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Stop bragging about being bad at math

In the Washington Post today, Matt Bai writes about the Sierra Club's new style guide. It has the usual woke prescriptions ("stand with us" is offensive to the disabled, for example), which I understand is a topic of considerable interest these days.

Therefore I'm going to ignore it and instead focus on a trivial pet peeve of mind. Here is Bai explaining "embodied cognition":

I’m not exactly Bill Nye the Science Guy (having failed high school physics), but the basic idea is . . .

You'll have to click the link if you want to know what embodied cognition is. I, however, want to urge writers (and others) to stop bragging about how bad you are at math or science. It's hard to imagine someone like Bai explaining, say, the objective correlative, but interjecting that he might get it wrong since he failed high school English.

Now, fine, I know you're thinking that when I said this was trivial I was understating things. But it's still annoying. My complaint is nothing new (google C.P. Snow for more), and I imagine this kind of humblebragging is less common than it used to be, but we should get rid of it entirely. Being innumerate is not something you should be able to sheepishly admit in order to build camaraderie. It's a shortcoming—and if you're a journalist it's one you should probably try to address.

That ends today's super earnest griping. And my apologies to Matt, who just happened to catch my eye right after a bone marrow biopsy.

44 thoughts on “Stop bragging about being bad at math

  1. cephalopod

    The spouse was in a grad program in a math field that was packed with Chinese students. The Chinese students just could not fathom the way Americans seemed proud of not being able to do math. To them it was akin to admitting you were illiterate, since they viewed both reading and math as necessary basic skills.

    But Americans also seem proud of not being able to spell. I think American culture is dismissive of anything that seems too detail-oriented, as if the truly smart are all "big picture" thinkers, and details are for lowly secretaries.

    1. HokieAnnie

      Americans can't spell because English is illogical when it comes to spelling. It's not a moral failing, some of us were A students but for spelling aka, our brains aren't wired for that. So don't be so smug.

  2. kahner

    wow, kevin, that's quite a rant over a writer providing some context about their expertise in a topic they're writing about. I don't see saying "I’m not exactly Bill Nye the Science Guy" as any kind of "humble brag" or attempt to build cameraderie or anything else objectionable. It's simple telling his readers he might not be fully accurate in his explanation of something he's a non-expert in. and of course it also does not imply he hasn't already tried to address any shortcoming in his mathematical or scientific expertise. but that doesn't mean it made him a trained scientist or qualified expert. honestly this whole post is kinda baffling to me.

    1. Ken Rhodes

      "I’m not exactly Bill Nye the Science Guy" Is NOT what put Kevin on tilt. Rather, it was what followed, where he bragged about failing a high school science class. Not an upper-level MIT physics course in quantum mechanics; a high school class.

      1. kahner

        but why is that conclusively deemed a brag instead a fact? maybe bai really isn't good at understanding physics, which is why he failed high school physics and why he's decided to let his readers know he's particularly bad at it when writing about it. maybe he meant it as a brag, but it's certainly not how i read it.

  3. Bobber

    The blind folks I have known have all been fine with hearing and saying "See you later," so I don't have a problem with "stand with us."

  4. MattBallAZ

    Regarding everyone talking about "woke" - we tried to watch the new Chris Rock special last night. Jeebus effing christobol, won't these comedians shut the eff up about "wokism" and "cancel culture"? Such pathetic, self-centered whining. It isn't funny or original

    1. Joseph Harbin

      The anti-"cancel culture" warriors are typically worse than the ones they criticize. Book bans, don't-say-gay laws, etc. Using government to mandate your own cultural preferences is far more dangerous, and not to mention, unconstitutional.

      On a related note, there are now at least three bills in Congress designed to rein in TikTok. There's some serious discussion about banning the platform altogether, and in one form or another, we are likely to see some bipartisan legislation pass soon.

      We are approaching peak anti-China fearmongering and apparently ready to shred our First Amendment in the process. On of the effects will be to alienate the younger generation. I hope enough Dems come to their senses and stop the insanity.

      1. Ken Rhodes

        I’m sorry, Joseph, in all the times I’ve read the Constitution I seem to have missed the part of the First Amendment that guarantees foreign companies the right to unfettered access to our telecommunications media. Perhaps you could cite the specific text of that part.

        1. Joseph Harbin

          On the matter of the First Amendment, Ken, here it is, in its entirety.

          "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

          Maybe you can point out the exception to freedom of speech where it says "but not for foreigners, especially those based in Beijing, and not during one of our regular bouts of xenophobia."

          I'm not sure what you mean by "unfettered access to our telecommunications media." Maybe you can explain, starting with the word "our."

          In regard to internet censorship, which is what banning TikTok seems to me to be a clear violation of, let me quote Wikipedia:

          Internet censorship in the United States is the suppression of information published or viewed on the Internet in the United States. The First Amendment of the United States Constitution protects freedom of speech and expression against federal, state, and local government censorship.

