Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/06/21/watch-piers-morgan-try-to-emba.html
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So… Morgan thinks Pi and the Pythagorean theorem are the same thing?
What a pretentious dick; serves him right that he was so eager to make someone else look foolish that he inadvertently exposed his own ignorance.
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Has Piers Morgan ever not made an ass of himself?
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It’s his job, as far as I know.
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It’s not even right if you do forgive him confusing pi with the Pythagorean theorem. 3.147 is a) 3 decimal places, not 5, and b) not how I would round 3.1415… to 3 decimal places.
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It takes a special kind of smug idiot to treat an entire television audience to a variation on Muphry’s law.
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There was that time he had Alex Jones on his show and he was arguably the “less of an ass” of the two of them. I don’t know if that qualifies as him as not making an ass of himself.
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Somebody wake up Jeremy Clarkson and tell him it’s time to punch Pierce again.
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Of course he was trying to illustrate that she is not “smart” by whatever measure he wanted to use to determine her “smartness”. The thing is…and it’s something he certainly doesn’t get…the definition of smart is different for different people. Knowing some mathematical value/theorem is simply not a necessary piece of info for this young lady, and trying to measure her intelligence against that is what should be embarrassing in the first place.
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I mean, it’s an amazing self-own. His premise seems to be that memorizing random facts makes one educated. Yet he not only doesn’t know the difference between the Pythagorean theorem and Pi, he doesn’t seem to know what “decimal places” means (or he thinks Pi is 0.3…), and he manages to get what little of Pi he does recite, wrong.
I assume he said five decimal places only because he assumed most people remember Pi as “3.14” and knew, on some level, that even he didn’t know the number he was asking for, so there was no chance they’d know it. And the thing is, knowing “3.14” is good enough, even if one has call to use it. I mean, on those rare occasions when I’m actually using Pi (for graphics related programming), I actually do remember and use five decimal places and I’m pretty sure it’s overkill.
It’s kind of amazing how something he only threw out there to show someone else’s ignorance (even though it does no such thing) happened to be wrong on every level.
It’s more than that, though. His attempt to suggest someone else was ignorant instead revealed his own profound ignorance on the subject. One thing wrong would have been a mistake, and thus Muphry’s Law, but getting everything wrong (and not being aware of it)…
He’s confused “knowing irrelevant facts” with being smart. Ironically, by his own measure, he’s really not smart. Also, on some level I think he was aware he didn’t know the information he was demanding, and thus didn’t live up to his own intelligence test - but did it merely to tear someone else down.
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“Do you know Pythagoras’s theorem to the nearest five decimal place?”
I will be using that line forever now.
“Come on everyone knows that, it’s as simple as knowing Pythagoras’s theorem to the nearest five decimal place”
“Chuck Norris knows Pythagoras’s theorem to the nearest five decimal place”
etc.
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That’s exactly how it seemed.
Personally, I’m not at all mathematically inclined, but I still remember Pi and I know that the Pythagorean theorem concerns the sides of right triangles… and I’d never just assume that anyone who doesn’t know that is somehow ‘less intelligent’ than I am.
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I think an honest mistake in a subject you studied 40 years ago is normal, and not a thing to be mocked.
What’s not normal is using it as a weapon against… whoever that woman is.
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Sure, but that’s not what happened here. The mistake may have been honest, but the underlying intent was shady as fuck.
Yeah, I’d never heard of her before this, or that show either.
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Thinking that having memorized random facts makes one smart feels like a stupid person’s notion of what intelligence is, to me. This is a particularly weird example, like demanding to know which year “Being and Nothingness” was written, while not knowing, or expecting them to know, anything about the contents of the book, who the author was, etc. Of course in this case it was also only a standard that applied to other people, so…
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I don’t even hold against him the mix up of Pythagorean vs Pi only because for a non mathematician I feel that can be an easy slip of the tongue. You think the right thing but misspeak. Fine. Common enough thing for most people.
Again it’s the entire idea that you are going to “measure” her intelligence and judge her by a standard you just made up.
No one should do that to anyone. And it’s shameful when assholes like him do it. And they do it routinely. Unfortunately.
Edit: @Melz2 is spot on. His intent is shdady as fuck and it’s that which exposes him as such a despicable human being.
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Abso-fucking-lutely; @anon61833566 nailed when he commented that “smart” isn’t necessarily the same thing for everyone; depending upon what info we individually need to retain in order to exist.
And the mere rote memorization of facts is not the same thing as “being smart.”
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Watch Piers Morgan
No, not ever, he’s a waste of human flesh.
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