rage bait, dressed up in a wordy style, but I don't view this as "mainstream".
Unfortunately the selection of criticisms is not great. I agree with some, but then it mixes it with things like
>The UK Office for National Statistics has already succumbed to such ideas, proposing that respondents should be allowed to self-identify their sex in the 2021 census.
This is something we've been doing in my country for decades and I don't see a problem with it (the alternative is to ask the person that does the census to take a guess on the gender of the person...sometimes it's easy, sometimes not so much)
The census is a set of forms. It isn't like there's someone in front of you trying to guess your age, gender etc. What "self-identify" means here is that you're allowed to pick whatever you want regardless of biological truth, whereas normally lying on a census can result in a fine.
I think "biological truth" is loaded here. In terms of a census there is an ambiguity about what it is that you're counting, are you counting people biologically born a given gender, people who are going to pair with the opposite sex, people who prefer a particular prefix or people that can give birth to children?
It appears in this case the census is content in counting people who prefer a particular prefix and only counting that (which can be self-identified) achieves its aims.
Tbh I don't massively see how this changes how one might treat census data (especially since the numbers remain small enough). I would suggest that if your research requires data points for people born as women then maybe you should be looking for other datasets such as births.
> While people nowadays are enumerated by race based on self-identification, until 1950 their race on the census was mainly determined by their census enumerator.[170] During this time multiracial people who were White and of another race were usually marked down as belonging to the other race due to the One drop rule.[170] The instructions provided to enumerators endorsed this practice.
The problem is inaccurate data. Depending on how the census data is used, it may well be important to distinguish between, for example, a man who thinks he's a woman, and an actual woman.
The number of trans people is so minuscule that any perceived inaccuracy due to people identifying as their non-biological gender would not make the slightest difference in any statistic.
Plus, if you wanted to have more accurate data, you could ask more accurate questions, e.g. "are you able to give birth" or anything like that. Now, people might refuse to answer, but that's their right.
How would you know? Did the last one to pop out rip out everything on the way out? Have you been trying to conceive for years without success?
Being able to conceive is not a simple yes or no answer. If you simplify beyond the conversation with your doctor, you need to make unfortunate assumptions. That’s why it’s so thorny.
Exactly, it's not. Not every biological woman can conceive, so I don't know why <1% of trans people would invalidate the results of some survey.
Some people believe that trans rights mean that suddenly everyone will try to claim they're "actually" men or women without any real skin in the game. I find this line of reasoning, no matter what your opinions about biological vs. other types of gender or about pronouns are (personally, I find pronouns besides he, she or they to be slightly ridiculous), to be akin to "gay rights mean people are going to stop having children" types of arguments. It's just not such a big deal that it's worth starting a culture war over IMHO.
There are males being placed in what were previously female-only prisons, some of whom have sexually assaulted and impregnated the women there. This is what so-called "trans rights" has given us.
It's always a bit funny listening to people complain about this, because at best they're naive about what they're criticising and at worst they're deliberately misrepresenting it.
For example, the author here states
>There is nothing particularly European about rational knowledge. Maths has always been an astonishingly international pursuit. The digits 0123456789 we use today were first written in India and inspired by Chinese mathematics.
Yes, I agree, the history of Maths isn't particularly western or imperialist, so let's look at what the consultation said about decolonizing maths:
>for example, decolonising the curriculum can involve explicit reflection on the history of MSOR [maths] knowledge generation
Right, so in your complaint about "decolonizing" you totally agree with their example of decolonizing maths.
Again, from the author:
>There are genuine issues around race that mathematics needs to address. For example, we don’t have as many black maths lecturers as we should.
and from the consultation:
> for example, decolonising the curriculum can involve ... reflecting on how delivery or admission practices might adversely impact on certain subgroups within the student cohort.
So again, why is this author writing a petition to oppose the thing he supports?
My guess would be that the author has picked up some far right talking points from the same people that bought you "Critical Race theory is a marxist plot"- the telltale sign is the weird tangent about "rational knowledge" being superior to other kinds of knowledge- a talking point straight out of the CRT panic.
Still shocked to find the apologists for these blatantly racist ideas lurking here in the comments.
No, there is nothing good about "decolonizing", "equity", DEI, anti racism, or any of your other rubbish Marxist ideas. They are destructive ideas that tear down everything that we've built post enlightenment.
Look at what it's doing to education. In Virginia, we tried to stop teaching advanced math in high school, because it was creating "inequitable" situations. Should we get rid of gyms too? I've been lifting weights every week, but I'm still not as strong as an athlete!
And still the apologists for these ideas will rush to the comments and say it's well meaning and just poorly implemented, misunderstood, or outright deny that these things are happening. It boggles the mind.
I am always shocked that somehow "we shouldn't teach algebra in middle school because Black kids aren't able to learn it" somehow became a progressive viewpoint.
A bit like how "anyone who performs the cultural stereotypes of femininity is a woman" is now apparently a progressive viewpoint, rather than the regressive misogyny it used to be.
I've taught maths at a few universities and until recently taught computing at a university, teaching algorithms etc (and am female if that is relevant!). I ended up recently at a talk at the university where they were talking about decolonising the computing curriculum.
One of the thing that I felt hadn't been taken into account was that as lecturers we are qualified to teaching computing/maths not to teach history/social sciences. I really didn't feel like I should be teaching history when I stopped learning history at school aged 15. The course I was teaching covered Turing machines and I'd feel very weird suddenly diverting into discussing that Turing was gay (but he's also a white male just to complicate things...). It all felt like a massive distraction from actually trying to teach the materials better.
I have to admit that when I was a student, it never really bothered me at all that all theorems were named after men (perhaps Noether got in there somewhere, but I really can't think of anybody else). They just felt like names to me and I was interested in the maths not the history. It had much more of an impact on me seeing female lecturers teaching and doing research.
Thanks for contributing your experience. I think it's important that the guidelines ought to consider the actual reported experiences and attitudes of the students whom they're trying to show sensitivity to. If as in your case they generally do nothing much, then it does feel like a waste of effort.
Not arguing that you’re wrong, but as a (counter / data)-point, both me and my friend were… relieved (for lack of a better word) when the convention of referring to things as master / slave in computing changed to primary / replica, etc. We are both from one of the countries where the slave trade was most active. It wasn’t something we would complain about out loud, it did not affect our work or productivity in any way. In fact we would have been content / happy to continue using the previous names. But it still felt good / noteworthy to not have to see them continuously, all day long. So sometimes providing that kind of context, or changing names of things to make everyone more comfortable, is a small thing but much appreciated by the minorities involved. I’m not sure it’s necessary to take it to the extent that you’re facing however :)
Thanks for sharing that, it's much more common to see opinions from people based on what they think others feel.
That word pairing evoked a bad history and was based on that particular definition of the word "master." Do you feel differently about other uses of the word on its own based on different meanings? I'm thinking of Git using "master," some switching to using "main," but also usage based on knowledge or skill mastery, like "Master's degree" or Frontend Masters. https://frontendmasters.com/
These ideas are philosophically void, but really thrive in practice. I think it has to do with encoding population into discrete identities, this is why buraucracies love it, it's like building an API between populations and institutions. Instead of going through a process of representation (like a union or voting) you simply assign yourself a ready made identity and get represented.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 282 ms ] threadSeems like a strange error to make considering the number of times the term is used.
Edit: Ok apparently this is an accepted term. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decolonization
I have no idea why as colonise and decolonise already mean things. And colonial is a distinct thing.
This is about a hangover of colonialism.
To me colony is A-political, whereas colonial applys to the politics.
Taking it further. I colonise America I colonise mars I colonise maths?
What does that mean? We aren't talking about a literal colony, were talking about colonialism. So (De)colonialise is the word the I would make up to describe this.
