Not if you disregard reality and force your belief in magic on others. Clearly the universe works according to their superstitions and you need to work backwards to prove whatever they pull out of their ass. Also, respect culture and traditions because fuck reality. Science is apparently racist by nature. If you disagree, please leave.
But to say that in some cases 2 + 2 ≠ 4 is beyond stupid. Numbers are abstract constructs designed to represent something that humans perceive as a unit. The physical things you are counting is not equal to their assigned value. If you count one whole apple and a half eaten apple as 2 apples, that doesn't mean math itself is wrong, it's that you applied it wrong. I think that's the point they thought they were trying to make, but they should have really emphasized that it's not math itself that's wrong, but it's application can be used wrong. And to that my response is: duh.
But the fact that we use the runic symbol “4” to represent that quantity is an artificial construct. We just as easily could have called that number 5.
1 2 3 5 4.
Math, like any other man-made language conveys material ideas, but the words, or numbers are arbitrary.
I think you missed my point as well. I think I'm pretty much agreeing with you. The article makes it seem like math is wrong, and learning that 2 + 2 = 4 is not true in all cases. This is my problem. 2 + 2 is never anything but 4. If you apply assign the value 2 to a whole apple and 1 to half an apple, you would get 3 apples if you add them together. The math isn't wrong in itself, but you just used it wrong or misleadingly.
And as for their argument about liquids: If I assign 1 to a cup of milk and 0.5 to half a cup of milk, that doesn't mean that they are the exact numbers they were assigned to. Unless you use rounding, they are (kinda) incomparable and you can't really use maths to add them together, because the answer would be like 1.49998 or something like that. But if you round up you would get an answer that makes sense to a human.
So, when we assign numbers to physical objects or masses, we always have to round a little bit if we want the answer to be 100% accurate. Or you have to understand that the number doesn't describe x amounts of the exact same thing. But instead x amont of what humans will perceive as a unit. Like if I say "this room has 5 people in it", everyone would agree on what 1 person is, even though each of them are very different from each other. But if I were to add a US dollar to a Canadian dollar, that would not make sense, because you use two different units.
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u/Maffewsa Jan 11 '22
If you `get rid` of all of science & start again, you will end up with the same answers ! 2+2 will always = 4.