Qin Hui, Did You Fail Elementary School Math?

2006/6/16 15:04:15

Who is Qin Hui? I genuinely have no idea. Nowadays even Furong can become famous by swaying a few times without any breeze—whoever wants to be famous, go ahead. The reason I bring up this name and have constructed the sentence "Qin Hui, did you fail elementary school math?" is not because these two Chinese characters combined carry any special force. It is simply that whenever I see the following type of statement, regardless of whether the person behind the name is famous or not, this ID will greet them with the same sentence: "X, did you fail elementary school math?" And today, with no particular significance, the variable X takes the value "Qin Hui."

What exactly constitutes statements that qualify as failing elementary school math—that is not important. What matters is that the following statement is among them, especially when it appears in print in a newspaper, which compels a few extra words. Of course, even though such statements fall under the category of failing elementary school math, I must quote it in full: "Historical causation is, in essence, only a possibility (even if a very high possibility) rather than a necessity. The occurrence of one thing 'very likely' leads to a certain result, but you can hardly say it 'necessarily' leads to that result, even though the probability may be very high. In other words, history is a causal chain worth investigating. But this causation is not deterministic causation—it is probabilistic causation. And once one understands the probabilistic nature of historical causation, one can deduce: any causation with a probability less than 1, when multiplied infinitely many times, will yield a total product approaching zero. And this total product represents the overall probability, in the causal-chain sense, of the long-duration historical process constituted by all these events. Evidently, this means that even if the causal probability of each individual event is very high, the total probability of the entire causal chain will be negligible."

Did this person's elementary school math teacher not inform them that for probability to be applied to something, that something must first exist within a space that can be probabilized, and that not just any space can be probabilized? In fact, one could say that spaces amenable to probability are a special case. Is history such a space? Who can prove that history constitutes such a space? Anyone who could prove it is themselves within history—even if such a proof existed, it would itself have been historicized. The proof of history's probabilistic nature requires it to satisfy all axioms that a probability space must satisfy, rather than relying on garbage language like "very likely" and "necessarily." Without such proof, the subsequent discourse on the multiplication principle is nothing but delirium. Of course, newspaper delirium can be monetized these days, and that is probably the key reason why even those who failed elementary school math can engage in delirium.

I despise all those who dress themselves up with mathematical concepts—those this-ists and that-ists. Mathematics does not exist for your monetization. When you—for instance, today's so-called economists—monetize various mathematical concepts, you must first prove that these mathematical concepts are applicable at all. And all proofs ultimately come down to class standpoint. Just as the world of geometry is only the world that can be geometrized, for reality, what can be geometrized and by what kind of geometry—that is the crux of the crux. And that is class struggle!