One Two

by Berg

Image Text: Cue letters from Anthropology majors complaining that this view of numerolinguistic development perpetuates a widespread myth. They get to write letters like that because when you're not getting a real science degree you have a lot of free time.

First off- in case you breezed past the "by" line, this is Berg, not Jeff. I'm gonna be updating the site periodically whenever Ol' Jeffaroo needs a helping hand. Pleasure to meet you. And now, on to the explanation...

Today's comic shows us a television screen featuring The Count, a Sesame Street character of some renown who's a fan of counting (and probably has some sort of Autistic Spectrum Disorder). He counts, as he is known to do, but runs out of numbers after 2, defaulting then to "Many." The implication, based on the caption, is that The Count is presenting a counting lesson for primitive cultures, who don't have a sophisticated enough system of numbers to express anything larger than 2 specifically.

Based on the 2005 documentary "The World According to Sesame Street," there is reason to believe that if there were a culture who's numeric system was this simple that this is indeed the Sesame Street that was created for them. After all, if Rruga Sesam (Kosovo) can have a bit about how to identify and avoid old landmines, why wouldn't this fictional culture's Sesame Street have a simplified version of The Count?

The image text is fairly self-explanatory, but still worth picking apart- it's a clear dig at Anthropology, and by extension the rest of the so-called "soft sciences." Soft science is a derisive categorization of many social sciences, or fields of study in general who's methodology falls very much under the umbrella of science, but who's areas of study require the use of more subjective conjecturing than objective analysis of data (I'm looking at you, Sociology). Soft sciences, such as Anthropology, are therefore seen by many as less rigorous than hard sciences, such as Physics.

The author is suggesting, then, that the lack of rigor necessary to earn a degree in Anthropology enables its students to pursue less important lines of inquiry- such as "is Xkcd sensitive to stereotypes of primitive cultures?" The answer to which is, of course, NO.