>I think I understand all the stuff in your email, except the bit about the
>"We" in the "We are on the quest". I had to right this in English because I
>don't understand Calculus. Where does Calculus come from? A Lost African
>Tribe? A figment of someone's tormented medievial schizoid imagination that
>intuitively made sense to a Very Few Mathematicians who explained it to
>Engineers who designed some products and gave the Designs to the Gunsmiths
>who then made some Technology, who gave it to the State, who gave it to the
>Boy Soldiers, who made shit happen for the Empire/Reich/Congress so that
>Everyone could be Safe and Happy? [Excused the rant, sometimes The System
>gets to me.]
I don't know if I'll excuse the rant. It's too easy being technophobic. All
you have to do is to appeal to the fact that "no-one really likes boring
math
stuff" (which isn't true) or "modern science caused all our environmental
problems" (which also isn't true, we've had many of them ever since we
domesticated animals and settled in communities). Another common approach
is "science has created nuclear weapons/nervegas/machineguns/DDT/whatever",
which isn't quite wrong, it's just that it gives the impression that Science
is an Evil Thing that creates other Evil Things all on its own, possibly
using humans as pawns or slave labor. Science is a tool.
I could go on, but I'd just start repeating myself. Why is this attitude so
common? It can't be just luddite neophobia (or can it?); mathematics, at
least, has been with us for long enough not to be considered "new and
therefore dangerous". It seems more like "it's easy to blame scientists,
they
are rather few and no-one understands what they're doing". Let's find a new
group to hate, it's not fashionable to hate blacks or jews anymore.. hmm..
how about hating scientists? All of them, not just the (rather few, in
comparison) ones who develop weapons and pesticides and othe nasty stuff.
What possesses people to be proud of their ignorance? Not on knowing that
most, if not all of their knowledge must be considered subjective and
subject
to change (that's understandable and, in my opinion, worthwhile if not done
to
excess); no, they pride themselves on actually not knowing _anything_ about
a
subject - and not _wanting_ to know?
That aside, it's not math you need to join a discussion, just some rudimentary logic. It's like common sense, only less common and more sensible.
-Engan
(An eye for an eye, a rant for a rant)