Yesterday, in Part Two of this essay series, we found out why — regardless of what we learned in school — the shortest distance between Point A and Point B means diddly squat when the neighbor’s cat appears.
We’ll never know if Euclid recognized this gnarly problem back in 250 BC, when he was writing his book on geometry, Elements. He seemed to be having too much fun with his ruler and compass to concern himself with little details like reality… or neighborhood cats. Maybe people didn’t keep cats back then? I don’t know. But over the next 2000 years, a lot of people did keep cats — and Airedale Terriers — and mathematics, repeatedly crashing its pointy little head against the brick wall of reality, gradually brought mathematicians to their intellectual knees. So they chose the coward’s way out.
First, to quickly refresh my argument — that mathematics exists in a fantasy world — we can consider, for a moment, the very simplest of all math problems.
1 + 1 =
Most people (having been misled for years by vile mathematicians) would probably solve the equation this way:
1 + 1 = 2
Not so fast, my friend. Yes, if that problem appeared on your second grade arithmetic test, you would definitely want to give the answer, 1 + 1 = 2 and earn another gold star. But in the real world, the answer is not so simple.
In the real world, where “1” means “one object”, the answer is usually:
1 + 1 = 1
Now I will certainly understand if, at this point, you want to call me crazy… or stupid. That’s okay. A lot of people have called me crazy or stupid, or both. No hard feelings. But if you bear with me, you might come to understand how and why our world is currently being led down the primrose path — not by the politicians, but by the mathematicians.
We live on a remarkable planet. Agreed? And, although not one of us has visited every square mile of the planet, we’ve come to a general consensus that most of the earth’s surface is covered by water. Most of the water is contained in oceans and lakes and rivers, but there’s also a lot of water hanging around in the atmosphere in the form of clouds and water vapor. We’re also pretty confortable with the concept that the human body is mostly water. All in all, we’re pretty darn familiar with water — as rain, as oceans, as dishwater, as club soda. We “know” water. Intimately.
The water in the clouds high above the earth exists as tiny little droplets. Now, when water droplets get cold, they like to snuggle up to each other. And we know very well what happens when two drops of water touch. Something pretty darn interesting. They become one.
During any given moment, approximately 4 quadrillion water droplets are in the act of joining together to make slightly larger droplets. (That’s a very approximate number.) This is by far the most common form of addition on Planet Earth. Two droplets come together to form one droplet.
And in each of those 4 quadrillion cases of “droplet addition”:
1 + 1 = 1
Looking at the overall reality of life on earth, then… it’s actually relatively unusual that
1 + 1 = 2.
In most cases of addition, 1 + 1 = 1… which means, by extrapolation, that the rest of mathematics is a pretty much a bald-faced lie, since they started off by screwing up the simplest, most basic equation. That’s why the mathematicians — faced with a perverted fantasy they’d been embracing for 2000 years — invented an even more ridiculous (and cowardly) fabrication:
Statistics.
When you tell a lie and you get caught, you have to come up with an even bigger lie, to cover up the first lie. The statisticians essentially tell us, “Hey, we don’t really understand how reality works, but we will assign impressive-looking but essentially phony mathematics to it anyway, to keep you believing that we know what we’re talking about.”
Truth be told, the clever parlor games that Euclid and his friends came up with, back in Egypt in 250 BC, were enormously entertaining — considering that they were making up the rules of the game. Life is always easier when you can make up your own rules. But when you start to believe that the rules of mathematics were “handed down from above,” then you desperately need statistics.
Statisticians know almost nothing, but make it sound oh so impressive anyway. If you ask a statistician, “Hey, Professor. How many children do I have?” he has no idea at all. So he says, “Statistically speaking, you have 2.65 children.”
Is that stupid, or what? The psychic down the street can come up with a better answer than “2.65”. But what recourse does the poor mathematician have… when even his most basic math assumptions are dead wrong?
“Did you read this humorous essay to the very end?” There is a real, true answer that that question. Either you did… or you didn’t. (If you didn’t, then you can stop reading here, because the end is about six sentences away.) The mathematicians and statisticians have no idea if you’ve read this essay to the very end. All their fancy equations and algorithms can’t answer this very simple, unambiguous question. But rather than admit their ignorance and confess, “Well… we really don’t know…” they hand us statistics.
“There’s a 64 percent chance that the reader has read this essay to the very end.”
Maybe you can agree with me, if I spitefully classify such a response as “100 percent wrong.” Statistically speaking.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.