Unable to conduct real discussions!

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 9, 2021

Kudzu devours the land: Ideology is swarming across our discourse like a fast-growing kudzu.

It's devouring our ability to conduct sensible discussions of any serious topic. It's getting harder and harder to watch us make our attempts.

Where does Our Town look more incoherent? On the (current) question of how public schools should teach our nation's brutal history? Or is it on the (current) question how public schools should teach math?

Then too, consider some of the things Anastasia Higginbotham said to The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf in their recent colloquy about whiteness.

Higginbotham wrote a children's book on the subject of whiteness. She said many odd things in the colloquy. but let's stick to one basic question: 

Based on the evidence shown below, did she know that police officers shoot and kill twice as many white people, as opposed to the number of decedents who are black?

HIGGINBOTHAM (6/5/21): I started [the book] with a shooting because videos of police officers killing unarmed Black people were coming out one after the othersame as now. Each time the Black community would gather to say “Stop killing our families!,” police would violently attack them too. It’s our responsibility to help children cope with life exactly as it is and grow in the process, whether it’s divorce, death, sexuality, or violent white supremacy embedded into all of our systems.

[...]

Whiteness is the reason these killings by police happen—the white cultural mindset that tells us white is good and innocent, while Black is bad and dangerous. Whiteness is the reason cops make split-second decisions to fire their weapons into the body of an unarmed person who is Black, while not even reaching for their weapon during interactions with armed and violent criminals who are white. You ask what is the appropriate age to tell children about police brutality, but which children do you mean? The siblings, cousins, children, and grandchildren of people whose family members are targeted know about it. You mean white children. When is the right age to tell white children about a system so cruel, we fear it will be traumatizing for them to even find out about it? Yes, I think it’s appropriate to teach my book to white kindergartners. (Higginbotham's italics)

Twice as many white kids have had siblings, cousins, parents and grandparents shot and killed by police officers. (We know—that's disproportionate.)

That's "disproportionate," but those are the numerical facts. Leave aside the other things Higginbotham said in the course of her discussion with Friedersdorf. Answer this question alone:

Did Higginbotham know that the numbers are like that? Or did she think that only black people get shot and killed by police officers, perhaps because those are the only videos she sees on Our Town's TV stations?

It would be better if no one got shot and killed? But based upon the things she said, did Higginbotham understand those basic facts? Or is kudzu eating the land?

Along with matters like that, we've been exploring this lofty question: 

In his new biography, can Stephan Budiansky explain Kurt Gödel's iconic "incompleteness theorem" in a way the general reader will understand?

We're prepared to announce the answer today—it's a thousand times no! Explanation simply isn't one our species' key skills.

We're reasonably good at inventing things. Our technologies could always be more advanced, but they're quite dependable. (Amazingly so, we'd allege.)

That said, analysis and explanation simply aren't our species' bags. Thought leaders aren't able to explain most things, and other thought leaders don't notice.

Still coming: No, please. Don't ask!

First, a bit of a dodge: No general reader will understand Budiansky's explanation of the incompleteness theorem. At some point, before too long, we plan to re-explore this fascinating topic.

("Phantom explanation" might be an appropriate name for this ubiquitous syndrome.).

For today, here's what Jennifer Szalai said in her review of Budiansky's book in the New York Times. In fairness, she didn't quite say that Budiansky "made Gödel easy." But we'd describe this as an initial dodge, followed by a flat misstatement:

SZALAI (6/3/21): ...Gödel’s “incompleteness theorem,” which he presented in 1930, when he was 24, upended his profession’s assumption that mathematics should be able to prove a mathematical statement that is true. Gödel’s proof landed on a mathematical statement that was true but unprovable.

For interested readers, Budiansky supplies an appendix that moves through Gödel’s proof, step by step, but granular knowledge of formal logic isn’t essential for anyone’s enjoyment of this moving biography. Budiansky—whose impressive and impressively varied output includes a novel, a book about Oliver Wendell Holmes, another about post-Civil War violence and a history of cats—brings a polymath’s interest to bear on a man whose life intersected with the political and philosophical upheavals of the 20th century.

[...]

Not only does Budiansky offer a clear discussion of the incompleteness theorem along with the accolades it elicited; he takes care to embed the proof in the life, avoiding the kind of gloomy interpretations that so often made Gödel feel misunderstood. Gödel had smashed the establishment understanding of mathematics to pieces—or had he? Gödel refused the nihilistic conclusion drawn by some from his work: that because there were truths that weren’t provable, nothing mathematical was truly knowable. He drew optimistic inferences instead, choosing to emphasize that there would always be new mathematical truths to discover.

First, we're told that you can enjoy this book even if you don't attain "granular knowledge" of the iconic theorem. Later, we're told that Budiansky "offers a clear discussion" of same. A clear discussion, full stop!

Is that accurate? Does Budiansky "offer a clear discussion of the incompleteness theorem?" We're going to say that yes, he does—if you have no idea what a clear discussion looks like.

