Comment on I dunno
mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 1 day agoIf you’ve written a(b)², then you mean (a×b)²
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:
6a²b²=6(ab)²
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 1 day 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 1 day 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?