Colony->colonize->decolonize
Colonial is an adjective from colony. You can add -ize to the noun, no need for this intermediary step.
> a verb-forming suffix occurring originally in loanwords from Greek that have entered English through Latin or French (baptize; barbarize; catechize); within English, -ize is added to adjectives and nouns to form transitive verbs with the general senses “to render, make” (actualize; fossilize; sterilize; Americanize)
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/-ize#:~:text=a%20verb%2Dfo...
Elon musk colonises mars.
Elon musk decolonises mars.
Colony is a fairly A-political word to me.
Colonial has political connotations.
So if I wanted to talk about the political elements of the times when colonys were a thing would say colonial. And variations of that word.
As we are talking about politics, it seems that colonial seems to be the better word.
If I wanted to talk about setting off across the Atlantic and setting up a base, I would describe that as a colony, and the continuing process of that would be colonisation. If I wanted to talk about the negative impacts on the indigenous population, I would describe that as colonialism and the process by extension, colonialisation.
Googling around I'm obviously in a minority as far as word usage goes, and I'm surprised I haven't come across this before. It still seems strange how decolonise was the work settled on though.
Whether it's an error or not. The same error being made multiple times is to me a normal case. So is a single error. An error being made sometimes is rather what I would call surprising.
If you know something but make a mistake it's likely a one-off error. If you don't know something you will make the same error many times until someone alerts you to the situation. Both very likely cases if you ask me.
Whereas if you have N mentions and ~N/2 are wrong, then that is the most unlikely case. Since you'd either have to forget what you know half the time, or you would have to make a sloppy mistake half of the time.
> We are funded through a number of channels:
membership fees from higher education providers
contracts and agreements with the UK funding councils and organisations to which QAA reports annually
private contracts, consultancy and business development work in the UK and internationally
statutory fees from providers for work on behalf of the regulator in England
fees and maintenance charges paid by providers of higher education seeking educational oversight for immigration purposes as required by the Home Office.
https://www.qaa.ac.uk/about-us/how-we're-run/how-we're-funde...
They hide how the various funding streams tot up, presumably to maintain the incredibly thin veneer of a pretence they’re not a government body.
> The financial statements consolidate the results of the charity and its wholly owned subsidiary on a line-by-line basis. The financial statements are prepared in sterling, which is the functional currency of the group. A separate Statement of Financial Activities (SOFA), and income and expenditure account, for the charity itself are not presented because the charity has taken advantage of the exemptions afforded by section 408 of the Companies Act 2006. As required by the Charities Accounts (Scotland) Regulations 2006 (as amended), a cash flow statement for the charity is included.
https://www.qaa.ac.uk/docs/qaa/about-us/qaa-annual-report-an...
Have you actually read The Spectator? I don't want to defend them too much, since I'm not a huge fan, but they publish all kinds of stuff about Britains "inability to plan or innovate" and criticising the government on that.
edit: That's not to say that they haven't also published a lot of articles blaming everything on the "woke left"
Chairs were known in ancient Egypt, the fork in Byzantium. Neither is a colonial power by any reasonable definition.
Beg your pardon? If a colonial power is a country that expanded by force in lands that were not ethnically theirs (and I can't really think of a meaningful definition that would single out European powers between the 16th and early 20th century), then ancient Egypt and the (Eastern) Roman Empire are definitely colonial powers.
>> the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically while forcing its own language and cultural values upon its people.
Ancient Egypt and the Roman empire weren't colonial powers by this definition. I do not know a lot about China, but Sinicisation seems to fit colonial markers, so the first empire to really colonize should be chinese? The Umayad Califate in some sense too, but I think i'm missing the idea of "pressure" and "force" in the definition.
off the top of my head, both Roman Britain and Roman Egypt fit this one perfectly. The "exploitation" wasn't purely negative, just like the exploitation of colonies by Britain or France wasn't purely negative, but it was still exploitation.
Latin was originally spoken in a small part of central Italy. By 400 it was spoken in all of Italy, Gaul, Hispania, the North African coast, substantial parts of what is modern Germany and the Low Countries, Dacia (Romania) and was no doubt still spoken in Britain. That happened through conquest, not voluntary accession.
You obviously have no knowledge of Europe/North Africa/Asia Minor Antique Era; your definition is perfectly accurate for both the Egyptian and the Roman empires (and many others, from the Assyrians to Hittites through the Persians, the Greeks [ever wondered where the “pont” in “pontus region” is coming from?] and the Carthaginians).
> full or partial political control over another country
The definition of an empire.
> occupying it with settlers
Exactly what the Romans did in Gaul, Germania, Dacia, Illyria, Hispania, Anglia, Magna Graecia, Sicilia, Batavia, Helvetia, Thracia, Egypt, Judea, Mauritania, etc. You should know that gifting a plot of land somewhere in the Empire to veterans to compensate them for their service was both a way to motivate them and spread Roman culture and way of life.
> and exploiting it economically
Wars were among the big sources of slave labor.
> while forcing its own language and cultural values upon its people.
Spoiler alert: the “Roman” in Gallo-Roman is not endogeneous, and nowadays romance language share the same ancestor language for a very simple reason. And if everywhere from London to Benghazi and Porto to Ankara is covered in Roman ruins, it's not because aliens put them there.
And the story is exactly the same for the Egyptian Empire: Syria, Kush, Nubia, Lybia and Canaan are not the cradle of the Egpytian dynasties.
> so the first empire to really colonize should be chinese?
The first empire to really colonize is probably dating back to before there was writing to remember its name.
> The Umayad Califate [...] missing the idea of "pressure" and "force"
Ah yes, of course, Christian Spain voluntarily got incorporated into the Califate, and the famous battle they had with the Franks in the middle of France was but a playful tourney... sweeping military expansion is a major characteristic of the Umayad caliphate.
The Gauls, Celts, and many other colonized peoples may beg to differ.
By your definition, almost every native civilization of the Americas is a colonial power. Something has gone awry. (I’m not certain what “lands that were not ethnically theirs” means absent the doctrine of terra nullius, which also postdates any ancient empire.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_colonialism
“Colonialism in the modern sense began with the "Age of Discovery", led by Portuguese, who became increasingly adventuresome following the conquest of Ceuta in 1415. . .”
Such a manipulation only leads to absurd situations, such as the famous Greek or Phenician colonies, from Marseille to Carthage through Odessa, not being classifiable as colonies anymore. Or the Russian colonization of Siberia not being a colonization anymore.
Talk about ‶European overseas invasions″, ‶European transcontinental settlements″ or whatever, but please don't hijack a word that has been used with a much wider meaning for centuries.
Egypt extended as far south as modern Sudan at various times. They ruled over people of different cultures and languages for hundreds of years. During the New Kingdom period Egypt extended as far north as modern Syria.
The Byzantine Empire did in fact contain many nations, which were not in any sense equal. The Greek speaking Roman Christians ruled over Dacians, Illyrians, Isaurians, Cappadocians, other Anatolians.
If having an empire doesn’t make you a colonist what does?
He probably means Windsor chairs, the construction and design of which are superior to all other chairs, full stop. They were perfected in the workshops of Philadelphia in the 1700s. They are the pinnacle of chair design and construction.
What the Egyptians (and following cultures) had were benches. Until recently, a chair with a back was a luxury item. It wasn't until the Welsh stick chair, where a poor Welsh farmer during the off-season first crafted himself a chair from the sticks in his hedge, or the Windsor chairs that followed, that common folk had access to such technology.
So a better analogy would be, if you think this is a valid idea, then you should be aware that the people responsible for chairs, eating utensils and the widespread use of the English language may also have had reprehensible views.
Do we really need to be aware of that? Maybe, maybe not. But regardless, it's a lot less dangerous or absurd than what you're suggesting.
