Episode 190 - Layers in Truth Seeking, Smart Toilets, and Set Theory Counting
Today's solo episode covers:
- Peter Boghossian's Resignation Letter and the Evolution of the Academy away from Truth Seeking to Ideological Rigidity
- How to create layers of communities for truth and peace
- The latest news in smart toilets, promise of health plus security concerns
- The set theory principle of inclusion and exclusion in set theory and how the mathematical jump from "union" to "addition" is a difficult one
Links
Peter Brohossian: My University Sacrificed Ideas for Ideology
Cogent Social Sciences: The Conceptual Penis (peer reviewed!)
WSJ: Smart toilets will step in for Health Monitoring
Wikipedia: Inclusion-Exclusion Principle
Related Episodes
Episode 184 on Academic Freedom
Episode 114 on Smart Toilets
Transcript
Max Sklar: You're listening to The Local Maximum Episode 190.
Time to expand your perspective. Welcome to The Local Maximum. Now, here's your host, Max Sklar.
Max: Welcome, everyone! Welcome. You have reached another Local Maximum. We're going to do a solo show today. Maybe this is going to be a quick solo show because this is just off of the double two-part episode that I did with Aaron last week on our experiences on 9/11, before and after that lasted—two episodes. I'm really happy how it came out. Kind of interested in what the feedback—it’s very different sort of thing than what we usually do, but there is video for that.
If you are interested in seeing the video, you can go on YouTube or Odysee, and see me and Aaron discuss this stuff in person. If you just listen to it, it's the previous two episodes on your podcast app.
This is Episode 190. Whenever it's a whole number—divisible by 10, I like to sometimes, when it's divisible by 10, do a solo show and reset things, and summarize a little bit. I've got a little sore throat over the last couple of days. I've got my nice tea here with honey in it. Hopefully, I'll be good to go. But we'll see how much I get. Essentially, three topics to get through today, which I hope you'll join me for.
First is we're going to talk about an article by Peter Boghossian, who just essentially, it's a letter of resignation from his position at Portland State University because according to him, the university system no longer seeks the truth. It’s now openly ideological. I want to talk about that letter a little bit. It's very interesting, actually. His background is very interesting. Also, combine it with some of my ideas with academic openness and seeking the truth.
The second thing I wanted to get to today—a smart toilet update because Episode 114, which I did with Aaron last year on smart toilets. I think it’s one of my favorite episodes of all time on Local Maximum. Guess what? The Wall Street Journal is talking about smart toilets. I want to talk about what they said.
Finally, for those of you who want a math discussion—I love doing math discussions on the show. You will wait until the end. I am going to talk about the inclusion and exclusion principle, which also involves layers. Today's theme is layers because everything involves layers, especially the toilet. But also the idea of academic openness and having different groups. I'll talk about that in a second.
Let's start off with the Peter Boghossian article. He actually posted this in the Bari Weiss Substack. For those of you who already know some of his activism he did a couple years ago. I'll get into that in a minute because it's pretty hilarious. His article is entitled, ‘My University Sacrificed Ideas for Ideology. So Today I Quit’. The subtitle is: The more I spoke out against the illiberalism that has swallowed Portland State University, the more retaliation I faced.
It's an open letter of resignation from his university. I usually don't read—I'm not going to read the whole thing verbatim. There are a couple of paragraphs that I do want to read, and I do want to quote.
He goes on:
“Over the last decade, it has been my privilege to teach at the university. My specialties are critical thinking, ethics, and the Socratic method, and I teach classes like Science and Pseudoscience and The Philosophy of Education.
This kind of caught my eye a little bit because the idea of critical thinking and learning how to learn, and expanding your perspective — all part of the Local Maximum. Maybe, I'll get him on the show.
He continues:
“But in addition to exploring classic philosophers and traditional texts, I've invited a wide range of guest lecturers to address my classes, from Flat Earthers to Christian apologists, to global climate skeptics to Occupy Wall Street advocates. I'm proud of my work. I invited the speakers, not because I agreed with their worldviews, but primarily because I didn't. From those messy and difficult conversations, I've seen the best of what our students can achieve. Questioning beliefs while respecting believers, staying even-tempered in challenging circumstances, and even changing their minds.”
