WelcomeOn not learning mathematics in school, etc.
Good day! (Ref.: Alexander Mercouris)
Let me start by noting that mathematical genius Dr. and sometime Asst. Professor U.C Berkeley Theodore J. Kaczynski, aka: "The Unabomber" died yesterday (+2023.06.10), apparently by suicide. I remember reading his "Manifesto" when The New York Times newspaper published it, and being impressed by how intelligent it was, and how pathetic some of the criticisms of it were from academics who felt a need to try to argue against him like recently a number of them have argued against Prof. Jeffrey Sachs anent the Ukraine war. "The treason of the Intellectuals" (Julien Benda) is always with us. If anyone finds The Unabomber's Manifesto toxic due to ad hominum argumentation, let them read eminent Roman Catholic professor Jacques Ellul's "The technological..." books which essentially say the same things just more respectably packaged.
But that was not my motivator this morning. I was playing with "Microsoft Rewards" on the computer and asked the Bing AI a question: "How did people do division before Arabic numbers, i.e.: with Roman numerals?" I could not see how to do it. The AI gave me an an answer: That is was like long division (with Arabic numbers, sic). And it gave an example, and please excuse if I have misremembered it because I did not expect a helpful answer. I asked about thirteen divided by 3. The AI gave an example:
XIII | III
|
X | IV
|
– | --
III | I
What the? Well, I finally figured it out (do you see how little I understood mathematics in school even though I got "A" grades in mathemaics classes?). You sit there and start subtracting III's from XIII and you find you can do this IV times. And what do you have left? I.
Two things: (1) The AI had shown me the answer to my question. Better than all the math teachers I ever had in "a place called school", where they were my masters, etc. But also: (2) The AI got its example wrong. My human intelligence, once cued in to what was going on, figured this out too, and I replied to The AL:
XIII | III
|
XII | IV
|
– | --
I | I
The AI responded that I was right and thanked me for correcting its mistake.
So there we have a little parable about AI: It can help us even more than many humans (which, in my case, is not saying much, since the humans often hurt me, including in school), but also it can make mistakes. So if humans blindly follow what AI tells them, they can end up as messed up as if they blindly follow their Supreme Deity like, e.g.: Patriarch Abraham who was going to kill an innocent civilian because his AI — typo: God told him to do it.
Back to Dr. Unabomber. Why did a mathematical genius become a mass murdered? I think I found the answer long ago and it has to do with schools: "Ted" was emotionally fragile. At 16 he entered Harvard University as a freshman and he did not "fit in". In his sophomore year he took a psychology course where the professor did what psychology professors often do: use their students as free guniea pigs for experiments. Ted was a participant in such an experiment as part of he course. He later found out the purpose of the experiment and it changed his life: The experiment was to learn how persons respond to being humiliated.
Thank you for reading. A number nobody needs to know anything about mathematics to understand which was applied to me in 1968 is the following. Exercise for the reader: what is the meaning of this number: 18-11-46-503 ?
I took lots of Get-tested-and-graded-on-"mathematics"-subjects courses in school
