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felipec  unbelief  2yr ago (felipec.substack.com)   3600 thread views

2+2 = not what you think

felipec.substack.com

Changing someone's mind is very difficult, that's why I like puzzles most people get wrong: to try to open their mind. Challenging the claim that 2+2 is unequivocally 4 is one of my favorites to get people to reconsider what they think is true with 100% certainty.

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For the author himself it's an interesting discovery.

It's not about what I think, from what I've seen very few people know about abstract algebra, many don't know what modulo is, and the vast majority of those who do, consider it an operation, not a completely new kind of arithmetic (as mathematicians do).

If this was general knowledge people wouldn't keep saying 2+2=4 as if it was an unequivocal fact, and at least someone would would say "well, only under normal arithmetic". I've never heard somebody say that.

Can you find an article or someone seriously saying that 2+2 isn't necessarily 4? (other than woke activists decrying Western mathematics)

In the real world people do misinterpret, and they rarely (if ever) follow Grice's razor. They argue about what Trump said, rather than what Trump meant.

Semantics is in my opinion a huge problem in modern discourse. Russia claims what they did in Ukraine was a "special military operation", but other people claim it's a "war". Which is it? Meaning does matter.

Even in deep philosophical debates meaning is everything. A debate about "free will" entirely depends on what opposing sides mean by "free will", and there's at least three different definitions.

You say the meaning of meaning is "not extremely deep", but does it have to be? People fail extremely basic problems of logic (90% fail the Wason selection task), basic problems of probability (like the Monty Hall problem), I've also setup my own problems of probability of probability, and guess what?: most people get it wrong.

Maybe some ideas are too simple for you, but what about other people perhaps not so intellectually gifted? My objective is to arrive to a concept that even people with an IQ of 80 would be able to understand, and I'm not sure they would understand what modular arithmetic even means (not the modulo operator), so perhaps even though it's "not extremely deep" for you, it's a challenge for them.

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