Also an aside, not something people are good at these days. Okay, continuing to quote:
“I never once believe, nor do I now. But the purpose of instruction was to lead my students to a particular conclusion. Rather, I sought to create the conditions for rigorous thought to help them gain the tools to hunt and furrow for their own conclusions. This is why I became a teacher, and why I love teaching. But brick by brick, the university has made this kind of intellectual exploration impossible. It has transformed a bastion of free inquiry into a social justice factory, whose only inputs were race, gender, and victimhood, and whose only outputs were grievance and division.”
It goes on to state a lot of examples of this that are really telling. I encourage you to read the whole article. I'll post it on localmaxradio.com/190. The takeaway from me is that he feels that he's not working with reasonable people who are open to questioning, and open to having their assumptions challenged or open to justifying what they're doing. The university system has been taken over by a rigid ideology. That's a big problem. I think either one day it'll break or the fever will break, or new institutions will take its place because ignoring reality is, in the long term, an unsustainable strategy. Could be sustainable in the short term, lead to bad consequences, but long term, it's unsustainable. If you want to think long term, you think “Okay, how do we get beyond this?”
Peter Boghossian did a little bit of activism in the past — this is hilarious. When he published fake papers in academic journals. Why would you publish a fake paper in academic journals? He was trying to show that they were not serious because these things were deliberately pseudoscience. But they reached the conclusions that the journals were looking for, or they were in the style of the journals looking for. These were in peer-reviewed journals.
One from 2017, I think this was this first one, was titled — and I'm not making this up — The Conceptual Penis As A Social Construct, published in the peer-reviewed Cogent Social Science. In this paper, he argues that a penis is not a real thing. It's really an abstract concept.
Quote in the abstract:
“We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood, not as an anatomical organ, but as a social construct isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity.”
This thing goes on and on. This just kind of made it up. This crap just got posted — no one noticed. So he kept — and no one noticed. No one said, “Oh, I better make some changes.” So he kept doing more, and they just got increasingly absurd from there. He kept getting them into journals. It's not hard to see why the academy doesn't like him. They're probably saying that he's making a mockery of their system of course. It's really the system that's making a mockery of itself by publishing this stuff. I mean, there's a point — it's not like an open journal where everyone can publish. They have standards. They have peer review. He's just stress testing it, and they fail the stress test. It's like if you try to get all these weapons past TSA, and you just go right past easily, again, maybe they're not keeping us safe. Same thing’s here.
But the academy will resort to intimidation tactics rather than dialogue, which is again, what happens when people seek power over truth. You're not actually going to get a discussion. Ultimately, Peter Boghossian decided that he couldn't change the system from within, which is why he left, and which is why — we'd like to embark and talk about or hopefully, people embark on these long-term projects to build replacement systems. This is happening from everywhere — from money and finance to also education. It's been going on for a while, it's going to be a very long road. But I think in the end, it will be a worthwhile one.
Well, we talk about the future of all this stuff on this podcast — money and finance. We talk about crypto and Bitcoin, education. What is the future of education? What is the future of academia? Very hard to say. It feels like we've got an unsustainable path where it's getting increasingly insular. How long can that be sustained? Also, how long can the education bubble be sustained, where it's so expensive, but the value of it is uncertain? I'm not so sure. But I am excited to have more discussions about this on Local Maximum in the future.
I want to refer on this one to my idea of like layers of free speech and academic freedom that I talked about in Episode 184 — when I talked about academic freedom. I'd like to refine my idea to talk about layers in communities in general that help us figure out who we're going to interact with, and how to find truth, and how to figure out if you're either truth-seeking community —- or it doesn't have to be truth-seeking community — if your community, or society, or country is a healthy one. If you have a country, or society, or community, one thing to ask is, “What ideas kind of need to be universally accepted among this group?” If the answer is none — if you want a global community, and you want to avoid having some Universalist idea that everybody has to follow. Well, it's not going to work well without conflict.
