Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
The Battle over ‘2+2=4’ Started as a Joke
According to Cathy Young, writing for Arc Digital, the “Battle of Two Plus Two” started out as a meme mocking social justice warriors. Back in June, James Lindsay, co-author of Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody, a new book with possibly the longest subtitle ever, posted a series of graphics that he called Woke Minis, including:
This was retweeted this to Nicole Hanna-Jones of Project 1619 fame, who fired back with the message:
Using Arabic numerals to try to make a point about white, Western superiority is just so damn classic.
Brittany Marshall, a Ph.D. candidate, teacher, and “self-described ‘social justice change agent'” reinforced Hanna-Jones:
Paul Joseph Watson, a right-wing blogger, quickly fired back:
With the battle lines drawn, the fight was on. A call went out to SJWs everywhere asking for examples in which two plus two do not equal four. Responses ranging from the clever to the ridiculous flooded in. Techniques fell into two categories:
- Switching from base 10 to bases 3, or 4:
- In base 3, 2+2 = 11
- In base 4, 2+2=10
- Playing word games. For example:
- Two apples plus two oranges doesn’t equal four apples
- Two people plus two people equals forty fingers
Changing the base, however, doesn’t change the mathematics, only the way in which the same values are represented.
Word games can be creative and sometimes amusing, but they rely on the sleight-of-hand trick of eliminating abstraction (two anythings plus two anythings equals four anythings), which eliminates mathematics altogether, replacing it with meaningless nonsense (two horses plus two horses equals sixteen hooves).
The injection of political correctness hardly started with James Lindsay’s mocking tweet, however. Young points to Seattle Public School’s 2019 K-12 Math Ethnic Studies Framework, which asks students to consider such questions as:
- Where does Power and Oppression show up in our math experiences?
- Who holds power in a mathematical classroom?
- Who gets to say if an answer is right?
- How is math manipulated to allow inequality and oppression to persist?
- Where is there an opportunity to examine systemic oppression?
- Can you suggest resolutions to oppressive mathematical practices?
- How can we change mathematics from individualistic to collectivist thinking?
Young’s article also provides a link to the academic paper: Queering Mathematics: Disrupting Binary Oppositions in Mathematics Pre-service Teacher Education.
Young criticizes both sides for their angry, over-the-top rhetoric but concludes that it’s the Left that’s doing real damage:
Published in General[T]he “pro-SJW” camp includes people who are doing real harm to education, who traffic in provocative but empty sound bites like “mathematics operates as whiteness” and seem far more occupied with vague questions like “Can mathematics be antiracist?” than with the actual teaching of math. It also includes well-intentioned progressives who either genuinely don’t see how toxic this stuff is, or pretend not to understand.
This is not about intellectual exercises that yield “2+2=5.” It’s about an ideology that treats the math classroom as a place of oppression and racial division, and insinuates that the teacher who decides whether an answer is right or wrong has unjust power: An ideology which, under guise of anti-oppression advocacy, tells black and Latino kids that math as we know it is not for them.
In this riff on the 2+2=(something other than four) theme, I think it’s amusing that the heterodox view seems to be espoused by conservatives, not liberals. As if there’s anything conservative about declaring mathematics subjective.
Alternative Math (9:06)
They are right in the sense that it is “simply” a frame of reference in which 2+2 = 4.
It just happens to be an incredibly valuable frame of reference to understand.
Even if it was a product of Western Imperialism (it’s not) we’d just be forced to give three cheers for Imperialism.
Assuming, of course, we want our dishwashers, washing machines, electrical plants, and food production facilities to work—you know, all of the components of our society that make modern feminism possible.
I’m wondering if the best way to respond to comments like “2+2 = 4 is Western Imperialist mathematics” is something along the lines of “I’m not a fan of labels.”
Thus, if they want to be cultural masochists, respond with a little cultural relativism.
A little relativism really can take some of the excess steam out of an overheated system.
They actually originated in India. HA!! Take that Abrahamic World!!!
(We always knew we were good for nothing.)
Well its a good thing we continue to use our sumarian derived units of time, weights, and measures.
Unlike the rest of the world who use the white imperialist metric system.
#fightakkadianoppression
Another leftist idea that started as a joke:
I can’t help but think this is a long troll meant to expose us as easily offended snowflakes. Don’t give this air.
NHJ: “Using Arabic numerals to try to make a point about white, Western superiority is just so damn classic.”
C’mon man! That’s got to be a joke, right? Right??
I’m pretty sure these geniuses would never have made it to the moon. In fact, buggy whip manufacturers would still be in business if they’d been “teaching” math last millennium.
Buggy whip manufacturers still are in business.
Not all of ’em. Demand is waaaaay down.
Not as far down as it is for slide rule manufacturers.
Lol. I looked for slide rules on Amazon. They had more listings for 6′ stick rules than for slide rules.
6′? Oughta be able to get better precision that way.
When I first started doing carpentry work, there weren’t tape measures. You’d get measurements like 6′ 49 1/2″. Tapes are much better.
I’ll bite, what is “shoulder golf?”
That’s when you stand on someone’s shoulders and tee off using the head as your ball. In some cases, it actually improves the person’s IQ.
That’s bigoted against the “differently-abled” who may have fewer – or more! – fingers each.
As a computer geek since the late 1960s, I’d like to point out the difference between “two PLUS two” versus “two AND two.”
Two PLUS two is always four, however represented/in whatever base.
But AND is a logical/boolean/binary operation.
In binary, two – 10 – AND two – 10 – is two. 10.
Three – 11 – AND two – 10 – is also two. 10.
Three – 11 – AND one – 01 – is one. 01.
Two – 10 – AND one – 01 – is zero. oo.
Oh, and three – 11 – AND three – 11 – is three. 11.