Talk:Two plus two make five

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I haven't read 1984 in a while, but I distinctly remember it being "Two and two make five". Am I just misremembering? Ketsuban has spoken. The debate is over. 03:05, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

I have the novel in front of me (a UK Penguin edition, printed 1990. Part 1, Chapter 8., says:
In the end the part would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it.
But on the following page, Winston writes in his diary:
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.'
He later writes TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE in the Ministry of Love (Part 3, Chapter four, and 2 + 2 = 5 after that. (In many copes this comes says 2 + 2 = - this is the result of a disastrous printing error in an early edition.)
It's a bit academic - but I think the quote from Winston's diary entry is the axiom we're referring to, so I'd rather mimic that format.
I've redirected Two and two make five and (more common in modern UK English) Two plus two makes five here.
And egad, I've just noticed the 2005 in the date of your question... oh well, better late than never. Robin Johnson 14:50, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

Well I could divide 5 by 2 and have the visual rounding to 1 digit, then when I add them it turns to 5. {Seas 23:00, 25 August 2005 (UTC)}

Contents

[edit] Descartes

This phrase is also used in Descartes' Meditations. Should that be included? It's much earlier than any of the other references. Batkins 21:10, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

[1] "But when I considered any matter in arithmetic and geometry, that was very simple and easy, as, for example, that two and three added together make five, and things of this sort, did I not view them with at least sufficient clearness to warrant me in affirming their truth?" Seems reasonable. Whoever wants to put it in would have to read through the section a bit more than I'm going to right now. Paxfeline 12:52, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] 2+2=11

At least they do in base-3 arithmetic. Saying 2+2=4 carried the unstated assumption that we are using familiar base-10 arithmetic, or at least something higher than base-4, where 2+2+10. In binary, 2 does not exist but 1+1+1+1=100.

There is a rather older saying, that no authority can decide that one plus one equals three. Of course married couples manage to achieve it, from one viewpoint.

What the book actually says is "Physical facts could not be ignored. In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four."

This comes from the fake book he gets given by apparant rebels who are actually secret police. He has earlier written "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows."

Which is rubbish. No real system ever asked people to believe basic arithmetic. For that matter, Orwell in his 1942 essey Looking Back on the Spanish War gives no specific cases of history being falsified. Nothing better than the Fascists saying that there were more Russians in Spain than there really were, without naming a specific source or asking if it could have been a sincere false belief.

Orwell in Looking Back on the Spanish War contradicts what he's said in Hommage To Catalonia, which had been mostly ignored at the time. He says in 1942: The Trotskyist thesis that the war could have been won if the revolution had not been sabotaged was probably false. To nationalise factories, demolish churches, and issue revolutionary manifestos would not have made the armies more efficient. The Fascists won because they were the stronger; they had modern arms and the others hadn’t. No political strategy could offset that. This is flatly against what he'd said earlier and no longer admits to having said.

I'd say that the right leadership probably could have won that war, but that there is no actual person who had those gifts. Nestor Mackno might have managed it, if he'd still been alive and fit to fight: he had done pretty remarkable things in the Russian Civil War before being destroyed by the Bolsheviks. In China, Mao won an anti-fascist against rather worse odds.

Orwell is an interesting writer but not an honest one.

--GwydionM 19:13, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

Similarly, Douglas Adams pointed out that 6 * 7 == Forty-two... in base 13. --Kris Schnee 08:51, 9 May 2006 (UTC)
I think the assumption of base 10 may safely go unstated, eh? Perhaps Pop Culture should have a 'Parody/Altered formulation' category to hold stuff like this and the 'for extremely large values of 2' joke. (And my extremely pithy addition.) Paxfeline 12:44, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] If two and two make five, what does five and five make?

After first hearing this phrase, one question stung in my mind: if two and two make five, what happens to all of the other numbers? Is five plus five still ten, or is it now eight? Logialy speaking, if two and two make five, then five is four. If five and five is the same as two plus two plus two plus two, then five and five make eight.

