Image Description: A digital meme divided into two main panels: a mathematical whiteboard explanation at the top and a reaction image at the bottom. Top Panel (The Whiteboard): Titled “P-ADIC FINANCE where p = profit.” It explains a fictional financial system using real advanced mathematics. Left text: “In this metric, a number’s size is how little profit divides it. The more profitable the crime, the closer its penalty sits to zero. String together ever-bigger crimes and the fines don’t blow up, they converge.” A sequence shows: “p, p^2, p^3, … arrow pointing to 0.” Right chart: A table titled “Crime, Profit, Fine, Fine Size in P-Adic Metric.” It lists crimes: Outsource pollution: Profit = p, Fine = $1M, P-adic size = 1/p (small). Fake the numbers: Profit = p^2, Fine = $10M, P-adic size = 1/p^2 (smaller). Fix the market: Profit = p^3, Fine = $100M, P-adic size = 1/p^3 (tinier). Ruin a country: Profit = p^4, Fine = $1B, P-adic size = 1/p^4 (minuscule). Repeat infinitely: Profit = p^n, Fine = p^n (lol), P-adic size = 1/p^n which approaches 0. Below the chart: A number line showing 0 on the far left (labeled “Where your fines live”) and numbers increasing to the right (labeled “Big in absolute world”). A final box states: “The true crime in a corporate environment is not choosing p.” Bottom Panel (The Reaction): A sepia-toned photograph of a group of wealthy white men in suits, including former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, laughing uproariously together at a gathering. Edited comic speech bubbles are assigned to them: One asks, “Why’d we even need lawyers?” Another laughs, “We just changed the metric lmfao.” A third says, “Fines are for poors.” A man in the foreground laughs, “Infinite money glitch found boys.” In the bottom right corner, a modern internet meme character (a crying, angry “Wojak” in a suit wearing a badge that reads “REGULATORS”) has a thought bubble that reads: “They took us for absolute fools.” Bottom Caption: Superimposed across the bottom in large, bold, white Impact font: “THEY TOOK US FOR ABSOLUTE FOOLS”—a pun on the word “absolute” referring to both being deeply tricked and the standard mathematical “absolute metric.”
I actually experienced the very same. I often deliberately try to act stupid or give wrong answers, just to somehow fit in. Masking is a thing you learn quickly :) The only thing people fear even more than the strange and unknown, is people being smarter than themselves. “Gyro Gearloose” I would’ve taken as a compliment though. Today. Probably not back then, obviously.
Good you took it well, but also this is very anecdotal. We might’ve overcome this, but others break and stay broken. Might it be due to lacking help, lacking reference-frame, lacking whatever. So I wouldn’t really want that for my kid. Not that one has any influence on it, as school is a mighty force parents often cannot barely compete with. It’s 4 decades ago, but I still remember this one guy we bullied hardcore. all day long. all year long. Just because he had poor parents. He basically had the same clothes all year long. What a stupid metric to judge people, but stupid is always majority.
Until it’s not. Until there are more poor but well-educated parents who educate their children in turn.
In Arabic, we have a word with no direct English equivalent: tarbiya (تربية). I think the closest translation might be “custodianship of upbringing,” but it describes the dynamics of learning rather than the mechanics. It’s a bidirectional process (though not everyone will admit that)—it doesn’t just teach children how to solve a specific problem; it teaches them how to develop their own way of tackling an unfamiliar one.