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

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…

it’s mean in that they intentionally wrote it to trip people up so we’d have this very conversion…

This was literally written for twitter content…

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.

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…