• Hawanja@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    I just fail to see how you come to the conclusion that it was written in a “mean” way. It’s math, there is no “nice” way to write an equation.

    • TheKingBee@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      it’s mean in that they intentionally wrote it to trip people up so we’d have this very conversion…

      • Hawanja@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        But how do you know they did that? Becuase it’s perfectly legit the way it’s written.

        • TheKingBee@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          Because this it’s trivial to write it in a way that won’t cause this confusion and yet every 3 months or so someone posts another one of these gotcha no context given equations and we as the internet have this same discussion again and again. It’s bait…

          • Hawanja@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago

            Well, it’s causing YOU confusion yes. But to anyone who remembers the order of operation it’s not confusing at all.

            • TheKingBee@lemmy.world
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              21 hours ago

              Do you remember how this reply thread started? I literally fixed the equation so that it would be less confusing to people, I couldn’t do that if I didn’t know what order it was meant to go in…

              I’m just not assuming that people are stupid because they got tripped up by something designed to trip them up.

              It’s writing like this with math, you can find the sentence structure, but it makes it a puzzle people will mess up unnecessarily It's writing like this with math.

              • Hawanja@lemmy.world
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                4 hours ago

                But you didn’t “Fix” the equation, because it wasn’t “broken.” You just rearranged it so that it made more sense to you, yourself, personally. It already made sense to other people who’ve learned the proper order of operations. Your metaphor fails here because unlike the signs you posted above, this equation is perfectly understandable in either form.

                I’m sorry my friend, math is not “mean.” You cannot use math to oppress people.