And this is irrelevant at best, stupid at core and dangerous at worst. Learning stuff is what matters in an educational institution, not moral judgement of the one who discovered each bit of current knowledge.
But we do hold the discovery process to moral standards. Every study involving humans (and I guess animals as well) goes through an ethics boards.
I think it's not too far out there to earmark certain discoveries as "knowledge obtained by methods we would not allow by today's standards".
And second of all, there are degrees to it. Not every bit of medical knowledge was obtained by vivisection and Mengele-style experiments on "undesirables".
There are a finite number of hours in the day and week: what do we spend them on?
If you want to learn the history of science/math, take a history course. If you're in a science/math course presumably your goal is to learn those subjects, and not history.
Who did Euclid or Pythagoras oppress? Leibniz or Newton? Pascal or Laplace? Euler or Gauss?
Liebniz wasn't much better: "Leibniz’s early views were no more savoury; ‘barbarians,’ whom he considered ‘beasts’ (see Perkins, 111), could be destroyed in order to civilize them." https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-leibniz/
Obviously not all mathematicians espoused problematic views, but it's worth demonstrating sensitivity to this aspect if it broadens the appeal of the subject.
Firstly on p6:
> Values of EDI [Equality, Diversity and Inclusion] should permeate the curriculum and every aspect of the learning experience to ensure the diverse nature of society in all its forms is evident. MSOR providers should reflect on their curricula and processes to ensure that no group is disadvantaged or othered; for example, decolonising the curriculum can involve explicit reflection on the history of MSOR knowledge generation, as well as reflecting on how delivery or admission practices might adversely impact on certain subgroups within the student cohort. EDI aspects of student engagement and achievement should be monitored and actions formed to ensure equity.
Then on p. 7:
> the curriculum should present a multicultural and decolonised view of MSOR, informed by the student voice. Where possible, it should present the work of a diverse group of MSOR practitioners. Students should be made aware of problematic issues in the development of the MSOR content they are being taught, for example some pioneers of statistics supported eugenics, or some mathematicians had connections to the slave trade, racism or Nazism. Students should be educated in general EDI matters and also those that are specifically elevant to MSOR, such as the need to consider diversity in data collection and analysis.
I sympathise with the idea that this isn't particularly relevant to the content of mathematics. But I see nothing in the above that suggests social constructivism or challenges objective knowledge.
> for example some pioneers of statistics supported eugenics, or some mathematicians had connections to the slave trade, racism or Nazism
That's really a form of history, maybe social history or science history. At best it's mixing subject matters and potentially depriving people of learning math, and at worse it's pushing this ideology that has to see everything through the lens of oppressor and oppressed (not saying it's never useful, but the ideology seems to pushing itself into every corner of society and distorting everything it comes across).
Every one in history held morally reprehensible views the Wigs, the Nazis, the Commies every one.
If we spent all day reading about all the morally reprehensible things that where done in history we would never do any maths as we would be doing history. Obviously there is more history than can be known so what is the point?
You seem to have missed the core idea of math and science, and confused it with one of those other human endeavors subject to being in and out of political favor. So allow me to clarify. Science and math, above all else, is an ideological commitment to the premise that truth does not derive from authority. The validity of Euclid's elements does not derive from Euclid carrying a certain clout in a mathematical establishment of prestige. Relativity did not supplant Newtonian physics because Albert reached a certain level of control within the ranks of the Royal Society. Pointing out the views and beliefs of scientists and mathematicians which have since fallen out of favor maybe detracts from their respectability, but their work wasn't built on the authority of their institutional respectability in the first place.
Will it actually work out that way? I don't know for sure, but I don't dismiss it as quickly as many people here seem to.
> So allow me to clarify. Science and math, above all else, is an ideological commitment to the premise that truth does not derive from authority.
Nobody cares if the person who invented the chair, tortured puppies in their free time. It doesn't change the history of the invention, nor the utility of it. It's just a way for unimportant, unaccomplished people to farm digital reputation through virtue signaling.
If people fail to understand that a person who lived 2300 years before our time must have held quite a range of views that we would today consider totally abhorrent, then that's not a failure in the teaching of mathematics but of history - or maybe even a failure to use common sense.
Imagine thinking chairs are a product of colonial culture…
And whether you agree with their position or not, I think, the woke movement is not proceeding very strategically. Granted, so far their approach - which basically boils down to "lots of pressure" - has been admirably successful. Yet, I don't think it's going to be sustainable. I see a real risk that the tide might be turning and a backlash will happen when the pressure gets too much on those that feel pressurized. This could destroy a lot of successes of the woke campaign, which could be avoided if those pushing these ideas tried to be appear less confrontational, matter-of-factly, and aggressive.
For instance, instead of presenting a proposal like the one hand at hand "top down" - which now meets a predictable opposition - it could be a more successful long-term strategy to get all of the affected people into the same boat first, and then move forward with strong support, rather than dropping suggestions for what appear like radical changes.
I suppose, though, that one reason this latter strategy hasn't already been pursued in some fields is that the opposition, like in this article, just immediately makes more sense, which then leaves little hope to get the changes implemented.
But this isn't a "top down" proposal to change everything. This is a 30 page document by an independent rankings agency that mentions "decolonisation" twice, both in sentences which advise mentioning the historical context of certain mathematical developments (congratulations, your lecture mentions in passing that Spearman came up with his rank correlation coefficient in part to justify his horrible racial hierarchy theories, but it's useful for other things too. Curriculum decolonised!) which I suspect some lecturers have been doing for years. Some people are going to disagree no matter what the change is and how it's suggested.
Examples of actual "top down" proposals in the culture war come from government ministers insisting that the National Trust shouldn't be referencing Churchill's position on India in its Churchill exhibitions lest it paint him in a less-than-heroic light and threatening to make university funding contingent on universities hosting particular speakers. For some reason HN is convinced that student petitions and consultation documents are a more egregious abuse of power though...
Correct, there are multiple continuous quantifiers which we can use to determine sex and therefore it is a multimodal distribution.
It's also not really an identity in any meaningful sense. A male can say "I am female", but, that is just a false statement.
Out of curiosity, what would these "quantifiers" be? Given your claim that there are many you should be able to supply a list?
The actual treatment of why this mostly does not apply to maths is very thin.
And there actually is a problem with the notion of mathematical truth: Not within mathematics itself but in its transfer to sociological questions. Here, simply presupposing that concepts can be defined with a universal meaning and statements have a universal truth is simply not true. Mathematics is not advanced enough to discuss these matters properly. (So: New notions need to developed)
Since most readers here have a background in programming, here's an analogy of what the issues are: Sociology is about distributed systems. And these are more complicated. For example thinking about time in distributed systems requires quite a lot of non-trivial tech (vector clocks, etc). It's even more complicated for sociological notions.
But in general, I agree: The topic mostly does not apply to maths.
And no one is blaming maths.
If physicists realize there's something missing, they develop the maths they require. Or they ask their maths friends to do it. And it might happen if enough people care to pull it off. Same applies here.
(But it's not very likely since most sociologists are not very educated in mathematics)
You make the argument that sociology is its own thing that can't be conflated with math which I think every one agrees with, isn't that the premise of the article?
Sociology has its time and place and thats in sociology, just like Math has its own time and place Math.
Mathematical truth and logic is often used as a gold standard for universal truth. And it is then often used as a straw argument to simply push away complex and uncomfortable questions. (A hyperbole of such a misguided line of reasoning would be "Software is just maths/logic and therefore pure and we so don't need to think about sexism and other social issues in sofware engineering.". A more nuanced version would be parts of the article we are discussing.)
But the "default tech" when thinking about mathematical truth (for example predicate logic) is in itself biased towards universally definable truths: A given predicate is universally defined a-priori.
