00:00if you think about the 20th century then you're thinking well you need to know enough math to
00:08function at the post office but in the 21st century we're in a different ballgame here
00:15the world that we're moving toward has math everywhere and I don't mean this in like
00:23there's math everywhere kids kind of a way I mean something concrete and kind of dark
00:29you've seen the math just fly out of control with this virus social media privacy carnage
00:37on Wall Street when you consider the issues that we as a society face most of them are
00:42fundamentally mathematical the algorithm AI health insurance climate change there's no
00:48way to think about gerrymandering without thinking about math math is central to what democracy will
00:55or will not become we have a math crisis in America because we have taught math in a way
01:04that alienates people it made me not want to go to school we mispredict who can and who can't do what
01:15based on socioeconomic status we mispredict based on race we mispredict based on gender for as long as
01:23this algorithm misrepresents me I'm gonna be denied parole and I'm gonna I'm gonna stay in prison
01:28there is a view that if you're not going to go into science and engineering finance and accounting
01:36then you don't need to do math and that is a very narrow view of what math is social media platforms
01:43are trying to limit the spread of conspiracy theories what we need now is the ability to discern what
01:50counts as good information and what doesn't that's what math brings us it's a language for proving
01:56things we need to be able to understand when people are making particular kinds of arguments
02:01whether or not there's data to support them 99% of the isis and al-qaeda content that we take down on
02:09Facebook our AI systems flagged before any human sees it did you know that if you insert a single
02:14statistic into an assertion people are 92% more likely to accept it without question everyone is
02:22capable of mathematical thinking it's like an inheritance you get just for being human it's
02:27not just about numbers and equations it's about thinking logically about the whole human world
02:39whether you're trying to win a basketball game find a cure for cancer everything ends up being a math
02:44problem the question is how is it that we can begin to use math to actually understand the world
02:49and then to also change the world
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