fl...@dgp.toronto.edu (Alan J Rosenthal) wrote:
> I've been thinking a bit about why this pisses me off so much. One could
> argue that this "calculating..." thing is just minor theatrics. But it
> pisses me off because it's bullshit, because it's pretending that adding
> a few numbers together is much harder than it is. It's falsehood for
> falsehood's sake, like crime television shows or belief in UFOs.
What pisses me off most about such things is not that they make that
calculation seem harder, but that they make calculation seem hard _at
all_. It's not that it makes tallying-up seem a hard kind of arithmetic,
it's that it makes the usual lit-crit-major whine of "but numbers are
haaaaarrrddd!! I shouldn't be made to do this, I should be allowed to
give my opinion without understanding that you can't have more than 100%
of something!"
Yes, higher maths can be ball-breakingly hard. But arithmetic _is not_.
And higher maths is something the vast majority of people will never
even have seen, not even in high school. Group theory, higher-
dimensional non-Euclidean geometry, algebra on functions, yes, you're
allowed to be daunted by those. But not by anything you learned in grade
school. Not by adding up, or even long division or square roots.
If you have the brains to know the difference between they're and their,
or even if you only have the brains to know Beyonce from Rihanna, then
yes, damn it, you also owe it to yourself and to the world around you to
be able to add up your shopping list and know the difference between
2**3 and 3**2. Stop making excuses, you dumb journos.
Richard