I guess I’m going on a limb here to say that the intricacies of German Grammar is in fact trivia for people who don’t speak German, and the people who laughed at JFK for calling himself a donut were kind of jerks.
Ah, but what if you’re buying 3 gallons of milk and 2 loaves of bread? Order matters when you’re calculating 3g+2b.
Actually, that’s sort of the way it did happen: the theoretical underpinnings came later, historically.
I’m dismissive of almost everything on Facebook, but this particular problem is something that you could either learn from or be offended by. It certainly does demonstrate that people are not as good at math as the could be if they were willing to spend a slight amount of effort, and it also shows how people would rather double down and take offense rather than learn something.
Right, like that particular equation.
The convention would be whether you add or subtract first, or whether you multiply or divide first. PEMDAS is the same as PEDMAS is the same as PEMDSA or PEDMSA. But whether you do the addition and subtraction before or after the multiplication and division is actually important, and while not “natural law” is based on the real world.
Let’s say you have a grocery list, you have 6 items that cost $5, 3 items that cost $2, 8 items that cost $4, and you were going to pick up an item that cost $10, but they were out. The equation for this grocery list is 6x5+3x2+8x4+0x10. You see how you would get a completely different (and very wrong) number if you didn’t use the correct order of operations?
And that’s just groceries, I can’t imagine how someone goes about understanding their monthly budget without understanding those basics.
Or polyamory.
Of course, but in the real world, I understand the context of that equation I wrote. I’m not going to add the cost of a frozen pizza to the number of cucumbers I bought before multiplying by the number of pizzas I bought and then multiplying that by the cost of a cucumber.
Geez, I shouldn’t post when I’m bored, I’m getting way too invested in this theoretical trick question.
That’s not something I ever do - but it would go something like three gallons of milk at $2 each is $6 plus a dozen eggs at $3 and so on. Not one big equation -multiple simple ones. And I would never include zero times $10 for the item the store was out of.
I don’t have a budget and as for the bills, I add up the bills and subtract the total from my checking account balance.
Yes, but I have no idea what the order of operations has to do with that. I certainly don’t check the banks math to see that they charged me the exact correct amount of interest each month.
I didn’t say I’m bad at math or even that I hate math (neither of which is true) - what I said is that people forget things they don’t use and the order of operations is something that many people don’t use frequently. It has nothing to do with not understanding that it costs more to drive from work to home and back than the electricity for the light would eve cost
None of that requires the order of operations, because you never write it out as a single equation without parentheses. People are just solving small multiplication problems as they go. If they wanted to write it all down, they could use parentheses, or even other conventions to show how each operation is grouped. The order of operations is just a rule that allows you to simplify how you write down equations, treating the most commonly used order to reduce the number of parentheses used.
The reason people get offended is that people look down on them and make fun of them. You, for example, push the idea that they don’t really care about math, when they just took the time out of their day to do some recreational mathematics, and even did it in their head. That doesn’t sound like someone who doesn’t care.
The thing is, the people who look down are just as much the target audience. That’s what creates the controversy that drives up engagement. They want them to make the other people get offended. And then they get offended that people got offended, and you get an outrage feedback loop. That gets more and more participation, which means the algorithm now will boost their subsequent posts.
Really, anyone who actually engages at all is being tricked. Even if you know “PEMDAS” or “BEDMAS” or whatever they call it these days, the desire to show off about it still feeds the engagement. It’s not like those who post these care if you get it right or wrong.
What’s more, when you talk to actual mathematicians, they all seem to uniformly hate this sort of thing. They hate it when math is used as some sort of trick. They push this idea that you should write equations to be clearly understood. Because they care more about the actual math than following some convention.
Not to mention so many of these problems actually use actual ambiguities, by mixing in different ways to indicate multiplication or division. Or they just randomly throw in a multiplication out of the blue that wouldn’t be there in real life, whether the everyday stuff or the mathematical equations. You don’t, for instance, have a set of additions with one multiplication thrown in out of nowhere. Heck, it’s rare you ever even actually write out multiplication by zero. You just leave that term out.
Again, they’re designed to trick people, and that’s not actually what mathematics is about. Most mathematicians I’ve encountered say that it’s more important to be as clear as possible, and will use extra parentheses if they notice people getting mixed up. Most programmers will say “just use parentheses” rather than depending on the order of operations.
Sure, this sort of thing can be a fun little “pub quiz” or trivia game thing. Nothing wrong with that. But when it’s used to judge people, I would argue it goes too far. And it’s not good to keep perpetuating this myth that so many people are “bad at math” because they don’t remember certain rules. Being good at following rules isn’t the same thing as being good at math.
Yet that is what our education system tends to push. And that’s why most math educators keep trying to come up with something better.
Right; and that helps to explain why the order of operations rule works the way it does. See (if you care) the posts by @Senegoid in this thread:
Isn’t that what the SDMB is all about?
Reminds me of all the articles I have read about women having sex with men more often than men with women (or the other way around), even with rankings by country. They never get tired of postulating one or the other when it is evident that both cannot be. I can only hope it is clickbait for innumeracy victims.
