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felipec  unbelief  1yr ago (felipec.substack.com)   3218 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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But that is the point: most people make assumptions.

Assumptions about the meaning of symbols, namely that symbols carry their conventional meaning unless denoted otherwise.

This is a necessary prerequisite of communication, and messing with it is merely a failure to communicate.

And the failure to communicate can be entirely on the listening side by assuming a meaning that was never there.

The fact that today people don't understand each other is a huge problem, and worse: people don't want to understand what the other side is actually saying.

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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