this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
825 points (98.5% liked)

Funny: Home of the Haha

6839 readers
907 users here now

Welcome to /c/funny, a place for all your humorous and amusing content.

Looking for mods! Send an application to Stamets!

Our Rules:

  1. Keep it civil. We're all people here. Be respectful to one another.

  2. No sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia or any other flavor of bigotry. I should not need to explain this one.

  3. Try not to repost anything posted within the past month. Beyond that, go for it. Not everyone is on every site all the time.


Other Communities:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today -3 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Just noticed if you also decrease something by 10%, then increase by 10%, you also get a net loss of 1. Math itself is biased towards loss.

Anyone convinced in the malevolent creator theory yet?

[–] lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.com 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Math isn't biased. Flawed reasoning is. For x ≠ 0

(1 + x)(1 − x) = 1 − x² < 1

The correct way to cancel scaling by a proportion is its reciprocal, ie, for x ≠ 0

x ∙ ¹⁄ₓ = 1

A 10% decrease is ⁹⁄₁₀

100% − 10% = 90% = ⁹⁄₁₀

Its reciprocal is ¹⁰⁄₉, a ¹⁄₉ = 11¹⁄₉% increase

1 / (100% − 10%) = ¹⁰⁄₉ = 100% + 11¹⁄₉%

We make it complicated by stating increase/decrease & percent instead of simple scaling factors. The western world has a weird 💯 fetish almost as funny as ancient mesopotamians and the number 60.

In general, for proportional change x, the proportional change y to cancel it is the solution of

(1 + x)(1 + y) = 1
y = (1 + x)⁻¹ − 1

[–] And009@lemmynsfw.com 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Increase by 10 then decrease by 10. Same problem. Math is lossy.

[–] WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today 2 points 3 days ago

Adding flat numbers is different from adding a percent.