Even if the rule in the UN with countries is, “Any country could do what it wants, and we're not going to intervene.” Well, but one country could attack another. You obviously don't have a — and then if you want to say, “Okay, no country can attack another.” That's already saying, “Well, here's kind of a universal idea. We want everyone to accept in order to maintain the peace.” So, you do have to have some sort of universally accepted norm to function as a society. The answer of “no universally accepted ideas”, I don't think holds up very well. But the answer of a broad range of ideas, a very broad range of ideas does seem to work.
Let me put it this way. If your society is very big, you want to have a set of universally accepted ideas that is very broad. In other words, it's a big tent. If you want a small group, then you could have a very narrow group of people who generally have the same ideas about things. In other words, it will work in layers. Many religious and political organizations work like that where there'll be umbrella organizations that have a much broader set of ideas for which the constituent parts kind of disagree.
I feel like that is — I mean, I talked about the idea of freedom of speech. We have a very, very broad freedom of speech throughout the country. But what kind of freedom of speech do you have in the university? I still think it should be very broad. I think that the ideas put forth actually, in this article by Peter Boghossian about really bringing in people you disagree with, and trying to have those discussions. In some cases, like Flat Earthers — it's people who might not be worth listening to academically, but it's actually a good practice to talk to people who you kind of disagree with, and sort of see, “Okay, how do we have this discussion without shouting each other down?” I feel like that is a good practice in an academic setting. I feel like we have to have that layer on top of it for academia.
I feel like what's happening now in academia is that the range of discussion and the rules of debate are getting very narrow, and it's becoming increasingly acceptable to bully and harass people who are outside that narrow range of debate. They're basically trying to run a broad truth-seeking operation — or at least they’re selling themselves as a broad truth-seeking operation — but they're acting like they're a very narrow cult-like situation. What's going to happen is either they're going to shrink, or they're going to make it out the other side, and ultimately, the fever will break — like I said before. I don't really know what will happen, but the situation is unsustainable the way I see it.
Alright, so enough of that. I feel like I'm not terribly — I wish I was a little bit more articulate on this issue, so I seek to be. That’s why I talk about it more. If you have any thoughts on how academic freedom should work, or what's going to happen there or what's a good way to have these discussions or to deal with people who might not be interested in rational debate? Please go on my localmaxradio.com or send me an email localmaxradio@gmail.com.
Alright, next up — this is the one you've been waiting for — smart toilets. It is from the Wall Street Journal. Smart toilets are back in the news. They have the section — “The Future of Everything” section. Again, one of my favorite episodes on Local Maximum was Episode 114: Biden joins the Podoverse — which that didn't last very long. Smart toilets — really funny discussion. I'm not going to go through all our smart toilet puns and jokes today. I think one of the questions is, “Is this something we really need?” Maybe? I'll leave that up to you. In episode 114, we talked about the Stanford toilet. All these universities are getting involved. They want to redesign your toilet. The Stanford toilet is also the lead in this one, but there's also a Duke toilet — we'll get to in a minute.
So I quote:
“These smart facilities are designed to look out for signs of gastrointestinal disease, monitor blood pressure or tell you that you need to eat more fish, all from the comfort of your personal throne.”
Now, there's also a proposal from Duke University, which I'm calling the “Duke Toilet”. It analyzes the contents of your flush, and it tells you if you are getting the right amount of fiber and that sort of thing — will tell you how to change your diet. Then, I'm going to quote someone from Medic.Life.
In the article:
“If you want someone to use something, it has to be incredibly simple”, says Chad Adams, President and Chief Executive of the company Medic.Life, which is working to get FDA clearance for its Medic.Lav smart toilet. “Everybody has to go to the bathroom.”
Now, we talked before, “How do you make sure it's the right person?” Okay, there's that thing, maybe it could tell. If I remember correctly, the one proposal is to take pictures of your butthole. I don't know if we want that. Medic.Lav wants to sell these things to assistive living facilities, which makes sense. It's probably a good idea if you're an assisted living facility to check up on your health.
