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67: Wrath of Math (Mathematics Used Unwisely)
596 Plays3 years ago
Mathematics is a subject that has been used for great things over time: it has helped people grow food, design shelter, and in every part of life. It should be, then, no surprise that sometimes mathematics is used for evil; that is to say, there are times where mathematics is used to either implement or justify regressive things like greed, racism, classism, and even genocide. So when has math been used for destructive purposes? What makes us mis-apply mathematics? And why can oversimplification lead to devastation? All of this, and more, on this episode of Breaking Math.
Theme song is Breaking Math Theme by Elliot Smith of Albuquerque.
This episode is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For more information, go to CreativeCommons.org
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Theme song is Breaking Math Theme by Elliot Smith of Albuquerque.
This episode is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For more information, go to CreativeCommons.org
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This episode is sponsored by
· Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support
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Transcript
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Mathematics Misused in History
00:02:56
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Get in touch with us at breakingmathpodcast.gmail.com with questions, comments, suggestions, corrections, and anything else you might think would benefit our show. You can also send us an email at breakingmathpodcast.gmail.com. Mathematics is a subject that has been used for great things over time. It has helped people grow food, design shelter, and is used in every part of life.
00:03:23
Speaker
It should be that no surprise that sometimes mathematics is used for evil. That is to say, there are times where mathematics is used to either implement or justify regressive things, like greed, racism, classism, and even genocide. So when has math been used for destructive purposes? What makes us misapply mathematics? And why can oversimplification lead to devastation? All this and more on this episode of Breaking Math.
Malthus vs Engels on Population Theory
00:03:47
Speaker
Episode 67, Wrath of Math.
00:03:55
Speaker
I'm Sophia, and I'm going to be doing this episode alone today. But don't worry, we're going to be talking about some cool stuff today. We're going to be talking about when math goes wrong. So it's going to happen for a couple of reasons. It can either be misapplied, that is to say valid math is used incorrectly, and that type of misuse of math is usually used to convince people of something used for justifications, versus when math is misused.
00:04:22
Speaker
which is to say that valid math is used for harmful purposes, it's more directly used. This is what you see when you use math for things like bad accounting, which we'll talk about later, which can get a lot uglier than you might think.
00:04:40
Speaker
All right, first we, and yes we, you and me, listener, are going to be talking about Thomas Robert Malthus. He was born either the 13th or 14th of February in 1766 in West God, which is in Surrey, England, and he died 68 years later on the 23rd of December 1834 in Bath, which is in Somerset.
00:05:01
Speaker
So Malthus was a macro economist. What he did mostly was look at big trends in a society and what he saw or what he thought he saw, we'll talk about more about that later, is an exponential increase in population over time with a linear increase in food production ability. And what that means if you think about it is, let's say you and me both have $1 on day one of the year.
00:05:29
Speaker
Let's say on day two, somebody gives me $1,000 and all they do is double your money. Well, you have $2 and I have $1,001. On day three, I have $2,001 and you have four. So you don't have very much for the time being, but there is a time very soon, I believe is around like $7,000.
00:05:50
Speaker
and for one side the doubling quickly takes over. And a misapplication of exponential growth is actually a common theme in the misuse of mathematics. Basically what it assumes is that some trend will continue forever. XKCD has a go-to cartoon about this where somebody estimates that in two weeks they're gonna be married to over 14 people based on yesterday they were married with zero and today they're married with one.
00:06:18
Speaker
So it is of long logic, and there is some support for this idea. I mean, there are countries where there are problems with supply. However, these correlate with bigger and different macroeconomic trends I will talk about in a second.
Historical Misuse of Mathematical Simplifications
00:06:37
Speaker
So this quote I think is really telling of Malthus's philosophy.
