I agree, each UK citizen is infused with the original sin of being a colonizer and their opinion should be discarded until they purge this sin from their bodies through appropriate cleansing rituals.
Perhaps some form of self-flagelation or bloodletting?
Goodness gracious. Invoking religious self-harm imagery in response to mild criticism feels wildly out of pocket. Do you genuinely think anti-colonial activism demands this or anything even resembling this of post-colonial states?
It feels like a really silly way to deflect from the concept that maybe average UK citizens do benefit in some way from their colonial past.
Do you not find it out of pocket that you made a judgement about the validity of someone's opinion based on their (not even birth) nationality? Is there anything they could say or do to make their opinion worth listening to?
> Is there anything they could say or do to make their opinion worth listening to?
That’s the thing, I didn’t say their opinion isn’t worth listening to or consideration in general. Acknowledging bias isn’t the same as discarding opinion.
It's not though. It's either being obtuse or outright silly. How exactly does "decolonisation" figure in any of the things they said?
> average UK citizens do benefit in some way from their colonial past.
Even if they do, which is debatable (i.e. it's not clear they benefit more from it than people living in other European countries which didn't have extensive colonial empires) what does this have to with nonsensical subjects being taught in universities?
I'm not sure. They did supposedly organized "Decolonization in Mathematics" conference. I have no particular interest in figuring out what that means exactly on a non superficial level because it would be a waste of time.
I googled the term you put in quotes and found a lovely article in Nature that seems to indicate that it's mostly about correcting common lies in Mathematics history.
""
Fibonacci's sequence (i.e. 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, ...) was discovered in Africa long before the Italian wrote it down, in the form of Ghanaian textile cloth and Egyptian temple design. (1)
""
or:
""
It is long believed calculus was discovered by Leibniz and Newton, however there is evidence of Indians having discovered the subject 300 years earlier in the Kerala School. (2)
""
Fun trivia I guess. Also inconsequential if Fibonacci, Leibniz, Newton made their discoveries independently since further developments were based on their work.
It's like saying that Ancient Greeks and not Newcomen or Watt "invented" the steam engine... Again, interesting piece of historical trivia but hardly has much to do with physics as a science.
It's significant because we already have patterns of thought where we credit civilization and such to white people and it causes problems.
You might not realize it, but thousands of these tiny things over a lifetime creates a subconscious bias. And then that manifests in real ways. Like, for example, disregarding or discrediting an area of study you know nothing about based purely on the type of people who created the study.
I agree - trying to show that other people may have discovered things that we believe we did exclusively is abhorrent and those people deserve all the sanctions that we can impose on them.
I agree, each UK citizen is infused with the original sin of being a colonizer and their opinion should be discarded until they purge this sin from their bodies through appropriate cleansing rituals.
Perhaps some form of self-flagelation or bloodletting?
Goodness gracious. Invoking religious self-harm imagery in response to mild criticism feels wildly out of pocket. Do you genuinely think anti-colonial activism demands this or anything even resembling this of post-colonial states?
It feels like a really silly way to deflect from the concept that maybe average UK citizens do benefit in some way from their colonial past.
Do you not find it out of pocket that you made a judgement about the validity of someone's opinion based on their (not even birth) nationality? Is there anything they could say or do to make their opinion worth listening to?
> Is there anything they could say or do to make their opinion worth listening to?
That’s the thing, I didn’t say their opinion isn’t worth listening to or consideration in general. Acknowledging bias isn’t the same as discarding opinion.
> mild criticism
It's not though. It's either being obtuse or outright silly. How exactly does "decolonisation" figure in any of the things they said?
> average UK citizens do benefit in some way from their colonial past.
Even if they do, which is debatable (i.e. it's not clear they benefit more from it than people living in other European countries which didn't have extensive colonial empires) what does this have to with nonsensical subjects being taught in universities?
> what does this have to with nonsensical subjects being taught in universities
Since we’re bringing it back onto topic, has any university ever ran a “decolonised maths” program? What would that look like?
I'm not sure. They did supposedly organized "Decolonization in Mathematics" conference. I have no particular interest in figuring out what that means exactly on a non superficial level because it would be a waste of time.
I googled the term you put in quotes and found a lovely article in Nature that seems to indicate that it's mostly about correcting common lies in Mathematics history.
Seems relatively straightforward to me...
Things like:
"" Fibonacci's sequence (i.e. 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, ...) was discovered in Africa long before the Italian wrote it down, in the form of Ghanaian textile cloth and Egyptian temple design. (1) "" or: "" It is long believed calculus was discovered by Leibniz and Newton, however there is evidence of Indians having discovered the subject 300 years earlier in the Kerala School. (2) ""
Fun trivia I guess. Also inconsequential if Fibonacci, Leibniz, Newton made their discoveries independently since further developments were based on their work.
It's like saying that Ancient Greeks and not Newcomen or Watt "invented" the steam engine... Again, interesting piece of historical trivia but hardly has much to do with physics as a science.
It's significant because we already have patterns of thought where we credit civilization and such to white people and it causes problems.
You might not realize it, but thousands of these tiny things over a lifetime creates a subconscious bias. And then that manifests in real ways. Like, for example, disregarding or discrediting an area of study you know nothing about based purely on the type of people who created the study.
I agree - trying to show that other people may have discovered things that we believe we did exclusively is abhorrent and those people deserve all the sanctions that we can impose on them.
Where are those quotes from?
This appears to be the source: https://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/school-of-mathematics/about-us/eq...
And don't forget people who like me are in the UK but weren't born there.