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Stupidity and Ignorance
Mar. 4th, 2005 02:58 pmWhile I was in California, my sister E. gave me one of those little desk calendars - you know the kind, "Word of the Day" or "Thought of the Day" or the like. This one is entitled "Well, Duh! Our Stupid World and Welcome to It". Now, quite a few of the entries are very funny, but there's one that just bugs me.
Here's the text:
The authors appear to have a little difficulty with arithmetic. $89,000 divided among 120,000 poor farmers would give each of them the munificent amount of $.74. Yeah, that's a wonderful step towards relieving their poverty.
But there's a larger error involved here. The dictionary in question was never intended for use by the Tzotzil; like all dictionaries of this sort, it was written for the benefit of linguists and anthropologists wishing to study the Tzotzil culture before it degrades further under the pressures of poverty and encroachment by the surrounding Mexican-Spanish culture. There are literally thousands of languages in imminent or long-term danger of extinction, and linguists are racing to gather what information they can before they go under. (There are also efforts to preserve or revive some of those languages, but that's an uphill road.) This is a perfectly appropriate use of Smithsonian funds, in keeping with its mandate from the government.
I have read of an incident at a Congressional hearing on funding of the National Science Foundation. A Congressman (or perhaps a Senator, I don't recall) pointed to an item which had been budgeted for research into "complex analysis", and drawled that perhaps it would have been cheaper if they had settled for simple analysis. Eyeroll. "Analysis" is a cover term for those branches of mathematics which are descended from calculus; complex analysis is simply the application of the techniques of calculus to the complex numbers, as contrasted with, for example, real analysis. (In point of fact, complex analysis is in some respects simpler than real analysis.) Of course, the costs of studying these subjects are about the same...
Again, back in the late '70s or early '80s I saw a newspaper column by the then-famous muckraker Jack Anderson. He was complaining about government waste, and pointed to a paper which had been written with government support. The paper, he said, came to a certain remarkable conclusion, which he quoted. The statement quoted was, indeed, trivial-seeming. However, it happens that the paper was on the mathematical subject known as knot theory, which I know a little bit about - and I recognized the "conclusion" as being one of the fundamental definitions in that subject. It took me a while to realize what error Anderson had made, but it's a natural one. Anderson was a journalist, trained in the rhetorical conventions of that field - and every journalist knows that you put your main point in the first paragraph; the rest of the article or column is devoted to details and elaborations. But the rhetorical conventions of mathematics are different: you begin with such things as a statement of the problem and the fundamental definitions you're going to work with. The meat of the work - the real conclusion - appears later. No wonder Anderson missed the point!
This sort of thing galls me. It is so easy to mock legitimate scientific inquiry, especially if you have no comprehension of what is actually being done and why. Those are the real DUH! moments, as far as I'm concerned.
Here's the text:
Government by the Idiots
In 1977, the Smithsonian Institution bankrolled development of a dictionary of Tzotzil, a language spoken by only 120,000 poor farmers in southern Mexico, nearly none of whom could read or write - and, therefore, didn't have much use for a dictionary. If the government had simply given the farmers the $89,000 it spent on the dictionary they didn't need, they wouldn't have been so poor.
The authors appear to have a little difficulty with arithmetic. $89,000 divided among 120,000 poor farmers would give each of them the munificent amount of $.74. Yeah, that's a wonderful step towards relieving their poverty.
But there's a larger error involved here. The dictionary in question was never intended for use by the Tzotzil; like all dictionaries of this sort, it was written for the benefit of linguists and anthropologists wishing to study the Tzotzil culture before it degrades further under the pressures of poverty and encroachment by the surrounding Mexican-Spanish culture. There are literally thousands of languages in imminent or long-term danger of extinction, and linguists are racing to gather what information they can before they go under. (There are also efforts to preserve or revive some of those languages, but that's an uphill road.) This is a perfectly appropriate use of Smithsonian funds, in keeping with its mandate from the government.
I have read of an incident at a Congressional hearing on funding of the National Science Foundation. A Congressman (or perhaps a Senator, I don't recall) pointed to an item which had been budgeted for research into "complex analysis", and drawled that perhaps it would have been cheaper if they had settled for simple analysis. Eyeroll. "Analysis" is a cover term for those branches of mathematics which are descended from calculus; complex analysis is simply the application of the techniques of calculus to the complex numbers, as contrasted with, for example, real analysis. (In point of fact, complex analysis is in some respects simpler than real analysis.) Of course, the costs of studying these subjects are about the same...
Again, back in the late '70s or early '80s I saw a newspaper column by the then-famous muckraker Jack Anderson. He was complaining about government waste, and pointed to a paper which had been written with government support. The paper, he said, came to a certain remarkable conclusion, which he quoted. The statement quoted was, indeed, trivial-seeming. However, it happens that the paper was on the mathematical subject known as knot theory, which I know a little bit about - and I recognized the "conclusion" as being one of the fundamental definitions in that subject. It took me a while to realize what error Anderson had made, but it's a natural one. Anderson was a journalist, trained in the rhetorical conventions of that field - and every journalist knows that you put your main point in the first paragraph; the rest of the article or column is devoted to details and elaborations. But the rhetorical conventions of mathematics are different: you begin with such things as a statement of the problem and the fundamental definitions you're going to work with. The meat of the work - the real conclusion - appears later. No wonder Anderson missed the point!
This sort of thing galls me. It is so easy to mock legitimate scientific inquiry, especially if you have no comprehension of what is actually being done and why. Those are the real DUH! moments, as far as I'm concerned.
