Comment on I dunno
FishFace@piefed.social 2 days agoCouldn’t resist:
but when multiplications are denoted by juxtaposition, as in 4c ÷ 3ab
Damn, and I thought they were called “products” not “multiplications” 🤔🤔🤔
No it doesn’t. If you meant ab², then you would just write ab². If you’ve written a(b)², then you mean (a×b)²
If you can find an explicit textbook example where writing a(b)² is said to be evaluated as (a×b)² then that’s another way you can prove your good faith (When I say “explicit” I don’t mean it must literally be that formula; the variables a and b could have different names, or could be constants written with numerals, and the exponent could be anything other than 1). Likewise, if you can find any explicit textbook example which specifically mentions an “exception” to the distributive law, that would demonstrate good faith.
I’m not saying that such an explicit example is the only way to demonstrate your claim, but I’m just trying to give you more opportunities to prove that you’re not just a troll and that it’s possible to have a productive discussion. You insist you’re talking about mathematical rules that cannot be violated, so it should be no problem to find an explicit mention of them.
If you think this insistence on demonstrating your good faith is unfair, you should remember that you are saying that the practice of calculators, mathematical tools, programming languages and mathematical software are all wrong and that you are right, and that my interpretation of your own textbooks is wrong. While it’s not impossible for many people to be wrong about something and for me to interpret something wrong, if you show no ability to admit error, or to admit that disagreement from competing authorities casts doubt on your claims, or to evince your controversial claims with explicit examples that are not subject to interpretational contortions, the likelihood is that you’re not willing to ever see truth and there’s no point arguing with such a person.
By the way, sorry for making multiple replies on the same point.
As my own show of good faith, I do see that one of your textbooks (Chrystal) has the convention that a number “carries with it” a + or -, which is suppressed in the case of a term-initial positive number. If you demonstrate it worth continuing the discussion, I’ll explain why I think this is a bad convention and why the formal first-order language of arithmetic doesn’t have this convention.
mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
When shown a textbook that explicitly distinguishes 6(ab)^3^ meaning 6(ab)(ab)(ab) and (6ab)^3^ meaning (6ab)(6ab)(6ab), they accidentally got it right whilst sneering and inventing their sPeCiAl cAsE:
They can’t even keep their horseshit straight when their inane pivots to division are directly addressed. Every response begins “nuh uh!” and backfills whatever needs to be true for you to be wrong and them to be smarterer.
They’re just full of shit.
FishFace@piefed.social 2 days ago
I haven’t been able to follow the entirety of that conversation so I don’t remember what exactly he said about combining (implicit) multiplication, brackets and powers.
I think their fundamental confusion is in thinking that the distributive law is something you must do instead of a property of multiplication that you can use to aid in the manipulation of algebraic expressions but don’t have to. Folded into their inability to understand that some aspects of maths are custom and convention, whilst others are rules fundamental to the operation of the universe. Somewhere along the way he seems to think that distributivity is something to do with brackets instead of something to do with addition and multiplication - I really don’t understand how that has happened!
I’m pursuing a tack where I’ll see if I can get him to actually cop to any of his verifiable mistakes, or back up any of his whackadoodle claims with direct references. If he can’t, I’m out - but I do like to give people an opportunity to demonstrate they’re not trolling. The nice thing is that it doesn’t really matter whether they’re trolling or not - someone who is able to admit mistakes is someone worth trying to convince they’ve made a mistake, and someone who isn’t is not. So if you can test the waters with a simple mistake, even if it’s not central, you can establish whether there’s any point persevering.
Tomorrow I’m expecting another wall of text responding to every single word except the ones where I ask for such an admission, and I’ll have satisfied myself he’s a lost cause. I’ll try and watch out for his spam on future arithmetic-ragebait threads so I can help the effort to head him off though :P
BTW did you go on his mastodon profile? He’s had a bee in his bonnet about this, and been pushing his wrong ideas of what the distributive law are, since 2023.
mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Oh yeah, had a laugh at some RPN guy saying, ‘Hey you should check this thesis specifically about order of operations.’
This dipshit: “I already know what it’ll be - a University person who’s forgotten about Terms and The Distributive Law - they’re ALL like that.”
All of them! Wow! What a coincidence!
Isn’t it fucking crazy how everyone in the world is wrong about this, and math still works?