Thaaaat's Numberwang
"Number occupies a strategic position in this conflict, because it is simultaneously the most generalized basis of thought and that which demands most abruptly the question of its being." — Alain Badiou
See also Mitchell & Webb's "Numberwang" sketch.
![“[People] who are otherwise very good at math may totally flunk a problem that they would otherwise probably be able to solve, simply because giving the right answer goes against their political beliefs.” — The Most Depressing Discovery About the...](https://64.media.tumblr.com/edb2bcc81ec5ccc4c6877c6f35fe2d13/tumblr_mur9m0Rm2f1qzt94do1_400.jpg)
“[People] who are otherwise very good at math may totally flunk a problem that they would otherwise probably be able to solve, simply because giving the right answer goes against their political beliefs.” — The Most Depressing Discovery About the Brain, Ever
“the opponents of austerity have won a decisive intellectual victory, and it has made no difference — When Good Things Happen to Bad Ideas
More:
it was kind of a real-world example of Simon Wren-Lewis’s thought experiment of shutting half the economy down — or in this case more like shutting a few percent of the economy down — then starting it up again, and hailing the resulting growth as a policy triumph
(via dvdp)
(via proofmathisbeautiful)
“At one point they set cell L51 equal to AVERAGE(L30:L44) when the correct procuedure was AVERAGE(L30:L49). By typing wrong, they accidentally left Denmark, Canada, Belgium, Austria, and Australia out of the average. — Is The Reinhart-Rogoff Result Based On A Simple Spreadsheet Error?
but:
The fact that Reinhart/Rogoff was widely cited despite its huge obvious theoretical problems leads me to confidently predict that the existence of equally huge, albeit more subtle, empirical problems won’t change anything either.
(via bestrooftalkever)
“The bigger potential flaw with Chief Justice Roberts’s argument is not with the statistics he cites but with the conclusion he draws from them” — In Supreme Court Debate on Voting Rights Act, a Dubious Use of Statistics
(via capnskull)
How Dell numberwanged itself to near death
Dell has spent more on stock buybacks than it has made in profit over its entire existence.
The experimental results suggest a bias for nonsense math in judgments of quality of research.
Further, this bias was only found among people with degrees from areas outside mathematics, science and technology. Presumably lack of mathematical skills renders difficult own critical evaluation of meaningless mathematics.