this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] Hawanja@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Those sentence are also perfectly understandable, once you’ve understood the order of the words, but they’re written in such away that you have to think about it.

No, they aren't. Read the way they're written, as in left to right, none of those sentances make sense. They do not make sense because they disobey the rules of grammar.

But the math equation 2+5(8-5)=17 makes perfect sense. Writing it like (8+5)5+2 =17 also makes perfect sense, but writing it this way does not somehow enable it to make "more" sense than the first way. It does not, because both of those equations are the exact same thing. It's called "the law of equivalence," i.e. 2+5=5+2. It's just two ways of writing the exact same thing. You cannot do this with grammar. "The Horse eats the grass" =/= "The grass eats the Horse." You cannot just rearrange the words in a sentance and get the same meaning the same way you can rearrange the elements in an equation.

It's not "less effort" to read it one way or the other, because both of those equations are exactly the same. It only makes "more" sense to YOU, yourself, personally. But to everyone else who learned the order of operations it makes no difference which way it's written.

It’s obviously not just myself as posting out of order math problems are a constant source of online engagement.

Like I said in the begining, people are fucking stupid.

[–] SmartmanApps@programming.dev 0 points 3 days ago

Writing it like (8+5)5+2 =17 also makes perfect sense

Actually that's invalid syntax. Imagine if it was (8-5)-5 and you see why.

[–] TheKingBee@lemmy.world 1 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

People are stupid, any system that fails to take that into account and mitigate it is doomed to frustration and failure...

writing it this way does not somehow enable it to make “more” sense than the first way

it does because people read (and therefore do math) left to right. it makes more sense because it accounts for the fact that most people know how to read, but don't know the operational order of math equations.

We're just going in circles, so let's just agree to disagree.

[–] Hawanja@lemmy.world 0 points 4 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

People are stupid, any system that fails to take that into account and mitigate it is doomed to frustration and failure…

I hope you're not implying that arithmetic has somehow "failed" the human race or something.

it does because people read (and therefore do math) left to right.

No, it only makes more sense this way to YOU, yourself, personally. To everyone else who knows the order of operations it makes perfect sense either way. You're projecting your own limitations on everybody else. Other people have learned the proper way to do equations.