tycho wrote:jaggernaut wrote:tycho wrote:21-6+2= 21-(6+2)= 21-6-2= 21-8= 13.
Wrong!
21-6+2= 21-(6-2)=21-4= 17
Thank you @jaggernaut. The Man God has plenty of debugging to do.
Or maybe the best the best thing is to do away with all programs and keep an empty head.
I have been trying to look at this bug, and the results are fascinating.
First, why did I insert the brackets? I saw myself inserting the brackets. The event was fast and 'automatic', almost irrational. It was much later that I began to see the effects of my decision.
At this point the issue at hand ceases to be purely mathematical. For mathematics is a language that strictly depends on my motives and intentions. That is, we are now looking at my mind.
Or rather, we are now looking at the mind that was learning BODMAS then.
I learned BODMAS when I was four years old, at home. And so it is easy for you to understand when I say that my teacher saw no other way of making me learn other than using pain as a motivator.
BODMAS is about ordering. And one lesson I learned 'wrongly' is that of using the bracket as an ordering tool. Little did I know that the more order you create, the more the complications!
Again, order can only be created arbitrarily for the human always has imperfect information at any instance.
That is, humans cannot be perfectly rational while the systems he has created demand perfect rationality.
But there's Arrow's impossibility theorem that can be stated simply as there is no ordering system that is fair or even 'good enough'.
The above theorem posits three criteria of fairness, of which two deal with the transitivity of an individual's preferences to group and a third one, that of the absence of a 'dictator'.
In this BODMAS problem, Citizen dictated, then Wazua protested, then Wazuans began to protest amongst themselves. And even now as we look at this protest 'KNEC' and calculators have already been consulted.
That brings us to the 'Spirit of the times' central authority is under great pressure, or rather, we no longer have a central authority for anything. That is, the citizen will always get it wrong.
This line of thought has great implications to every facet of Society, an ordinal system, but I don't want to write so long a letter!