Wary Jerry
Y’all…
I had to go to FB to find out about fireworks tonight due to a passing rain storm. I haven’t been on FB in a long, long time.
There are people posting elementary school math problems and adults are arguing about the answers.
What is happening to this world? Did people forget how to do basic arithmetic?
Fennix :donor:
@jerry Years ago, a very smart friend of mine reposted some copypasta about how incredibly rare it was for a year to start on a Wednesday, something which hadn't happened for 400 years.
They weren't sharing it because they found it to be hilarious and they wanted to critique it. They were genuinely sharing it because they thought it was a weird quirk of the calendar and didn't bother flipping back a few years to see if it was even true.
This person was just sharing something for likes in 2010 or so. It's been about harvesting and driving interaction for a long long time, and those "could be ambiguous" math things are great for having gigantic arguments over. Just like the whole "The Dress" thing.
Stephan Neuhaus
@jerry The "math problems" I've seen are mostly about operator priority, like 2 + 2 x 2, is that 6 or 8? Yes, it's good to know about these things, but mathematically, it's just a convention and therefore boring. I mean it's not as if they were arguing about Russell's paradox or anything.
I think these "problems" are created as attention-getters because the people who pose them know that at least someone will get them wrong and before you know it, people will be called idiots.
johntimaeus
You looked at math on Facebook?
I'm sorry for your loss.
pejacoby
@jerry sigh, makes you yearn for the blue/black gold/white dress days of the other place, don’t it?
I don’t use FB myself at all but have to copilot my spouse’s account so she can relearn how to post a picture every time she falls into some A/B test hole. She’s not technical and so logically figures it’s her fault every time. Another negative-feedback-loop interaction…
Wary Jerry
@iamkale I suspect you are right. But that’s the thing: the answer is trivially obvious. And I’m not talking about the cute ones that have a factorial (!) at the end - just addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division
Matthew Miller :donor:
@jerry My understanding is that those kinds of engagement-bait math posts are intentionally ambiguous to foment disagreement. They're the kind of problems you'd never see in academia because the order of operations are under-defined.
Michael Miller :blobrdm: 🦆
@jerry my wife occasionally shows me the never-ending PEMDAS debates. It’s stunning.
LovesTha🥧
@jerry Plenty of them never learned it :(
Also half the rules you learned should never be used.
Just like programming, just because it's possible to learn the order of evaluation of every operator doesn't mean you should use that.
Clarity is good.
Chris Ely
That particular topic seems to be one that is often argued about.
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