I Think We're In A Contest In Our Society, The Goal Of Which Is To Say The Stupidest Thing And Get People To Pretend They Believe It.

While still a drip, drip, drip compared to what rains from the humanities, leftie professors at universities are jockeying to try to get math, science, and engineering fields into the "white supremacy" game:

Three British professors recently claimed that statistical analyses have been weaponized to “serve white racial interests” within academia and beyond.

Led by David Gillborn, a professor at the University of Birmingham, the professors argue that math serves white interests because it can “frequently encode racist perspectives beneath the facade of supposed quantitative objectivity.”

“Contrary to popular belief, and the assertions of many quantitative researchers, numbers are neither objective nor color-blind,” Gillborn and his team assert in their article for the journal Race, Ethnicity, and Education.

To address the racism numbers reinforce, the professors advocate for the adoption of “QuantCrit”—a portmanteau for “quantitative analysis” and “critical race theory.” Quantcrit, they say, has five key tenets, including that “numbers are not neutral.”

Numbers are not neutral because “quantitative data is often gathered and analyzed in ways that reflect the interests, assumptions, and perceptions of White elites,” they contend, adding that even so-called objective analysis fails to take the pervasiveness of racism into account...

“Numbers are social constructs and likely to embody the dominant (racist) assumptions that shape contemporary society,” they write. As a consequence, they assert that “in many cases, numbers speak for White racial interests.”

Two points about the above quote.

First, this is the second time in a week I've read the term "portmanteau".  Is that becoming "a thing"?  Is jamming words together the new "in" thing, like putting capital letters in the middle of a word (e.g., iPhone, AirLand Battle Doctrine) or putting "e" at the beginning of a word in technical circles?

Second, 5.  There it is, a number.  5.  Is it a white number?  Is it a black number?  Is it an Asian number?  Is it a Hispanic number?  Whose interests does it serve?  I'm a white man; would it mean something different if an American Indian woman had typed that number?

Just because you say something stupid, that doesn't mean I have to take it (or you) seriously.