2+2=5 is catching on among the "woke". Good Lord, when you're taking your direction from the villain in George Orwell's 1984, how on Earth can you claim you are on the side of the good?

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[–]ArthnoldManacatsaman 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Oh interesting, I didn't realise that had a name.

The one that bothers me most is the 'well it works in different bases!' argument. Yes, I'm sure it does (not a mathematician), but don't you have to declare what base you're working in before you present things like that? If you wrote a mathematical paper and did the whole thing in base 4 but didn't tell anyone that's what you'd done, all your calculations would be meaningless, because we work in base 10 (?) by default.

[–]lawuigi 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I'd say that's more being careless if you forget to declare the base. Unless you are trying to take advantage of people thinking in base 10 by default then we run the risk of someone being deceptive and trying to trap you. In that case they are waiting for you to assume and will then chastise you for making the leap in logic to make you look foolish. A dirty trick that is all too good at swaying opinion that is unfortunate in a logical argument.

[–]AFutureConcern 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

You're exactly right - we have common assumptions and don't go around introducing weird bases and the like without saying so. Lindsay goes into exactly this in detail - he points out they want to erase any stable meaning of words or concepts, so they have the say in what things mean, i.e. it's bigger than just mathematics.