memes @lemmy.world

1w ago

Math is not a democracy

126 comments

I mean, obviously ten.
But I at least understand 16.
I deeply worry about the percentage just next to the other three numbers.
- 13 is probably the next most chosen because it’s closest to 10.
  Not including the correct answer is also a form of engagement bait to get additional comments and such saying “wait the real answer is 10, wtf?”
- Why worry? You can see them on the right side of the image
  
  It not even remotely possible to make an odd number out of that.
  The numbers on the right-hand side are what I'm actually working about.
- The other choices are people that wanted to awnser ten but could not because it wasn't a choice. So they took a random number or the one closest to ten
- Why worry about obviously fake bullshit?
- Your obviously is only a convention and not everyone agree with that. Not even all peogramming languages or calculators.
  If you wanted obviously, it would have to have different order or parentheses or both. Of course everything in math is convention but I mean more obvious.
  2+2*4 is obvious with PEDMAS, but hardy obvious to common people
  2+(2*4) is more obvious to common people
  2*4+2 is even more obvious to people not good with math. I would say this is the preferred form.
  (2*4)+2 doesn't really add more to it, it just emphasises it more, but unnecessarily.
  
  Honestly that’s my pet peeve about this category of content. Over the years I’ve seen (at least) hundreds of these check-out-how-bad-at-math-everyone-is posts and it’s nearly always order of operations related. Apparently, a bunch of people forgot (or just never learned) PEMDAS.
  Now, having an agreed-upon convention absolutely matters for arriving at expected computational outcomes, but we call it a convention for a reason: it’s not a “correct” vs “incorrect” principle of mathematics. It’s just a rule we agreed upon to allow consistent results.
  So any good math educator will be clear on this. If you know the PEMDAS convention already, that’s good, since it’s by far the most common today. But if you don’t yet, don’t worry. It doesn’t mean you’re too dumb to math. With a bit of practice, you won’t even have to remember the acronym.
  
  I feel like people should at least remember math at a 4th grade level and be able to get 10. What is the point of making it obvious the universe will never ever arrange itself in such a fashion. The point is if you remember simple rules you applied for a 10-15 years.
  
  common people who are not good at math...
  PEMDAS is in the 5th-grade curriculum.
  My obviously is gated to people who can hadle 5th-grade math.
  I would say we should not provide the mathematically illiterate any say in the matter. They need to spend 10 minutes on Youtube and learn it.
  
  Try RPN for a whole different beast
  
  Your obviously is only a convention
  Nope. Rules of Maths
  it would have to have different order or parentheses or both.
  Neither. Multiplication is always before Addition, hence "obviously"
  Of course everything in math is convention
  Nope. The vast majority of it is proven rules
  2+(2*4) is more obvious to common people
  Weird then how many people were able to get this right without brackets for centuries before we started using brackets in Maths (which we've only had for 300 years)
  
  PEMDAS isn't obvious to "common people"? Why not? It doesn't seem like an arbitrary convention to me...
  If "×" means "groups of," then "2+2×4" means "two plus two groups of four" which only makes sense, to me, to be read as "two plus two groups of four" rather than "two plus two groups of four"
  Sure the order of operations could be arbitrarily different, but I feel like we settled on that order because it simply makes more sense intuitively.
  I'm aware of the possibility that it only feels natural and intuitive to me because I was taught that way, but I at least don't think that applies to this specific example
  
  There's just 5 lots of 2. If it's hard then think of x being just a bunch of + smooshed together. So
  2 + 2 x 4
  expands to
  2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2
  or contracts to
  5 x 2

A multiple choice question where all the answers are wrong, says nothing about math or the mathematical understanding of the general population.
This is engagementbait and its hooked you too.
- No u
  
  im had
- That’s normal for multiple choice, and sometimes all the answers are correct. You’re supposed to pick the most correct based on the viewpoint of the course.
  We can assume it’s 16 because the audience weren’t taught order of operations. (2+2)*4
  
  That’s normal for multiple choice
  No it isn't.
  sometimes all the answers are correct
  Not in multiple choice they aren't. At best you might have "D) All of the above" if there's genuinely more than 1 answer
  We can assume
  Someone screwed up somewhere, and there will be lots of complaints from students. Despite it being "you only had 1 job", proofreaders still miss things sometimes...