00:06:43
Speaker
We will suppose the means of subsistence in any country just equal to the easy support of its inhabitants. The constant effort towards population increases the number of people before the means of subsistence are increased. The food therefore which before supported seven millions
00:06:59
Speaker
must now be divided among seven millions and a half or eight millions. The poor consequently must live much worse and many of them be reduced to severe distress. The number of laborers also being above the proportion of the work in the market, the price of labor must tend towards a decrease, while the price of provisions would at the same time tend to rise. So you could really see this simplification in this trend. I don't think it's a surprise to many of you that Malthus and Malthusius in general perceive ideas of charity to the poor.
00:07:28
Speaker
as being futile. This has been used especially in Tory and Whig politics in England and more recently with Neo-Malthusianism, which is used sometimes to justify eco-fascism.
00:07:43
Speaker
One of his critics at the time was Frederick Engels, who was born on the 20th of November 1820 and died in 1895 on the 5th of August. He was born in Barman in the Kingdom of Prussia and he died in London, England. So he was born somewhere in modern-day Austria or Germany.
00:08:02
Speaker
So, Engels' argument wasn't perfect itself, but what he argued was that the more people there are, the quicker we can develop new ways to grow things. And in some ways, he was correct. I mean, farming has grown in efficiency so much since the start. I mean, factory farming for all its bad things is, I mean, nobody can say it isn't efficient, right?
00:08:27
Speaker
It also fails to account for the fact that humans aren't just, you know, we're not like bull voxes. We're not these simple life forms that just reproduce, reproduce, reproduce. Even they probably have evolved mechanisms like humans. For example, in times of famine and hardship, people don't have as many children for a period of time. There's all sorts of weird correlations that you could find like this, but
00:08:53
Speaker
Suffice it to say, it's not good for an ecosystem if an animal takes over that ecosystem, and it's not good for that animal if that happens because it has no ecosystem, it has nowhere to go.
Enron and Accounting Practices
00:09:05
Speaker
So over time, these mechanisms have developed as an evolutionary reaction to this thing.
00:09:10
Speaker
And Stuart Brand in The Whole Earth Discipline talks about how it contrasts the 1963 inflection point showed that the imagined soaring J curve of human increase was instead a normal S curve. An inflection point is when something goes from increasing more and more quickly
00:09:28
Speaker
to still increasing but increasing less quickly. So if it's like if you're on a roller coaster it's like kind of like when you start the curve it's kind of like in the middle of the curve before you get to the top where you're not curving upward anymore but you're starting to curve downward but you're still on the hole going up. Mathematically speaking it's where the second derivative is zero.
00:09:48
Speaker
But yeah, these kind of simplifications lead to problems. I mean, it's led to problems before really the Lotka-Volterra model is known, which is a system of differential equations that model predator-prey relationships. You could think of it intuitively as a lot of predators eat a lot of prey, so they
00:10:08
Speaker
grow quickly but then the prey there's fewer of them and then the foxes or whatever the predator is starve so that goes down and they go in cycles and you can find these cycles in nature but there were attempts I believe it was in Washington or Oregon in the United States
00:10:27
Speaker
Where they decided to like kill all the deer in this forest and it caused like mayhem so it is really easy to oversimplify with mathematics because Simple solutions are beautiful sometimes but we have to apply the real world to everything we have to test everything and realize that we're working with models and understand their limitations, but also it know in depth what they teach us and
Dual Nature of Accounting
00:10:55
Speaker
Alright, so now we're going to talk about accounting and when that is misused. So accounting is an application of math, right? It's addition and subtraction and sometimes multiplication when you're dealing with things like taxes, but at the end of the day, it's addition and subtraction. The accounting formula is pretty simple. It's your assets.
00:11:17
Speaker
You know like your building that you do work from your company truck Whatever is equal to your equity plus your liabilities. So like liabilities is things like Unsold merchandise and equity is like money you have in the bank
00:11:33
Speaker
So, it should be no surprise that this system, because it's so simple, and it's used for so many complicated things, I mean, at the end of the day, everybody who trades on the stock exchange, everybody brushes with accounting principles at one point or another. I mean, just the term credit card is an accounting term, because when you charge something, your account is credited, which actually means it's decreased.