          Banning websites and apps is what they do in authoritarian dictatorships, not the United States. Outside of child pornography, I don't know of a case of the government shutting down access for users before. We don't block access to foreign sites. We don't block access to state-owned media like RT and Al Jazeera, or to foreign broadcasters and publishers as diverse as the Economist and the Pyongyang Times. Banning TikTok would be a terrible precedent, and we should know better than to start doing it now.

          TikTok is a social media platform that raises many of the same concerns as other social media -- questions about privacy, addictive usage (especially with teens), slanted news & information, Section 230 protections that may be too broad. We ought to look hard at those issues and come up with solutions that address them across the industry.

          But nobody's talking about banning FB, IG, or Twitter. Congress is talking about banning TikTok because its owner, ByteDance, is based in China (legally, its HQ is in the Cayman Islands). We worry that TikTok might provide the CCP with too much information about, and control of, Americans' online experiences. A lot of that is conjecture, but let's assume the worst -- that China has all the data and capabilities that our tech overlords have today. Let's use this occasion to get serious about passing privacy protections for users. We could address some of the broader problems of social media. But banning TikTok because it's a Chinese company is, in a word, un-American.

        1. J. Frank Parnell

          Right wingers and MAGAts are the biggest proponent of cancel culture. Ask Liz Cheney if you don't believe me.

    2. kahner

      watching rich famous dudes decry cancel culture while performing on a global platform for massive sums of money is quite the sight.

  5. Yikes

    If you want to gripe about something how about the fact that Bai uses "embodied cognition" as support for his argument while admitting, not that he is bad at math, but that he really isn't sure he's qualified to explain what "embodied cognition" is.

    Kind of like Peggy Noonan weighing in on covid lab leak theory.

    He was probably just on deadline. He got citations to experts for other points.

  6. Pittsburgh Mike

    Actually, I'm with Kevin on this. Journalists being bad at math is why we get breathless articles about how eating too many carrots causes cancer, and the like.

    I recently saw an article about how more Blacks attend segregated schools now, compared with 1968. But the paper's definition of a minority attending a segregated school was "a minority who's attending a school with a minority white population," and that of course was much harder to do in 1968, when white students were like 88% of the school age population, compared with today, where the white population of students is 49%. As a matter of fact, with that definition and today's population, if every student were evenly distributed by ethnicity across all schools, every students would be attending a segregated school, since no school would be majority white.

    Basically, journalists' inability to understand basic logic, math or especially statistics is why the vast majority of articles you read aren't just stupid, they're wrong.

    The reason I started reading Kevin's blog is that he's one of the few bloggers or journalists of any form who can sanity check the memes out there, and call out BS when he sees it.

    1. HokieAnnie

      Very bad example - you're arguing that segregated schools are acceptable because we continue to have segregated housing.

  7. Joseph Harbin

    A modest proposal: All journalists should have their bylines link to their college transcripts and Wordle stats. That way we could determine ourselves whom not to pay attention to.

    Much of the language debate is a battle between the olds and the youngs. I have quibbles with some of the newer suggestions on what to say and not say, though overall trying not to be offensive is a welcome move. Yesterday, watched a bit of "The Way We Were" on TV. The Redford character made a casual joke about "dykes," using that term as though it were an entirely appropriate word for lesbians. We are smarter and more sensitive about that today. When older folk complain about younger folk going too far, we should remember that is often how progress is made. (The word itself can be used casually in a certain affirmative sense today, but it's taken taken a roundabout route to get there.)

  8. Leo1008

    It's almost like humblebragging, for Kevin, is some sort of symbol that objectifies his current irritation. Sort of like "the objective correlative" ...

  9. Zephyr

    It's not just journalists who are bad at math. It's everyone! I am constantly annoyed at every cashier who is unable to make correct change or unable to correctly calculate a 20% discount in their head. Or, every single person under the age of 40 incapable of balancing a checkbook manually or adding two numbers in their head. Aargh!

    1. HokieAnnie

      There's no need to manually balance a checkbook. First off folks don't write checks anymore and secondly you just download the transactions from your bank's website into your spreadsheet software. But I do get annoyed with folks who aren't good at adding figures in their heads *and* are my colleagues in the Comptroller division.

  10. dilbert dogbert

    I was pondering WOKE and it came to the peabrain that there is MATH!!!
    MATH is communism and socialism in disguise!!!!!!! It is grooming children to use Arabic Numbers and the Indian ZERO!!!
    When are the rethuglicans gonna discover MATHINESS!!! It has Equations, Division, Addition, Multiplication, Deferential's, Deferentation, Derivatives, Integrals, Divergence and Curl!!!! What will they think of Matrices Cross Products, Dot Products. Math they are coming for you!!!
    Even worse it has negative numbers and even imaginary numbers. Taught, of course, by Drag Queens!!!!
    It just came to me that they are gonna go berserk when they come across higher dimension geometry!!!!

