TheKingBee

joined 2 years ago
[–] 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.

[–] TheKingBee@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago (5 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.

If there are multiple ways to do things and one is more accessible to most people with less effort that isn't the objectively right way but it is better.

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

[–] TheKingBee@lemmy.world -1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (8 children)

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.

[–] TheKingBee@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago (11 children)

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...

[–] TheKingBee@lemmy.world 0 points 2 weeks ago (14 children)

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

[–] TheKingBee@lemmy.world -1 points 2 weeks ago (16 children)

This was literally written for twitter content...

[–] TheKingBee@lemmy.world -2 points 2 weeks ago (19 children)

The operational order is fucked, the way I rewrote is more readable, even if you remember the order. The only reason you'd write the equation like that is to be mean, there's no reason to write it like that unless you're trying to trip people up.

[–] TheKingBee@lemmy.world -3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (24 children)

No, it's written poorly to drive engagement. People read left to right and try to do math that way too, but if you want to be mean to people who don't remember things they learned in elementary school then never applied in real life you write it like OP.

(8-5)5+2

Far easier for most people, but then you don't get the arguments...