How bad is The Great Stupid, the frenzied effort by radical cultural revolutionaries on the far Left, emulating Chairman Mao as they try to take full advantage of the supine sane as they cower in fear of the George Floyd Freakout mobs?
This bad: John Sexton writes about John Lindsay, ” one of the people woke academics most love to hate because of his work hoaxing woke journals. He also has a site where he regularly writes about the strange new world of woke academia.” Lindsey trolled the purveyors of Critical Social Justice ideology by asserting as fact that 2+2=4, and challenging the Woke and Widiculous to prove otherwise. Incredibly, or maybe not so incredibly in the grip of The Great Stupid, some academics actually tried to do it. Lindsay wrote:
[P]ostmodernism, particularly in the hands of the ideology of Critical Social Justice, is not at all interested in truth. It is only interested in power, which it will establish through its attempted revolution, which it in turn knows it can only achieve by turning otherwise intelligent, well-meaning people into “accomplices” by manipulating their good will, charity, fear of being disliked or ostracized, and, especially, unawareness of what is actually going on beneath the rhetorical tricks they’re being served up with intentionally limited context.
To achieve this revolution, postmodernist Critical Social justice is centrally interested in destabilizing meaning so that those it anoints as sufficiently virtuous can decide what is “true” and so that no one has any grounds upon which they could disagree, even in principle. It is a direct assault on reason itself by means of destabilizing the meaning of meaning with the purpose of installing its own priestly caste of arbiters of how things will be according to the rubrics it lays out.
Sexton observes,
[T]he idea that 2+2=5 was specifically raised in George Orwell’s 1984 as something the Party would announce simply because it wanted to establish its dominance over reality itself….the fact that these people are unconsciously recapitulating aspects of one the world’s best known dystopian novels should tell us all we need to know about them.
Read the whole thing.
The advocates of 2+2=5 are among the anti-Americans Joe Biden and the Democrats are courting as allies in their effort to upend traditional American values, weaken democratic institutions, and install a system of favored races, genders, and ideological indoctrination.
If they understand what is at stake, I do not believe the American public will allow it.
Oh. My bad. (That was sarcasm.)
It was John R. Lewis, not John L. Lewis. You know: God.
But since 2+2=5, it’s all OK. It is what it wasn’t. God Understands.
When I first started reading, I thought the obvious tactic would be to redefine the symbol “5” to mean the number four, because of course any form of language relies upon conventions to convey meaning. Such redefinitions, of course do nothing to challenge or elucidate the underlying idea being communicated, they simply thwart attempts to communicate it, which is exactly Sexton’s point.
When you add 2 idiots + 2 idiots, it sure seems like you get 5 idiots because there is no bound to idiocy these days.
2 + 2 = 5 also makes the square root of 5 easier : If 2 + 2 = 5, then 2 x 2 = 5. Thus, sqrt(5) = 2. Much easier to remember than 2.236…..
Well, 7 x 13 = 28. https://youtu.be/lzxVyO6cpos
Jack wrote, “The advocates of 2+2=5 are among the anti-Americans Joe Biden and the Democrats are courting as allies in their effort to upend traditional American values, weaken democratic institutions, and install a system of favored races, genders, and ideological indoctrination.”
In my opinion what’s happening in the United States right now is a very intentional bastardization* of an entire culture in an effort to fundamentally shift society away from a Constitution based free society towards dictatorial totalitarianism. The only way to accomplish this is to fundamentally destroy the existing culture in the minds of the masses by demonizing absolutely everything that built it, it’s all evil, and gradually replace that evil culture as you go with propaganda based psychological indoctrination, aka brainwashing!
*Bastardize: change (something) in such a way as to lower its quality or value, typically by adding new elements.
A couple more links for the.”critical mathematics”..pile.
https://mathedcollective.wordpress.com/2020/07/09/attack-on-brittany-marshall/
2+2=5 *but only* for sufficiently large values of 2 and sufficiently small values of 5.
So only in very esoteric contexts, such as when 2.49999999999999999999999999999999999999 is represented as 2, and 4.99999999999999999999999999999999999998 is represented as 5, the kind of thing that happens when converting 64bit IEEE floating point and 32bit VAX floating point format to give an unsigned integer result.
Numerical analysts have to be aware of such things when doing really high precision repeated arithmetic operations in heterogenous environments. You don’t round till the end.
There are other even more abstruse cases in number theory, but in the usual arithmetic system we use, where the addition operator is reflexive, symmetric, and transitive, commutative (a+b = b+a for example), 2+2 = an integer between 3 and 5 exclusive.
Even that isn’t true in “bankers rounding”.
https://support.mindbodyonline.com/s/article/203274703-Why-isn-t-my-sales-tax-rounding-up-Banker-s-Rounding?language=en_US
MINDBODY uses something called Banker’s Rounding. It’s a commonly used method for rounding taxes. Rather than rounding 0.5 and higher up, and 0.4 and lower down, bankers rounding rounds 0.5 to the nearest even number. Essentially if the cent value of the tax total is odd, the 0.5 (half-cent) rounds upwards; If the cent value is even, the half-cent rounds it downwards. Here’s an example:
A business owner has a 6.5% tax rate. Due to banker’s rounding, a $1.00 transaction will ring up as $1.06 instead of $1.07:
A $1.00 X 6.5% tax= 0.065. If you look at the 0.065 in the terms of dollars and cents, this is 6.5 cents. Because the six is in the cents place and is an even number, Banker’s rounding determines that 6.5 cents will be rounded down to six cents. Therefore, we add six cents to our $1.00 charge= $1.06 total sale including tax.
Additional examples that would determine whether the tax would round up or down:
A $15.00 sale X 7.5% tax = $1.125 ß Because the two (the middle number after the decimal) is in the cent place and is even, this value would round down to the nearest even cent, which would be $1.12 in sales tax. Making the sale $15.00 + 1.12= $16.12 total.
A $15.00 sale X 8.5% tax = $1.275 ß Because the seven (the middle number after the decimal) is an odd number, this value would round up to the nearest even cent, which would be $1.28. Making the sale $15.00 + 1.28= $16.28 total.
Situations where Banker’s rounding wouldn’t apply
Banker’s rounding isn’t applied if the cents in thousandths ($0.001) place doesn’t end in the number five. In this scenario, normal rounding rules apply.
For example:
A $1.00 sale X 6.7% tax = $0.067. Bankers rounding doesn’t apply because the last number is 7, instead of 5, so this value will follow normal rounding rules and round up to a tax amount of $0.07.
A $15.50 sale X 6.7% tax = $1.0478. Since the last number in the cents ends in 8, instead of 5, Banker’s rounding does not apply and normal rounding rules kick in to round up the tax amount to $1.05.
TLDR; 2+2=4
(except when it doesn’t, 2+2=11 in trinary notation for example)
The purpose of Banker’s Rounding (this is the first time I’ve heard it called that, BTW) is so that the addition of many such “x.5” numbers after rounding will more closely approximate the sum of those same numbers before rounding.
Basically, at that dead-in-the-middle case, you round half of them up and half of them down. It’s arbitrary, but it has validity.
–Dwayne