mathiness instills confidence

but only in those unfamiliar with math

familiarity breeds contempt, or at the very least, it informs caution about trusting familiar tricks.

but unfamiliarity can seem seductive, even authoritative, especially if it seems complex or “hard.”

behavioral economists and psychologists study this.

it’s a dangerous phenomenon that the unscrupulous might use to advantage as a form of “nudge” or other cognitive manipulation.

let’s look.

i just came across a fun article that may well explain quite a lot.

(thanks to crémieux for finding this)

it selected 200 american adults with advanced degrees.

they were asked to gauge study abstracts and rate their assessment of their quality on a scale of 0-100. it used the same two abstracts for all participants, one on food sharing practices among foragers and another on the consequences of incarceration.

here’s the fun bit:

and adding “mathiness” to an abstract caused people to rate it more highly in inverse proportion to how much they knew about math and models.

for humanities, social sciences the variance was large and stat sig (p<0.01) and for other (including education) it was twice as big and also stat sig (p<0.01). that’s a helluva p value for an N this small. this seems to be a VERY pronounced effect and it gets worse the less expert in math you are.

i’d wager this effect gets even worse amongst liberal arts majors without advanced degrees… (this was not studied here)

the science crowd actually trusted “mathiness” perhaps a bit less than a study without it (not stat sig). but humanities loved it and educators etc really ate it up.

boy, that sure explains a lot about covid, covid models, and who went nuts trusting what, doesn’t it?

it also likely explains a great deal about why so many humanities majors and educators are convinced by the mathiness of global warming models and why far fewer who actually work in the hard sciences (apart from those whose grants depend upon it) are.

the paper had a wonderful quote on this:

“Within the field of pure mathematics, academic writing is expected to be completely transparent to anyone knowledgeable about the mathematical concepts involved. A typical reviewer of a pure mathematics paper will not tolerate a sentence or paragraph for which the meaning is obscure. The same cannot be said about some other academic disciplines.”

it’s small wonder they respond to math they cannot read. half of social sciences these days seems to consist of deliberately impenetrable jargon to occlude and obscure meaning (if, indeed, there is any meaning at all) so it seems to be seen as some sort of feature rather than a bug. but “oh, that’s unparsable and/or incomprehensible to me; it must be profound” is a truly dangerous basis for intellectual belief.

it can rapidly lead to entire fields run by naked emperors where anyone pointing out the nudity gets called “reactionary” or “stupid.” thus, those of little self-confidence or discernment slaver to accept whatever pabulum they are fed in order to make pretense of being clever.

the downspiral of standards and belief systems that ensues is an inevitable as it is tragic.

but the actual smart people look at it a little differently

actual smart people also tend to know things like “6 cm of sea level rise per year is basically impossible.” the reality has been 3.3mm per year, basically 1/18th of that. (source, NASA)

and so i would go so far as to warn those not well versed in math against trust in mathiness.

to be sure, calculation can be very useful, but it can also lie like a cheap rug as not only do figures lie, but liars figure and they figure that they might blow a fast one by you with math that you are not familiar with. “statistics” was not placed beyond “lies and damn lies” without reason.

do not trust that which you cannot verify nor assume that numbers and complex equations convey accuracy or rigor.

many may try to use that against you or simply catch you up in the incomprehension of their own crowd-following behavior.

and this is, as any education major can see, conclusive proof that you should be suspicious…