MONDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 2025
Inquiring minds wanted to know: We mentioned this morning that President Trump has been on a jag of late. At Mediaite, you can read about the kinds of outbursts and bizarre claims which get disappeared—and thereby normalized—by major orgs in Blue America like the New York Times.
That said:
Increasingly, the madness is general over the American discourse. The madness gets reported at Mediaite, and it comes from many directions. So it goes when the so-called "democratization of media"—including the invention of the podcast—reinvents Huey Long's impossible dream in the following way:
"Every influencer a king."
From here, we'd like to move to the strange start of this book review in yesterday's New York Times. In his opening paragraph, Jordan Ellenberg makes a somewhat peculiar claim about some of the last century's greatest minds.
Dual headline included:
Can Math Be Violent? For 3 Scholars, the Answer Was Yes
In “The Great Math War,” Jason Socrates Bardi takes on a battle for the soul of numbers that divided the experts of its day.It may surprise most readers to learn that, just a century or so ago, some of the era’s greatest mathematical minds were enlisted in a debate about whether numbers exist. You’d think, after millenniums, we’d have gotten that straight. But it’s not that simple, as Jason Socrates Bardi explains in his new book, “The Great Math War.”
That's the start of the review. According to Ellenberg—and we're not exactly saying he's "wrong"—some of our greatest mathematical minds were trying to determine whether numbers exist.
(The headlines describe those giants as "experts.")
We'd like to discuss that peculiar claim—it goes straight to the heart of the later Wittgenstein's murky / jumbled / instructive work—but experience over the past thirty years has taught us that we shouldn't.
Friend, do you believe that numbers exist? We humans are remarkably good at building tall buildings, less skilled almost everywhere else.
Let's not disappear this bizarre claim, made by someone who may be suffering from cognitive decline:
ReplyDelete"...major orgs in Blue America like the New York Times."
Bob just isn’t cognitive. His decline is sad but inexorable.
DeleteAnonymouse 2:510pm, that’s so ridiculous. There’s not a pro-Trump columnist at the NYT. They are liberals or anti-Trump conservatives.
DeleteThat’s the dichotomy? Pro-trump or blue?
DeleteAnonymouse 3:13pm, pro- David Brooks?
DeleteCecelia,
DeleteIt just seems that way because the NY times doesn't report on the ages or mental states of Presidential candidates.
A relationship between believing the NY Times is blue media and childhood vaccines is not unproven.
DeleteAnonymouse 3:56pm, if only I had a nickel for all things not unproven.
Delete4:04,
DeleteIf I only had a nickel for every child killed by Trump and RFK, Jr.
Anonymouse 4:04pm, you’d do better with bitcoin.
Delete4:43,
DeleteWe'd all do better without fascists running the country.
Anonymouse 1:47pm, you’d do better if you were on medication,
DeleteThe measles killing more children than guns, is RFK Jr.'s goal.
DeleteRepublican sex pests are a dime a dozen.
DeleteAnonymouse 5:21pm, and you’ve got dimes.
DeleteAt that rate you can buy the Senate for 50 cents.
Delete@5:15 - Biden deserves credit. Measles were brought into the country by unvetted immigrants.
DeleteSomerby squeezes out an extra bit of poop today. Huzzah!
ReplyDeleteAnd how do you characterize what it is that you’re squeezing out?
DeleteDG,
DeleteWho could know for sure?
There seem to be two different mathematics: First, there's there's the one related to the real, physical world. Here, numbers are finite. Lines don't extend forever. Geometric figure are drawn with sides that may be as thin as a pen point, but which have finite thickness. OTOH, there's the generalized models of mathematics, where there are many different infinities. Where lines extend infinitely. Where the sides of triangles have no thickness.
ReplyDeleteThese models are useful. They allowed the discovery of important things about ordinary numbers and physical shapes. But, these models also allow the discovery of things that relate to the models but which do not extend to physical reality. E.g., once you postulate a model with unlimited integers, your model then includes infinity. If you postulate counting all the subsets of an infinite set, you now have bigger infinities. Euclidean geometry postulates line of zero thickness.
Hilbert and Cantor represent the latter. Brouwer holds the former POV
We have evolved past the age when people were criticized if they didn't believe 2+2=4.
Delete4:45,
DeleteThat kind of elitism gave us to Trump.
there's the generalized models of mathematics, where there are many different infinities.
DeleteGeez! You don't have to go very far for an example: all integers and all real numbers represent two different kinds of infinity. It is important to understand as it relates to computer science: it is only possible to write programs to enumerate countably infinite sets.