That was exactly my first thought upon reading your first couple of paragraphs!

If anything, I think doing math has made me see the world LESS as a right-or-wrong thing. When you get math in your head, you see the strict, axiomatic formulation of it, which does lead to a right-or-wrong (or undecidable) view of the mathematical world. But the contrast between the strict logic of math and the fuzzier nature of the non-mathematical world stands out, and I become less able to create that right-or-wrong binary. Thus I find myself hearing someone else's position, recreating the argument they might use to justify it, and then being able to say "That's a defensible argument", without being bound to agree with it. I've become more receptive, not less, to opposing points of view, as long as they can be reasonably justified with a logical argument.

Leaving Jordan Elleniceberg or whomever aside, the only reason anyone would ever work for Slate is because he/she is an utterly incompetent journalist. Slate is not a real news source any more than the SAT is a real math test.

I don't think one can really claim that the SAT is not a "real math test." Clearly the SAT is not particularly useful for distinguishing between people in the top 1% of math ability, but analogously the Putnam (which maybe you consider a "real math test") is pretty useless for distinguishing between people in the bottom 99%. The SAT is probably as good a test as any for assessing a person's ability at math to within about 5 percentile points. To do this, it sacrifices high-resolution for the very top students, but it is still a "real math test," just as the Putnam is a "real math test" that makes a big sacrifice on the lower end in order to gain accuracy at the top.

I disagree - I think there a quite a few good writers and reporters at Slate. Dahlia Lithwick's writings on the Supreme Court may be among the most interesting regular columns I read on the entire internet, for example, and William Saletan is also quite good. I find Kaus's writing structure tough to grok sometimes, and Hitchens is often almost unreadable, but they both bring up interesting viewpoints, whether or not I agree with them.

*sighs*

I was just engaging in some good-natured and ignorant elitism, and you guys had to come and ruin the fun.

Okay.... I have no clue who half those Slate writers are, so I'll just take your word for it. However, I find most journalism to be ridiculously dumb!--and, in part, perhaps, because the cardinality of the intersection between math-knowledgables and journalists is small, articles about math can pretty much be expected to be dumb. They seem to rival articles about education and especially math education for the title of "most worthless reporting ever." Think, for example, "The Incredibles," or "Amazing +: Perfect Girls...," both of which appeared in, of all papers, The New York Times. Oh yeah--my cousin was interviewed for "The Incredibles"--she was the one with 3.931 GPA. I gave her a call; turns out, they made it up. Surprise, Surprise.

Let's follow this logic for a minute. Relative to what one could expect as common media knowledge, what are the things I know most about? Well, math and high school, and, most of all, excelling in high school. In each and every one of those areas, the popular press has succeeded in giving abysmal coverage. Yet most people, who, perhaps, are not high school math students, don't share my particular expertise, so they can't detect the ridiculousness--and similarly, I don't notice the ridiculousness in their coverage of politics, world affairs, domestic issues that don't quite concern 15-year-olds, etc.

But does this give us any reason to assume those articles aren't ridiculous? Given the fact that the popular press can't come up with legitimate stories in any field about which I am reasonably knowledgable, is there any reason to suspect that an expert in Turkish history wouldn't find the recent coverage of Ataturk an oversimplified misrepresentation of his legacy? (Also, didn't he kill like a billion Armenians just randomly?) The answer--OF COURSE NOT! No one who actually knows something about X is going to be satisfied with popular press coverage about X.

Shouldn't this be obvious? There's a reason it's the popular press--it's intended for the masses. They don't have the time or the capacity to put together extensively researched, scholarly articles. How can we seriously expect anything more than dumbed down mediocre garbage from the popular press? So, in this sense, my point that you are always going to find the Slate coverage of math-related issues absurd still holds because to a truly all-informed reader, (nearly) everything on Slate is absurd.

Furthermore, (and this is the key), you can't criticize their coverage of math while exonerating their coverage of everything else. Their coverage of math doesn't satisfy you, being a (legitimate) math educator and such, but it works for about everyone else. And if you demand that other people dig deeper and find credible information on math and its actual role in society, you better do the same for the other guy's specialty. Of course, you weren't faulting individual readers so much as the writers, but you'd still have to come up with some reasoning as to why the writers should educate themselves about math and not, say, Turkey, beyond the level necessary to write for Slate. I'm not entirely sure if this can be done convincingly.

