You must log in or register to comment.
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
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]
I love this so much because on the ballot, the right answer is also often missing
People who are responsible for the Wayland protocol: “This seems like a good idea, but also give veto rights to weirdos.”
Null.
wrong sub should be a shitpost
Wait, which numeral system are we using
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.
2+2*4=164 ☝️🤓
Okay, buddy elementary school
Is that a good elementary school?
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:)
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.
Solve for x
x=4/7
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?
Regular multiplication? Sure. But this is Rustydrd multiplication, which assigns different values to products I don’t like.
Fourg
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 about obviously fake bullshit?
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 😊
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.
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.
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.
Try RPN for a whole different beast
I am familiar with RPN. At least RPN is always unambiguous
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.
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?
