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.
Delete"Measles were brought into the country by unvetted immigrants."
DeleteNope. Turns out it was low vaccination rates in Texas, where the outbreak started:
"Public health officials have emphasized that the most effective way to prevent measles is to obtain two doses of the measles-mumps-rubella shot. But, anti-vaccine sentiment has pushed pockets of Texas to fall below the 95% vaccination rate needed for herd immunity against measles."
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/05/08/texas-measles-spread-oklahoma-new-mexico/
Wonder where people got the idea not to vaccinate their kids?
Hector, in which population within Texas are measles rates low?
DeleteVaccination rates low
DeleteAI Overview says this:
Delete"The 2025 Texas measles outbreak was caused by the highly contagious measles virus spreading within close-knit communities with low measles vaccination rates, particularly in Gaines County.
Key factors contributing to the outbreak included:
Low Vaccination Coverage: The primary cause was a concentration of unvaccinated individuals. Gaines County, the epicenter, had one of the country's highest rates of vaccine exemptions, with nearly 14% of children skipping a required vaccine in the prior school year, well below the 95% threshold needed for community immunity.
Vaccine Hesitancy: Public health experts noted that the low vaccination rates were driven by increased skepticism about vaccines and misinformation, rather than religious exemptions."
Interesting. After asking you that question, the stuff I read laid it on the Mennonites.
DeleteCecelia, get all your recommended immunizations. Tell your husband and your kids to get theirs.
DeleteAnonymouse 9:22pm, he’s a big boy. I don’t tell him what to do,
DeleteMeasles don’t care what religion someone is.
DeleteIf he doesn’t get his immunizations, he endangers everyone around him.
DeleteAnonymouse 10:01pm, everyone round him? Not if they’re immunized.
DeleteHe is a potential danger to everyone around him. Some people cannot get immunized because of health problems. They depend on herd immunity (meeting no one else with measles to infect them). Others may be babies too young to be immunized. Those who do not get immunized endanger those who have no choice. You cannot know who you may be endangering around you.
DeleteThis sounds like another situation where lack of empathy prevents selfish people from considdring their impact on the group, others.
Delete"After asking you that question, the stuff I read laid it on the Mennonites."
DeleteI believe they were one of the 'close-knit communities' that the AI Overview was too sensitive to name.
Anonymouse 10:47pm, no, your framing of things is anonymouse-hyperbolic. People who don’t get immunized are not a danger to “everyone”. You can make a point about the importance of immunizations, without trying to sounding like Rev. Jim Jones.
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.
You can count how many subsets a set has. E.g., a set with two elements, {A,B}, has 4 subsets {A,B}, {A}, {B}, and the empty set. In theory one can do this with infinite sets. At one point I knew how to prove that the number of subsets of an infinite set is a larger infinity than the set itself. E.g., a set of size ℵ1 has ℵ2 elements.
DeleteHow in the world could that result be useful in the real world? It can't be. ℵ1 doesn't exist in the real world. Nor do ℵ2, ℵ2, ℵ3, etc. In the Cantor theory, which I once understood, there are infinitely many infinities. But, there are none at all here on earth.
Even on earth, if n is a number, n + 1 is a number, too. So it almost looks like there are infinitely many numbers. Also, if we have a square with one-inch sides, the length of the diagonal is the square root of two, which can easily be shown to be an irrational number. Next thing you know, we have uncountably many real numbers.
DeleteSo very basic mathematics leads to the problems David is pointing out. They are, however, unworthy of Bob Somerby’s attention.
What does it mean for a number to exist "on earth"? If that phrase means anything, it ought to mean that
Deleten is a number that exists on earth if there is some set with n elements in it. By that definition, numbers larger than the number of sub-atomic particles in the universe do not exist on earth, even though such numbers do exist in our standard mathematical models. √2 does not exist on earth. Nobody can point to a line with length √2 inches long. Nor would there be any way to verify that length, is such a line exists. We cannot measure anything well enough to know that its length is √2 rather than something close to √2.
I have come around from the Hilbert POV to the Brouwer POV. I also now buy Bob's view that Russell's paradox doesn't really exist on earth.
This statement is false on earth. Not David’s statement, this statement. This statement asserting its own falsity. So, is “This statement is false on earth” true on earth or false on earth?
DeleteOne might say there’s no statement. Consider this alternative: “This statement is true.” That’s not self-contradictory, but it arguably has no content.
DeleteElection fraud is real.
ReplyDeletehttps://azmirror.com/briefs/turning-point-leader-former-gop-rep-pleads-guilty-to-attempted-election-fraud/
Right. And, fraud is practiced by both parties. So, we need to tighten up election procedures. Paper ballots. Same day voting. ID cards. Limited and strictly regulated absentee ballots.
DeleteIn 2020 the Republicans attempted massive fraud.
DeleteTheir candidate was pleading with election officials to just "find some votes" and making wild accusations of fraud by the other side, none of which were ever substantiated, and ordering top DOJ officials to just "say there were problems with the elections and me and the Republican congressman will take care of the rest."
The whole effort culminated with a riot at the Capitol, with supporters chanting "Hang Mike Pence" because Pence had refused to go along with the crooked scheme.
Remember?
No one has documented any more than a miniscule statistically insignificant amount of voter fraud in this country despite republicans' focus on this. Meanwhile, in Georgia, voting precincts in close geographic proximity but differing in racial demographics have markedly different wait lines, with black populations waiting far longer than whites, this discrepancy having been engineered by republican "leadership" . Hence, rubes like DiC advocate for a system that favors voting in person.
Delete
ReplyDeleteThe New York Times is blue America? Jesus Christ, Bob, wake up.
Mary Tyler Moore shoots pool:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/shorts/geC3wkcC0TM