My main concern here with this kind of technology, and I think the main concern for the public is privacy. I would like to see all of the upsides of these investments. Health monitoring can not only save your life, but it can help you live a better quality of life. Think about it. Think of you getting diet recommendations — personalized diet recommendations so that you can wake up with more energy, healthier; you're better overall. But this underscores the need to think security and privacy first in terms of internet technology. I think that's where we need to go. This is not 2005, where you put up a page in PHP and have people send you all their information, and just mash it together, and see what you get. We are getting into some really sensitive stuff these days. We need to think security and privacy first.
According to the article:
A 300-person survey conducted by the Stanford team found that one third of respondents were uncomfortable with the concept of a smart toilet that collects health data, with many citing privacy as a chief concern. Respondents were especially uncomfortable with the camera-based approach — yes, that camera-based approach. More than half, however, were at least somewhat comfortable with a smart toilet.
I think for me, I don't want this data to be used against people — to be able to be used in investigations. For example, what if they can see what drugs someone has taken? Or if they can use it to get information about someone's sex life, and all that stuff? There's a lot of talk right now, but isolating the unvaccinated, and a lot of propaganda — I don't know. Everyone's putting on their pages that they got vaccinated, which is really weird. I can tell you guys, I got vaccinated, but I'm not putting it proudly on my profile. I've noticed people, “I won't associate with people unvaccinated.” I mean, it doesn't make any sense because if you're vaccinated, why would you have to worry?
I feel there's a lot of hateful propaganda towards people who have a difference of opinion and made a different choice. That only underscores the need to better protect health data for the future because I don't know who they're going to go after in 10 years. They could be going after anyone. The mob is going this way and that way. If we're going to bring these smart toilets into our home, I want the security system to be ironclad, that the data couldn't be used for—- essentially, we could somehow build models that might give us personalized recommendation and alert the people who need to be alerted if there's a problem, but also something where there's no backdoor to be hacked by either criminals or the police or the government, or anyone like that.
But on the plus side — there is a big plus side here. The plus side is there is a real need for this type of medical innovation. Doctors don't have a lot of data to go off when they treat you. You just come in, they have maybe 30 minutes to make a decision — and that's it. The machine learning approach that can take into account all your data and look to personalized recommendations can really go a long way in assisting and improving your health, especially for those small decisions that you make every day like, “How are you going to change your diet?” What exercises should I do? What supplements should I be taking?” Doctors don't have the time to sit down hours, and hours, and hours, and go through this with you — for most people at least. This could be a very helpful piece of technology I actually believe so. Given the caveats that I mentioned before, I would bring a smart toilet into my home. Sure, I am very forward-thinking, very pro-technology. We all are here on Local Maximum.
Finally, my last discussion of layers. We're going to go into a math topic. This topic is a topic in propositional logic. It's the idea of having a set of objects — a set of mathematical objects and trying to count them. It's a counting problem. Counting is one of the main problems in mathematics. The main principle I want to go over today is something called the “inclusion-exclusion principle”. Very basic and it’s pretty intuitive, and it's very important. If you're a high school student, it’s a good idea to understand this.
The question is this, “If I have two mathematical sets of objects, and I know how much are in each of them — this one has 20 members, and this one has 30 members — and I put them together. How big is the resulting set?” Well, you could say, “ You could just add the two sizes. This one is 20, this one is 30. Maybe the total has 50.” But that doesn't really work if they're not disjoint. In other words, if they overlap. Let's say that they have 10 overlapping. Really, the first set has 20 people, the second set has 30 people, but actually, 10 people are in both sets. This is a good problem. Even younger in grade school, you can kind of go through this problem where in the end, you have to subtract 10. If you just add them together and get 50, you counted that group twice, or in both groups.
To help with this, you can kind of think of a Venn diagram, and the two set example is very difficult. If you think of a Venn diagram with two circles. You have one circle on the right, one circle on the left. You add them together, and then there's that little strip — it looks like an ellipse, but it's not really an ellipse because it has those two pointy things at the end. But the intersection of the two circles, when you add the number of items in the two circles together, that gets counted twice. Then, you have to subtract that away.
