The book is a week closer to reality. I can feel your anticipation flowing backwards through my router. For those who cannot wait, here is something to keep you busy while you are fidgeting. Amazon allows me to make the electronic version of any of my books free for 72 hours every 90 days. Starting today, Saturday, January 16, 2021 until Monday at midnight, you can download either the Big Book of Real Estate or the Little Book of Silly (use the links in this paragraph) at no cost. Spread the good news. The Gospel According to Uncle Roger in all its myriad forms is free for three days and worth exactly what you pay for it!
The new book, How to Make Mistakes, may set mistake-making back a hundred years. Not a bad bargain given the mistakes we have already made so far this century. Last century’s mistakes sort of look tame by comparison. The original working title was “How to Make Fake News.” By the time I had dissected the news to find the source of its error I realized that much of what passes for fake news were just mistakes, some simple and innocent, other deliberate and venal.
Fake news is now a major industry. It always was but with new delivery systems multiplying in cyberspace, the number and types of news fakery have grown to match all the avenues available to send it down. Fake news today is the digital analog to that first newsletter I wrote 50 years ago, a lot of important sounding words strung together meaning nothing. The difference is that 50 years ago anyone reading what I wrote got the joke. Far fewer will today.
The avenues AND the fakery are digital. Thus, they all have a mathematical basis. Society now has a serious problem. We have failed to educate several generations and the results are before us. We have evolved to a point where someone else’s tweet replaces your logic, judgment and clear-headed thinking. Does that story sound like it has a happy ending?
Let’s check the education level of your Basic North American Rioter. Not their diplomas, those are handed out like candy, let’s check what they actually know. Here is a picture of one of them delivering the usual slam on math education and education in general.
Really? The dated metaphor of a woman dressed like this manages to persist because math phobia is pervasive. But it has spread more generally today to ridicule anyone with a sound education, solid values and common sense, all taught alongside math in the old days. It is hard to image anyone saying today what she says. Did she not touch a light switch? Electricity can only be explained with mathematics. Does she own a computer, an IPad, a cell phone? The reality is that in today’s digital world it is sort of true that most people don’t use math. More accurately math uses them. Every mouse click, every swipe, every Tweet, every GPS move is recorded. All with digital pulses. It may only be ones and zeros, but it is still math. Those who fail to understand it are doomed to be pawns of it. The Chinese, Indians and Russians are good mathematicians and have proved twice now they can get anyone they want elected President of the United States.
So, we have this friend who is a classy lady, self-assured, and not one bit in doubt about her convictions. Recently we were dining with her and the subject of math came up. This sent her into a convulsive lecture. She was against math, did not need it, hated the subject in school, pretty much what you are thinking right now. When she took a breath, I said to her “Do you know the difference between right and wrong?” to which she responded with a hint of righteous indignation, “I certainly do.”
I said “You do know that involves subtraction…”