Was this multiple choice? Because if 10 isn't an option, people are just going to answer whatever.
- It was engagement bait. It's always engagement bait.

It’s not a bad analogy for american democracy. None of the options are correct, so you either pick the wrong answer that makes some amount of sense or write in the correct answer and be completely ignored in the tally of results.

This is why I write it as 2+(2x4). The parentheses aren't techniclly necessary, but they do make it clearer to people who haven't been in a school for 35 years.
- just get rid of the x. 2+(24) = 26
  
  Why write more than necessary? Surely 26 = 26 is enough.
- 2+8x

This isn’t even math, just convention on rules for order of operations.
- Order of operations only has one rule: Bedmas (or pemdas if you're not from north america)
  
  Huh it was always pemdas in both highschool and college in new England for me.... they were also always parentheses. 'Brackets' only reffered to '[ ]' which were reserved for matrices or number sets, eg 2*[2,5,8]+2= [6,12,18]
  
  If you look at the arguments on math forums, you'll see that there isn't just one rule.
  It is a convention, and different places teach different conventions.
  \ Namely, some places say that PEDMAS is a very strict order. Other places say that it is PE D|M A|S, where D and M are the same level and order is left-to-right, and same with addition vs subtraction.
  \ And others, even in this post, say it's PEMDAS, which I have heard before.
  "Correct" and "incorrect" don't apply to conventions, it's simply a matter of if the people talking agree on the convention to use. And there are clearly at least three that highly educated people use and can't agree on.
- The one response you got was just like, "But there's just ONE rule." totally missing your point.

The annoying prevalence of this meme suggests to me that an alarming number of people lack even a middle-school understanding of basic arithmetic.
- Wait until you hear what the average reading level is.
- It's not arithmetic at all, it's just about convention aka how to communicate math. The author didn't make themselves clear enough so people misunderstand what calculation they mean.
  
  In mathematics and computer programming, the order of operations is a collection of conventions about which arithmetic operations to perform first in order to evaluate a given mathematical expression.
  The order of operations is part of arithmetic. Although, the memes about it are certainly not good mathematics communication.
  
  it’s just about convention aka how to communicate math
  They're rules actually.
  The author didn’t make themselves clear enough
  Yes they did, someone screwed up the answers, just like in this book...
  
  misunderstand what calculation they mean
  There's only 1 possible answer to it.

Let's just agree to disagree, then. /s
- That 10 guy is totally biased.
  We should hear from both sides.
  
  I say we vote on it. Oh, wait. /s

I love this so much because on the ballot, the right answer is also often missing

I know this is a PEMDAS joke, one of many for the PEMDAS throne.
But yeah, we need to really, really worry about the coming day when "math becomes a democracy" and that is already happening for a wide array of other facts and knowledge about the world.
Whatever "civility politics" liberals infested our collective minds with have to be abandoned. We have to get a lot harder and a lot less tolerant of other people's "beliefs" even if you think "Well they're only harming themselves by thinking 1x1=4" but they're not, we need to start viewing these people as threats to our future. We no longer live in isolation, whatever bullshit your parents drove into you about "nothing on the internet being real and shouldn't matter" was utter hogwash and even less relevant in 2025/2026. We get everything from the internet, including a sense of community and connection, which is why nutsoids find each other and turn something like a joke about earth being flat into an entire anti-science movement.
If you've ever seen those dumb sci-fi shows or movies where science if forbidden and people caught learning science are punished, and thought "that's so unrealistic" well I have some real bad news for you.
- But if enough people are doing it wrong, that means it’s common usage, and therefore it’s right!
  -The English Language
  
  Which is perfectly fine for languages:)
- Yeah. It's definitely "the liberals" responsible for poor math skills.

Okay, buddy elementary school
- Is that a good elementary school?
  
  It's okay, buddy

SADMEP

Solve for x
- Here you go. By the commutative property of multiplication:
  2 + 2x4 = 2 + 24x
  Rearranging this leads to:
  x = -1/12
  which means that x is the limit of the diverging series:
  x = 1 + 2 + 3 + ...
  
