this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
511 points (87.3% liked)
Asklemmy
43968 readers
1681 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Those math questions that rely on purposeful ambiguity in order to drive engagement are annoying as fuck. It's like "congratulations, you just proved that in math (and questions in general) if you're not clear with what you're asking, people will get different answers". What fantastic value! What a novel hypothesis! Now fucking knock it off. I'm tired of literally everyone screaming about how their way is right when it doesn't fucking matter, the question was asked in a bullshit way in order to piss everyone off.
Bonus, PEMDAS, BEMDAS, PE-MD-AS. It's a goddamn terrible mnemonic that twists itself in knots to make the acronym work, rather than to make the order of operations clear. Screaming it doesn't make your shit any clearer anyways.
Join me in RPN land, where we sit by looking smug while people thought different systems of infix notation debate the right answer.
There's not different rules of Maths though, and the people "debating" the answer are those who don't remember all the rules.
Three are also tests where you are expected to think like the person who made the test to figure or what the “correct” answer us. It’s not really correct, but it is the one that gets you the points.
Also some IQ question have several correct answers, but only one of them gives you the points. Super annoying. If you’re creative and smart enough to come up with a logically consistent answer you’re still not guaranteed to get the “correct” answer.
If they weren't ambiguous, then you wouldn't see them getting popular. The difference of opinion drives engagement which means it's more likely to show in your feed because that's how most social media algorithms work.
Things that everyone agrees on don't get engagement, so they don't bubble up to the top.
#MathsIsNeverAmbiguous They get popular because people who don't remember all the rules of Maths want to argue with the people who do remember all the rules of Maths. #DontForgetDistribution
Agree!! Things like "No dog breed begins with P!" Are equally annoying for me.
#MathsIsNeverAmbiguous The engagement is driven by people not remembering the rules of Maths. #DontForgetDistribution