The proposition "two and two make five" is false, so from it any proposition can be derived, including: five and five make eight, and five and five make ten, and five and five make seventy-nine. Also, you should give me money. Melchoir 20:56, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
This is reminiscent of "if pi were 3, what would circles look like?" All sorts of answers are possible, since, after all, pi isn't 3, and most likely cannot be without ultimately creating a contradiction somewhere. What would "really" be the case is an unanswerable question without making some further assumptions, and really says more about human psychology and how our minds represent reality than about the statement itself. What if two and two make five? We can entertain the notion superficially, but whether it's meaningful in any sense is another matter. If two and two really made five, then "two", "five" and the concept of addition would not be what they are. Your guess would be as good as mine on what five and five made, or if bananas are yellow in such a world, assuming there are bananas and colors in the first place... 82.92.119.11 16:40, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Eugene Lyons

Does anyone have a clear authority for the idea that the main influence on Orwell was Goering's statement? (I'm not disputing that Goering said it.) Although some of this could be regarded as original research, as far as I can judge the main influence was Eugene Lyons's Assignment In Utopia. When I read it I thought that Orwell must have read this, since there is a similarity of mental atmosphere to 1984, including e.g. the cult of personality around Stalin and the demonisation of Trotsky, but above all it contained a chapter "2+2=5", actually a slogan used to predict that the 5-year plan would be completed in 4 years. My suspicions were confirmed when I came across a review of Assignment in Utopia in Orwell's collected journalism. The next point is not original research, Bernard Crick's important biography of Orwell considers Assignment in Utopia to have been an important influence. This is not to deny that Orwell may have been aware of Goering and Dostoevsky's comments.

BTW, Gwydion M is right to point to Orwell apparently changing his position on the Spanish Civil War, but that is not the same as dishonesty. (And I don't think the Trotskyists ever did say the Republic should have burned more churches.) PatGallacher 20:41, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] If two and two make five, what does that make one and one?

Is it possible, I am not stating that to be true, that one plus one make three. I won't continue on with my point until someone questions my integrity--Lord X 19:16, 7 May 2006 (UTC)Xinyu

See above. There is no reason to assume 2 + 2 = 5 implies 1 + 1 = 3, since 2 + 2 = 5 is just false. You can certainly think of a system where 2 + 2 = 5 and 1 + 1 = 3, but such a system wouldn't describe the natural numbers accurately: in such a system it's simply impossible for the symbols "1", "+", "=" and "3" to stand for 1, addition, equality and 3.
What's 5 ÷ 2 in your system? 2 × 2? 5 - 3? 2 + 2 - 1 - 1? 1 + 1 + 1? 3 ÷ 3? Either you hit a contradiction somewhere or you've just found a way to describe some interesting but probably pointless way of stringing symbols together. It's like asking "if you could divide by zero, what would the answer be?" You can't divide by zero, for good reasons, so this question is meaningless. You can speculate about it all you want, but there's no such thing as a definitive answer. There aren't even "more right" and "more wrong" answers, unless you're just talking about what seems right to us—a matter of psychology.
You can redefine the meaning of "division" so division by zero does have an answer (as our article on it mentions), but if you do that you're no longer asking the same question. Same thing with two and two making five: you need to redefine "two" and "plus" and "equal" and "five", and when you do that you can make "one and one" equal anything you want while you're at it. Doesn't make it meaningful. 82.92.119.11 22:51, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
You in fact CAN divide by zero. Take a walk to the nearest college and ask the head of the math department. ;-) (not necessary, i know, just pointing out an error in your logic. NOT an attack)
\lim_{x\rightarrow \infty} \frac{1}{x} = 0\, English Translation: as x approaches infinity (or gets large), one divided by x approaches zero
That is to say that it never reaches zero, except at infinity. For the purpose of our finite brains (and calculators), a 1 followed by 1000 zeros is sufficient.
Slithytove2 04:12, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Pi

Is the "pi = 3" comment appropriate here? --Kris Schnee 08:51, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

If so, it would seem that we live in '1984'. Oh God... Paxfeline 09:44, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Pithy addition

2 plus 2 makes five, for values of 4 masquerading as five. I lobby this be added to the lexicon. :P (Go out and start saying it!) Paxfeline 09:47, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

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