This kind of problem falls under "communicating badly and acting smug when misunderstood". Use parenthesis and the problem goes away.

Words that End in GRY

xkcd (xkcd.com)

Engagement bait

Please don't include X with the boomers. Since we stepped into the real world and realized it functions completely differently than what we were raised to believe, life's just been a neverending string of "wait, that was wrong too?" We just want to survive another day under the radar.

Sorry fellow X'rs for publicly acknowledging our existence. Hopefully this post doesn't get any upvotes. *Pulls blanket back over my head.

That's the point.

Set the bar low, but just high enough that tons of people still trip over it.

Sit back and enjoy the comment wars.

The people who are confident but wrong are too proud to admit they were wrong even if they realize it, and comment angrily.

The people who are right and know why, comment for corrections and some to show off how S-M-R-T they are.

The people who are wrong but willing to accept that just have their realization and probably don't think about it again. So do the people who don't know and/or care.

But those first two groups will keep the post going in both shares and comments, because "look at all these wrong people"

It's all designed to boost engagement.

Parenthesis, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction.

should actually be

Parenthesis, exponents, (multiplication and division), (addition and subtraction).

Addition and subtraction are given the same priority, and are done in the same step, from left to right.

It's not a great system of notation, it could be made far clearer (and parenthesis allow you to make it as clear as you like), but it's essentially the universal standard now and it's what we're stuck with.

As a millennial, I'm starting to relate more and more. The world changes very quickly, and all of the sudden things you knew as fact have different meanings, and there are new words and stuff. It's not all bad change, but it's change, and odds are, I'm finding out something changed the hard way.

This guy is the the guy posting the answer and then spending hours fighting the idiots who got it wrong on Facebook.

Nerd.

x/0 is the set {+inf,-inf}, fite me IRL.

The average home buyer in the US 17 years ago was born in 1968. Today? 1968. Yeah excuse me but as an elder millennial, Gen X can mostly fuck right off.

This is the kind of post designed to invoke a reaction. Facebook's and pretty much every other algorithm driven social media is designed to promote posts that have high interaction. So a post that invokes lots of negative reactions gets lots of promotion. Hence the downfall of modern society.

The first rule of gen-x is you don't talk about gen-x!

This right here is exactly why it's been so popular for so long.

I like the version where these problems are made purposefully ambiguous so people will fight over it and raise the level of interaction

Knowing basic arithmetic does not mean you know Math, and the fact you so hung up about this trivial aspect says a lot about you. Additionally, you express yourself like a boomer.

Seriously, I was raised with so much propaganda.

Up until my late twenties I had believed basically everything I was taught in school. I never had reason to question it, as I was basically living in a bubble. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that when the colonists arrived to this country, it wasn't just big empty open spaces that the native Americans gladly shared with us. Funny enough, that's roughly when I gained access to the internet.

Is it also lazy to learn Roy G. Biv to know the color spectrum instead of learning all the physics and optical properties behind that?

Or what about My Very Elderly Mother Just Served Us Nine Pickles to know the planets instead of learning orbital dynamics and astrophysics?

Christ man, it's a mnemonic device for elementary schoolers.

G U I N U S.

I know it's probably a typo, but I'm enjoying it.

Those two things are memorisation tasks. Maths is not about memorisation.

You are not supposed to remember that the area of a triangle is a * h / 2, you're supposed to understand why it's the case. You're supposed to be able to show that any triangle that can possibly exist is half the area of the rectangle it's stuck in: Start with the trivial case (right-angled triangle), then move on to more complicated cases. If you've understood that once, there is no reason to remember anything because you can derive the formula at a moment's notice.

All maths can be understood and derived like that. The names of the colours, their ordering, the names of the planets and how they're ordered, they're arbitrary, they have no rhyme or reason, they need to be memorised if you want to recall them. Maths doesn't, instead it dies when you apply memorisation.

Ein Anfänger (der) Gitarre Hat Elan. There, that's the Guitar strings in German. Why do I know that? Because my music theory knowledge sucks. I can't apply it, music is all vibes to me but I still need a way to match the strings to what the tuner is displaying. You should never learn music theory from me, just as you shouldn't learn maths from a teacher who can't prove a * h / 2, or thinks it's unimportant whether you can prove it.

I was good at math and it was one of my favorite core subjects in school, so I know I'm a weirdo but... I never understood how people couldn't understand basic PEMDAS/BEDMAS/Whatever-the-fuck-your-country-calls-it.

Obviously these problems are shitty engagement bait because they don't use parentheses, but still, seeing people fuck up the fact that Multiplication AND Division occur at the same time, and then the next step is Addition AND Subtraction just stupefies me.

Like, did you sleep through 4 years of elementary school to miss that fact??? Even in middle school pre-algebra teachers still did PEMDAS refreshers. I get that once I get out of college I'm probably gonna forget half the pre-calc shit I learned because I won't need it, and I'm not being drilled on it everyday like people in school are, but PEMDAS is a fundamental and basic daily life skill that everyone should know...

I really wish we gave a fuck about US education.

For me it's the arguments when there is a parentheses but no operator (otherwise known as implied multiplication) in these baits e.g. 15 + 2(4 - 2)

If you don't know operator orders I have given up long ago, but I have seen a few lengthy discussions about this