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This is a month old, but Tucker Carlson had a bizarre interview with a Jeff Elofson.
TW if you're an elderly teacher with a sensitive constitution.
In it, Tuckers asks 'Why does algebra put letters into numbers?'
His interviewee concludes that those who use 'fake math with letters' are 'good little goyslaves'.
The clip is both baffling and hilarious, it reminds me of these memes I've seen, and it's almost surprising that it did not come with an Onion logo in the corner.
This clip looks so bad that I had a hard time making sense of it. Carlson is clearly an educated guy, but now that I look at his wikipedia page, he barely graduated. So it is perhaps possible that basic math has somehow escaped his understanding.
On the other hand, this may be part of a strategy to connect with the lower classes 'we love the poorly educated'.
Another possibility I could see is associating some basic ignorance with the kind of people who unironically use the prefix 'goy' as in 'goyslop'. Not a good look.
My preferred explanation is that Tucker is tired of all his success after getting fired from Fox News, which if I recall correctly had to do with the release of his text messages critical of Trump's low-brow appeal. So he's trying to tank himself, somehow.
Maybe I'm extrapolating too much, but this kind of public attitude is worrying for the future of America.
On one hand we have the math-computer wizards and their AI(SI?) transhumanist revolution and on the other hand we have this.
I was scraping the bottom of the youtube barrel about 6 months ago and started watching some Tucker Carlson videos. He is somewhat fine/normal most of the time but occasionally drops mind numbingly stupid thoughts or ideas that make me recoil with disbelief. My impression is that he is just not very smart and seems to revel in his kind of aw-shucks naivety that I imagine some part of his audience relates to or finds charming.
That would still make him top notch leadership material for his party. I think the current incumbent differs mostly from him in that Trump's brain would be unable to latch onto a thought like "symbolic math is fake" because it is a claim about reality which does not involve himself. Once you add a handle for his ego to grasp, my estimate is that Trump's brain would have no problems matching Carlson in unhingedness. "Democrats are using algebra to score political points" - "They are using their fake math to spread lies about me." "The Fields Medal is a prestigious award sometimes called the 'Nobel of mathematics'" - "Then Norway should award it to me, for my revolutionary work of doing math with letters which had my teachers in awe in 11th grade."
I mean, this is what happened when Trump somehow learned about the problem of AI alignment. His brain latched onto the intelligence part and decided that a machine which was his equal in cognitive ability was just as absurd as another human which was, thus trivially solving alignment. Having thus proven his superiority, he then graciously awarded the machines the mandatory label of "super intelligence".
Obviously with Trump nobody is surprised, this guy has been tweeting every brain-fart for decades, it is his whole brand. Statistically speaking, there should be some smart GOP leaders around, but likely they have the good sense to keep that embarrassing fact about themselves hidden rather than alienating their base.
It sounds like you think the Republicans are the party of dumb people or dumb leadership, so is there an American party for smart people or smart leadership?
Not to my knowledge. I think the FPTP voting system of the US makes for some pretty bizarre coalitions on both sides.
I do believe that the Republicans dominate around the "math with numbers in it is fake math for fake jobs" demographics (at least among the Whites), but will happily concede that this is just a part of the GOP coalition. There is the religious right, libertarians, rurals, blue-collar workers, billionaires, foreign policy hawks, anti-vaxxers, etc.
And the Democrats are the party of the urbanites, PMC, LGBT, racial minorities, wokes, college-educated, recent immigrants, etc. I am sure that some of these groups are on average less intelligent than some of the Republican demographics.
Nor do I believe that putting the stupid front and center has always been a GOP thing. In my mind, GWB, the leader of the free world under whose tenure various torture prisons of different levels of avowal were established was evil in a way Trump has so far failed to match, but despite countless memes to the contrary I do not believe that W was stupid himself or putting most of his focus on the stupid demographic.
However, I do believe that the MAGA version of the GOP is putting the stupid as their base demographic. This was Trump's appeal from the first primary. He is obviously less Christian than even I am. He is not rural, or had any foreign policy stance, or political convictions such as libertarianism. No, his appeal was that the political establishment cried "Anyone but that buffoon" any time he was mentioned. He was the kid who managed to grab attention by taking a dump in the swimming pool. Any other candidate would have been done for when the "grab them by the pussy" thing got leaked. But him it hardly hurt because it was so on brand, nobody was under any illusions that he was not a sex pest. The more the establishment (both the parts which went to Epstein's island with him and the others) whined about how absolutely unacceptable this behavior was in a candidate, the greater his appeal.
In his first administration, his effect was mitigated because he was surrounded by normal Republicans and career bureaucrats, though he did go through quite some personnel. This time, it is no longer just him. Hegseth or RFK Jr seem to be his equal in being outrage bait rather than having any qualifications. In retrospect, I think Trump missed out on the obvious pick for education secretary, which is a field in which his performance of triggering the establishment has been lacking. Tucker Carlson appearing with Trump on stage announcing that henceforth, federal funding would be denied to any schools which teach "fake letter math" would have done to math teachers what RFK did to epidemiologists.
I can't comment on the long term effects of replacing all the policy wonks with guys whose main qualification is that the establishment goes "anyone but him". Perhaps his tariffs will bring the US to prosperity far beyond anything I can imagine. Perhaps Hegseth's testosterone-boosted warriors will outperform the somber, inclusive professionals of previous administrations on the battlefield. Perhaps RFK Jr will cure autism. More centrally, perhaps "nothing ever happens" will continue to hold.
Personally, I am still hoping that the Americans will learn that voting the pool-shitter class president is great for disgust-maxxing your teacher, but comes with some downsides which will only gradually reveal themselves during his tenure.
What did he do? Did they figure out if it was a lab leak or not?
Better than transing them.
They do need a boy to tell them the emperor is naked.
Only an actual fool would 'trust the experts' in all of the politicized scientific fields, which is most of the ones with the most practical relevance to daily life. Perhaps intellectual mediocrity is acceptable if we all just agree that it is, as stated by Pinker
We have to keep spending money on solutions that don't work and propping up entire swathes of bureaucrats, because it would be mean to say the truth. That's just fate.
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Is there a point to this post? An argument?
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