Florida bans math textbooks to save students from ‘indoctrination’

Somehow I’d missed the fact that Florida recently banned 41% of proposed maths textbooks from it’s schools, mostly on the basis of them apparently being “too woke”. A list of the 54 textbooks that were rejected is available.

Or as the Florida Department of Education writes in their definitely not over-dramatic press release:

Florida Rejects Publishers’ Attempts to Indoctrinate Students

Pressed for examples of what that could even mean - exactly what level of Rich White Man Anti-America hatred mind control was infused into these books? - well the worst they managed to produce were a couple of examples that asked students to answer standard looking (to me?) math questions, which happened to use a dataset of Implicit Association Test results.

Now there is certainly substantial debate to be had as to to what extent the results of the IAT translate into real world racism. And perhaps the textbook authors could have been a little more careful with their chart titles given that the FAQ of Harvard’s “Project Implicit” says that the authors wouldn’t necessarily use the word “prejudice” in describing the results of the test. But “indoctrination” seems a strong word if this is the worst example the Florida DoE could come up with. I don’t think many people belive that the IAT measures nothing.

This is a math textbook. So a more relevant issue might be more whether the results have patterns that you can use math to describe, and, well, that seems pretty self-evident. Plus, if you were looking to argue that the IAT is invalid, mathematics would likely be one of the main tools you’d use.

It seems publishers are nonetheless willing to rewrite some of them anyway, with 17 books since being approved on the basis that all WOKE CONTENT has been removed - communicated by the Florida Department of Education with a graphic that the makers of Brass Eye would be jealous of.

DuoLingo, an app I use to learn Spanish, informs us that a single sentence can potentially have over 200,000 “correct” translations 🤯. They’ll accept more than 2000 for “No necesito un taxi, vivo cerca”, one of which is “I don’t need a taxi, I live close by”.

Currently reading: The Trial by Franz Kafka 📚.

It’s probably about time I read the original source, given how much I like the word ‘Kafkaesque’.

Has Texas just outlawed content moderation?

Has Texas - admittedly a state that is not shy of creating harmful and unworkable laws - really just outlawed social media content moderation? And maybe even any algorithm that prioritises what you see when you log into such sites.

I’m no fan of a lot of these big social media companies, but I can’t see forcing them to show you every piece of garbage anyone wants to spill out of their troll-brains into the digital ether is going to make for a better experience.

Twitter declining to host Trump’s tweets on the basis that they break its terms of service and incite violence must really have annoyed certain people.

Texas’s law makes it illegal for any social media platform with 50 million or more US monthly users to “block, ban, remove, deplatform, demonetize, de-boost, restrict, deny equal access or visibility to, or otherwise discriminate against expression.”

And no, these services can’t necessarily even just roll their eyes, give up and go elsewhere.

Buried in the law is a prohibition on discriminating against Texans based on their geographic location. By withdrawing from Texas, tech companies could expose themselves to allegations they have geographically discriminated against Texans in violation of HB 20.

Am loving building the Lego piano set. The attention to detail is awesome. Gotta build the Lego hammers so the keys can hit the Lego strings.

Some longer-form thoughts on the Roe v Wade leak with relevance to data privacy. Honestly, however that turns out - personally I’m not at all hopeful - there’s plenty to worry about around how much of our personal data is flying around and how it could be used against you.

A friend reminded me that Boris Johnson’s critique of working from home as being a series of inefficient wanders around the kitchen making drinks, having snacks, and getting distracted is in fact an accurate description of…office life.

Our Prime Minister is against working from home on the basis that:

…you spend an awful lot of time making another cup of coffee and then, you know, getting up, walking very slowly to the fridge, hacking off a small piece of cheese, then walking very slowly back to your laptop and then forgetting what it was you’re doing.

Feels like one of those occasions whereby by making a general claim that people are doing something “wrong” you end up revealing more about your own behaviour than anyone else’s.

There should be a name for that phenomenon if there isn’t already one. Projection? Pot calling the kettle black? Hypocrisy? Nothing quite seems to perfectly encompass it.

Incredible visualisation from Our World In Data showing the flow of human existence, from birth to death. About 7% of all humans that ever existed are alive today!

Currently reading: Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move by Reece Jones 📚.

From the preface:

…borders that are open for corporations, capital, and consumer goods but closed for workers and regulators are creating dramatic inequalities in wealth and opportunity within individual countries and at a global scale

is a sentiment I already tend to believe. I’m interested to see what evidence the authors muster up in support of it.

🎥 Watched Dune.

Let the modern incarnation of the spice battles begin.