There's no tools for things such as conflicting definitions and speakers positions in predicate logic: In reality, different actors in a discussion might not agree on what even they are talking about.
Take as an example the often discussed statement "White people can not experience racism". If you try to naively approach this with the toolset of universally definable notions you quickly realize that it can not be true (assuming a definition of racism that is not in itself skewed).
But there is a lot of things going on here: Who are these white people? Is the statement "This person is white" even based on a well defined predicate (Hint: It's not)? Etc etc.
And so: If the only logic in your toolset is predicate logic, it's hard to grasp sociological issues.
That said, I'll agree that it sometimes feels like there's two types of people, the ones that think everything is amenable to rigorous and objective reasoning and the ones that think nothing is. But it's important to realise that both these modes of reasoning are important. For example, a mathematical proof can show that there exists no perfect voting system under some reasonable definition of "fairness"[0], but the theorem itself cannot decide whether that definition of fairness is really the one we care about.
But it's one thing to say that "there are more modes of reasoning than ones that lead to objective outcomes" and quite another to say that objective facts play no major role in our society and that getting people to understand that you can't always bend reality to your preconceptions isn't incredibly important.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theo...
I guess you could apply that questioning to sociology. You could ask why some groups are more prone to crime than others using a statistical test. You could maybe use data to try to reason about sociological questions. It might turn up some ugly results. Or maybe people could ask why standardized scores differ between groups and instead of concluding there must be a difference in the test takers, they conclude the mathematics on the test must be at fault. So where it is convenient people question the validity of mathematics itself.
But on the other hand when someone tries to quantify diversity statistics and says there are too many white men who are CEOs or there is a black-white wealth gap, it seems like mathematics is perfectly legitimate. Should people watching the populations of white people be reminded that their statistical techniques are incorrect because they haven't been 'decolonised'?
Of course it's a very deep topic in the philosophy of science, foundations of math and logic, and philosophy of mathematics to ask about what math really is and where it applies but that's not what is being done here when there is talk of decolonisation.
For humanist sciences truth is a tool in service of a higher, moral goal. Just like lying is another tool. Both are to be used, and whether some claim is true or false is not nearly as relevant as whether it can change society. For languages truth is irrelevant, after all you're studying fiction. Fiction is mean to convey "higher truths", which can in practice be anything from amusement to outright deception.
Often people in these sciences go further and go for outright postmodernism, which disputes that truth and falsehood even exist at all. It's just a matter of perspective.
In itself the argument seems valid. But it relies on assumptions that are (at best) highly debatable:
First, the author of the post assumes that the definition of the humanities he presents is universally true (carried by everyone). It is not: I never heard of it before, and I don't agree with it. To me it's just part of a taxonomy of how departments in universities are partitioned.
Second, even under the assumption that this definition was universally shared, the argument presupposes that this definition would then also fully determine the actual praxis. Which I highly doubt.
Third, the point about lying is just a bunch of fear mongering BS.
Etc etc.
This reminds me of that "racial sensitivity guide" that told employees punctuality and logical objectivity were "white expectations" not to be applied to persons of color.
In New Zealand the school chemistry and biology syllabus has been decolonised and now invokes the concept of mauri, or life force, to give the atomic theory a new spiritual dimension.
I went to high school and college so deep in the bible belt you could put an empty Coke can to your ear and hear banjo music and our textbooks still didn't have anything like that bullshit.
yeah I got news for you about most Europeans there also.
The crux of the issue/problem. Distribution is non-uniform and very chunky. At this point I am convinced that if there exists natural 'types' of mindset and behavior, they cross cut (far less intrinsic) ethnic and cultural boundaries.
https://i.imgur.com/jFSGqnl.png
A more cynical person might say they’ve injected a red herring into the thread, wasting others’ time.
>The framework recommends eight times that teachers use a troubling document, “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction: Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction.” This manual claims that teachers addressing students’ mistakes forthrightly is a form of white supremacy. It sets forth indicators of “white supremacy culture in the mathematics classroom,” including a focus on “getting the right answer,” teaching math in a “linear fashion,” requiring students to “show their work” and grading them on demonstrated knowledge of the subject matter. “The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false,” the manual explains. “Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuates ‘objectivity.’ ” Apparently, that’s also racist.
It's funny how every single conversation about this stuff spends most of its time debating whether its really happening and almost no time on the actual content of the ideology being pushed.
It's just a (somewhat stereotypical - "bland is best," really?) list of the aspects of Western culture which the author believes derive from "white culture." It doesn't even present these points as negative.
If one were to criticize it, one could point out the degree to which many so-called "white cultural" ideals were founded on a religion not created by white people (Christianity) and non-Judeo-Christian (Greek and Hindu) philosophy and ideals. The European cultural complex didn't arise in a vaccuum.
Also that many of those bullet points seem to be so vague as to be universal. For instance, I doubt white people alone recognize the existence of cause and effect, respect for authority or patriarchy.
But the general premise - that the constructs of white culture (to the degree that it exists, which itself is debated) are considered default in American society, as a function of white supremacy reinforcing that default on all races and suppressing cultural variance in the name of conformity to a white-derived normativity - is correct.
Which makes it all the more incredible, that the "host" operating system culture of the melting pot is attacked and a attempt is made to "regulate" cultural blending. Its a majority vote system, without a need for regulation. The good thing goes in ("Yoga" as a sport, meditation system), the bad stays out (insane cults, backwards religous practices that are abanduned in all religions). Nobody needed to facilitate or control that, but a sparse, neutral stove and a pot.
The people vote, with there feet, there wallets and there actions. Unemployed commisars, race-warriors and revolutionarys are free to form a line for unemployment checks.
Yes, a lot of progress has been made in regards to cultural integration in the US, but that progress has been due to attempts to "regulate" cultural blending, rather than in spite of it. The US has had to be forced time and again - often with persistent struggle and at times violence - to live up to its stated ideals. Even today, the most prominent political movement across the US and Europe is explicitly Eurocentric and xenophobic, seeing immigration as a threat to cultural integrity and civil society and multicultural and multiracial integration is at best harmful, at worst impossible.
If you believe the anglo-saxon majority no longer holds the majority of the political power in the US, ouf.
This is simply not true. The natives embraced a lot of aspects of European culture. Nearly all developed métis cultures and deep commercial trade. Most of the initial treaties were ones of friendship and alliances.
Go visit a native museum, they want to preserve their culture, not expunge it from European influence. They hate wokeness and mass immigration too, by the way.
If mathematics and the recognition of cause-and-effect are white supremacy, then maybe they're right. /s
Seriously, this new "dei" or "crt" rhetoric needs to get shut down hard or it will undo all the progress that has been achieved.
Therefore the idea of the existence of objective truth (2+2=4) must destroyed and subverted in order for the "goodfact" to be swallowed.
I just finished The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek, and he lays this out fairly well as a strategy of totalitarian regimes, or groups with totalitarian impulses. (Chapter 11, I believe)
Even beyond the natural sciences, this seems to have been somewhat the case. I remember my uncle, who is as unabashedly anti-communist as it gets, once showing me a grammar of some minority language written in the GDR and commenting, almost with admiration, that "back then, they invested a lot of resources on things like that".
That can't be, unless one subscribes to a highly racist view of the world. Concepts like "objective, rational linear thinking" are not anything to do with "whiteness" and to even suggest it is, is really quite profoundly insulting to everyone who isn't white.
Yes. As I spent several short paragraphs saying exactly just that, and in agreement with that premise. "The constructs of white culture" to which I referred do not refer to the specific items of that list, which I explicitly disclaimed and criticized in my comment.
I probably should have been more specific, precise and exact in my wording and not assumed that people would have put forth more than the minimum effort for a comment that goes against the HN zeitgeist, but I suspect I could have posted an entire essay and no one here would have bothered to actually read all the words. Mea culpa.
