Michele Bachmann: the stupidest politician of them all?

I seem to have written a lot about numeracy, climate change, politicians and science lately. Michele Bachmann brings it all together: a stupid, innumerate politician who passes off a risible pastiche of science as the real thing - and gets away with it!

Her initial argument is, 'if carbon dioxide is good it can't be bad' (See Is carbon dioxide good or bad?) She goes on to argue that as there's not very much of it carbon dioxide can't be a problem (See If carbon dioxide is a 'trace gas' why is it a problem?) In explaining how little of it there is she overstates the concentration of carbon dioxide by a factor of 100 (3% rather than 0.0388%) and understates the proportion that is anthropogenic by a factor of 10 (3% rather than 30%). None of that really matters to her though - she knows she is right so why does she need to know what she's talking about? Her understanding of science does not get past the public relations definition of science.

UK politics is not exactly inspiring at the moment, but I'd like to think that any MP who made a speech like Michele Bachmann's in the House of Commons would be laughed out of Westminster. At the very least, he or she would get a hard time from the press. How is it that Americans let their politicians get away with it? I wouldn't trust Michele Bachmann with a Soda Stream, let alone a planet. (A Soda Stream is a device for carbonating drinks.) It's time the rest of us realised that we can't leave the future of the World in the hands of US politicians - they aren't up to the job and I'm not sure there's much that the American people can do about it. 

Hands off to him

This comment on a talk at TED by Bill Gates made me envious, and also made me think about the problems people have with maths:

"It is very interested to watch this speech.it is more energitic to me.The following speech is full of sciencesand more useful to us.so i got more interesting facts through this hands off to him."

I would love to be able to write like that. Maths I can do badly, and it's great. For many people the idea of doing maths badly is so inhibiting that any mathematical thought becomes impossible, whereas I can muddle through confident that I'll reach a worthwhile conclusion even if the path I take is inelegant. Many people struggle with maths, and I think I know what that's like because I have a similar problem with language. Most people can 'just talk' - they can muddle through language - but not me.  

You will probably never hear something like "hands off to him" from me - I'm just too uptight. I have trouble saying a word out loud if I'm not sure how it's spelt and would feel extremely uncomfortable using idiom I didn't understand. Small talk makes me feel stupid - I can't 'just say' things. Foreign languages humiliate me, and that's not right, surely. Foreign languages should be liberating for the speaker because no one has any right to expect fluency. Being overly concerned about getting it right doesn't improve my communication, it makes it stilted and ultimately makes me mute. 

Fortunately for me, language is something one just has to get on with - there's no way of opting out. Maths is different because it is possible to go through life without solving an equation. But there is something very tragic about a life without mathematics. When I hear people proclaiming proudly that they 'Have never needed to know the cosine of anything' I think, 'How can that be? What have you been doing with yourself? Don't you know what you've been missing? What a waste!' 

It's only language that has an inhibiting effect on me. Everything else I do with abandon: I have no fear of failure and little fear of how I will look when I fail. It means I fail often and frequently look like a twat, neither of which do me any favours, but it's worth it to be able to think things that no one has thought before. The success I do enjoy comes from this freedom to fail. I know that if I make a mathematical mistake equivalent to 'hands off to him' I'll discover it soon enough and it will make me smile rather than cringe. 

We all know that there are times and places to be extremely precise or beautiful with language but most of the time the pressure is off. It's like that with mathematics too. Just as we don't always have to write like a lawyer or a poet we don't always have to calculate like mathematician or a physicist. People generally understand that there is a multitude of different ways that literacy can enhance our lives and empower us to make sense of the world. The same is true of numeracy, if only we can be a bit relaxed about it.

Nevertheless, envious as I am, if you are going to add a comment to video, as a courtesy to your readers it's polite to have a more substantial point to make than 'hands off to him'.

(For a similar, but far more articulate point about science rather than maths, see: http://bit.ly/ctnCE0)