| If anything at all is objective, it's mathematics. Anyone can verify if the statements are true, independently. Granted, some of the statements are massively complicated, so not everyone can do it reasonably fast; however when you state something, typically you need to prove it. I (naively) thought this protected this particular discipline from "modern politics" or whatever we want to call this insanity that is spreading. I worry that we might reach a place where people believe that 1+1 is not exactly 2, it is dependent on the emotions of the person uttering the words, akin to the current discussions of male/female, genders, pronouns and so on. It looks weird even typing this, but I am sure someone in 19th or 20th century would say the same thing about the current state of what is a man, what is a woman, who gives birth.. things that are so obvious that but yet disputed. I don't understand what can be done about people legitimately believing insane things. I have no doubt that they believe what they are saying. We ought not to fund it with tax $ at least.. disappointing. > The QAA’s benchmark document that defines the common mathematics curriculum has grown in length by 50 per cent in just three years, but not because of any radical shift in the nature of the mathematics. Instead there has been a been a decision to introduce teaching on diversity, Just like the communists forced Marxism upon everyone, and Nazi Germany did the same thing to their youth. I expected Math would be the last place to be infected with this, but it has happened. We'll see how much it spreads. > Activists also have statistics in their sights. One academic review of school statistics textbooks ‘with a theoretical framework of queer theory and critical mathematics’ notes disapprovingly that ‘pregnancy was used frequently in problems involving females/women.’ Cannot be distinguished from pure comedy. What a reality we are living in. |
To use your last sentence about statistics, how you choose to handle variables, how they're put into regression models, and how those results are interpreted all have potentially subjective and cultural aspects to them.
As someone who works on mathematical and statistical models for a living, there's plenty of opportunities for subjectivity, from how methods are applied to what questions are considered important.