The sinister attempts to ‘decolonise’ mathematics

0 = 0

All science is racist and must be abolished

r2 sjws from the left to the right. they're all quite nuts. they should be forced into communal showers.

“Mommy, the teacher at school says science is racist! What does ‘respect my pronouns’ mean?”

Math be gone!

We need to abolish math so I win!

I've been in the computer field in the past and was exceptionally good in it and have worked with African-Americans who blew me away with real brilliance. I can't think of a more damaging thing to do to them and their image as professionals.

I can see this.

Some people would do better with a different system for using algebra or whatever. Different symbols.

It would be pretty ok interesting to see an Esperanto like way of mathematics language retold.

I don't think it's necessarily colonial but I can see how some people might feel that way since rich European men were a large part of writing math language.

If there's a new invented African or whatever culture way of retelling math, say using base 20, I think that would be interesting.

Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi is the father of algebra, r8

R9 did it look like x+y = 125 when he invented it?

There was some crap in the US about how facts are white and feelings are Of Color which was somehow related to math and science and not being focused on the right answer.

Fox News, as you might suspect, had a field day with it

China will not be decolonizing math. Science and math are the future and Americans will be left behind. How stupid this country has become.

R12 Hopefully they'll use all that math and science to take the carcinogens out of their products.

This is why people roll their eyes at this nonsense and dismiss it outright. It diminishes instances of real discrimination, and instead tries to replace it with this made up stuff.

🙄

Okay, this is getting really out of hand.

I don't care what a right-wing climate change denial website says about anything.

Can't be bothered reading the article. What does "decolonising" mathematics mean? And why is it sinister?

Isn't mathematics just logic? What's colonial about it and why is it "unscientific" to "decolonise" it?

It's not just mathematics. Indoctrination must be across the board.

For the first time, the Quality Assurance Agency, which checks on course standards, has incorporated critical race theory into its recommendations. It wants a wide range of courses - including sciences and maths - to teach about colonialism including 'white supremacy'.

n one bizarre example, the QAA says computing courses should address how 'hierarchies of colonial value' are 'reinforced' in the field.

Meanwhile in 𝒈𝒆𝒐𝒈𝒓𝒂𝒑𝒉𝒚, it thinks courses should acknowledge 'racism, classism, ableism, homophobia and patriarchy'.

The latest advice from the QAA is incorporated into 25 'subject benchmarks', which describe what it thinks students should study and the standards they should meet.

The benchmarks include new instructions on 'Equality, Diversity and Inclusion' for each subject.

The document for 𝒃𝒊𝒐𝒎𝒆𝒅𝒊𝒄𝒂𝒍 𝒔𝒄𝒊𝒆𝒏𝒄𝒆𝒔 says students should 'critically engage' with how the field has 'contributed to and benefited from social injustice' and how influential scientists might have 'benefited from and perpetuated misogyny, racism, homophobia, ableism and other prejudices'.

Meanwhile, 𝒆𝒄𝒐𝒏𝒐𝒎𝒊𝒄𝒔 undergraduates should be taught that it is 'still predominantly a white, male and Western field'.

And 𝒍𝒂𝒏𝒈𝒖𝒂𝒈𝒆 𝒄𝒐𝒖𝒓𝒔𝒆𝒔 are told to encourage students to reflect on 'historical and contemporary forms of injustice and inequality related to imperialism, colonialism, class or gender divisions'.

R18. I'm actually somewhat glad some sciences are going to have to confront their past homophobia.

It wasn't that long ago that gays were considered mentally ill and psychologists/psychiatrists were trying their best to make conversion therapy work. Which we now know is tantamount to torture for some.

[quote]It wasn't that long ago that gays were considered mentally ill and psychologists/psychiatrists were trying their best to make conversion therapy work. Which we now know is tantamount to torture for some.

And in fact, that was the past. Wrongs were corrected. This is the year 2022.

Perhaps we should now confront the new conversion therapy that goes under the name of "gender affirming care".

And the anti-trans loons are here.

Yeah, the NYTimes, anti-trans loons!

Sounds like some bullshit committee crapped out a boilerplate woke agenda that they expect math departments to decipher.

Universities could likely throw in 1 or 2 minutes of multicultural math history at the beginning of each class to keep the thought police at bay rather than taking the edict too seriously and rewriting the curriculum.

R21 Get off the computer and go dilate.

Everyone knows that a trans womxn of color worked the first equation and conjugated the first verb.

Mathematics are universal

Any thing universal means it applies to *everyone*, every race, every culture, everywhere, every time

Therefore Mathematics cannot be racist

QED

The global competitors and wannabe vanquishers of the US and Western Europe are not "de-colonising" mathematics or science. They are mastering it and taking it to greater heights, while these latter-day Red Guards of the West destroy the liberal democratic countries from the inside.

R12 I believe this article is about the UK.

Shark Tank agrees Harvard educated business majors think they know it all.

R26. Theoretically that's not quite accurate. Mathematics is an expression of logic that attempts to understand the external universe. That external universe is obviously (largely) the same for everyone, everywhere, all the time (unless you're in some alternate universe or a black hole or something), but the logical processes we employ to UNDERSTAND that universe are not going to be the same everywhere.

There was a book that talked about this a while ago, that the evolutionary processes we take for granted on Earth have likely led us to evolve certain patterns of thinking, a specific kind of brain structure, and hence certain kinds of logic. But that's not going to be the case for aliens who have evolved under completely different selection pressures. Their language, their mathematics, their logic will look completely different from ours. How they understand and interact with the same external universe will be completely alien to us.