Social media does like to post equations that are tricky to solve. Can we stump you?
It’s similar to a test in math clsss. The teacher is making sure the student understands the order of operations.
People that use math regularly at work normally use parentheses in equations for clarity. We don’t rely entirely on the order of operations. We’re not trying to prove anything to a teacher. Accuracy and understanding the equation is our biggest concern. You really don’t want to give your boss a report with bad data because of 4 x4 + 1. When you could write it (4x4) +1 and avoid any possible confusion .
Yeah, nobody is thinking “order of operatoins” when they sum up something like that in real life. They’re more thinking (2 of this) + (3 of that) + (6 of this). You’re not grouping it in your head in a linear fashion trying to do math from left to right as 2 * $4 + 3 * $6 + 6 * $5. You don’t even have to know such a thing as order of operations even exists to do this problem intuitively and correctly.
Of course not, because you do understand the order of operation, even if you don’t use them explicitly.
I have seen people doing exactly that sort of thing while tallying up costs of materials or bills.
So, you don’t have a plan for how you are going to spend your money in advance?
Not specifically the order of operations, but math and the “feel” for numbers in general.
But yeah, I do check other people’s math when they are using it to tell me how much money I owe them, and I have saved myself thousands of dollars by finding errors in their favor, and have cost myself hundreds of dollars by finding errors in mine.
Forgetting what the order of operations is is completely understandable. Forgetting that they exist is a different beast altogether.
I think that they are related, as in either case, it’s math. You use math to determine how much a light will cost to keep burning all day, and you use math to determine what it will cost to drive home to turn it off. Without even thinking about it, I knew that it would not come out positive, but I had to actually put the numbers down on paper to convince her.
That may occur occasionally, but the much more common is that people will think that people are going to look down on them and make fun of them than it actually happens. If you see this “equation” and you solve it incorrectly, and you never tell anyone or anyone ever knows, then no one is making fun of you, any negative emotion is entirely because of internalization, not because of anything that anyone else has done.
You, for example, have internalized this in order to make up this accusation out of whole cloth.
Are you talking about posters here? This message board is not a good cross section of the populace. I’d argue that most here are at least in the top 10% educationally and intellectually. I’m talking about in real life, where I often get told, “I hate math” any time I’m trying to explain simple concepts like budgets.
I had a friend that liked riding motorcycles, and he would ride them cross country all the time. One day, he said he was riding from Miami, Florida to Anchorage, Alaska, and I thought for a second, and said, “That’s like 5200 miles.” He blinked, and said, “That’s almost exactly right, how’d you know that?” I started to explain Fermi estimation and Pythagoras theorem, and he said, “Nevermind, I don’t really care, I hate math.”
I’ve had employees claim they didn’t feel they were getting paid enough, and when I asked if they knew what they made, they didn’t know. It took a hard lesson on them to quit, go somewhere else, and they still don’t know what they are getting paid, they just know that they don’t have enough money to pay for everything they used to be able to afford.
Math is important, without math, how do you even survive? (Poorly, seems to be the answer.)
Not if they learned something. But then, I guess people do get offended if they are tricked into learning something.
They hate arithmetic period. As I said far upthread, anything below 4th grade is rote repetition and is boring, and anything above is esoteric and is only engaged by nerds and geeks.
It’s like you are trying to say that mathematicians never create or solve mathematical puzzles. Sure, this one would be pretty simplistic to a mathematician, but it’s really no different than many that get passed around, except in its simplicity. Math is entirely about convention.
Pretty much all mathematicians in academia do is to create and solve puzzles.
See, that’s my whole point here. By knowing and understanding the order of operations, there are no ambiguities. Only by refusing to acknowledge that they exist is it in the slightest bit ambiguous.
There are many equations that relate directly to real life, and some that are purely for recreational mathematics, that have variables in them. Sometimes, those variables are a 0. If you don’t know what to do with that 0 when it is multiplied by another number, then you are going to get the wrong answer.
You don’t leave the term out if you don’t know if the variable is going to be a 0 ahead of time.
I would say that you have gone too far when you argue that it’s used to judge people.
That’s literally all it is. It’s a little bit of trivia sent out on facebook. Anything more than that is entirely people getting upset about getting that bit of trivia wrong.
It’s no different than if I asked when the Battle of Gettysburg was, and people getting upset and “feeling judged” that they don’t know history because they didn’t know the date. There’s nothing wrong with not knowing when it was, I’d have to look it up, I couldn’t even tell you with confidence the year, much less the date. Now, if you then claim it’s a trick question because no one remembers that stuff decades later, and that knowing history is stupid, and that we don’t need to even know that there was a battle at Gettysburg or even that there was a Civil War, then we are getting into the same territory as people saying that using order of operations is bullshit and arbitrary.
I don’t think that it’s used to judge people at all. I see pretty much all the comments being people being offended over being “tricked”. The offense is taken, even though it’s not being given.
No, I see that people are bad at math when they make bad decisions that are based on a lack of understanding of math, not because they don’t remember the rules.