    1. Ken Rhodes

      I tell ya, I learned to handle negative numbers, but these imaginary numbers? I just can’t imagine them!

    2. J. Frank Parnell

      The bible is inerrant, and it clearly tells us π = 3.0. The whole π = 3.14159 . . . thing is irrational.

    1. Amber

      When I was in school, this was definitely the case. But my kids' elementary school has been doing a pretty good job making math interesting. They've started introducing the logic puzzle aspects of math a lot earlier and are using computer games to get kids through the rote memorization and basic math practice parts in a way that holds their interest.

  11. different_name

    I find it irritating because the "I suck at math" thing is an "acceptable" way to say "I'm not a nerd". If you, as an adult, are still that insecure, get a therapist.

    Although I will say it is fun to mess with people who do that. My go-tos are

    "Oh, I'm so sorry. That must be very difficult. I know there are people who can help you with that, though. No, really, I am sympathetic to your plight. I'm an ally."

    And (if I were talking to a journalist), "Oh, that's OK, we all have our interests. Take me, for instance. I don't give a shit about journalism."

  12. coynedj

    It always surprises people when I admit that I'm good at math. Some people act like I'm a visitor from an advanced civilization when I do three-digit multiplications in my head.

    Beyond math, I wish people would become familiar with basis statistics. Poor risk assessment is a blight on the land. So much money has been wasted on minor risks, while we pay scant attention to major risks.

    1. ScentOfViolets

      Three digits? Dayyum. I'm down to two, at least for anything that takes on the order of ten seconds. Left-to-right is your friend with this sort of mental arithmetic.

    2. bouncing_b

      Some risks are uniquely terrifying and not appropriately assessed by their statistics.

      Plane crashes, for instance. How many people die in plane crashes? Almost none, but we move heaven and earth to prevent them. (Even in the 1970s when crashes were an almost monthly occurrence the number killed was miniscule compared to other cause of death). By the statistics we shouldn't bother.

      Or mass shootings. The gun nuts tell us that mass shootings hardly add up to a major cause of death - and they're right about that - but they're uniquely terrifying so the numbers don't imply we shouldn't care.

      People being human means some things are not well described by statistics.

    3. J. Frank Parnell

      Humans evolved living in small tribal groups. When someone in your village of 30 people got eaten by a tiger you knew it was a real risk. Unfortunately we have the same emotional reaction today when we hear that someone in our city of two million people choked on a tater tot.

  13. cld

    If I told Matt Bai to fuck off and die would it be offensive to incels because, you know, they're virgins?

    Valorizing thin-skinned-ness seems like a really wrong thing to do.

  14. KenSchulz

    Thanks to a course in linear systems analysis I took in graduate school, I knew why this is funny:
    Q: What is the contour integral around Western Europe?
    A: Zero, because all the Poles are in Eastern Europe.

    1. J. Frank Parnell

      Before the fall of the Iron Curtain there was the joke about the Polish scientists who commandeered a plane and defected to the US. As they flew by the Statue of Liberty they all looked out the right hand windows, at which point the plane went out of control and crashed. The accident report blamed instability due to too many Poles on the right hand side of the plane.

  15. dugsteen

    THANK YOU. I work with a non-profit* that helps little kids get excited about math, and one of the biggest obstacles is the parents (and sometimes the teachers) who make it clear to the little ones that being scared of math is expected and accepted. “Math is hard” Barbie is only the tip of the iceberg.
    * Bedtime Math (https://bedtimemath.org) if anyone’s interested.

  16. Citizen99

    Thank you, thank you, thank you, Kevin! For years I thought I was the only one who found this annoying. I blame the right, of course, which has turned being a "reg'lar guy" into a culture badge. But you also have to blame "lib'rul Hollywood" for pandering to that same notion for years and years in movies and TV. This is why China is destined to kick our ass, and how ironic is it that the right-wing culture community that is so exercised about China is the same community that loves to mock the "elites" who understand math and science.

  17. Larry Jones

    I have struggled all my long life with math, from the day in second grade that a Catholic nun pulled me out of my seat by the ear and held me there while telling the rest of the class that I was "falling behind" during a quiz on subtraction, to the day in college when a calculus teacher shamed me in class by revealing my bad test scores to everyone. I don't brag about it, and fuck anybody who thinks saying I'm bad at math constitutes "bragging."

    It was that calculus teacher who caused me to change my major and give up my life-long dream of working in NASA. By the time I went to college my eyesight was already not good enough to fly a jet, and my problems with math left out all the other possible ways I could be a spaceman.

    On the other hand, I can balance my checkbook, negotiate the purchase of a new home, set up a small computer network and do my own taxes. I have gadgets to help me with any calculating that I can't do in my head, and I'm over being embarrassed about my deficiency in math.

    I hope you, Kevin, can get over your pet peeve.

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