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.
2+8x
just get rid of the x. 2+(24) = 26
Why write more than necessary? Surely 26 = 26 is enough.
because i like getting rid of the x. it reminds me of her. like flushing.
This isn’t even math, just convention on rules for order of operations.
The one response you got was just like, “But there’s just ONE rule.” totally missing your point.
Order of operations only has one rule: Bedmas (or pemdas if you’re not from north america)
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 thatPEDMASis a very strict order. Other places say that it isPE 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’sPEDMAS, 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.
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]
I think canadians call ( ) brackets in math
I love this so much because on the ballot, the right answer is also often missing
@Mog_Spawn @humour 2 2x4’s are not as strong as a 4x4. But you have to remember to take of 1/4" from every width.
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
No, you’re Hildegarde
no u
ur trans now not sorry
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
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?”
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? 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.
I was trying yo make a shitty joke conflating you worrying (having concern) with you worrrying (wondering what).
an odd number out of t
sorry about that, completely wooshed me
Saul Goodman
If it helps, I saw what you did there, and I exhaled slightly harder out of my nose while smiling wryly. It’s even better the op didn’t get it. So like, well done and stuff 😊
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.
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.
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
PEMDAS isn’t obvious to “common people”? Why not?
Clearly not if most of these answers are incorrect. If it was obvious, there wouldn’t be as many answers as there are.
It didn’t occur to me that the poll may function that way. Does it? I thought this was engagement bait in which the poll’s author lists only wrong answers as options
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 learned BEDMAS. Doesn’t really change your comment other than effectively “spelling” of a single term
Most actual math people never have to think about pemdas here because no one would ever write a problem like this. The trick here is “when was the last time I saw an X to mean multiplication” so I would already be off about it
1 + 1/2 in my brain is clearly 1.5, but 1+1÷2 doesn’t even register in my brain properly.
Right, and that clue IMO unravels the more troubling aspect of why this content spreads so quickly:
It’s deliberately aimed at people with a rudimentary math education who can be made to feel far superior to others who, in spite of having roughly the same level of proficiency, are missing/forgetting a single fact that has a disproportionate effect on the result they expect.
That is, it’s blue-dress-level contentious engagement bait for anyone with low math skills, whether or not they remember PEMDAS.
Blue-dress-level?
Old internet thing. Hotly debated at the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress
I’ll add the contextual link above for others, since it’s been awhile.
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.
Try RPN for a whole different beast
I am familiar with RPN. At least RPN is always unambiguous
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
You’ve completely not understood that order of operations is an arbitrary convention. How did you decide to expand the definition of multiplication before evaluating the addition? Convention.
You can’t write 2 + 2 ÷ 2 like this, so how are you gonna decide whether to decide to divide or add first?
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”]
Okay, buddy elementary school
Is that a good elementary school?
It’s okay, buddy
2+2*4=164 ☝️🤓
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.
Yeah. It’s definitely “the liberals” responsible for poor math skills.
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:)
Null.
Wait, which numeral system are we using
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.
People who are responsible for the Wayland protocol: “This seems like a good idea, but also give veto rights to weirdos.”
