lol @ dis

Another blog author in my area recently wrote a post suggesting that global warming doesn't exist because some places are unseasonably cold. I've explained why this argument is faulty on several occasions, but it doesn't seem to be getting through. The average temperature of the Earth is indeed rising. The concept of an average, unlike Baye's formula or the more complex end of combinatorics, is really intuitive and easy to understand. So I don't see what the problem is. Unless there's some blinding political bias here. Nah, that'd be stupid.

Incidentally, the same author also wrote this opinion piece for the Morning Crawl which, among other lulzworthy bits, contains

The next thing we do is scrap all those stupid ".... studies" majors in college. Again, look at what the Asian countries do and follow that example. Of course, many Asians come here to pursue the math and science degrees. You can bet they don't come here for courses in Family Studies.

It's nice how he sticks 'Asians' into one amorphous category. Some East Asian societies tend to put a very high value on scientific matters, others less so. He's probably thinking of China, Korea and Japan in particular. Ok, fair enough. But even then, I know a bunch of Asians who are studying some humanity or another, including one English major named Jiseong who told me she sucks at math. What the fuck?! Also, a lot of Asian schools are adopting successful Western reforms, which is cool because it shows that either side can learn from the other.



But that's kind of besides the main point: the irony of complaining about how much America's youth suck because they're whiny and innumerate while being whiny and innumerate oneself. It is true that most American youths are boring and shitty, as with our adult population, but that's not strictly the fault of liberals or conservatives, because a lot of people on either side are also boring and shitty. There is one undigested nugget of wisdom in that steaming pile of horse manure: that we in the US, and in fact other Anglo countries, don't value education as much as we should. Specifically, hard sciences and math. (On average, heh.)

But the solution to that is not to scapegoat problems on "the liberals" (á la "the Jews"). That's weak. Especially given that there is a strong anti-intellectual current in the Right ... why study probability anyway? I don't trust anything that was made by a bunch of pointy-headed, pantyhose-wearing French academiacos with names like 'Laplace'.

Hey, I'm not sure about the way out of this one myself, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't involve emulation of a lazy stereotype or blaming every single problem on "thuh lib'ruls". (And by this, I mean a general solution. For me, I know it will involve committing a bunch of calligraphic characters to memory.)