When ideas are actually being trafficked -- that is when they're new and struggling for breathing room, they're rarely clearly right or wrong. Consensus forms over a fairly long amount of time. With luck, and a lot of verification, over the course of a decade or three theories elide to the canon of science's best understanding of a given problem space. There we might broadly refer to theories as "true", but that's just everyday conversational shorthand, not the language of science.
The problem in the intersection with pop culture is that it's generally only well after those couple of decades of a theory working its way into the canon of scientific understanding that it begins working its way through pop culture. This is the critical point where there's a lot of naysaying from the general public and a lot of rolled eyes from scientists. It's at this point that science transforms into politics: each side hardens their positions, begins stating them in absolutist terms and tries to win the other side over, usually based on an appeal to authority.
Science itself is, in fact, a slow and reasonably democratic process. It is at times dogmatic, but far less than, say, American politics.
Does maths use the scientific method to answer questions? Do the questions maths can answer concern areas outside of just maths? Is maths something that is used _within_ the scientific method to answer questions, in a variety of different disciplines?
It's a lot easier to approach and attempt to answer questions (get consensus) when you have a generally accepted method for doing so. It seems like maths entusiasists, e.g. the kind who love computers, can take widely different approaches to answering the types of wide-ranging questions addressed in the sciences. They may even disregard the scientific method altogether.
If Usenet/WWW is any indication I'm guessing this leads to a lot of disagreement between maths devotees if the topic at hand is anything but pure maths and logic.
Not taking anything away from people who love maths. In fact, one of the major problems in the sciences is the lack of mathematical rigor by far too many scientists when analysing results.
tl;dr Scientific method + maths = good. Need both for solid analysis and reasoning.
[0]See e.g. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Engineers_and_woo
I often think that while a purely technical background and education might be really powerful and enable one to analyze and predict well-behaved things better than others - which could lead to better decisions, it is extremely important to be receptive to the "inexplicable-until-experienced" stuff like music or business or relationships - to know that there are things that can't be controlled and shouldn't be controlled - that some things should evolve of their own accord - the chaotically evolved imperfect being more beautiful than the mathematically-designed perfect. (Edit: a combination of both works quite well, in my experience - some of the best businessmen, economic and political advisers I know of have engineering backgrounds - and no, they aren't unreasonably conservative or dogmatic).
In my opinion, the fear of "what will happen if I let go?" can lead to authoritarianism via technocracy (aside from the fact that anyone can get drunk on power) - not one's profession.
Funnily enough, in our media it was reported that of late, students receiving top-level government scholarships to the US/UK/elsewhere hardly ever choose engineering any more, but study economics instead (probably influenced by the dominance of the financial industry). So the next generation of Singapore leaders may very well be dominated by economics trainees - I wonder what sort of government we'll get, then? Certainly a more diverse one, but also one lacking in engineers and scientists.
Science may not be binary, but it's a heck of a lot more binary than Literary Criticism, Political Science, Law, or even Economics.
Consider the recently proposed ban on large servings of sweetened drinks. Do these promote diabetes costing the country lots of money in eventual treatment and lost productivity? Absolutely. Does the government have any business telling me what I drink with my Quarter Pounder and Large Fries? No.
I believe the answer to something like diabetes is more nuanced, such as the promotion of healthy eating habits in general, removing the massive grain subsidies that promote the existence of lots of cheap carbs and the availability of lots of meat. I'm sure a sociologist or psychologist could come up with better ideas for promoting health diets without being excessively coercive.
I in no way see how this applies to your fear of rule by scientists?
Speaking from the peanut gallery, more specifically, it's much more Bayesian than people would have you believe. Popular literature and most science instructors are not a very good source of context.
The hype does not equal the delivery.
I've tried having conversations explaining Bayes, general probability, and its relationship to scientific theories. Almost always falls on deaf ears. People are incredibly horrible at math--and I don't even consider myself to be that great at it. Their failures at being good with understanding maths flows into being horrible at understanding science, especially that which involves mathematics as integral part of its probabilistic standing in relation to alternatives.
Maybe it's different with computer scientists, who live up there in the realm of pure thought and can bend reality to their will.
The data says it works, after all.
Science seems to leave the methods of rational thought far behind when it enters American politics.
In science, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. The bigger the claims a hypothesis makes, the more skepticism you should have about that hypothesis.
In political terms, the bigger the policy you're talking about, the more skepticism you should have about that policy.
This mindset leads toward literal conservatism -- always make small steps away from the status quo -- or libertarianism -- we need to be skeptical of government, so let's make it as weak as possible, and move powers as close to the bottom of the pyramid as possible (i.e. get the federal government's fingers out of housing, education and healthcare, and leave them up to state or local governments.)
Why so many scientists are pro-big-government lefties has always completely baffled me.
If you are a right-wing proprietarian, you might not object to that, on grounds you consented. If you're not that, you will feel exploited. The fact that the USA has the OECD's worst governmental working-condition laws that completely fail to make the extraction process feel more like a normal, bearable part of human life doesn't help.
