• octoperson
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    1 year ago

    The math agenda? What are the conservatives worrying about this week?

    • jadero@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      I had a very strange conversation a couple of years ago. It seems that some people think that math is used only as a tool to control the population or something.

      We were talking about something that most people would consider pretty innocuous, catch and release fishing. I mentioned that I had recently read an article that claimed that mortality among released fish was still high enough that approximately every second released fish should be counted against your limit because of the percentage of released fish that die of catch-related causes.

      That lit the other guy’s hair on fire. “That’s math! You can’t seriously think that math is real? It’s all made up!” (Or words to that effect. Mouth frothing removed to protect the innocent.)

      Over the course of the rest of the conversation, I “learned” that math was invented as a tool of oppression. Science uses math to create fake knowledge. Our senses are the only true sources of knowledge.

      • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        They are anti-everything they don’t understand. Unfortunately that’s most things.

      • snoons@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        How to control a population 101:

        Make them only trust their emotions.

      • octoperson
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        1 year ago

        If they actually followed through with that you’d kind of have to admire it. What else would they have to do away with? All abstract concepts obviously, along with everything they’d been told, read, or imagined. How about theory of mind? Object permanence? Would they be newly surprised by the sunrise every day?

        • jadero@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          It devolves pretty quickly into an infantile solipsism. The world exists only for me, and only when I’m looking.

    • FrostyTheDoo@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      These are people that literally never grew up.

      It’s the 8 year old mentality of ‘math is hard and confusing, I would rather spend the day living in my imaginary world’

      What we are seeing now is the temper tantrum that happens when someone challenges them to leave their comfort zone.

      • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        A temper tantrum that goes on for years. At least with children it’s usually over in minutes.

    • sndmn@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Math has a known liberal bias.

      I expect they’d be upset about arabic numerals if they knew that’s what they’re called.

    • Smatt@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Yeah that stood out to me too, I’ve heard of these other dumb things.