Directly from the article.
- He doesn't have a high opinion of it
- He makes a vague allusion to some unspecified conflict of interest (?!)
- He argues that first-order skill development is most effective (which may be true, but misses the point).
- He says that higher order value of mathematics is "unsettled".
As he is defending a fundamentally anti-intellectual position, I'm going to need a little more than that.
I’m sure the author has a high opinion of mathematics as an intellectual pursuit. He is a Math professor. That’s separate from his argument, that it has very limited practical use, even to most engineers and others you would assume would be highly selected for finding it useful.
If Mathematics was enormously useful for teaching argument and precise thought in a reliable way Economics would have eaten all the other social sciences already. Economists know far more Math than the others. Math is uncommonly useful but if it was that good at teaching people how to think, if the transfer of learning argument was true, it would not need to be argued. It b would be bloody obvious.
There's this thing called the burden of proof, in philosophy. When you take a difficult position, you must displace this burden. The author has not done so, and it is not my responsibility to show how he is wrong: he has not shown how he is correct.
Anti-intellectual. You keep on saying that the author is anti-intellectual for denigrating the practical value of Math.
What I am saying (or at least what I intend to say) is that he is defending an anti-intellectualist idea/position, which is just a fact by definition.
Saying something is of limited practical value is not an anti-intellectual position. I do not think most people get any practical value out of the chemistry or physics they learn in school.
This is a good example of an anti-intellectual comment or attitude.
Very eloquent phrase, I’m going to steal this!