If someone doesn’t know how to balance their budget because they are bad at math, that’s something that hurts them, not any judgement that they may feel that others are making on them because they got a problem on facebook wrong.
Math is poorly taught in grade school. Many educators take the same attitude that you do, that these rules and conventions are just arbitrary, and will not ever be useful in life. They make it boring and unengaging and all about rote practice and memorization. It’s rare that someone actually takes an interest in math after it being beaten into them how boring they should find it. By the time they see a “math educator” it’s too late, they are already turned off to the whole subject.
If I were an elementary instructor, I’d play videos from Numberphile and a few other channels that have people who are passionate about math, who explain what they are doing on a level that barely requires arithmetic to understand, and who may excite and inspire students to want to understand how these people came up with and solved these ideas.
I didn’t say that. What I said is that I don’t have a budget. I couldn’t tell you how much I spend a month on groceries or how much I spend a year on clothes or vacations because I don’t plan in January how much I am going to spend on those things and I don’t keep track of it over the course of a year. I know that my income is enough to pay my bills and save some money and still have enough left over that it doesn’t matter if I spend $4000 on vacations this year or $8000. So I might plan to spend $8K on vacations even while I don’t actually have a budget.
I’m sure that someone who can’t figure out that it costs more to drive home doesn’t have a good understanding of math - but that doesn’t mean that someone who doesn’t remember anything about the order of operations because they haven’t needed to use in in thirty years doesn’t have a good understanding of math.
I specifically referred to checking the bank’s math to see if they charged me the correct amount of interest - I find it hard to believe you do that regularly but if you say so I’ll believe you. But I don’t think you saved yourself thousands of dollars by checking math and finding errors. I think you saved those dollars by finding either payments that weren’t credited or inaccurate charges - which is really not checking their math but checking their recordkeeping.
But that doesn’t have anything to do with order of operations. If anything, it’s knowing how to group parts of a problem together – in math, this would be using parentheses. Say Ime and Bob go in halvsies on a gift for Charlie. We buy a $50 bottle of whiskey, a $20 cake, and a $50 Target gift certificate. We need to split this. If we think of it as 50+20+50/2 and follow the “order of operations” we screw up the answer. It’s obviously (50+20+50)/2. That’s because we intuitively think of it as hey, let’s find the sum of 50+20+50 first, and then divide by two, just like with the grocery equation, we think of, hey, let’s find the subtotals of our groupings and add them together. It has nothing to do with order of operations or knowing them or not. Even if we decided the order of operations were backward, we’d still end up with the right answer, because we’re grouping the subtotals in our heads for the final addition or final division.
Fair enough. Some of us don’t have that luxury though, and do have to consider how much we spend. I spent a number of years having to make sure that I would have enough money at the end of the month to pay my mortgage and bills, and so had to figure out how much I could afford to spend on food, and whether I had enough to buy gas to take my dog to the park.
Now that I run a business, I still need to budget things, to make sure that I have enough to make payroll, rent, and my other bills. I have to figure out how much I need to charge clients in order to do these things, and how much I can afford to pay my employees based on these numbers.
Come to think of it, most of the business owners that I know that are struggling also hate math.
I never said that they did. However, not even knowing that such a thing exists, and even going to the extent of claiming that they don’t matter and are offended by being asked the question in the first place is in the same vein. If someone doesn’t have a good grasp of math, they make poor decisions.
I was talking about understanding the cost of financing loans in the first place. Anyone that understands math wouldn’t get an ARM, unless they were in the very small segment of the population that it is a useful tool. the entire 2008 crisis was caused by people not understanding math and taking out loans that they couldn’t afford (helped along by banks and lenders pushing these loans sure). I bought my house in the early days of ARM popularity, and when they offered it, I thought about it for a few seconds before I rejected it based on being able to tell how much it would end up costing me in the long run. Others who aren’t as good at math just saw a low monthly payment being offered, and took it up, often along with a home equity loan that they didn’t need and really couldn’t afford.
I didn’t say that they didn’t make those errors on purpose. I’m sure that at least some were. But when I’m involved in 7 and 8 figure contracts, it pays to double check their invoices, to makes sure they didn’t make any “mistakes”. Having a decent head for numbers means that I didn’t have to pull out a calculator and check each item on the invoice, I could tell just by looking at it that some things were obviously off. Other people who contract these people who don’t check over the math get ripped off.
Basically what you have done there is explain the purpose of, and derive from first principles, the order of operations. You understand that they are not arbitrary, and that they have real world application, even if you don’t formalize it with “proper” notation.
You are not Dunning-Krugerin’ us, are you?
Ah, OK then 
Or (50/4 + 20/4 + 50/4) x 2. The possibilities are endless. But for a proper gift a 50$ whisky… ah, well.
I did originally have it as $100, but didn’t want to be too bougie. 
I’m not using that to judge people at all either!!!
slooooowly walks away… Did anyone see anything?
Note Charlie also got a $20 cake. That’s like cheap-ass grocery store cake around here. They obviously are just buying gifts for the social convention, not because they like Charlie.