  Wouldnt 2x4 actually equate to 2 * 4 * x not 24 * x? So it would be 8x?
- x=4/7

In america, math IS a democracy, and this is why we are losing our democracy.
- So that's where the slogan "stop the count" comes from

Should really allow people to answer how they want.
Who's Big Math in charge of the multiple choice?
Who's denying a voice to those who want to answer that question with "10"? [Edit: or "F"? ~ or an essay on being "off by 1"]

@MogSpawn @humour 2 2x4's are not as strong as a 4x4. But you have to remember to take of 1/4" from every width.

So people just assumed an imaginary parentheses?
- Parenthesis, Powers(exponents), Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction is the order of mathematics.
  https://www.mathsisfun.com/operation-order-pemdas.html
  
  Yes, that’s why I was asking why 59% just assumed there were parentheses in the equation.
  
  *is a common convention

8x + 2

Fourg

Conventions shmonventions

2+2*4=16₄ ☝️🤓

I'm worried how many people answered the odd numbers for an equation where it is only possible to end up with an even numbered answer.
- I'm guessing the 13 results are from people who just picked the closest number to the correct one.
  
  I'm guessing someone photoshopped some blue bars. I'm not convinced anyone really answered it. Or if they did why? What were the stakes?
  If i were to be paid to answer a stupid questions, I'd gladly give a stupid answers all day long. I don't think that's a stupid thing to do - the stupid thing is to ask the question. In fact that is about half of my real job.

Wait, which numeral system are we using

Null.

Some programming languages do away with operator precedence for a big parsing speed boost. J/APL and stack languages are "best known". in J, right to left parsing,
16 = 4 * 2 + 2
- Assuming an equation with no context is anything but standard mathematics is peak "well, technically"
  
  There's big advantages to no precedence rules. You don't have to remember them all. Haskell/SML family create nightmares from trying to have user defined operators with precedence "value" of 0-10. Operators are extremely powerful syntax simplification, but precedence rules makes them too hard to mentally parse.

Not with that attitude it's not!?!
(Americans be like: skill issue, git guud)

Maybe it was addressed at Smalltalk programmers. 😉

wrong sub should be a shitpost

People who are responsible for the Wayland protocol: "This seems like a good idea, but also give veto rights to weirdos."

Technically it can be, since PEMDAS is not an immutable law, it's convention so we can communicate maths and come to the same answer.
- It's a convention just as letters and digits are. If you communicate with people, you better follow the convention they are used to or make it explicit when you don't. That is when your goal is to be understood of cause. Otherwise dkfurveekfifrhrvaakdjf I guess
- Yeah, in the way that 12 inches equal a foot
  It's completely arbitrary, but it's very very very important that we agree on measurements
- At least twice now I've had math nerds get really mad when I suggested "if people are misreading it, add parentheses". Very much skinner "it's the children who are out of touch".
  Some people would rather be right than understood, I guess.
  No one's going to die because you write x = c + (a * b) even though those parentheses aren't strictly needed.

PEMDAS isn’t even real. It’s something we made up to make stupid people feel better about being poor communicators. I challenge someone to create a word problem that actually requires the use of pemdas where you couldn’t just reword the problem to actually make sense.
Creating fake problems by inserting ambiguity is ridiculous.
- Nothing about math is real. Every single thing about it is abstract.
  
  Nothing about math is real
  You spelt "everything" wrong
  Every single thing about it is abstract
  Representing something real underneath in every case - 1+1=2 can refer to apples, eggs, cardboard boxes, anything at all.
- The point is to allow more concise representation of problems that don't include words. If you're willing to be arbitrarily verbose, you can just add enough parentheses that you don't need the other five letters.
- PEMDAS isn’t even real
  Yes it is
  It’s something we made up
  No it isn't. They are proven rules of Maths arising from the definitions of the operators to begin with.
  Creating fake problems by inserting ambiguity is ridiculous
  There's no ambiguity in the order of operations rules
  
  Ok than I guess according to you PEMDSA doesn’t work. Or what about PEDMAS or PEDMSA maybe? Oh wait we made up that order cuz it’s easier to say? No way, color me shocked.

126 comments