Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps--and Better Brookings Senior Fellows? (Yet Another Kevin Drum vs. Diane Ravitch Edition)

Kevin Drum writes:

The Washington Monthly: [Re] Diane Ravitch's op-ed about math instruction in the Wall Street Journal, I've now learned of two [more errors]: [Ravitch writes:] "Attempts to solve problems without basic skills caused some critics, especially professional mathematicians, to deride the 'new, new math' as 'rainforest algebra'." This is woefully misleading. The person who coined the term "rainforest algebra" was Marianne Jennings. She isn't a professional mathematician, she's a business professor at Arizona State University and a well known conservative columnist. [Ravitch writes:] "A new textbook, Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers, shows how problem solving, ethnomathematics and political action can be merged." Rethinking Mathematics is not a textbook. It's a collection of articles that provide suggestions for math projects to be used at various grade levels.... "Textbook" implies a primary text... suggests that it's meant to be the sole text used. A resource book, conversely, is meant for occasional use.... There's nothing insidious about a math resource book that focuses on social justice, just as there's nothing insidious about a resource book aimed at Christian schools that focuses on math problems taken from the Bible. I Kings 7:23 might make a good geometry unit, for example.*

That's three factual errors in the first four paragraphs of Ravitch's op-ed. This is not a good track record.

But this quality work is about what we have seen over and over again from the Wall Street Journal editorial page, no? The surprising thing is not that a writer for the Journal editorial page is so... misleading, but that the Brookings Institution doesn't have better... quality control.

---

*Kevin is undertaking high-class snark here, intelligible only to those who know the Hebrew Bible extremely well. The verse is:

And [Solomon] made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about.

It's round--it's a circle. It's ten cubits across. It's thirty cubits in circumference. In short, the Hebrew Bible says pi = 3. Not 3.14, 3. Not 22/7, 3.

Comments

[panochia]

Or 355/113 note-first three odd numbers doubled.

[Gene O'Grady]

It was once my impression that, disagree with her or not, Ravitch was someone to take seriously.

Do I conclude that that is no longer the case?

[Stuart]

"Kevin is undertaking high-class snark here, intelligible only to those who know the Hebrew Bible extremely well."

This is the soft bigotry of low expectations applied to American knowledge of the text of the Bible. Ignorance of the Bible among those who claim to be true believers should be even more of a scandal than ignorance of math among those who learn it only reluctantly.

[Brian]

One of Yahweh's subtler, but most impressive, miracles.

[Ellen1910]

Well; if you're going to depend on a slap-dash translation.

The proper translation is "it was sorta round all about."

[John Emerson]

There are also the waters above the firmament.

[piotr]

Dear Dr. DeLong, this is from interview of Bush with The Guardian:

PRESIDENT BUSH: I walked away from Kyoto because it would damage America's economy, you bet. It would have destroyed our economy. It was a lousy deal for the American economy. I felt there was a better way. And that's why...

Could you comment on that? As a non-economist, I may be naive, but is there any particular difference in economic impact of carbon tax that would stimulate private efforts to save fossil energy and a broad consumption tax that is contemplated as a part of "tax reform"? Both would be regressive but rewarding investment over consumption etc.

[Anand]

"In short, the Hebrew Bible says pi = 3. Not 3.14, 3. Not 22/7, 3."

Perhaps you could have stressed that 3.14 and 22/7 are better approximations of pi than 3. (Since pi is an irrational number, it cannot have a rational form like 22/7 or a terminating decimal expansion like 3.14.)

[khr]

3 versus 3.14159 is less than 5% measurement error. In a pre-industrial society. Doesn't strike me as a good reason to get snarky about.

[Strange Doctrines]

"...less than 5% measurement error..."

New suggested biblical disclaimer: "The following material should be approached with the understanding that the Word of God has a margin of error of at least +/- 4%."

[kharris]

High-class snark requiring knowledge of the Hebrew Testiment? No, no. You need only be aware of legislation submitted to the (I believe it was) Alabama legislature half way through the 20th Century.

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

BDL - "but that the Brookings Institution doesn't have better... quality control."

Conservatives need affirmative action too, you know.

[anne]

Diane Ravitch is a widely published, widely heralded professor of education from Columbia University, who has been battling the shades of John Dewey for decades for conservatives. That Ravitch might work out of any university or think tank or Brookings should not be the least surprising. There has for years been continual subtle and overt pressure to foster conservative education stances; thoroughness or fairness is seldom of concern.

[RT]

One doesn't need to be intimately familiar with the Hebrew Bible (or even the English translation of same) to get Kevin's joke; all one has to do is Google "I Kings 7:23".