As for your rant about surplus-value extraction: Presumably your boss isn't just taking your surplus for free; they're providing things that helps you work more efficiently. For example, if you're a steelworker, your employer provides a very expensive steel mill; without access to that equipment, your steelmaking skills are fairly useless.
In industries that have little capital requirement, like software development or web design, the things an employer might bring to the table to enhance their employees' created value include: A product vision, an already-existing codebase, brand or website, a talented team, support services such as marketing, accounting, legal...
Also, working for an employer lowers risk for employees who work on uncertain ventures. If you spend half a year developing a new product for an employer, you still get paid for those six months even if it's a total flop and nobody ever buys it. But if you'd built it on your own time and bootstrapped it into a startup instead, yes, you'd keep the entire profit if it went well -- but you'd get nothing (financially) from those six months of work if it flopped. This "insurance" against product flops is part of what the employer's portion of your created value pays for.
If you feel you're being exploited -- your employer is taking too much of the value you're creating -- then you're free to negotiate with them, change employers, change industries, or build your own startup.
Just make sure you have plenty of string theorists and perhaps some archeological geneticists and exoplanet meteorologists as well. That should even things out.
#1 Language and ethnicity are not the same. #2 Singapore is 74 percent Chinese. Do a tiny, tiny, tiny bit of research before copy-pasting nonsense. Leterally, 10 seconds of research would be plenty.
Because I am a Wikipedian, I don't rely on Wikipedia to tell me things that I know more thoroughly from better sources, including but not limited to personal experience. I speak Chinese (the four Sinitic languages Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese, and Hakka), and I can understand the jokes that people of differing Chinese ethnicities tell about people of other Chinese ethnicities. All I can say is that if you think "Chinese" is one ethnic group practically or for purposes of educational policy, you should have another think coming. Even in China itself that is an issue. By official Chinese government survey,
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838...
barely more than half of the population in China is even conversant in the national standard language.
So thank you for your suggestion. My suggestion is next time, please, do more than 10 seconds of research. You might learn something if you are open to more sources than just the University of Google.
This is all to say that it could be argued that Singapore is a Chinese-majority nation, but it doesn't take away from the fact that there are many Malays and Indians here, and many foreigners of all stripes (Indians, Europeans, Americans). Foreigners make up 2m of our 5.2m people (38%), which is pretty shocking really (500k of them have become permanent residents, though).
I'd say that in the context of primary schools here, diversity isn't at a true melting-pot level. Furthermore, education among Chinese families is pursued in the same aggressive way as in other East Asian nations - the majority of students have supplementary tutoring, sometimes from the early grades. The culture of academic emphasis among parents is in line with the government's pedadogical efforts, which results in high achievement levels.
This is not to take away from the success of the Singaporean mathematics curriculum, which is quite outstanding by most measures - probably because it was designed by mathematicians and teachers in tandem, drawing on the best practices in the world known at the time (the late 70s/early 80s). Though even that is changing with our new emphasis on knowledge by construction, collaboration and discovery.
"I’ve visited Singapore a few times in recent years and been impressed with its wealth and modernity. I was also quite aware of its world-leading programs in mathematics education and naturally noted that one of the candidates for president was Tony Tan, who has a Ph.D. in applied mathematics. Tan won the very close election and joined the government of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who also has a degree in mathematics."
Indeed, it is hard to remember anymore that Singapore was a very, very poor country when it achieved independence (after being expelled from the Federation of Malaysia in 1965). Singapore was settled earliest by ethnic groups similar to those in current Malaysia, with a big influx of wretchedly poor agricultural laborers for plantation labor during the British colonial period. It was not expected in the pre-independence period (which extended into my lifetime) that Singapore would ever be prosperous. (You can watch a videotape of the movie Saint Jack, which was filmed in Singapore, for a reminder of the poverty in Singapore as recently as in the early 1970s.)
But the early leadership of independent Singapore strongly emphasized effective generally available primary education (without at first even making school attendance compulsory) and studied the best international examples of sound textbooks and effective teaching practice.
http://www.merga.net.au/documents/RP182006.pdf
People from Singapore are so ethnically diverse that Singapore has four official languages from four different language families. School pupils in my generation (born in the late 1950s) grew up in a country that was extremely poor (it's hard to remember that about Singapore, but until the 1970s Singapore was definitely part of the Third World) and were educated in a foreign language (the language of schooling in Singapore has long been English, but the home languages of most Singaporeans are south Chinese languages like my wife's native Hokkien or Austronesian languages like Malay or Indian languages like Tamil) and yet received very thorough instruction in mathematics.
Today Singapore is prosperous, and one set of projections suggests it is on track to be the richest country in the world on a per-capita basis by 2050.
http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/15/singapore...
