Dave Winer is one of my pet peeves; his only redeeming quality is that he may be the most aptly named human being on the planet.  He’s whining about the use of the term ’social graph’ as opposed to ’social network’, and claims that the people who use the term ‘graph’ to describe our web of social connections are idiots.

There really is nothing more annoying than being called an idiot by one of your pet peeves, so forgive me if the rest of this blog post comes off as a bit harsh.

Here are a few things you might not want to do if your primary goal is to not sound like an idiot:

• Spell ‘theorems’ as ‘theorums’.
• Claim that all graphs are four colourable. The non-idiotic version of this statement is ‘all planar graphs are four colourable‘. (Don’t like my British spelling? Bite me. My graph theory textbook was written by a dude who spoke the King’s English.)
• Say that combinatorics is related to statistics. This statement is arguably more misleading than the ’social graph’ terminology Dave is railing against– combinatorics is related to the statistics of coin flips, but not to things like bell curves or regression or anything else that a normal person would associate with ’statistics’.

Looking over this list, I wonder if Dave’s idiocy wasn’t a strategic attempt to prove his point– if a nominal “math major” like Dave Winer doesn’t know anything about graph theory, how can we expect a mere mortal to understand it? This sort of thing drives me crazy– it plays off of math phobia to trick people into thinking this stuff is really hard and that they’re not capable of understanding it.

Bad form, Dave. You’re on my list. Well, you were on my list before. But now you’re like, even higher on the list.

Labels: math, social networks, rants

[ 1 comments ]