Mathematics as magic to be taken at face value

published Aug 14, 2013 01:46 by admin ( last modified Aug 14, 2013 01:46 )

Mathematics is high status, probably due to its success in physics, and because of this it is used in fields and applied to problems that are too unstructured and messy for it to make any sense.

In fact sometimes it is used to obscure: You simply take some maths that is really hard to understand and rely on people not being able to follow your train of thought through it and accept your conclusions at face value. It's like HC Andersen's story about the Emperor's new clothes.

One example is complex mathematic functions applied to finance, but now we can read about another case applied to psychology. I think this quote from the linked article speaks all by itself (my boldface):

Upon reading a 1963 paper on Lorenz equations “with some difficulty,” Brown realized that the equation Fredrickson and Losada used to calculate the critical positivity ratio had no connection to their emotion data: Regardless of the volunteers’ data points, the equation would simply generate the same, meaningless number.

And this was a paper that gained quite some status:

“What’s shocking is not just that this piece of pseudomathematical nonsense received 322 scholarly citations and 164,000 web mentions, but that no one criticized it publicly for eight years, not even supposed experts in the field,” Sokal says.