Granted, I make a few generalizations above, but eh, math is a turkey and so is turkey and, without bothering to read it, I still think Slate is dumb.

Oh yeah--I enjoyed your subtle demonstration that you know who I am. And I appreciate your pretending not to know it. Really and truly, thank you.

I don't think what's going on here is simply 'bad journalism'. I think it's a continuation of the commonly-held belief of non-math/science folks that "Math/science people are more intelligent than I am, but that's OK because I'm more creative/worldly/wise than they are, and it's the latter that really matters". In high school, you see this take the form of "Smart people get good grades, but that's OK because I'm cooler, and that's what matters." Of course, both these statements are completely false - they're a nice warm blanket for their ego, but they don't put food on the table.

As for the media, I think the internet has done us a great service by expanding (greatly) the variance of the quality of commentary. Very common media sources (network/cable news, Time, Newsweek, etc) have all slid to the common denominator, but there are many sources that are quite good. And by sources, I mean individual writers, not general websites. I ignore most of the social stuff at Slate, but I've found a few writers I really respect, and I read them primarily. When I read an article by someone not in that small set on Slate, I expect less, accordingly. So, while they may not have their Turkish history down, I write that off as ignorance of that author, not the whole site. Basically, I disagree with the assertion that to an expert, the mass media is always wrong - some of them will get it right. Moreover, what's the non-expert to do to get a little knowledge? Go to primary sources on everything? That's lunacy. Get a little surface knowledge from trusted sources - if it interests you enough, then go ahead and dive deeper. That's what a decent resource like Economist or certain Slate writers offers: the first cut that might make you interested enough to learn more.

Eh fine ok well your first point is one that I clearly ignored--and most likely shouldn't have since math especially gets that sort of treatment in American culture (as opposed to say, Romanian culture, where the taxicab drives all love math--according to Titu anyway ) I'm not quite sure it's limited to math and doesn't somewhat extend to knowledge in general, but eh--and on a sidenote, that whole compensation thing is utterly ridiculous--as in whoa you're better than me in this, but WE'RE ALL SPECIAL--and I can play... um... basketball, ergo we're equally cool. Sometimes people have to sit down and just say stuff like errr some people are just smarter than I and that's it.

Mathcamp '05:
Me: But I bet you don't play sports!
Alex: Errr actually I pwn at soccer (with a probability of 1.01)
Me (sarcastic): Um... Alex ok so you're better than I am in math, certainly, but also soccer? BUT I CAN SOLVE THE RUBIK'S CUBE! (I do think a better rebuttal might have been: I'm from New York. Period. End of contest.)

As for the mass media thing--in truth, I don't think stuff intended for mass consumption is really going to be all that informative. As you mention, Time, Newsweek and other broad audience things are just dumb . And stuff intended for increasingly specialized people is just going to be more helpful, so if you want to learn some stuff about Clinton vs. Obama, read your U.S. News, but if you want to actually know about politics, you're going to have to dig deeper (and take a look at a few roll calls and try your hand at interpreting them). In any case, you're right that trying to reduce all participants in mass journalism to one stereotype is obviously ridiculous--but I never pretended to be that serious about this anyway (and I still stand by the recommendation that in general, the Journal of American Political Ideology or whatever is going to have better explanations for the neocon failures than Slate--even though there may be one or two or 3.14159 Slate writers worth reading).

EDIT: No need to bother responding to this since clearly we're having a ridiculous debate anyway, and I think we pretty much agree. (And it shouldn't be terribly difficult to discern my attitude concerning our exchange from my initial post ).

umm...just a tad over -insert word i can't think of it- (ooh analystic)

Hrmmmm this debate is pretty suspic, but I actually think many journalists don't have junk knowledge on their topics... your point about not scrutinizing other topics in the same way as we do math is somewhat valid, but math is different in that if you take a random journalist, he/she is 101% more likely to know stuff about history than about math. I would also like to point out that newsmedia have this ridiculous tendency to recycle the same stories with the same point of view over and over again... the "overachieving" phenomenon (e.g., the NY times articles mentioned) is a classic example. Those articles tend to be the worst and tend to obscure the few that bring up interesting and original points.

P.S. As you should be able to tell with a probability of 1.01, that quote was not quite verbatim.