Why do they make us do all that extra multiplying for (a+b)^2? FOIL? it's just a bunch of extra work. "show your work" ? I can do it in my head! (a+b)^2 is a^2 + b^2 And that's how it will be with me in charge.
FOIL is a deep state plot to add extra steps to homework!
(This is what Trump sounds like to me when he talks about countries paying us. And climate change... and everything. )
"Look, (a+b)^2 - and the thing is, here in America, we have the greatest mathematicians in the world - but they tell me a^2, they tell me b^2, they tell me some mathematicians say 2ab, maybe Chinese mathematicians, I don't know, but they tell me - and did you know there's a thing called the Chinese Remainder Theorem? Not many people know that, but under Obama, under Biden, you have children going into schools and being told... and they said to me FOIL. Did you know that? There's a thing called FOIL, and it's, it's... but so they were telling me there's this thing called FOIL, and I said 'We're going to FOIL the Chinese". That's what we're gonna do folks, we're gonna FOIL the Chinese, and Sleepy Joe Biden just lets them walk all over us - you know, when I was President, American schools and universities taught the greatest math in the world. They really did. Every category. We were killing it. They said to me they couldn't believe it. But under Sleepy Joe it's been - so anyway (a+b)^2 there's a lot of things you can say but I don't think science knows actually.
Needs more "And this mathematician he came to me, real smart guy, numbers guy, he comes to me tears in his eyes and he says 'sir, they have taken these numbers too far, but you have made it so we can multiply again', we can mul TEE ply again multiplication. We don't like that we don't like that, but he liked it this smart guy, but not smart like me. I'm not a numbers guy. But I'm a smart guy..."
I'm never writing like that again... it's ... catchy... it ... it gets inside your head and I can still hear that voice rambling and meandering and dissembling... it's horrible... like a memetic plague!
@futurebird
A lot of the folks who’ve started weird-ass religions over the years, Madame Blavatsky is a famous one, there are scads of them, generally based their stuff on texts they’ve created using a technique called automatic writing. Most of them say shit like it was dictated to them by God, or aliens, or Zeus. Pure stream of conscious stuff. That’s what he sounds like. Reminds me of Robin Williams riffing at his most manic, cocaine-fueled period.
It feels good when someone tells you that the egg heads have it wrong and your basic uninformed guess solved the problem faster, better and more correcter than all those people who always make you feel stupid.
There is a deep unmet need in this country ... for people to feel informed, like they aren't being tricked, like they get it... and it's being exploited to continue to trick them ... which will only make that need grow deeper ... if they don't die before they catch on.
@futurebird every known human need or desire or drive has been exploited, and new ones will be, as quickly as they are discovered, for political and financial gain.
I don't even think it's that being informed, having a real sense of what you know (and what you don't know!) makes people less vulnerable to this because they know more information... No, it's the confidence to not be flattered by anyone who tries to make you feel like you know better than people who have studied the problem more.
It's more than "trusting experts" it's knowing how you can identify experts, the degree to which they can & can't be trusted.
@futurebird
This is something I've come to think of as the modern crisis of epistemology:
If you aren't expert enough to know a thing, and aren't exposed enough to specialized knowledge on a regular basis to even get a vague sense of what is likely/unlikely, then you will have to trust experts (or text created by) to inform you.
But how do you learn to judge who the real experts are, when you lack expertise yourself?
And when you lack expertise on how to evaluate claims objectively?
It starts when we are kids. Did adults treat your questions with respect? Did they help you find your errors and understand why they were errors?
Do you feel included when you listen to people who work in science talking? Do you feel like you could be one of them if you took a different path or is it alienating?
@futurebird Even highly educated people can fall prey to this kind of thinking, often out of the belief that the expertise they already have should be enough to have everything figured out.
Physicists are notorious for thinking they have the key to understanding other fields of knowledge better than the people who are actually working on them, because they're such intellectual generalists. And sometimes they become kind of crankish as they "go emeritus".
@futurebird I've been seeing a lot of conspiracy theorist activity on scientific topics lately--particularly the flat earth/"space is fake" people pushing wilfully ignorant cosmology.
I've noticed that they always lean in the direction of making the universe smaller, more intuitive, more qualitatively simple (at the cost of imagining an elaborate and poorly motivated conspiracy). Anything that seems peculiar or counterintuitive at first glance is evidence that it's all fake and there's a conspiracy. It doesn't matter if the real explanation is pretty simple because if you're explaining you're losing.
I suppose it's like that with non-scientific topics too. The answer is always simple, something a first-grader could grasp, and if it's not, that's because some bad person is tricking you. You'll never, ever have to feel you don't understand something.
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