00:12:02
Speaker
And it's an accounts receivable, which is the money that you are supposed to give to the bank or some similar Column in your ledger is increased So it's kind of interesting how sometimes is misused and one way that it was misused is in the 1980s in Enron There's a fabulous book I recommend called the smartest guys in the room which details the rise and fall of Enron and it reads like a crime book because
00:12:29
Speaker
Okay, there's things like people putting company money in their personal offshore account to make it look like the next month is an increase over the current month by taking some of the excess profits and really shady things like that. And the way they accounted was absolutely no exception. Basically, they used a system of accounting
00:12:50
Speaker
So anyone sold oil and energy. So they accounted for profits in a very strange way. Normally, profits are counted when you get the checks from the people and you decrease the amount of money they own your books and you increase the cash that you actually have in your bank account.
00:13:09
Speaker
But Enron used a very obscure way of accounting and they only got away with it because the SEC was at the time known for not being very litigious or very strong. I mean it was the 1980s and they recorded all the profit that they would get from a contract for natural gas or whatever when they did the sale.
00:13:33
Speaker
which made their profits look really big on paper, but it also meant that they had to increase the number of sales that they did every month to have growth, which is a much less stable way of showing growth. It's really a more frantic way of growing.
00:13:49
Speaker
But they used it because when you evaluate, stock valuation is a whole thing. I mean, we could get into more economic and accounting principles at some point. They definitely deserve their own episode. But at the end of the day, it's good to know that accounting is used for a lot of good things. Every endeavor, every business, whatever you have, a club, needs to account for its things.
00:14:14
Speaker
And so use is a way of knowing where your endeavor stands. Before accounting was a big thing in Europe, people would be like, okay, I have this barrel and that barrel, I guess, I would have these coins. But then with you had accounting, they're like, okay, I'm like losing money this month. And because it's a way of knowing where people are, that's why you had things like Hindu Arabic numerals, the kind that you and me use every day being banned in Florence in favor of Rome numerals, because so they could be understood more easily by auditors and things like that.
00:14:44
Speaker
But accounting can be used validly for all sorts of evil too. Because not just good endeavors need to account for their things. Every nasty endeavor you've ever heard of probably has a ledger somewhere.
00:14:56
Speaker
And this deserves its own episode, but I'll briefly mention that IBM designed machines that were essentially big accounting machines that took in punch cards for Nazi Germany in use in the Holocaust.
Mathematics in Gambling
00:15:10
Speaker
So this also brings to a point, math doesn't have to be complicated for it to have bad impact. Anybody can understand accounting with a couple hours of directed tutoring.
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00:17:54
Speaker
The last thing that we're going to talk about on this episode, and I realize that the short episode, is gambling. Because gambling is a really interesting thing, because if it were understood en masse by people as a completely logical thing, nobody would gamble. The house only makes money if the rules are weighted in its favor.
00:18:11
Speaker
And that's the thing is that a lot of people look at gambling and see only that and think, why do people gamble? And there are actually secondary benefits that are used to keep people there. You can think of this as a smoke and mirrors behind the math, like alcohol, good company and, you know, discussions and things like that.
00:18:27
Speaker
And, you know, games. Game of cards is fun. Some people, like, you know, like games of cards. Some people like the blinking lights in slot machines. That's why penny slots are big amongst people who didn't grow up playing either arcade games or video games very much. It's a need for that sort of impulse stimulus.
00:18:46
Speaker
And so, how does the house do this? Basically, they analyze the game statistically, and this was done in the 1600s in a lot of places, because as people created gambling systems, people were like, oh, we could apply this fake math to real math and make sure that we increase our earnings by keeping people both engaged and winning less than we make.
