• linja@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      If I’m not meant to think about it until understanding emerges, then that means it should be immediately understandable without thinking. It is not.

      • The_Biggest_Cum@lemmynsfw.com
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        5 months ago

        It is, actually

        The numbers are imaginary, thus theyte not real, thus the math magicians (not gonna undo autocorrect there) are wrong and refuse to admit it because they insist imaginary numbers are real

        Don’t apply actual knowledge of what imaginary numbers are for this exercise

        • linja@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Ok, so this is a “joke” which is only funny to people who do not understand the context, and moreover jump to insane, unsubstantiated conclusions rather than expending an infinitesimal measure of effort to understand something they haven’t seen before. It’s active mockery of the very concept of being open to new ideas.

          • zalgotext@sh.itjust.works
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            5 months ago

            No, the joke plays on the two meanings of “imaginary” - one being “made up, not real”, and the other being the mathematical construct. The fact that you don’t get it doesn’t make it mockery, it just means you don’t get it.

      • lud@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        Sometimes it’s better to just accept that you don’t get the joke and move on.

        • linja@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          I might not find a joke funny, or I might not have the necessary context to appreciate it; that’s “not getting” a joke. If it’s possible to have too much context to appreciate a “joke”, it’s at the expense of people who know more than the audience.

            • linja@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              It might seem harmless, but the purpose of a joke is to draw a distinction between those who get it and those who don’t, fostering a sense of community. In this “joke”, the in-group is people who don’t know something; the community ideal fostered there is that knowledge is undesirable, that anything that seems unintuitive to the uninformed mind is inherently ridiculous. The “joke” has no effect if it doesn’t do this. Entertaining the idea without challenge is dangerous.

              • Carrot@lemmy.today
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                5 months ago

                That’s where you’re wrong. The joke is based around a play on words: the generally accepted definition of imaginary, and a math term. Thus, the in-group for this joke are people familiar with the common definition of imaginary, and familiar with the fact that “imaginary numbers” is a term used by mathematicians. The joke being that, if they use the term “imaginary numbers”, then someone came up with numbers that don’t fundamentally exist, and they were only used to cheat out an answer to a difficult problem. Of course, in math this isn’t the case, the numbers most definitely exist. To me it just seems like you’re trying to be a pompous know-it-all and ruin people’s fun, but you can’t even do that correctly because you didn’t understand what the joke even was.