this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2025
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Pemdas, parenthesis first, for a total of 3. Then multiplication, 15, then addition. 17. What's hard about this?
What's hard about it is people are fucking stupid.
No, it's written poorly to drive engagement. People read left to right and try to do math that way too, but if you want to be mean to people who don't remember things they learned in elementary school then never applied in real life you write it like OP.
(8-5)5+2
Far easier for most people, but then you don't get the arguments...
I studied physics a bit and order of operations was always clear. Not sure why people are down voting this.
Yes, thank you! Sure, it'd be great if people remembered arithmetic rules, but just write it better and it won't matter.
It's written like that in Maths textbooks. i.e. there's nothing wrong with it.
It's written the same way literally thousands of math problems in thousands of textbooks have written the same type of math problem for the last 100 years. OP did not write it that way to be "mean." He wrote it that way because it's a legit way to write it.
The operational order is fucked, the way I rewrote is more readable, even if you remember the order. The only reason you'd write the equation like that is to be mean, there's no reason to write it like that unless you're trying to trip people up.
You got it wrong on your first try, didn't you? Lol, it's not "mean" to write a math problem. The whole point of memorizing the order of operations is so that you can solve it no matter what order the equation is written in. No one wrote this problem on purpose just to make you fail to understand it, that's dumb.
This was literally written for twitter content...
I just fail to see how you come to the conclusion that it was written in a "mean" way. It's math, there is no "nice" way to write an equation.
it's mean in that they intentionally wrote it to trip people up so we'd have this very conversion...
But how do you know they did that? Becuase it's perfectly legit the way it's written.
Because this it's trivial to write it in a way that won't cause this confusion and yet every 3 months or so someone posts another one of these gotcha no context given equations and we as the internet have this same discussion again and again. It's bait...
Well, it's causing YOU confusion yes. But to anyone who remembers the order of operation it's not confusing at all.
Do you remember how this reply thread started? I literally fixed the equation so that it would be less confusing to people, I couldn't do that if I didn't know what order it was meant to go in...
I'm just not assuming that people are stupid because they got tripped up by something designed to trip them up.
It's writing like this with math, you can find the sentence structure, but it makes it a puzzle people will mess up unnecessarily
But you didn't "Fix" the equation, because it wasn't "broken." You just rearranged it so that it made more sense to you, yourself, personally. It already made sense to other people who've learned the proper order of operations. Your metaphor fails here because unlike the signs you posted above, this equation is perfectly understandable in either form.
I'm sorry my friend, math is not "mean." You cannot use math to oppress people.
Those sentence are also perfectly understandable, once you've understood the order of the words, but they're written in such away that you have to think about it.
If there are multiple ways to do things and one is more accessible to most people with less effort that isn't the objectively right way but it is better.
It's obviously not just myself as posting out of order math problems are a constant source of online engagement.
No, they aren't. Read the way they're written, as in left to right, none of those sentances make sense. They do not make sense because they disobey the rules of grammar.
But the math equation 2+5(8-5)=17 makes perfect sense. Writing it like (8+5)5+2 =17 also makes perfect sense, but writing it this way does not somehow enable it to make "more" sense than the first way. It does not, because both of those equations are the exact same thing. It's called "the law of equivalence," i.e. 2+5=5+2. It's just two ways of writing the exact same thing. You cannot do this with grammar. "The Horse eats the grass" =/= "The grass eats the Horse." You cannot just rearrange the words in a sentance and get the same meaning the same way you can rearrange the elements in an equation.
It's not "less effort" to read it one way or the other, because both of those equations are exactly the same. It only makes "more" sense to YOU, yourself, personally. But to everyone else who learned the order of operations it makes no difference which way it's written.
Like I said in the begining, people are fucking stupid.
People are stupid, any system that fails to take that into account and mitigate it is doomed to frustration and failure...
it does because people read (and therefore do math) left to right. it makes more sense because it accounts for the fact that most people know how to read, but don't know the operational order of math equations.
We're just going in circles, so let's just agree to disagree.
I hope you're not implying that arithmetic has somehow "failed" the human race or something.
No, it only makes more sense this way to YOU, yourself, personally. To everyone else who knows the order of operations it makes perfect sense either way. You're projecting your own limitations on everybody else. Other people have learned the proper way to do equations.
Actually that's invalid syntax. Imagine if it was (8-5)-5 and you see why.
There's no such thing, only people who remember the rules of Maths and people who don't
No you didn't. You wrote something that is mathematically invalid.
Which is exactly how it is written, for all those who remember the rules of Maths.
Test who remembers the rules of Maths
No it isn't.
Wrong.
Because it's written like that in Maths textbooks
Obeying the rules of Maths, as found in Maths textbooks
No it isn't
The engagement comes from people not remembering the rules of Maths
That's an invalid syntax. it's 5(8-5) or 5x(8-5), nothing else. Why is it invalid? Imagine (8-5)-5 - am I multiplying what's in the brackets by -5 (which gives -15), or subtracting 5 after doing the brackets (which gives -2)? Invalid syntax
Nope, it's wrong for everyone, due to being an invalid syntax.