Terryology 2024-11-06
I write this a few months before I plan to publish it. As the US presidential election bears inexorably down upon us, I find myself remembering how I distracted myself in the weeks following the last one: reading the nonsensical work of one Terrence Dashon Howard.
Now, ever since his appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience earlier this year, it's been fashionable, though by no means new, to try to explain the problems with Terryology from a mathematical perspective. People were jumping into his Twitter replies the moment he published a "paper" in a tweet, and my later attempts to explain group theory for SoME were inspired by his failure to understand why particular fundamental concepts of groups are the way they are.
However, in the years since, I've come to realize that such critiques cannot hope to convince Terrence himself, because they buy into a fundamental misunderstanding on Terrence's part. In short, he cannot currently be convinced of the falsity of 1 x 1 = 2, because he is using literally every symbol in that statement with a different meaning from accepted mathematical practice.
That said, I still feel the urge to try, so I'm going to try to get it out of my system:
:)
Oh, I guess I'm doing this, to set it off from the rest of the post.
Ahem.
Mr. Howard, suppose you own a bank operating according to the principles of Terryology. One day, a customer comes in with two checks made out to "cash", from two of your account holders. The checks are entirely legitimate, and the accounts have enough money to pay out the respective checks. One check is for $2, and the other check is for $3. How much should the teller pay the customer, and why?
The purpose of this seemingly trivial question is straightforward: by mainstream mathematics, the teller should pay the customer $5, but by analogy with your insistence that "1x1=2" because $1 and $1 is $2, the Terryological answer would appear to be "2x3=6". If you do not accept that the teller should pay $6, then I would like to know what $1 and $1 making $2 has to do with multiplication, and if you do accept it, I would like to give you a $10 bill, a $10 bill, a $10 bill, a $10 bill, a $10 bill, a $10 bill, a $10 bill, a $10 bill, a $10 bill, and a $10 bill, in exchange for a check equal to one tenth of their total value.
Remember, Terrence, it was the smiley that tried to swindle you out of a billion dollars, not me.
Anyway, the fundamental incompatibility between Terryology, and, um, real math, can be expressed philosophically:
Because nobody knows all mathematical truth ahead of time, mathematicians have to accept that they have incomplete knowledge, and develop tools to compensate for that, either by deriving new knowledge from existing knowledge, or by finding new ways to use existing knowledge. For the former, we can look at stuff like Euclid's elements, and for the latter, we can consider the technique of checking a calculation by casting out nines. The latter case is an example of abstraction, and it's a powerful tool: find the right abstraction to represent a problem, and you can come up with a general answer without getting bogged down by the specifics.
By contrast, the objects in Terryology are in some sense un-abstractable. An idiomatic rendering of Terryology's 1 x 1 = 2 would be something like "when considering the totality of existence, we may compound it with itself, and this produces a [duality?]". The concepts being represented are in some sense atomic.
Basically, this isn't mathematics, it's numerology.
I took some time (not a lot...) to polish this post, but my planned followup posts are going to be a bit rougher.
Good night.