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felipec  unbelief  1yr ago (felipec.substack.com)   3217 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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You can do equally annoying semantic tricks with pretty much anything, it's just harder to get away with it with when it isn't math:

Ie, "The Sun is smaller than a pebble" - - (Pebble is an alternate name I made up for the Milky Way)

"Grass isn't green" - - (I've defined Green to be 00FF00 in Hexadecimal, and this grass here is 28CF0E, which I have named "moss", so the colors aren't equal)

etc.

When you say things without rigorously defining every word ahead of time, there is an implicit promise that your words mean approximately what they usually mean in that language. Most words and concepts have reasonably well understood meanings, or such can be inferred via context. And this is almost always a good thing because it enables people to have conversations without carrying dictionaries around, not some close minded thing that needs to be challenged and abused with pedantic tricks and deception.

Except arithmetic isn't a semantic trick, and modern algebra is an important field of mathematics, not something I invented.

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Using non-standard definitions without denoting them beforehand is a semantic trick.

And if you want to do math, you absolutely need to rigorously define things.

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