Are we putting too much trust in algorithms and the mathematics upon which they are built?
Mordechai Levy-Eichel, a post-doc from Yale, argues it is precisely because politicians and bureaucrats try to extend their power through developments in mathematics and technology that we should try to understand and integrate the art and beauty behind mathematical ideas. Mathematics is a creative endeavor, Levy-Eichel argues, and the vitality of mathematical thinking can help us make better and more informed decisions in the future.
Levy-Eichel explains in this essay printed in Aeon:
Recognizing the role of mathematics in the history of how we think would actually make us more sophisticated in our political judgment. Those wishing to lend certainty and authority to their ideologies use mathematics, but they also abuse it. As the epitome of formal knowledge and the premier example of abstract reason, the specter of mathematics has haunted European thought for centuries. From theologians to politicians and economists, many have naively – even manipulatively – adopted mathematical methods to develop, and too often implement, overly simplistic theories of the world. Despite the repeated problems with this approach, the impulse has been seminal, formative and comparatively neglected.
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In some ways, mathematics is the hardest, and most realistic, art. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger, for instance, offers an example of an influential thinker who misrepresented mathematics as a kind of thinking divorced from the natural world. In the essay ‘Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics’ (1962), he writes: ‘In the mathematical project develops an obligation to principles demanded by the mathematical itself.’ In Heidegger’s view, the embrace of mathematics and technology brings a kind of repetitious, routinised, alienating world in its wake. The paradox, however, is that a desire to bypass repetitious exercises is precisely one of the things that motivates mathematicians. Elementary proofs are nothing if not ways to think about something in all applicable cases so that repetitive testing on each possibility is not necessary. Nothing could be more elegant. Describing technology and mathematical modes of thought as mechanistic and alienating mistakes the result for the process.