[Matt Davis]

Richard Buckminster Fuller, who detested pi, created a fully-functional (though wildly complex) alternate math, where pi=3.

[CTW]

"But this quality work ..."

it's worse than "quality of work". those with political agendas routinely shade the truth in their favor, but we have moved dramatically toward routine lying. one should be skeptical of any politically motivated statement, but if it comes from certain sources, the best bet is that it is at most a half truth if not a flat out lie.

my formula is: absent evidence to the contrary to assume that any statement from a bush admin spokesperson is a lie and that any statement from a bush apologist - op-ed columnist, republican party loyalist, conservative think tank fellow, et al - is at best a half-truth. conservatives, of course, have analogous formulas for liberal sources.

this state of affairs does severe damage to public discourse. we can all help correct this by calling to task those of any political stripe who engage in such practices. and part of this is avoiding euphemisms. when someone says something that is untrue and they know, or should know it is untrue, call it what it is - a lie, whether due to malice or inexcusable ignorance.

prof delong is an exemplar of this policy, but I think his no doubt generous nature clouded his judgment here. it appears that ravitch fails the truth test unequivocally on inexcusable ignorance grounds and arguably on malice grounds. so, she's lying.

[Gene O'Grady]

Shades of Margaret Fuller. How can one detest pi?

[slamra]

". . . less than 5% measurement error . . ."

A faith-based Apollo 11 could've missed the moon and sailed out into space with a 5% error in trajectory. (Moon diameter = c.3500km, and distance from earth is roughly 385,000km -- so a literal "moon shot" must miss the center of the moon by less than 1% to hit it).

According to the wikipedia, several other pre-industrial societies had gotten way closer than that at or before the fall of Rome.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi#History_of_.CF.80

"An Egyptian scribe named Ahmes is the source of the oldest known text to give an approximate value for π. The Rhind Mathematical Papyrus dates from the Egyptian Second Intermediate Period—though Ahmes states that he copied a Middle Kingdom papyrus—and describes the value in such a way that the result obtained comes out to 256 divided by 81 or 3.160.

The Chinese mathematician Liu Hui computed π to 3.141014 (good to three decimal places) in AD 263 and suggested that 3.14 was a good approximation.

The Indian mathematician and astronomer Aryabhata gave an accurate approximation for π. He wrote "Add four to one hundred, multiply by eight and then add sixty-two thousand. The result is approximately the circumference of a circle of diameter twenty thousand. By this rule the relation of the circumference to diameter is given." In other words (4+100)×8 + 62000 is the circumference of a circle with diameter 20000. This provides a value of π = 62832/20000 = 3.1416, correct when rounded off to four decimal places.

The Chinese mathematician and astronomer Zu Chongzhi computed π to 3.1415926 to 3.1415927 and gave two approximations of π 355/113 and 22/7 in the 5th century."

[Ottnott]

"khr" wrote:
"3 versus 3.14159 is less than 5% measurement error. In a pre-industrial society. Doesn't strike me as a good reason to get snarky about."

It wouldn't be a good reason to get snarky about the technical abilities of pre-industrial civilizations. It is, however, a good reason to get snarky about a source that a disturbing number of Americans regard as an infallible source of unquestionable truth.

Believe it or not, I've seen a Christian defense of the I Kings 7:23 version of pi. It required one to use the outer diameter of 10 cubits, assume some reasonable wall thickness for the vessel, and then use the INNER circumference for the 30 cubits.

The math works out reasonably, but the notion of measuring the INNER circumference is pretty ridiculous.

[Jeff]

When reading the New Testament one finds the answers to the questions of life in the Holy Trinity of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. Reading the Old Testament the answers are limited only to God. So perhaps if the passage had instead been placed in 1st John it would have read:

"And [Christ] made a molten sea, 9.64 cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was 5.00 cubits: and a line of 30.3 cubits did compass it round about."

Since, as we have seen, the New Testament includes three significant figures in the work.

[lcr]

khr, I'm with you. Approximate measurements, it being unimportant to the text. As someone else wrote somewhere else on the web, "One answer I would give to this embarrassing (to me) guy, would be that maybe the circumference actually measured 30.3l213 cubits and the diameter measured 9.64866 cubits. The ancients who perhaps hated fractions as much as school kiddies do today, simply gave the numbers as 30 and 10 respectively. Why should they not? We do know that they were not into the precision fetish that we are today."

This passage in itself tells us nothing about whether the Bible is true or what the Bible has to say about pi, then. This post tells us again how snarky people can be about at least some forms of religion -- and then they wonder why people think Gore was less religious.