Like im white and canadian, which is basically the same culture as america, but like a quarter of these seem specificly american to me.
And a bunch seem rediculous to apply as "white culture". Like that your intent matters when it comes to morality. I can appreciate that different cultures fall differently on the spectrum between outcome vs intention, but i highly highly doubt that white people are the only ones who give primacy to intention.
The white people value rationality part seems straight up racist.
Similar for communists. Don’t bother asking them for a historical track record of that idea.
see, e.g., "Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture" docs around 50-60 pages into the document dump at https://www.scribd.com/document/501975490/Government-of-Cana...
American doc: logical thinking is a part of white culture (with the implication it is not a part of other cultures)
Canadian doc: white supremists are often defensive and hoard power.
https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/15/smithsonian-pushes-raci...
Ultimately, if we’re gonna ask what norms are good we should have some cost function we are trying to optimize and ask for norms that encourage it to go up. Totally reasonable for different people to have different ideas of the good life and get different norms following that.
For example, when and if you refer to people by their first name or more formally with full titles for example. Whether working long into the night means you're dedicated or inefficient.
These are not right or wrong as such, they're just culture, but if you blunder into the situation assuming that everyone has the same culture, then someone bluntly telling you what's wrong with an idea can seem intentionally aggressive and rude, or someone trying to politely say no might seem vague, or worse, be taken as tacit agreement.
>The framework recommends eight times that teachers use a troubling document, “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction: Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction.” This manual claims that teachers addressing students’ mistakes forthrightly is a form of white supremacy. It sets forth indicators of “white supremacy culture in the mathematics classroom,” including a focus on “getting the right answer,” teaching math in a “linear fashion,” requiring students to “show their work” and grading them on demonstrated knowledge of the subject matter. “The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false,” the manual explains. “Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuates ‘objectivity.’ ” Apparently, that’s also racist.
I can’t see anything whatsoever indicating they teach the existence of a non physical life force. What I do see is some use of te reo Māori which I expect, like any language, will influence the way that students learn chemistry. That doesn’t necessarily sound like a bad thing to me, especially given it’s one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s official languages.
Edit: forgot to link the doc: https://ncea.education.govt.nz/science/chemistry-and-biology...
It has become a common belief that it is the duty of New Zealand schools under the Treaty of Waitangi to integrate Maori culture into students' learning. This belief is talked about in this article, which is a very informative article about the current state of Tikanga Maori in New Zealand: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/447962/the-schools-walki.... It is clear that Tikanga Maori is being implemented in many of the science class rooms of New Zealand.
Reminds me of the time when I had a software tutorial Google-translated from Farsi to English and it sounded like a magical incantation.
>The framework recommends eight times that teachers use a troubling document, “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction: Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction.” This manual claims that teachers addressing students’ mistakes forthrightly is a form of white supremacy. It sets forth indicators of “white supremacy culture in the mathematics classroom,” including a focus on “getting the right answer,” teaching math in a “linear fashion,” requiring students to “show their work” and grading them on demonstrated knowledge of the subject matter. “The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false,” the manual explains. “Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuates ‘objectivity.’ ” Apparently, that’s also racist.
Stop. Right. There.
Where do they get this "unequivocally false"? That sounds like they think they have something "purely objective" in... sociology, maybe? They're using their "purely objective" sociology to judge the objectivity of math, and finding math to be non-objective.
That's insane. These people should be barred from math and sociology.
In sociology, you got the replicability crisis (aka, it's mostly bulkshit).
The Sociologists want to bring that to mathematics so that the marginalized of the world don't feel inferior.
See also: https://www.quetzalec.com/
relevant sample:
"While some mathematical skills and concepts build off each other, the forced construct of linear teaching reinforces objectivity. A prime example is how matrices is considered a precalculus standard, even though the only math skill needed as a prerequisite is arithmetic. This is highly detrimental to students because they are systematically deprived of knowledge they could access due to false constructs. Math teachers have internalized the sequences that have been predetermined by standards and textbooks, rather than sequencing learning based on (pre)requisite knowledge. In general, teachers teach math like a ladder rather than a web."
Uh, last I checked, Euro-centric biology or chemistry didn't involve talking about Wille zum Leben or élan vital. Why does 'decolonized' science need to get involved with this totally unscientific woo?
We didn't learn alchemy. We learned about alchemy.
Sometimes surprising and interesting things happen when you experiment. Maybe goat piss with hair of a virgin seems weird, but burying shit in your backyard for awhile, digging it up, and mixing it with burnt wood seems pretty odd too when you think about it.
If memory serves, one of the big reasons for Britain’s naval supremacy for a long time was their discovery and exploitation of large deposits high-quality of saltpeter in India. Before that, they had “saltpeter plantations” with rows of organic waste soaked with human an animal urine and left to dry in the sun. Before that, it was groups of the King’s men going around the countryside and scraping the stone foundations of buildings and cemetery monuments.
Materials science follows in the footsteps of the alchemists, keeping alive the grand tradition of mixing random stuff together to see what happens. They too are frequently mixing things together in the hope of getting specific outcomes - usually it doesn't work.
Science is about how people deal with evidence. There wasn't any reason to think that gold couldn't be produced by mixing stuff together in the days when alchemy was popular. After all, a bunch of other substances could be made by mixing things, and it is obviously possible to mix liquids and get solids.
Or maybe not. I suspend judgement until I hear both sides.
To be fair there’s something to this. My dad told me a story of meeting a Danish person in Bangladesh (where we’re from) who observed that, given my dad’s fastidiousness about punctuality and standing in line “he probably didn’t fit in [there].” I tell my kids we got kicked out of our home country because “your grandpa couldn’t stand people showing up late to everything.”
(to the degree that “race” is a definable thing to begin with…)
I was born and raised in a Southern US state, and moved to the East Coast for a job in my 20s. On my first day I showed up at 7am because I wasn’t given a start time. The next person arrived at 9:20am. I was later told “we start at 9”.
Where I’m from, showing up twenty minutes after the “start time” for a job without excuse or apology would have a decent chance of getting you fired on the spot.
Both places could definitely be described as “white” - and for that matter, it’s even more pronounced now that I’m working mostly for California companies. Working hours are at best a suggestion.
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2022/11/01/richard-dawkins-is...
Compared to Chinese, some people in the western worlds really do not know how to respect the great civilization pioneered by the west.
[1] I was talking about the official message. Large number of Chinese people still believed in Chinese medicine
I can honestly say that I do see a “spiritual dimension” to a lot of things that are accepted science. I can’t imagine trying to get that into a textbook.
Science is about objective reality. Belief is by definition subjective, so it can’t be “science”. If it’s not science, it shouldn’t be in a science textbook.
If you want to teach it, teach it in world religions, theology, anthropology, or philosophy. If you have to, make an essay on the topic part of “language arts”. Just don’t try to dress it up as “science”, because it’s not.
What other ways? Can we all agree that there is only science or no science? What possibly can I learn from "other ways"? Case in point, what can I possibly learn from aboriginal maths, as advocated by the Seattle school board? Do they offer insights that I can understand category theories better? Do they offer insights so I can speed up my matrix multiplication? Do they offer insights so that modern mathematics can be easier to understand to undergrads? On the other hand, we didn't admire Ramanujan because he came from an "oppressed country" but because of his ingenuity in developing amazing math insights. Is that so hard to understand to the left?
Can we just make peace that western culture was incredibly lucky and admirable that they invented modern science, and other cultures should catch up? What's wrong with admitting that some culture contributed more to civilization and some culture could only play cargo-cult science?
