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Lord Dorwin raised his eyebrows and took a pinch of snuff hurriedly. ‘Why, whatevah foah, my deah fellow?’

‘To get the information first hand, of course.’

‘But wheah’s the necessity? It seems an uncommonly wound-about and hopelessly wigmawolish method of getting anyweahs. Look heah, now, I’ve got the wuhks of all the old mastahs – the gweat ahchaeologists of the past. I wigh them against each othah – balance the disagweements – analyse the conflicting statements – decide which is pwobably cowwect – and come to a conclusion. That is the scientific method. At least’ – patronizingly – ‘as I see it. How insuffewably cwude it would be to go to Ahctuwus, oah to Sol, foah instance, and blundah about, when the old mastahs have covahed the gwounds so much moah effectively than we could possibly hope to do.’ Hardin murmured politely,

‘I see.’ Scientific method, hell! No wonder the Galaxy was going to pot.

[and then, much later, Hardin says:]

‘It amounts to a diseased attitude – a conditional reflex that shunts aside the independence of your minds whenever it is a question of opposing authority. There seems no doubt ever in your minds that the Emperor is more powerful than you are, or Hari Seldon wiser. And that’s wrong, don’t you see?’

For some reason, no one cared to answer him.

Hardin continued: ‘It isn’t just you. It’s the whole Galaxy. Pirenne heard Lord Dorwin’s idea of scientific research. Lord Dorwin thought the way to be a good archaeologist was to read all the books on the subject – written by men who were dead for centuries. He thought that the way to solve archaeological puzzles was to weigh the opposing authorities. And Pirenne listened and made no objections. Don’t you see that there’s something wrong with that?’

The original Tweet thread was a math nerd who jokingly, and not incorrectly, illustrated how it was mathematically possible for 2+2 to sometimes be 5. The argument may have been weak, and some people may not have found it convincing, but it was a mathematical argument, meant as a joke for a small Twitter audience.

Through the Twitter telephone, many retweets and steps later, the original argument - considered, funny, valid, perhaps weak - somehow transformed into "2+2=4 is a mere social construct, and 5 is a valid answer" - which, yes, would be a disturbing trend if that were actually the argument. Thus the unduly passionate took up "2+2 is 4 not 5" as a political rallying cry. People I otherwise respect as rational began tweeting this.

It became complicated because there are always people who believe dumb things, like "mathematics is merely a white supremacist social construct", and as always with the unduly passionate, extreme opinions are held up as examples of dangerously typical. The author of the original thread was bullied by a mob.

It's complicated even further by the existence of an actual replication crisis in academe, in part driven by post-modern ideological pressures; there is actual loss of academic freedom even for the tenured.

But the lesson at the end of the day, to my mind, is that articles about whatever goes on over at Twitter, such as this one, such as this my post here, are always going to involve mobs of people being shitty, because the nature of the medium. Maybe they are as inevitable as "mobs of people are gambling in Las Vegas"