Our species is wired for slip-slides like this. All through the precincts of Our Town, the kudzu is gaining ground—fast!


16 comments:

  1. "Higginbotham wrote a children's book on the subject of whiteness."

    As usual, thank you, dear Bob, for documenting the atrocities.

    You may want to get over the Gödel theorem thing, though. You seem a little obsessed, and it might not be entirely healthy.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Higginbotham says nothing to support Somerby's suggestion that she doesn't understand that whites get shot by police too. He attributes that ignorance to her based on nothing but his own imagination.

    His analogy to kudzu, which is a vegetation whose presence clogs landscapes, is inappropriate when talking about the absence of knowledge on the part of Higginbotham. That won't trouble Somerby either, since his point is to refer to something undesirable and evoke a negative image which he links with Higginbotham:

    "But based upon the things she said, did Higginbotham understand those basic facts? Or is kudzu eating the land?"

    Is the shooting of a disproportionate number of unarmed black people justified by the fact that white people are shot too, many more of them compared to blacks because blacks are 13% (or 12.1% without multiracial people)? The concern for black people is the disproportion because it affects their lives more than such shootings affect white people generally. The rate of such shootings for blacks is three times higher than for whites.

    Everyone would like to see such shootings decrease for all segments of our population. Somerby's desire to pretend that racial bias doesn't not make things worse for black people is offensive in the face of such statistics, which he routinely buries ("disappears").

    Higginbotham is a children's book writer. Black children cannot avoid the media coverage of these shootings, whether they are personally affected by them or not. Dealing with children's feelings arising from these cases is a good thing. Somerby apparently doesn't think kids deserve to have an explanation, no need to comfort them or address their questions. It wouldn't hurt Somerby to exercise some compassion instead of his knee-jerk defensiveness when this subject comes up.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Bob's point is that her entire premise about "whiteness" causing police shootings is wrong.

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  3. "No general reader will understand Budiansky's explanation of the incompleteness theorem. "

    And why should they? This is something you generally encounter in graduate school, after acquiring sufficient background to study it. The book written by Budiansky is about Godel's life, not his theorem. It is a biography, not a math textbook.

    But Somerby wants to portray everyone around him as stupid. It is sad that he needs to do this to prop up his own failing ego -- much the way Trump has to single out losers to make himself feel like a winner.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I bought a copy of Budiansky's book simply because Somerby has been attacking it. The arbitrariness of Somerby's fixation on such authors is unfair to folks who are trying to earn a living as writers. They shouldn't be maligned for no good reason, because Somerby has personality problems.

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  4. "Is that accurate? Does Budiansky "offer a clear discussion of the incompleteness theorem?" We're going to say that yes, he does—if you have no idea what a clear discussion looks like."

    Actually, he does, if you have sufficient background to understand it. Somerby does not. (More than that, Somerby's ideas of coherence are derived from Wittgenstein's belief that language cannot communicate anything meaningful, that it all makes no sense, and not from any real understanding of how language is used today. After Wittgenstein came Quine and Putnam and many others who have dealt with issues of meaning and reference using language. Somerby stopped with Wittgenstein and has been unable to understand anything since reading him as a recalcitrant college student.)

    ReplyDelete
  5. "All through the precincts of Our Town, the kudzu is gaining ground—fast!"

    A better analogy would be to equate the plaques formed in Alzheimer's with the kudzu that clogs neighborhoods in the South. Somerby may sense that something similar is happening to his own mental functioning. He may be projecting that onto the discussions he hears around him, when it is his own mental deterioration that is producing that feeling. If so, he needs to see a doctor.

    ReplyDelete
  6. 'Is that accurate? Does Budiansky "offer a clear discussion of the incompleteness theorem?" We're going to say that yes, he does—if you have no idea what a clear discussion looks like.

    Our species is wired for slip-slides like this. '


    Somerby is too dumb to understand Godel's incompleteness theorem. Furthermore he blames Budiansky for his own lack of comprehension. Perhaps if he were less of a Trumptard and spent less time defending Trump, Roy Moore, Ron Johnson, Devin Nunes and Matt Gaetz, and frothing insanely at Maddow, he might be able to spend time learning Godel's Incompleteness theorem

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  8. Another issue we won't discuss is that in 90% of violent deaths of blacks, the offender is also black. This destroys the meme that if only the police were perfect, the live of blacks would improve immensely.

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    1. Another issue we won't discuss is the uptick in violent crime since the HUGE tax break Trump gave corporations. This destroys the idea that the crime increase happened due to BLM protests of police misconduct.

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    2. It's been talked to death about how if you raise taxes or the minimum wage, businesses will just raise prices, so consumers end up paying for the increases.
      What's not discussed is that the same can be said when we fine them after they break the law, which destroys the idea that there is any deterrent for businesses to not break the law when they choose to..

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    3. It's no selling a loosy cigarette, but maybe commiting fraud to such a degree it crashes the world's economy should be punished by death, too

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