00:19:10
Speaker
So, you know, for example, in roulette, in any game, if you bet both sides, you're going to lose a little bit of money. That's just how it works. And that's kind of the statistical basis of all gambling. So I'm going to give an example here of Blackjack.
00:19:26
Speaker
So Blackjack, the goal is to get as close to 21 as you can, or on 21, without going over. And the aces in this game are worth either 1 or 11 points, and face cards, meaning the Jack, the King, and the Queen, are worth 10 points.
00:19:43
Speaker
And the players are allowed to put down whatever cards they're dealt one at a time. They either hit or stand. Hit means they take another card, stand means they stay where they are. And if they go over 21, then they lose and the dealer gets their money, vice versa, and they win some money from the dealer.
00:20:05
Speaker
And the dealer actually has very specific rules. So in Blackjack, I'm just going to quote this. And this is actually from bicyclecards.com. When the dealer has served every player, the dealer's face-down card is turned up. If the total is 17 or more, it must stand. If the total is 16 or under, they must take a card.
00:20:25
Speaker
The dealer must continue to take cards until the total is 17 or more, at which point the dealer must stand. If the dealer has an ace, and counting it as 11 would bring the total to 17 or more, but not over 21, the dealer must count the ace as 11 and stand. So basically, it's an algorithm for how the dealer plays.
00:20:43
Speaker
And there's ways of getting around this, um, you know, like if you count cards, uh, you know, uh, and they don't shuffle the deck each time, you could, uh, if they play a lot of like high number cards, you're going to be like, Oh, they have a higher probability of playing low number cards. But I would never advise doing this at any casino because best case scenario, you get kicked out forever. Worst case scenario, you get dead. Um, there are casinos where they don't mess around with, uh, physical violence. And, uh, I mean, you, you went there, you knew what the deal was when you went in, don't count cards.
00:21:13
Speaker
And problem gamblers, interestingly, I've been shown by the Illinois Institute for Addiction Recovery to have a lack of norepinephrine, which is often a component of risk-seeking behavior because risk-seeking gives you adrenaline, which is norepinephrine. Sensation-seeking impulsivity, also traits of narcissism.
00:21:34
Speaker
And our editorial position here at Breaking Math is that no mental illness is a bad one, per se. Narcissism is viewed as a bad illness by a lot of people, but everything can be treated. To quote podcaster Marcus Parks, mental illness is not your fault, but it is your responsibility. So that was just a little diatribe. But it's interesting to note that these problems have a biological and psychological basis, which really shows how much of spoken mirrors this thing is.
00:22:04
Speaker
It also goes to show how profitable it is. For example, the early lottery system, which had tickets designed by Benjamin Franklin, who would actually use Leafs on a big roll of ink to verify identity. You'd verify your slip against the one that they had.
00:22:23
Speaker
And it was used to fund things like the revolution and the early United States government to a very large extent. I mean, the lottery in my home state of New Mexico, which I still reside in, is used for a scholarship. And I think the message can either be one, the gambling can be used for good things, but I think a bigger message is that we have the money to fix a lot of good problems already.
Responsible Use of Mathematics
00:22:48
Speaker
We just need to apply it. That's my little diatribe.
00:22:53
Speaker
Or every tool can be used for bad things, and mathematics is no exception. When you learn to wield a tool, whatever it is, learning about what it can do should always entail learning how you can harm yourself or others with what it does or makes. Humans have an uncanny ability to learn new things, and how to be careful with math, as well as science, should be one of them.
00:23:14
Speaker
I'm Sofia Baca and I'm losing my voice. But I was just going to mention that I was going to delve into IQ and racial science, but those really do need to be their own episodes. I'm on Twitter at Sci-Pod Sofia. That's Sofia with an F. And I'm also at Breaking Mouth Pod. That's the podcast's Twitter. We all post on that. And if you want a gift for someone for Christmas, why don't you get them a Tensor poster? We have that at Facebook.com slash Breaking Mouth podcast. Check it out and get it if that's your thing or someone you love staying.