What ‘left’? Let’s not bring America’s two right-wing parties into the picture.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-spectator-uk/
> We also rate them Mostly Factual in reporting, rather than High, due to misleading articles and a few failed fact checks regarding climate change.
One random sample, which Boris admitted was a lie:
> The Spectator - which he was editing at the time - printed an editorial saying the tragedy was “no excuse for Liverpool’s failure to acknowledge, even to this day, the part played in the disaster by drunken fans at the back of the crowd who mindlessly tried to fight their way into the ground that Saturday afternoon.”
> Smearing Liverpudlians, the editorial added: “They see themselves whenever possible as victims, and resent their victim status; yet at the same time they wallow in it.”
> An independent report and the 2016 inquests ruled there was nothing to suggest fans’ behaviour contributed to the disaster.
> In 2012 Mr Johnson apologised again, admitting claims about football fans' behaviour were a “lie”.
(Note that I am so old and centrist that I still believe journalists should care about society being relatively cohesive and peaceful, with a good long-term future. The Spectator both obviously believing otherwise and being very closely tied to Britain's (currently ruling) Conservative Party...that strikes me as a pretty bad sign.)
So that ought to tell you all you need to know.
I (naively) thought this protected this particular discipline from "modern politics" or whatever we want to call this insanity that is spreading. I worry that we might reach a place where people believe that 1+1 is not exactly 2, it is dependent on the emotions of the person uttering the words, akin to the current discussions of male/female, genders, pronouns and so on.
It looks weird even typing this, but I am sure someone in 19th or 20th century would say the same thing about the current state of what is a man, what is a woman, who gives birth.. things that are so obvious that but yet disputed.
I don't understand what can be done about people legitimately believing insane things. I have no doubt that they believe what they are saying. We ought not to fund it with tax $ at least.. disappointing.
> The QAA’s benchmark document that defines the common mathematics curriculum has grown in length by 50 per cent in just three years, but not because of any radical shift in the nature of the mathematics. Instead there has been a been a decision to introduce teaching on diversity,
Just like the communists forced Marxism upon everyone, and Nazi Germany did the same thing to their youth. I expected Math would be the last place to be infected with this, but it has happened. We'll see how much it spreads.
> Activists also have statistics in their sights. One academic review of school statistics textbooks ‘with a theoretical framework of queer theory and critical mathematics’ notes disapprovingly that ‘pregnancy was used frequently in problems involving females/women.’
Cannot be distinguished from pure comedy. What a reality we are living in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyxEpi3f40w
To use your last sentence about statistics, how you choose to handle variables, how they're put into regression models, and how those results are interpreted all have potentially subjective and cultural aspects to them.
As someone who works on mathematical and statistical models for a living, there's plenty of opportunities for subjectivity, from how methods are applied to what questions are considered important.
Presumably this is a good thing, given the complaint:
> But by requiring that all subject areas include these topics, the QAA is homogenising university teaching and diminishing true diversity of thought.
The 'sinister attempt' here is literally just advice to have a bit of a think about this stuff when you're covering areas where it might be relevant, like the history of mathematics; and to consider the diverse needs of your students. An academic who chooses to follow that recommendation has huge scope to determine how they do so.
The rest is just baggage Armstrong is bringing to it, and is very much his problem.
> It is easy when you work at a university to roll your eyes at this sort of thing and play along.
But that's not what happens. You roll your eyes, smile and then blatantly and insubordinately forget about it. No one ever follows up. No one cares, except that one over-worked bullshit compliance officer whose softly-worded "advisories" get tactically directed to spam.
Most people are already sensitive enough to teach incorporating a rich cultural history and awareness of "colonial values" (expeciallin maths which is practically a history of India, Persia and China), since it is precisely the bad sides of those values that are harming our own institutions today.
People in British universities have more important stuff on their plate at the moment, like dealing with a massive crisis in student disaffection, debt, and mental health problems, lecturer strike action, recruitment problems...
Till it gets used for witch hunts.
Do you realize that this is exactly the kind of thing that happens when an extremist and very active minority tries to push its ideas on the silent majority? The examples in history are abundant and often the outcomes were not very pleasant.
I would say that in the next couple of years we'll see 20% of British universities go to the wall, either as bankruptcy or takeovers, a tragedy directly attributable to mismanagement by failing to focus on core priorities.
When it comes to standing up for my students, most of whom have come places like Sri Lanka, Nigeria and Ghana and even Somalia (where they're literally starving to death), and who have gambled their family life savings on the one smart son or daughter (up to £25,000) I'll take on the "extremist" role of defending them with pride. I hope you'd have the courage too.
But there are different ways to fight battles. Instead of confrontation I don't even need to nudge my students to focus on what is important, for us to safely ignore well meaning do-gooders and direct all our energies into doing actual good. My strategy is letting them become the change I want to see in the world - despite indignant moralising from the sidelines that we are using "white man's maths" to stop black children starving.
This week I am working with three women, all obviously > 140 IQs who are the daughters of farmers in Africa. This is their big hope to bring independence to their countries through agriculture and AI. We're using machine learning to identify crop pests and select seeds. That mean using mathematics.
But while I am teaching them segmentation and pattern recognition in OpenCV I shouldn't have to worry every day that the department may close, the professors are laid-off and I'll never get to see these girls take back from the colonists what I think the world owes them. Why? because academics can no longer focus on doing their job, well and in good faith. The only dignified response is to smile and get on with your project regardless.
People not well-versed in the ins and outs of gender critical feminism versus trans privileges activism just look at all these masked and balaclavaed males making a huge scene, shouting abuse and threatening violence, and just see a gang of men bullying women who speak up.
That these males have bespoke gender identities that apparently make them all marginalized and vulnerable doesn't really register when they're spitting in women's faces and calling them cunts.
This is prima facie evidence of the socioeconomic disaster you speak of. Colleges flush with money blowing hundreds of thousands of dollars on DEI training and commissars.
Funny story, telling people that "whiteness" is to blame for everything doesn't improve mental health problems or student satisfaction.
Yes! I'd love to do math, but we're two lectures in, and the professor is still making land acknowledgments... Very satisfying.
Having someone like that in charge of "diversity" initiatives is like having Fat Albert run a campaign for health and fitness.
Spot on!
People can be ghouls and will absolutely use frameworks like this to bring down their peers, I’ve witnessed it with my own eyes.
But before you draw any conclusions from it, do watch "The Lives of Others" and research into what happened in the former East German GDR after the wall fell and the Stasi files were opened.
You see, the thing about "witch hunts" is this: It depends who is holding the torch. And time waits for no man.
In 1992 the files were incomplete paper records. Today, the actions of those teachers and students who colluded to destroy the lives of the girls are still on a server somewhere, indexable, cross referenceable, timestamped. Waiting.
What those bullies had better pray for, is that Dr. Martin Luther King was wrong. Because if the arc of history does tend toward justice....
I think this is conflating "promotion of rational thought" with chauvinism which can be applied to any viewpoint. You could for instance be a Buddhist chauvinist.
I think something is deeply wrong with our educational system. Many people seem entirely incapable of distinguishing between the most basic concepts. Is it due to poor vocabulary? Just not having the right words or not understanding the meaning of words when trying to express concepts? Is it lack of life experience? Confusing things like white supremacy or violence with acts that don't even come close to measuring up to the real thing? Or is it, as many presume, more nefarious and the intent is to simply burn everything to the ground out of the misguided belief that it will be easy (or even possible) to build a new utopia in the ashes?
I have no idea what the relevance of your second paragraph is
Do I have anything against diversity, equity, inclusion? No.
Did I often wish the department – which was already extremely diverse in age, gender, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, and citizenship status – would focus more on the work of doing good science, facilitating rich academic discourse, fostering cross-institutional collaborations, and driving more translation and commercial ventures? Yes. 100%, yes.
