The Left and Right on Mathematics

Mathematics is at once both discovered and invented

The right-wing "Intelligent Design" web site Uncommon Descent have posted more intriguing material. They quote from another right-wing web article where we hear that: 

Brooklyn College Professor of Math Education Laurie Rubel argued this week on Twitter that the mathematical equation 2+2=4 “reeks of white supremacist patriarchy.” Rubel’s tweet was retweeted and promoted by several academics at universities and colleges around the nation…

Several academics from institutions around the nation chimed in. Harvard Ph.D. candidate Kareem Carr suggested that math should be reevaluated because it was primarily developed by white men.

If this is factual and to be taken seriously then I would probably find myself  aligned with UD on this one: I'm at a loss as to why 2+2 = 4 "reeks of white supremacist patriarchy" - I'm not even sure what that means: Is it a property intrinsic to or extrinsic to 2+2=4? It's probably the latter; that is, it's in the eye of beholder in so far as the beholder has come to associate mathematics with "white supremacism", for whatever complex histrico-socio-political reason. But these very human attributions are not intrinsic to mathematics unless nature herself is somehow party to a "white supremacist" conspiracy. The synergy and rapport between mathematics and nature is nothing short of amazing; this is, as they say the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in modelling nature. Moreover, that nature facilitates the building of complex mathematical artefacts (i.e. technology) is further evidence that mathematics is beyond human likes, dislikes and fanciful political connotations.

The UD article also tells us that:

Carr apparently believes that the people who discovered theorems in math actually invented them the way a novelist writes a novel.

Well, that actually may be not be so very far from the mark: Humanly speaking discovery and creation have a very close relation: When human beings are creating they are discovering at the same time: The novelist, like the artist, is discovering and selecting (semantic) configurations from the platonic world of possibility: There are only so many stories that can be written given the size of the average book and an author/artist is conceiving and selecting one possible configuration. The connectedness of discovery and creation is very clear in technological innovation: If one has technological goals one quickly realises that one can't cobble together any old thing. So in order to find something that works we embark on a seek. reject and select process with teleological goals in mind. Seek, reject and select is a very general process which means that human creation is also about discovery. Mathematics, like any other so-called human "invention", is also discovered and recovered from the huge space of the platonic world of configurational possibility and reified as symbolic operations. Because platonic space is so large  then the reification of any of its huge range of possibilities is likely to be a one-off and at once both an invention and  discovery.

But although I would likely align with UD on the question of whether or not mathematical constructions are intrinsically racist the right-wing have their own extremists in their midst: In this instance I speak once again of their libertarian commentator "Polistra" who we've met twice before on my blog (See here and here). Any thing that smacks of establishment activity he's against. This time he comes up with this gem: 

Polistra August 10, 2020 at 11:48 pm: Nonsense. Tempest in an irrelevant teapot. Look. The math ESTABLISHMENT has been trying to tell us that math isn’t real, ever since Godel. This current attempt to fictionalize math is superficial compared to Godel. People who actually USE math know that it works consistently. Carpenters and cooks and drivers know how measurement works. A cook knows that doubling the ingredients will produce two cakes. A driver knows that he has to drive twice as fast to get to the same destination in half the time. Students who learn math by USING it can’t be fooled by Godel or by the wokers.

Once again we find Polistra railing against the evil plotting establishment. If Polistra is thinking of Godel's incompleteness theorem then he's talking nonsense and people on UD should challenge him but they never do; after all, he's on their side against the evil "Darwinists" in the establishment.  Godel was a theist and a Christian if a little eccentric. It is  unlikely, therefore, he would have gone down the road of social relativism or seen his mathematics as intrinsically racist or arbitrary. Polistra is about as crackpot as the cranks who rail against quantum theory and relativity. 

But there is a link between the extreme libertarian right and the communist left; they all hate the current democratic governmental establishment and its institutions and wish to sweep them away.

UPDATE 14/08/2020

We find atheist PZ Myers talking about this subject at this link:

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2020/08/12/david-silverman-and-woke-math/

Now PZ Myers is the sort of guy the right-wing pundits at Uncommon Descent are likely to accuse of helping along the notion that 2 + 2 = 4 is a piece of arbitrary white supremacism. But looking at the tenor of what he has written there is no attack there on  the intrinsic properties of mathematics. Instead it's all to do with the socio-political setting of mathematical teaching, that is the extrinsic properties of maths: e.g. who is controlling mathematical material, who dispenses it, who gets credit, how they use it etc. That, of course, is another story altogether. There are no doubt polarised extremists on both left and right, but PZ Myers isn't one of them as far as I can tell,