NaMP

I am a unicorn. Majestic, noble, shits rainbows… the whole shebang.

A photorealistic self-portrait.

Apparently.

See, I’m a “math person”. Which entails a laundry list of up- and downsides, just like a unicorn. I’m magic, but also people want to kill me for my blood.

Being a “math person” wasn’t particularly fun early on, it meant I sat alone at the back of the classroom with a text book from the middle school because I was so ahead of my peers. It meant a dangerously inflated ego for a teenager, convinced he would one day “rule over all the dummies.” In college, it became a muse that inspired a passion for teaching that has yet to genuinely burn out. As I perused my way through grad school and early professionalism, “math person” remained a feather in my cap and a guiding star through windfall and heartbreak.

Windfall looked like being prized for my discerning analytical mathematics skills. Heartbreak looked like the rest of the world staring back blankly at discerning analytical mathematics skills.

Heartbreak wasn’t a torrent. Heartbreak was a steady drip, slowly corroding my surface and strength. A broken record I found myself listening to on repeat —

“Oh I’m not a math person.”

It came up with family, friends, students, dates, lovers, coworkers. Early on, I thought “yeah, I get that because I AM a math person and I’ve been told it’s very rare.” Time goes on though and different people sing the same song. Slowly, I start to feel more like, “okay, but what does that even mean for us specifically?”

For the wide majority of people I met, “I’m not a math person,” means “I don’t want to talk about this anymore, let’s talk about the Real Housewives.”

That’s okay. I don’t need everyone to engage me at exactly my level. But still, there’s a large amount of dismissal there, and it’s pretty reductive and a tad suspicious given how prevalent it is. Like, sure you don’t want to talk about math, but it’s how I see and understand the world so if I’m talking it’s going to involve some math. You not wanting to talk about it means, to me, that you’re uncomfortable interpreting or discussing my viewpoints. All of the sudden, “I’m not a math person,” isn’t just a throwaway vulnerability, it’s the genuine end of understanding. Because you’ve also established me as a math person, and in the US the underlying current of anti-intellectualism pits us against each other in that framework.

As an adult, it’s been rather unfortunate. I grew up nurturing and loving myself for this “gift” that now leaves me feeling alone and misunderstood. Moreover, being a “math person” means I see all of the bullshit inherent in “I’m not a math person.”

Do you know what math is?

In my experience, most people do NOT know what math is. Not entirely, at least.

Earnestly, enough about me because it’s weirdly actually painful to ramble about this, and my go-to defense of abstraction kicks in naturally. This is about you, or more appropriately y’all.

Brazenly, in the digital age I don’t think you get to be “not a math person,” anymore. I think resting on that laurel, or rather assuming it’s normal and healthy, is actively doing harm to our society.

To clarify, there’s definitely nuance to be had. A lot of people I encounter who fall into the “not a math person” group tend to use it as a way to avoid the onus of being a critical consumer of information.

That absolutely has to stop. In the last four years, we have seen the damage to be done through the spread of misinformation. There are at least two culprits in that crime, because the reader picks up the trash and considers it truth. As a country (and perhaps as a species) we HAVE to get better at consuming critically.

The part that frustrates and resonates most with the “not a math person” mindset is the undeniable truth that the “digital age” is perhaps more appropriately thought of as the “data age.” Every day, the whole of humanity is producing an amount of data on the petabyte scale. If you’re unfamiliar (which a “not a math person” would be), a petabyte is a million gigabytes or a thousand terabytes. My laptop has about 500 gigabytes of storage built in, so together we’re producing at least a million laptops worth of data every day.

DOMO regularly produces infographics that showcase data production in the current age.

You might start to think, “not all of that data is math, what’s the point.”

All of that data is numbers, even the words. I say that so strongly because even for the parts that I might actually be wrong about, the majority of ways in which that data is used focuses on its numerical aspects. Twitter doesn’t care that you specifically use the word “tender” over “tendies” in your shitpost about baby Yoda. Twitter cares about how many people are like you. The data age moves on numbers, and on actual mathematics.

Which is to say, the majority of people also use the phrase “not a math person,” to mean “I’m not good at adding and subtracting numbers in my head quickly.”

No one cares, calculators do that. Arithmetic is part of mathematics, not all of it. Math is an understanding of patterns and the interpretation and abstraction of those patterns across situations. Similar to illiteracy, which is a lack of understanding of words in context, not understanding numbers in context is called innumeracy.

Pause and think about that comparison. Think about how you would feel as an adult in the US if you were illiterate.

…

You might actually be innumerate, but that’s a more dire problem in my mind, and something you should feel some impetus to work on.

Put more urgently, the current pandemic (CoViD-19 for the odd reader from the future) was and still is worsened by how wildly innumerate we are as a country. When I first saw the posts about “flattening the curve,” my initial thought was “that’s great except the average American doesn’t understand what the fuck the curve even is, and certainly not what it implies to ‘flatten it.’”

Beyond being ugly, this graph is genuinely frustrating for those who haven’t had to interpret a graph in 10+ years and who might not have been good at that in the first place.

In my head, this problem only gets worse and does so increasingly fast. The urgency of understanding the rampant data of the world becomes more and more pressing. The “not a math person” stance is entrenched in a childish demand for willing ignorance toward complacent consumerism. A child does not understand that eating more and more will just make it sick. A child is necessarily innumerate. Y’all are adults, so what’s your excuse?

Realistically, the onus isn’t just on the “not a math person.” I don’t genuinely expect everyone to become a “math person,” in the way that I am. And it’s partially up to myself and others like me to communicate math like “flatten the curve” in a way that’s more accessible.

I am asking that an effort be made to meet the “math people” closer to half way.

Learn what the curve is and how it moves. Learn where the numbers are right now and where they need to go.

Honestly, I think that you’ll be left behind if you don’t. The data age doesn’t seem to be stopping, and it’s going to consume you as numbers whether or not you want to learn the language.

Sincerely Not a NaMP,

August