In many ways, DEI initiatives, anti-racist policies, and decolonization aspire to worthy goals. Too often, though, they feel like the product of meme-driven corporate training and consulting firms who charge wholly unequipped professionals with disparate expertise with framing their work with a funhouse mirror of their on-the-ground reality.
There has to be a better way.
I live in a country that's 99.9% white in a field with 85%+ men. We don't get non-white people, because there are none here, and we don't get women, because there are very few women in such colleges at the first place. Comparing to other countries nearby and the ratio of women in tech colleges there (and later jobs), the only solution would be, to fuck up the economy so hard, that stem jobs would be one of the few ways to lead a relatively normal life, and then girls (who get better scores in hightschools and standardized exams here) would start studying one of those professions (and then probably leave the country).
If you go to eg. serbia (worse economy), there are a lot more women in eg. engineering (electrical, mechanical...).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
Would be interesting to hear if other countries have similar word games?
In the end, you need 999 bureaucrats to make sure one person get equity.
One reason why communist countries are poor. Nobody produces things because everybody in working in the administration of equity.
And in the end, everybody is poor.
Like, how “woke” China is in your opinion? Genociding Uyghurs doesn’t seem too “leftist” to me.
Just one example https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/how-we-work/201203/d...
The one thing scientifically shown to make people less racist, which unsurprisingly isn't promoted by management, is unionisation https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ajps.12537
Yet the same people advocating this "decolonizing" nonsense are also advocating segregation. The reason is that they need racism to continue. It is, for them, the axis around which the perpetual struggle must turn. Therefore, we can never acknowledge progress toward stamping out racism, nor permit ideas that help end it (like Martin Luther King Jr.'s notions on color-blindness, which are now vilified under CRT).
In mathematics? How do they do that?
So my ex-wife is Chinese and not to play into the stereotype but math is important to the Chinese.
When she was growing up in China, learning Math, what aspect of this was "colonialism"?
Now when our kids went to math class in Canada and the instructor was also Chinese, were they teaching "colonialism" as well as math?
Many of said historical events and persons were immoral with the morals of back then as well. Murder has always been bad. Slavery has always been immoral. Genocide has always been bad, but guess what happened when the Spanish invaded the Americas?
A position does not become objective by being the consensus opinion.
I value human life. If another human values human death, there isn't a sense in which my value is necessarily more objective than theirs.
A summary of the CI, for those unfamiliar with Kant:
Suppose you'd like to do something. Could you wish that everyone everywhere all the time behaved that way? That is, consider the hypothetical world where everyone everywhere did that thing as often as they wanted, and see whether you like the outcome (or, would prefer that hypothetical world to the one where no one anywhere ever did that thing).
If the world associated with the action you're considering is undesirable from a rational standpoint, then it's literally insane and a wholly despicable thing for you to do it. This is because, if you do it yourself while wishing no one else to do so, then you are considering your own self (or your own family or your own tribe) to be an exception to your own rational assessment of that behavior if everyone else were to do it. There is no rational basis for considering yourself such an exception just because you are yourself. So, don't do that thing.
Kant goes to extreme lengths to show that the Categorical Imperative is not just a nice idea that he dreamed up, but is rather an intrinsic entailment of rationality itself.
So, murder is objectively wrong because the idea of everyone, everywhere, in every time doing it would result in a horrible world that no rational person would prefer to the alternative where no one anywhere ever committed murder. Same with slavery and genocide. They're evil because if everyone everywhere did it, the resulting world would, if examined rationally, be worse than the world where no one anywhere ever did them.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative
We cannot all do the same things. For example, there are things that adults do that are necessary for the survival of humanity that children should not do.
So your response would be to add more provisions, yet you can always add more provisions, because there are many ways that we cannot be the same. Here's a trivial one: if your name is Bob, you can kill people, otherwise it's wrong. You can replace that with all sorts of reasons why you are justified and others are not. You are not constrained in how you frame it. It's easy to use murder as an example, because we already intersubjectively agree it is wrong (murder is also wrong by definition).
Let's get to an example closer to home for many people: I think it is clear that, using the categorical imperative, not having children is morally wrong because it would end horribly for the remaining aging population. I doubt you'd agree with that. You can only argue that the predicted result is not objective, but which predicted results are?
Also, if I see someone doing something which I don't think is viable on a larger scale, am I to conclude that they're evil, or is the categorical imperative only meant to be applied personally?
They put a stop to the practice of human sacrifice, which was rampant throughout the Aztec Empire?
The mass murder, slavery, and imperialism of the Aztecs was replaced by the mass murder, slavery, and imperialism of the Spaniards. But who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Otzoma?
The issue isn't whether we apply ethics from a relativist or objective standpoint, but that we pick and choose when we do. Right now, Europeans must always be judged by contemporary standards (ironically rooted in the Enlightenment), while other cultures must never be judged.
Should we apply this logic to time only or space as well?
Moving across space: Not everyone, not all at the same speed, not all in the same direction. And intent plays a role (note that it can be someone else's intent that's propelling one of course).
So I'm saying that time and space seem qualitatively quite different. That turns the question of
> Should we apply this logic to time only or space as well?
into one to be further explored with a "why? they're quite different" answer, rather than with a "yeah why not" answer.
I didn't find out about it until after they were gone, but yeah they had a couple.
They might also call you racist or antisemitic after you tell them off.
The past year I seriously started thinking about quitting the web, as in only use payment apps and services, everything else feels so bland, you can't talk about anything interesting anymore, and the replies usually feel weird and bland, either I'm going crazy or everyone else is noticing this but not saying anything.
The Spectator is a conservative publication with a reasonable liberal dislike for far-left overreach and bullying, like that discussed in the article.
> The Spectator, once suavely edited, now serves as a fraternity house for Douglas Murray, Toby Young, James Delingpole and Rod Liddle; pummelling Muslims and high-fiving on Brexit, these right-wing bros are to the posh periodicals what Jeremy Clarkson was to the BBC.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n18/pankaj-mishra/what-i...
> It used to be libertarian, cheeky. Now it’s like the Daily Mail. The difference is, I suppose, that its old spirit came from superiority. Now it comes from resentment and disappointment.
> The Spectator has become a sounding board for resentment, amplifying the catastrophist mentality that has gripped the right in Britain and the US.
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/media/2019/11/why-spec...
> Spectator and its Tory MP editor may face charges over Taki race rant
> Threats against black lawyer after article [editor Boris] Johnson admits it should not have carried
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/feb/28/uk.pressand...
Rod Liddle wrote in a 2018 column: "If you are an unpleasant person who enjoys macabre entertainment, wander down to Mile End and watch the women in full burka trying to cross the A11. That’s always good for a laugh."
https://bylinetimes.com/2021/11/30/new-study-highlights-anti...
> A 2021 study by the Muslim Council of Britain's Centre for Media Monitoring that looked at media coverage of Muslims and Islam in 34 publications found that The Spectator had the highest percentage of articles judged "antagonistic" to Muslims, 37.3% of all articles which mentioned the religion, and the highest proportion of articles which the study judged misrepresented Muslims and/or Islam, one in four. The Spectator also had the second highest negative bias of any publication studied, with 10.9% of relevant articles "very biased" (only Christian Today with 11.3% "very biased" was worse).
https://cfmm.org.uk/resources/publication/cfmm-report-britis...
And so on. Plenty more quotes and citations in https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/The_Spectator#Controversies.
(Update, original parent comment was just Rational Wiki)
That you have then copied and pasted those links into the comment after I replied, doesn't strengthen the case, or alter the irony (my original point) of using a far-left source to bolster the original silly claim.
These are facts, not opinions.
https://cfmm.org.uk/resources/publication/cfmm-report-britis...
