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It is harder every day to have a discussion about any public issue that does not slide quickly into anger over irreconcilable differences. This is partly due to massive, deliberate attempts to pollute our language with lies and conspiracy theories untethered to any notion of reality, a fog of misinformation applied mostly by the far right. But there are other, less obvious culprits. One of the big ones is not political, it’s mathematical. And diabolical.
It is one of the most pernicious concepts ever invented by mathematicians, the notion of the average — a concept that is virtually meaningless, that not only has nothing to offer our understanding of the world, but actively interferes with it. Continue reading