What I Didn’t Get Wrong About Eugenia Cheng

A few weeks ago, popularising mathematics star Eugenia Cheng had a guest essay published in the New York Times:

What I Got Wrong About D.E.I.

Needless to say, “DEI” is a central battleground of the continuing culture wars, being heavily targeted by the “Right” as well being a convenient label and rallying cry for the “Right” to target anything and anyone bearing even the faintest hint of “liberalism” or, even more evil, “socialism”. Sleazy proxy-ism by the “Right” notwithstanding, at least some on the “Left” have had pause to reconsider some of the blatant excesses and outright scams smuggled in under the cloak of DEI. Is Cheng now so reflective?

Cheng begins,

“As a woman in the male-dominated field of mathematics, I once opposed targeted efforts to help women succeed — what we now call diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, which are currently facing fierce backlash. I wanted to be judged on the merit of my mathematics alone.

…

As my career has advanced, what I’ve learned is that D.E.I. initiatives helped others see value in my abilities and experience that would have been missed otherwise. And it was through the lens of math that I came to understand this.

So, that would be a “no”. Whether, as she claims, Cheng ever had any broad reservations about DEI, she apparently doesn’t now. Here, she is attempting, and failing dismally, to sell DEI in a more subtle manner. In the New York Times. It’s not for the likes of Cheng to do any genuine missionary work, to go out and risk her head preaching to the natives.

Cheng’s essay is the standard selective and smug nonsense, and one could easily leave it to be, to lie in the mud with a thousand prior nonsenses. But it’s Cheng, and people fawn over her every nonsense; it annoys us. Moreover, Cheng’s essay is made worse by her overcute and clumsy “through the lens of mathematics” metaphoring. This really annoys us.

Cheng loves to wax lyrical on the importance of meaning over simple truth:

Math is famous for its equations, but equations are more subtle than they first appear.

Well, maybe. Cheng genuflects to the deep meaning underlying the equation 4 + 1 = 1 + 4.* This kind of thing is not necessarily bad, and we’ve engaged in it as well, but Cheng seems incapable of a light touch, of making a simple, clear point and then moving on. Last time it was the wonder of modular arithmetic somehow leading us to buckets of paint. This time it is possibly even sillier.

Here, Cheng’s key metaphor is metric spaces, which are the modern generalisation of Euclidean distance (as formulaically captured by Pythagoras). A metric space is any world (set) in which the “distance” between any two points can be assigned. This distance must satisfy obvious properties such as being nonnegative (and positive exactly for distinct points), and being symmetric (i.e. the distance from a to b equals the distance from b to a). Most central is the requirement of the “triangle inequality”:

dist(a,c) ≤ dist(a,b) + dist(b,c)

There are zillions of different metric spaces, and even zillions of different metrics for a given world. As Cheng puts it:

A metric is a way of measuring the distance between two points but not necessarily physical distance; it could be how much time it takes with traffic as a factor or how much energy will be expended, depending on whether you’re going uphill or downhill.

The reader may ponder whether and how these are metrics. (Hint: Either Cheng doesn’t know what she’s talking about or she does but she really sucks at explaining it.) In any case, what does any of this have to do with DEI? Cheng continues,

A distance cannot be measured based on the position of a single point. It requires the effort of measuring the distance between two points. This may sound redundant, but it’s an important clarification: Metrics can be measured only by taking into account the starting point and ending point, as well as relevant features of the journey — the whole story.

When we evaluate people, we could do the same. Instead of looking at just what they have achieved, we could also look at where they started and be clearer about how we are measuring the metaphorical distance they have come and whether we are taking into account the support they had or the obstructions they faced.

If someone achieved a certain SAT score after months of tutoring and someone else earned the same score having never seen an SAT before, it would be reasonable to be more impressed with the latter result and think that the second test taker has more potential. We should think of D.E.I. efforts as the best versions of this and aim to design systems that can measure the fuller picture of someone’s professional journey, not just the current result.

There you have it. That whole labored metaphor just to make the boringly obvious point that some people have it tougher, either because of where they begin or because of the path they must travel.

What of this is not entirely obvious to everyone, DEI proponents and opponents alike? The question, for anyone other than a hardline dog-eat-dog asshole, is and has always been how to implement DEI-like programs in a reasonably sensible manner, particularly in an age where the concern for self over society sees way too many willing to scam whatever they might scam. Cheng has added absolutely nothing to this very difficult question except an entirely useless mathematical gloss.

Well, to be fair, Cheng has also added whining and self-congratulation:

When I was admitted to the University of Cambridge as an undergraduate in math in 1994, I felt that I was a part of a clear minority. I struggled to keep up with some of the men in my class, many of whom had gone to elite boys’ schools where they had intense preparation. Yet I would progress to a Ph.D. and a career as a research mathematician.

…

It took me a long time to realize that when I began my career, I had probably worked much harder than I might have if I had had a different identity. I had to work against people telling me I would never be able to succeed. When I attended conferences, I dealt with inappropriate behavior from men senior to me. I had to find my way in my career having no mentors who looked at all like me. I am grateful for the support of some senior mathematicians, and I now realize that it wasn’t extra help because I was a woman; it was help in overcoming the extra obstructions I faced as a woman.

If Cheng said she had to deal with inappropriate behavior from men then presumably she did.** But any suggestion that Cheng did not have plenty of privileges, that Cheng’s was primarily an uphill journey, that Cheng is somehow a poster child for triumph over adversity, via DEI or otherwise, is simply laughable. 

 

*) If Cheng had been clearer about her message, she would have realised that the better equation to use is 1 + 4 = 4 + 1, but Cheng is not very good at this sort of thing.

**) So did I, for what it’s worth.