Oftentimes, the definition given as the sum of the — and I don't like this as a definition, but it's a mathematical fact — it's that the count of the union of two sets equals the count of the first set plus the count of the second set, minus the count of the intersection of the two sets. That the last part is subtracting off the people are counted twice. Another kind of balanced way to look at it is the union of the sets plus the intersection of the sets equals the first set plus the second set. That's kind of an interesting identity. Again, oftentimes, this is given kind of definitionally — which I don't really like in the architecture of mathematics.
Let's see what's going on with a three-set example because you can see what's kind of getting more complicated. Let's say you have three sets now. Now, you can imagine in your mind a Venn diagram with three circles. Now, there are a bunch of overlaps — each circle overlaps with the other one. Then, there's that tiny middle piece where all three of them overlap. What you have to do is you have to add all the sets together — A plus B plus C. But now the overlaps are counted twice, and that little piece in the middle that's counted three times.
First, you subtract all the overlaps. There are three overlaps, but each of those overlaps contains that middle piece. Now, the middle piece is missing entirely because you added it three times now you subtracted it three times. Now, you just have to add it back in. Again, you get A plus B plus C, minus A intersection B, minus A intersection C, minus B intersection C, plus A intersection B intersection C. That's to get the size of the whole union. If you didn't follow that, that’s my point. It's already getting very complicated.
When you have more and more sets that are overlapping, you get this pattern where you add together the size of every set, then you subtract off the overlaps, then you add in the triple overlaps, then you subtract off the quadruple overlaps, and you add in the quintuple overlaps, and so on and so forth. So it's very complex in practice. Every potential collection of sets and their overlaps are involved in that calculation. I think that calculation is going to be exponential in time. I've thought about this problem a lot from a philosophical perspective — to back up a little bit. Because I think this is a problem where if you want to look at the simple Venn diagrams of two and three circles, those are kind of middle school math problems. If you look at the generalized problem of many sets and overlapping, that's sort of like a college math problem.
My concern is that while all this is a way to connect the concept of union and sum, it actually ends up being a very complicated as a definition. The question is, “Well, how do you connect the concept of union and sum?” They're very different if you think about it. Union means, “Hey, I have one set, and I have another set. I want the set of everything that's in either or both.” The sum means that you're actually just counting one group, and then adding another group, and not taking into account who's being counted twice. I think that definition, initially, we should probably keep the notion of addition and union somewhat separate. I prefer the idea of first introducing adding sets, not unioning them — which tells you which sections have a higher multiplicity.
In other words, don't think in terms of sets. Think in terms of multisets. In other words, if I add set A to set B, then essentially, what you'll have is one, if you have that double Venn diagram, you'll have ones in the section that's only A, ones in the section that's only B — because all those things are counted one time. Then, all the things in the middle section, you have twos because those are counted twice. Same thing with the triple Venn diagram, overlapping stuff in that piece in the middle, those are threes because those are counted three times. Now, you have a multiset where items are counted by multiplicity. They're not just inner set or outer set.
Once you say I'm dealing with multisets and not sets, addition becomes pretty natural. Then, the question becomes, “Okay, I want to get the union where I squash all of those down to one. How do I do that?” Well, now you don't really need a definition for that. Now, you already have that kind of layered cake of sets that you have — which have different multiplicities, and can kind of figure out how much to subtract out in order to get all those values down to one. You can then rederive the principle of inclusion and exclusion, which I think is pretty cool. I am thinking of doing some math lectures — not as part of the podcast, but as part of separate videos that I'm going to do. Maybe some additional content for Local Maximum in the future. Stay tuned to that. I'd really like to get your feedback on that and what you think.
This is just a very quick discussion. Always tough to discuss math concepts, but I always try. I think if you expand from sets to multisets, you can then derive the PIE — a pie. But the principle of inclusion and exclusion — that's my main point. Okay, so now we had a little bit of coming into works today. We had a little bit of smart toilets — how is that layered? Oh, there's so many layers to the smart toilets. Then, of course, layers of academic freedom and a non-freedom — all placed on top of each other. Thank you very much for listening today. See you next week on Local Maximum. Have a great week everyone.
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