Chapter 1: "International Student Achievement in Mathematics" from the TIMSS 2007 study of mathematics achievement in many different countries includes, in Exhibit 1.1 (pages 34 and 35)
http://pirls.bc.edu/timss2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1.pdf
a chart of mathematics achievement levels in various countries. Although the United States is above the international average score among the countries surveyed, as we would expect from the level of economic development in the United States, the United States is well below the top country listed, which is Singapore. An average United States student is at the bottom quartile level for Singapore, or from another point of view, a top quartile student in the United States is only at the level of an average student in Singapore. I've been curious about mathematics education in Singapore ever since I heard of these results from an earlier TIMSS sample in the 1990s.
So regardless of whom we elect in the United States, why can't we be curious about what we can learn from other countries that have handled diverse language backgrounds of elementary pupils better than the United States has, and have enjoyed sustained, rapid economic growth for longer than the United States has?
ESPECIALLY NOTE THIS PART OF THE POST ABOUT MATHEMATICAL EDUCATION AND DEMOCRACY
Just yesterday, I learned from another Hacker News participant, one who grew up in one country and now lives and works in another, about the latest revision of the article "Word Problems in Russia and America"
http://www.de.ufpe.br/~toom/travel/sweden05/WP-SWEDEN-NEW.pd...
by Andrei Toom, a Russian mathematician who has lived in the United States and now teaches in Brazil. The document is long (98 pages) but well worth reading. Toom's conclusion is very striking.
"34. Conclusion
"Having read this article, somebody may think that I connect poor education with democracy. I do not. History connects them sometimes, at random as it seems. What I do think is that democracy has many aspects and free elections of political leaders is just one of them. Quality of education is not determined by quality of political structure and can deviate from it for better or worse. Let me illustrate this idea by two examples. There are 2354 problems in [Berez], a few dozens of which contain Soviet political propaganda.
"This is an example:
"Problem 59 How many years passed from the French burgeois revolution till the Great October socialist revolution if the former took place in 1789? (p. 17). [P: revolution]
"Here the political bias is evident, but from the mathematical point of view the problem is fair: the correct answer is arguably 1917 − 1789 = 128 . Soviet leaders wanted such problems to indoctrinate Soviet ideology along with teaching mathematics, but only half of their wishes came true: students learned mathematics, but got rid of the Soviet rule. Some rushed to the West taking jobs from those who were raised on problems like this:
"Problem 60 A national magazine surveyed teenagers to determine the number of hours of TV they watched each day. How many hours do you think the magazine reported? [St.1], p. 79. [P: TV]
"It may seem very human to use this problem in class: every student will be able to say something and nobody will be completely wrong, so nobody will be frustrated. But when these kids grow up, they will regret the years wasted on such shallow 'problems'."
To sum up, there isn't any necessary relationship between numeracy (which many, many people in Taiwan have because of very effective primary mathematics education there) and democracy and freedom (which the people of Taiwan won largely through peaceful protest movements even though their own former dictatorial government told them that they were culturally unsuited for free elections and a free press). I have followed the economic development and political liberalization of Taiwan closely since the 1970s, having lived there for six years of my life, and it is definitely empirically possible to have politicians who have strong math skills and win elections and to have genuinely free elections and deep protection of civil liberties. Why not the best? Why not seek all of the best features we can learn about from other countries for the country we live in?
AFTER THE LAST EDIT I STILL HAVE AVAILABLE:
Yes, I am speaking about both Singapore (the country mentioned in the submitted article that opened the thread) and Taiwan. Singapore is a good example of mathematics education, but a (relatively) bad example of democracy. Taiwan is a good example of mathematics education, another example of a poor country becoming prosperous by educating the masses, and also an ever improving example of democracy in a cultural context with a long history of tyranny. To sum up, improving mathematics education in the United States is a good idea, and several countries can provide good examples to the United States of how to do that. To the point of the submitted article, it would be good for voting behavior and legislation in the United States if the broader masses of the citizenry had better numeracy.
One other top-level comment made a very important point, the point I was thinking of making when I first read the title of the submitted article before reading its content.
"The largest punishment for those who are not interested in politics, is that they'll be governed by those who are."
Maybe the best solution would be to teach politics to scientists, and not the other way around?
One of my motivations for participating on Hacker News, where most participants are trained in technical subjects, rather than the foreign language (Chinese) undergraduate degree and law degree that I have, is that I think it is important for technically trained people to understand democratic politics and the representative legislative process better than most do. I try to do my part as a mathematics educator (my current occupation) to show Americans an alternative model of mathematics instruction, and I am gratified to have clients of all ethnicities from multiple countries who know that it is possible to do better in mathematics education than is done in America's public school system. I try to do my part here on HN to remind all our friends that politics is the art of compromise, and policy trade-offs have to be carefully considered and presented to stakeholders with persuasion rather than only with statements about what is correct. I enjoy the intellectual exchange here precisely because my years of living abroad and studying public policy sometimes give me something different from the consensus view to say here, and I correspondingly learn from people here who have a perspective besides that which I have gained from formal education and work experience. Let the scientists enter politics if they will, but let them do so with their eyes open.