Know your Future with Maths

[Subtitled: How to Throw Good Money After Bad Maths]

It is a truth not acknowledged universally enough* that Maths Is Good For You. By this I mean basic numeracy will give you skills for life and work, and develop mental rigour that will benefit you in ways you might never have appreciated.

Good outfit. Bad maths.

The God of Whizz is a cheerleader for maths, not least because of his role in making the fantastic online maths tutor called Maths-Whizz, but he’s inclined to be positive about maths and science skills in general, because he’s that kinda guy.

Something called ‘Hon-Sho‘ caught the God of Whizz’s attention last year, and to his dismay it’s still on the Interwebs in 2010. I’ll let their website explain:

Hon-Sho means “Your true character”. Rooted in mysticism and philosophy, Chinese oracle reading can be traced back over 4,000 years. Hon-Sho uses your personal and unique Digital-DNA to produce a character profile and daily oracle readings which enable you to make decisions regarding your fate.

Clear? Me neither. But it turns out that your ‘digital DNA’ is simply a set of numbers obtained from your date of birth, and the values of the letters in your name, where a=1 and z=26. So Samantha Smith, born on 17th September 1969, has values of 60, 77 and 69.

These magic numbers are used to create a personal ‘hexagram’ (a stack of six broken or unbroken lines), and a daily hexagram based on coincidences between your personal numbers and 64 daily random numbers. These hexagrams each link to particular nuggets of advice or information that can apparently be used to help you make decisions about your life.

Why ‘digital DNA’? Stay with me here – the hexagrams are divided into two ‘trigrams’ (three rows of broken or unbroken bars) which relate to binary counting methods. There are eight possible trigrams, and with two trigrams in a hexagram, 8 x 8 = 64.

It so happens that the genetic code of four nucleic acids (A,G,C,T) combine in threes to code for amino acids in 64 ways (4^3 = 64)! OMG.

Deep Breath.

The God of Whizz has, in theory, no objection to fools being parted from their money – it’s being going on since the beginning of time. The best schemes are those that seem just plausible enough, whilst promising incredible benefits that make the outlay worthwhile.

You say to yourself “I’m not sure if this is true, but if it is, it’s money well-spent!” It’s the precautionary principle, where the cost of not knowing your future outweighs the risk that you are throwing your money down the drain.

But the problem is that such things patently AREN’T true, and that a moment’s thought tells us that you would be better off throwing your money down the drain, after all – a sewer worker might score an unexpected bonus.

It doesn’t take a genius to realise that, according to Hon-Sho, your life is entirely bound in your date of birth and your given name. But what happens if you change your name? What’s the difference between the life chances of Jon and Jonathan, Alice and Alys? What if your mother had been induced a day early, or if her labour had lasted an extra day? Would your chances have forever changed when the clock in the maternity ward ticked past midnight? If the answer to any of the above is ‘yes’, then how?

All these scenarios would have yielded different ‘Digital DNA’, but would they have made for a fundamentally different person?

We are reassured that our actual genetic profiles are millions of base pairs long, that interpretation of our DNA still challenges some of the finest minds in science, and that it takes some serious kit to even read the stuff of life. So why might we willingly allow our lives to be boiled down to three short numbers?

Hon-Sho relies on our general lack of confidence with maths and our tendency to put value in ‘historic’ systems. The 64 coincidence seems magical enough to suggest that somehow the ancient Chinese anticipated modern science, just as the equally nonsensical Bible Code shows the Good Book anticipated the Second World War because some of its letters spelled ‘Hitler’.

But an old idea isn’t necessarily a good one, and a mathematical description isn’t necessarily a meaningful one. Ancient maths sounds doubly reliable (see fashions for vedic maths, mayan maths, etc).

But whilst many historic methods are still useful, Hon-Sho seems to involve throwing numbers at a wall and putting great, mystical, stock in the ones that stick. Daily Hon-Sho reports rely on the Barnum (or Forer) Effect, where vague descriptions and predictions are sufficiently specific to make the reader believe they apply to him or her directly.

Hon-Sho is the new horoscope. Which is all very well, it gives local newspapers a little extra revenue, and probably provides reassuring bromides to thousands of subscribers. Horoscope writers have been fleecing the gullible and wishful thinkers for decades. But the God of Whizz gets hot under the collar over this new abuse of science, maths, and rationality.

Numbers don’t mean anything. Maths has no intrinsic value, other than as a wonderful, challenging, and sometimes beautiful way of describing the world. It is the science of patterns, but nothing in those patterns holds any meaning, except where they relate to other things. The sooner we can all realise this, the sooner we can put our money towards things that will truly make us healthy, happy, and wise.

But if you still want help making decisions about the big things – toss a coin.

* With apologies to Austen, J.

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