"The line isn't Left vs Right. It's 'the truth matters' versus 'the truth is what we need it to be'."[UPDATED]

 

"The line isn't Left vs Right. It's 'the truth matters' versus 'the truth is what we need it to be.' That's the epistemological line between good and evil. The Activist Left knows that's the actual line, and they've known it for a long time. ...

    "There are people who reject the dialectical approach. Then there are people broken by it. Finally, ... there are people who know exactly what they're doing and do it to deceive and conquer."

~ James Lindsay

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"In universities across the world, humanities departments have, over time, come to reject the notion that there is such a thing as objective truth.
    "This nihilistic outlook was originally promoted by a small group of academics in the mid-20th century, but is now the dominant philosophy in a range of disciplines from literary criticism to gender and cultural studies. And while the doctrine has quietly swallowed the humanities, many thought it would never infiltrate the hard sciences. If one is engineering a bridge, for example, it would be reckless to reject the objective truth of gravity. If one is studying mathematics it would be foolish to deny that 2 + 2 = 4. 

    "And, rather than being a method to discover how the world works, such theorists argue Western science has been used as a tool to subjugate others. Efforts to 'decolonise' science are therefore efforts to undo this subjugation, by bringing into the fold other 'ways of knowing' that exist outside scientific methodology. These might include local knowledge about land management, religious knowledge about cosmology, or traditional ways of healing. Writing at 'The Conversation,' academic Alex Broadbent, of the University of Johannesburg, argues: 'There is African belief, and European belief, and your belief, and mine – but none of us have the right to assert that something is true, is a fact, or works, contrary to anyone else’s belief.' ... 

    "But herein lies the irony – by indulging the de-colonial activist agenda that rejects the existence of objective truths or a hierarchy of knowledge, universities undermine the very premise on which society deems them worthy of public funding. If we accept the de-colonial notion that no form of knowledge can be deemed superior to any other, then what exactly are students paying for? What specialised skills or benefits do university graduates gain that non-graduates lack? Why should the public continue to fund these multibillion-dollar organisations if the knowledge they offer is just as valid as any other 'way of knowing'?"

~ Claire Lehman, from her column 'In maths, truth & knowledge can't be mere matters of opinion'

Not everything that's measured is important. And not everything's that's important can be measured.

"What gets measured gets managed. But I’m saying something stronger here. If we are not careful, what gets measured is all we manage. We don’t just pay more attention to what is in the light. We forget what is in the shadows. We forget about the rest of the things that do not get captured in measures we become accustomed to studying and using.
    "Our desire to quantify complexity seduces us into ignoring [valuable] things that are less easily measured.... Other factors get forgotten [whose] effects, if real, are virtually impossible to quantify.... These intangibles are hard to keep in mind....

This is one of the first mistakes we can make with [a raw number] — we forget that it only captures part of what we care about. The other mistake we make is that a measure isn’t the thing itself...."

~ Russ Roberts, from his post 'Apples and Oranges: A Critique of Utilitarianism'

"Mathematics transcended their initial condition and became as it were a natural part of the world..."

"Man at a certain stage of his development invented arithmetic for the purely practical purpose of obtaining some kind of human order in a world which he knew to be ruled by gods whom he could not prevent from playing havoc with his sums whenever they felt so inclined....
    "Then, as the thousands of centuries trickled by, and the gods retired on a more or less adequate pension, and human calculations grew more and more acrobatic, mathematics transcended their initial condition and became as it were a natural part of the world ... and nobody seems to have been surprised at the queer fact of the outer network becoming an inner skeleton. Indeed, by digging a little deeper somewhere near the waistline of South America a lucky geologist may one day discover, as his spade rings against metal, the solid barrel hoop of the equator."

~ Vladimir Nabokov, from 'The Art of Literature & Commonsense,' collected in his Lectures on Literature