It is a fact that the Spectator published an article, "The alt-right isn't all wrong" by James Delingpole in which he defended his "friend and colleague" Milo Yiannopoulos. It is a fact that Delingpole downplayed the alt-right's antisemitism and racism because (in his opinion) it was "confected and insincere". It is a fact that Delingpole cited Carl "Sargon of Akkad" Benjamin's defence of the white genocide conspiracy theory.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-alt-right-isn-t-all-...
> These are facts, not opinions.
Who is doing the judging of how antagonistic an article is, in the Muslim Council of Britain's Centre for Media Monitoring? People with opinions.
It's subjective, and again, given the source, almost certainly biased against the Spectator's political stances.
>John Armstrong @johnarmstrong5 ; Reader in Financial Mathematics at King's College London. Also interested in academic freedom and a more sane approach to EDI
You didn't read the article, did you? Is that what "far-right" means now? Things one's too dismissive to look into?
Meanwhile:
>In New Zealand the school chemistry and biology syllabus has been decolonised and now invokes the concept of mauri, or life force, to give the atomic theory a new spiritual dimension. This is because of a central diktat that Maori knowledge must be given equal status to other forms of knowledge, including science. Activists also have statistics in their sights. One academic review of school statistics textbooks ‘with a theoretical framework of queer theory and critical mathematics’ notes disapprovingly that ‘pregnancy was used frequently in problems involving females/women.’
>John Armstrong @johnarmstrong5 ; Reader in Financial Mathematics at King's College London. Also interested in academic freedom and a more sane approach to EDI
You didn't read the article, did you? Is that what "far-right" means now? Things and subject matter experts one's too dismissive to look into?
I recall a time when "far right" was used to describe Nazis. This sort of wolf crying has rendered the term meaningless just like the word Nazi itself, racism, sexism, etc. It doesn't work anymore, people see through it.
The extreme-right rejects democracy, while the radical right accepts it, but rejects elements of liberal democracy such as minority rights or rule of law.
Obviously the Spectator is nowhere near far right and painstakingly affirms democratic principles. They’re mainstream right if anything.
Frankly I find opinions like yours extremist in themselves - disavowing press publications because of fuzzy accusations substantiated by twitter.
The Spectator used to be a respectable right wing publication. Since Brexit and Bojo, it's gone crazy. It's taken the same break from reality we've seen elsewhere in the far right, where people would rather spend time fighting a culture war that is not happening (except where they are making it...) than address any real economic or political issues...
And then, we can certainly debate the amount of historical context that should be included ideally in a mathematics education (although this has no clear answer; some people might prefer it, some people - who don't like humanities to begin with - might be worried to see the subjects they have been traditionally good at "diluted" - and at any rate, how much history helps with understanding mathematics depends a lot on the particular case in question). I do think the history of mathematics is interesting - although I don't think that there is that much ground to cover when it comes to the Babylonians...
But it's still a fact that today's maths teachers are not necessarily equipped to turn half of their mathematics currículum into a historical or sociological discipline.
And it also remains a fact that mathematics as we conceive of it was started by the Ancient Greeks and is tied a lot to our culture and to any culture that was also influenced by the Greeks (which includes the Muslim world and India - indeed in the middle ages, that is where all the progress was made), although some significant results were also discovered e.g. in China.
I completely agree with what you said - this is clearly a right wing opinion piece rage bait, dressed up in a wordy style, but I don't view this as "mainstream".
The parable of the Nazi Bar is relevant to HN: https://www.boredpanda.com/bar-bartender-nazi-punk-iamragesp...
>The UK Office for National Statistics has already succumbed to such ideas, proposing that respondents should be allowed to self-identify their sex in the 2021 census.
This is something we've been doing in my country for decades and I don't see a problem with it (the alternative is to ask the person that does the census to take a guess on the gender of the person...sometimes it's easy, sometimes not so much)
It appears in this case the census is content in counting people who prefer a particular prefix and only counting that (which can be self-identified) achieves its aims.
Tbh I don't massively see how this changes how one might treat census data (especially since the numbers remain small enough). I would suggest that if your research requires data points for people born as women then maybe you should be looking for other datasets such as births.
A census taker would decide what race you are, from categories thought up by other people.
https://www.census.gov/data-tools/demo/race/MREAD_1790_2010....
> While people nowadays are enumerated by race based on self-identification, until 1950 their race on the census was mainly determined by their census enumerator.[170] During this time multiracial people who were White and of another race were usually marked down as belonging to the other race due to the One drop rule.[170] The instructions provided to enumerators endorsed this practice.
Plus, if you wanted to have more accurate data, you could ask more accurate questions, e.g. "are you able to give birth" or anything like that. Now, people might refuse to answer, but that's their right.
Being able to conceive is not a simple yes or no answer. If you simplify beyond the conversation with your doctor, you need to make unfortunate assumptions. That’s why it’s so thorny.
Some people believe that trans rights mean that suddenly everyone will try to claim they're "actually" men or women without any real skin in the game. I find this line of reasoning, no matter what your opinions about biological vs. other types of gender or about pronouns are (personally, I find pronouns besides he, she or they to be slightly ridiculous), to be akin to "gay rights mean people are going to stop having children" types of arguments. It's just not such a big deal that it's worth starting a culture war over IMHO.
For example, the author here states
>There is nothing particularly European about rational knowledge. Maths has always been an astonishingly international pursuit. The digits 0123456789 we use today were first written in India and inspired by Chinese mathematics.
Yes, I agree, the history of Maths isn't particularly western or imperialist, so let's look at what the consultation said about decolonizing maths:
>for example, decolonising the curriculum can involve explicit reflection on the history of MSOR [maths] knowledge generation
Right, so in your complaint about "decolonizing" you totally agree with their example of decolonizing maths.
Again, from the author:
>There are genuine issues around race that mathematics needs to address. For example, we don’t have as many black maths lecturers as we should.
and from the consultation:
> for example, decolonising the curriculum can involve ... reflecting on how delivery or admission practices might adversely impact on certain subgroups within the student cohort.
So again, why is this author writing a petition to oppose the thing he supports?
My guess would be that the author has picked up some far right talking points from the same people that bought you "Critical Race theory is a marxist plot"- the telltale sign is the weird tangent about "rational knowledge" being superior to other kinds of knowledge- a talking point straight out of the CRT panic.
No, there is nothing good about "decolonizing", "equity", DEI, anti racism, or any of your other rubbish Marxist ideas. They are destructive ideas that tear down everything that we've built post enlightenment.
Look at what it's doing to education. In Virginia, we tried to stop teaching advanced math in high school, because it was creating "inequitable" situations. Should we get rid of gyms too? I've been lifting weights every week, but I'm still not as strong as an athlete!
And still the apologists for these ideas will rush to the comments and say it's well meaning and just poorly implemented, misunderstood, or outright deny that these things are happening. It boggles the mind.
One of the thing that I felt hadn't been taken into account was that as lecturers we are qualified to teaching computing/maths not to teach history/social sciences. I really didn't feel like I should be teaching history when I stopped learning history at school aged 15. The course I was teaching covered Turing machines and I'd feel very weird suddenly diverting into discussing that Turing was gay (but he's also a white male just to complicate things...). It all felt like a massive distraction from actually trying to teach the materials better.
I have to admit that when I was a student, it never really bothered me at all that all theorems were named after men (perhaps Noether got in there somewhere, but I really can't think of anybody else). They just felt like names to me and I was interested in the maths not the history. It had much more of an impact on me seeing female lecturers teaching and doing research.
That word pairing evoked a bad history and was based on that particular definition of the word "master." Do you feel differently about other uses of the word on its own based on different meanings? I'm thinking of Git using "master," some switching to using "main," but also usage based on knowledge or skill mastery, like "Master's degree" or Frontend Masters. https://frontendmasters.com/