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AgentGrimstone ,

Adding up the balance column doesn’t make sense to do in the first place.

lemmyng ,
@lemmyng@lemmy.ca avatar

You can’t just add the balances and expect it to amount to the same as the spend. Consider this: you spend 0, 0, 0, 50. Your balances are 50, 50, 50, 0. Adding up the balances you get 150. What does this mean? Absolutely nothing.

captainjaneway ,
@captainjaneway@lemmy.world avatar

Maybe 1, 1, 1 -> 49, 48, 47 is a better example though. But same thing.

lemmyng ,
@lemmyng@lemmy.ca avatar

I wanted to keep it simple and avoid a factorial sum. My example also shows that the remainder sum goes up even when nothing is spent.

jqubed ,
@jqubed@lemmy.world avatar

“I am your father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate”

SereneHurricane ,

“What’s that make us?”

Sidhean ,

add a “spend 0 / balance 50” column

ArtVandelay ,
@ArtVandelay@lemmy.world avatar

Data scientist here! What you have discovered is what’s known in data analytics as a semi-additive measure. Instead of summing the balance column, you would count it, and get a measure that showed how many transactions took place, but not a balance. Of course, there’s no reason to simply count the one column, a row count would suffice and return the same.

Vendetta9076 ,
@Vendetta9076@sh.itjust.works avatar

Am I missing something here? The numbers are different between the columns. The “extra 1” comes from the 30.

zammy95 ,

Remember in school when they made a big deal about the order of operations? This is why. It’s not clear as to why, as you’re not seeing the entire picture though, just some numbers.

pearsaltchocolatebar ,

This has nothing to do with order of operations.

CraigeryTheKid ,

OMG I do math all the time and the way the question was phrased I fell for it. (Summing balance)

I’m going to feel dumb for the rest of the day.

just2look ,

The balance has no reason to add up to 50. So there is no extra anything. If you kept spending 1 each row, and then summed the balance at the end, it would be massively higher than the 50 you started with.

cmgvd3lw OP ,

Yeah you’re right

bhmnscmm ,
@bhmnscmm@lemmy.world avatar

Watch this and it should clear things up.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=oN2_NarcM8c

nsomneeak ,

Put the 50 where the word balance is, and go diagonal. 50-20=30, 30-15=15, 15-9=6, 6-6=0

CountVon ,
@CountVon@sh.itjust.works avatar

Summing a balance column is never correct. Take any example that doesn’t end in a zero balance and it’s easy to see that the balance column’s sum is meaningless:

https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/f52be790-927d-4416-8e69-384a9d57cef9.png

threelonmusketeers ,

There’s no reason to expect that the sum of the balances remaining would be equal to the initial amount. If you spend in 1$ increments, the balances would be 49, 48, 47,… which sum to much larger than 50. If you spend 49$ followed by 1$, right away, the balances sum to 1$, which is much less than 50. This particular example has been “cooked” to give a value of 51. You can cook up another example to give whatever value you want.

Fake4000 ,

This calculation is a bit wrong.

Lets say for example you keep spending 5 after your first payment, then your totals at the bottom would be wrong and would look like this.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/a2b0fc72-c0f2-4489-b139-3c2fff5ef403.png

The correct way to do this is to accumulate the expenditure as your balance goes down, so that total for both spend and balance equals 50.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/bfd87a49-7af8-4a84-b49d-6c4f7a086cff.png

I hope this makes sense.

deegeese ,

The sum of spend will always be $50.

The sum of balance doesn’t mean anything and reflects the number of transactions rather than their size.

Do the same thing again spending $1 at a time and you’ll see.

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