It might really, really be a good idea for the snarky posters to chill a little on the religious attacks, and not on the ground of Pascal's wager. Just figure it's called being nice to devout beliefs of people you disagree with, and perhaps we can all find some transcendent ideal there that we can all embrace.

::firmly siding with khr::

[Ottnott]

lcr, I'm sympathetic to the points you and khr made...until I remember that there are a large number of people, including some of the most politically powerful people in this country that are using the Bible to tell us how we must live our lives.

One important justification they give for attempting to submit us to the rule of the Bible is that it is the infallible word of God.

If those political leaders viewed the Bibble as you apparently do--a document written by real humans subject to all the usual quirks and flaws and passions of real humans--then I would agree that the snark is unnecessary. Unfortunately, the people in power in Washington today do not share your enlightened view.

That said, don't you wonder why, if the writer of I Kings 7:23 was just rounding things off for convenience, the passage includes the competely redundant measure of circumference? The writer tells us that the vessel is round, and tells us the diameter. From that, the circumference is known.

[ArC]

One of the inspired apologia for this verse, BTW, tries to make a distinction between the inner circumference and outer diameter, IIRC.

Personally, I'm happy to chalk it up to literary license.

(But if anyone wants to go into a long discussion of how fractions and even irrational numbers were denoted in the ancient Hebrew system, I wouldn't mind reading that.)

[Basharov]

"High-class snark requiring knowledge of the Hebrew Testiment? No, no. You need only be aware of legislation submitted to the (I believe it was) Alabama legislature half way through the 20th Century."

Sigh. A bill was submitted to the Indiana Legislature in 1897 by a crackpot pseudo-mathematician who believed that he had solved the problem of how to square a circle. The lower house passed the thing without paying any attention to what the bill said (it was written in such a confusing manner that nobody cold figure out what it said anyway). An Indiana newspaper noticed the stupidity of the bill, and when the Indiana Senate got around to looking at it, killed the thing, but not before the "dumbest legislature on earth passed a law making the value of pi equal to 3" story became an impossible-to-kill myth.

[Basharov]

"The ancients who perhaps hated fractions as much as school kiddies do today, simply gave the numbers as 30 and 10 respectively. Why should they not? We do know that they were not into the precision fetish that we are today."

I suggest you make a visit to the Pyramid of Kukulkan at Chichen-Itza, in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico (built sometime around 1000 A.D.), at the vernal equinox in March. If it's a sunny day (and you get there early so you can be at the front of the 100,000 or so tourists who show up for the display), you'll see the shadow of a snake undulate down the side of the pyramid, which, with a giant snake's head at the bottom of the steps leading to the top creates an amazing illusion of a living snake. I doubt if many engineers today could build something to such exacting standards, and I think that if you were to go back in time and tell those Mayan architects that they were not "precision fetishists," they would throw you into the Sacred Cenote.

The same would be true of the architects of the Great Pyramids, who were obsessed with making sure the proportions were correct down to the fraction of a cubit.

You can't excuse the innumeracy of the writers of the Bible by saying "well, it was close enough for government work". What you can do is ask one of the Biblical literalists to explain how come God thinks pi is equal to three and watch him (seldom her) dodge all over the place until he end up accusing you of being a pawn of Satan.

[Firebug]

While the citation of 1 Kings 7:23 might hold some heft against Biblical inerranists, it is not as severe a problem to those of us in the Christian church who hold less literalist views. In order for this argument to be dispositive, one would need to assume that (1) the figures given were meant to be exact, and (2) that the "molten sea" was a perfect circle. Neither assumption, in my opinion, is supportable.

[chris Borthwick]

And (while I'm confident that the true answer is that the chroniclers were ignorant and uncaring) it's not difficult to square the figures, if not the circle; the Bible doesn't say the pot was cylindrical, and if one measurement is the brim distance and the other the widest/narrowest/average circumference, no contradiction.

[Jonathan Goodman]

As a mathematician and father I have to say that Ravitch is closer to the truth than Drum here. The "fuzzy math" programs bad and the people who develop them (e.g. the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics) are mostly incompetent. Mathematicians and quantitative scientists who have looked at the curricula agree by huge margins, and most of them are liberals (like me). Check out the web sites mathematicallycorrect.com or www.nychold.com for details.

[Ottnott]

You'd think that the party "closer to the truth" wouldn't need false information to support her case.

[Jonathan Goodman]

I think Ravitch is an over the top educational conservative (in the old sense of conservative -- yesteryear is best). I also think she gets lots of things wrong, as she did in this case. Fuzzy math is bad and what she says about it is an exaggerated version of the truth. Check out the web site mathematicallycorrect.com for details.

[de broek]

please read the article on the site about PI
and it will give you the true answer about pi in the bible