{"id":3696,"date":"2009-11-13T16:22:27","date_gmt":"2009-11-13T23:22:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/?p=3696"},"modified":"2009-11-13T16:22:27","modified_gmt":"2009-11-13T23:22:27","slug":"igon-value-problems-over-dilettante-matrices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/2009\/11\/13\/igon-value-problems-over-dilettante-matrices\/","title":{"rendered":"Igon Value Problems Over Dilettante Matrices"},"content":{"rendered":"

Friday the 13th is, apparently, a day of must read articles. This time it’s Steven Pinker’s review<\/a> of Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures<\/a>\"\". Readers who have taken linear algebra will be amused:<\/p>\n

He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “saggital plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aper\u221a\u00dfus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Friday the 13th is, apparently, a day of must read articles. This time it’s Steven Pinker’s review of Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures. Readers who have taken linear algebra will be amused: He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “saggital plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Igon Value Problems Over Dilettante Matrices”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[30,68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-funny-ha-ha","category-read-you-tweed"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3696\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}