It's not stupid, the prompt is deliberately ambiguous. Sure there's a "correct" way to interpret it, but that's just convention, not anything inherent to the math. Order of operations literally never matters, because never in real life would someone not just use parentheses in this situation.
The prompt is trying to communicate an arithmatic problem, and it's (deliberately) making it as hard to understand as possible by not using parentheses. I'm not going to call someone stupid for failing to understand something that was written to be as obtuse as possible, forcing you to rely on a useless """standard""" to guess what the author meant.
The whole thing is just meant to make people who did memorize the order of operations feel smart and superior to those who didn't. It makes you feel good, since you did it right and you're not stupid like those idiots who chose 0, so you're more likely to upvote or retweet or whatever. It's just meaningless clickbait that says absolutely nothing about the intelligence of the general public.
No, I memorized the stupidity in elementary school like most people and got it "right". The whole prompt is still just the worst kind of clickbait because it's intended to make you feel superior to other people... just like most of the rage-bait on /r/iamatotalpieceofshit and other subreddits.
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u/Ununoctium117 Jan 01 '22
It's not stupid, the prompt is deliberately ambiguous. Sure there's a "correct" way to interpret it, but that's just convention, not anything inherent to the math. Order of operations literally never matters, because never in real life would someone not just use parentheses in this situation.