So IN THEORY, cultural differences in mathematics may exist, even if they are marginal. Simply because the way we think may differ across cultures. But luckily we're all humans so the logic and brain structures are largely the same. Hence, how we collectively figured out how mathematics was done by the Mayans, the Egyptians, Indians etc. despite cultural and linguistic differences.

Mathematics has definitely differed across cultures historically. It was the Arab and Indian world who brought 0 to Western mathematics, as an example. The Romans did not use 0 at all.

[quote]Isn't mathematics just logic?

Nein!

This is their underlying objection to mathematics

R24, go fuck yourself, bigot.

I'm playing the devil's advocate here, but the reality is that mathematical notation looks radically different in some languages - Arabic, for example. It wouldn't be correct to say that the notation is universal, although some poster above have tried to imply that, and, thus, for people from non-European cultures with different alphabets or notation symbols, they might have to learn math TWICE, even though the underlying concepts are unchanged. I think it would be fair to say that European domination of world culture through colonization has force European notation of math upon different cultures, including having to learn Latin letters in order to do math.

Don't get me wrong, I utterly believe that math notation should be standard across the world, in order to allow mathematicians and scientists to communicate with one another - but it's ok to hold that thought and yet also acknowledge that the forcing the world to use the European notated version is an accident of a history of colonization. I'm sure that many of the mathematicians quoted above decrying this effort would be aghast if they were forced to express their mathematical thoughts in Arabic script (examples below).

Didn't take long for this thread to be invaded by delulu CCP trolls.

Not our fault Europeans have shown time and time again to be superior.

So true R34. My understanding is that a some ancient cultures had spatial elements when doing mathematical notation that isn't always easily translated into modern mathematics.

R31. Did Frege not think mathematics was logic? I thought he was one of the proponents of that idea?

r36 he was, but if I recall, Russell proved him wrong, via Russell's Paradox (hence, "naive set theory")

Were Russell and Frege STRAIGHT WHITE MEN?

See? Racist. Homophobic. Anti-trans.

if one recalls a decade ago and decades past, it was feminists screaming about the sexism in languages with masculine and feminine words. Or believed that we needed feminsitry, feminist math, feminist sciences. And it's odd they try to shift that blame everywhere else. Really, did everything that trannies are doing now. Even down to the X in latinx. Now they don't want to reverse course on any of that.. just the trannies bit. Even if that was the natural progresion of this madness.

sociology as a whole has rather spun out of control... and all its subcats. These cultural programs, gender and sexuality, were never meant to be a part of it and departments in their own right... they were initially history but now history is minimized and their all theory programs. . . departments which hold great power over schools. It's rather scary when you look it into it.. and how long such people have taken the spot that was once left to medical ethicists. Now filled with theologists once again but in the temple of the sociopolitical. . . and lacking any substantial study of the sciences they attempt to inform.

The underlying but not openly stated aim of the QAA bullshit is to discredit "critical reasoning skills" because the new population of immigrants came (voluntarily) to a region (Eurooe) where almost all the exemplars were white European men. The rest were Chinese, and later Anerican. And Britain, believe it or not, is still nearly 80% white.

So this is an attempt by QAA to leaven the pervasive sense amongst, particularly, black students that they are studying something that "doesn't look like me". Because, as we all know, the strides made in treating cancer, e.g., using that white supremacist oke' scientific method, are rooted in something evil . . . and this way, white men who achieved these advances can be taken down a bit and blacks can feel better about themselves.

Of course, if you're a black Briton with HER2 Negative breast cancer, you suddenly don't give fuck all about who found Perjeta and Herceptin and through what reasoning process.

The irony is that if next year several black scientists win Nobel prizes on medicine or chemistry or biology or physics, the objections willbsuddenmy meltcaway like snow in the spring sun.

Cultural ideology imposed on art is bad enough

But imposing it on the sciences, whose developments medical, mechanical, technological, military, and astrophysical underlie the entire existence of humans now, is not only politically shameful, it's dangerous.

This is Stalimism dressed up as equality.

And the black community will suffer just as much from the dilution of devotion to the methods that brought massive improvements in medicine and technology that all benefit from.

And, as a poster upthread pointed out so sapiently, whilst a declining Britain plays meaningless sociopolirical games with the premier basis of successful modern societies, the Chinese are laughing their sides off and keeping their eyes on the ball.

[quote] This is Stalimism dressed up as equality.

Literally. But you'd have to have been exposed to actual history to know that and this isn't likely to be on the modern syllabus..

See 𝐿𝑦𝑠𝑒𝑛𝑘𝑜𝑖𝑠𝑚

Decolonized = dumbed down…

Their entire reason for being is to tear it all down. And I do mean ALL.

They've already got a good start with the backing of many politicians, governments, media, universities, school systems, etc.

These mindless marauders don't have a clue what the outcome would be. They think you can have a "little" anarchy and then contain it.

Why I think the NY Times needs to receive a little visit and then suspend the writer of that article.

Democracy demands it.

Trans math:

🍆 + ✂️ = 💁‍♀️

Love you, R45.

Meanwhile, aliens world away, who mastered math eons ago, are laughing at us.

This whole idea is the most brain dead idea yet.

I'm starting to wonder whether one of the Great Filters of the Fermmi Paradox is that civilizations that achieve a particular level of advancement tend to destroy themselves once basic needs like food, clothing, and shelter become readily available and people start having time to navel gaze, and like Narcissus, fall in love with their own reflections.