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felipec  unbelief  2yr ago (felipec.substack.com)   3599 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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In general? Yes. In this example? Absolutely the speaker's fault. If you're using non-standard symbols, you need to denote that.

You are assuming I'm the one who brought up the 2+2=4 factoid.

If the speaker who brought up 2+2=4 is using standard symbols, he's unambiguously correct, so that can't be what we're talking about.

If the speaker claimed that 2+2=4 is unequivocally true, he/she is wrong.

Absolutely not. The speaker knows what the statement means, what the symbols mean, in what structure we're operating. The rest is just basic arithmetic over the natural numbers.

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