My point is that you’re trying to use some sort of odd pedantic mark trick to shift the conversation from your experience of “There is a group that I personally don’t care about” to “Math dictates that this is not actually a problem worth addressing.”
Your position that the important takeaway here is actually the importance of scrutinizing pointless minutiae rather than text rendering being fundamentally broken isn’t empirically based. Your entire argument is “look at how clever I am!”, which is fundamentally off-topic when talking about rendering text properly.
Like lol, how are people supposed to learn the script if their examples are all messed up? As a maths genious surely you could see the issue with how “impacted people” is somewhere between “fluent people” and “fluent people plus an unknown number of others.” What hard number did you land at when adding unknown variable x to the number of fluent speakers you googled?
> Your entire argument is “look at how clever I am!”, which is fundamentally off-topic when talking about rendering text properly.
I think this is a really uncharitable read of this conversation. This thread has been about the veracity and the relevance of the author's claim that "two billion people can read Arabic to some degree".
I don't think anyone is trying to refute the author's conclusion that Arabic text rendering is important. I also don't think anyone is trying to show off how clever they are.
Personally, I agree with the author's conclusion, and I thought the post was really neat! But I also think the 2 billion statistic weakened their argument -- it's better to omit a statistic than include the wrong one.
> This thread has been about the veracity and the relevance of the author's claim that "two billion people can read Arabic to some degree".
This is not really true. You tried to center your conclusion that your math was better than the author’s math while distracting from the topic of rendering text properly.
This thread has been about you insisting that people listen to your math and not discuss rendering text properly. lol this thread has been about how clever you are, _not_ rendering text properly.
It's not about the math at all, just "this seems like the wrong group to use as an example". It's a simple point, nobody is trying to show off.
And in these comments I'm assuming that the author has exactly the right number for the group they cited. Because it's really not about math. I have done no calculations and trust the number given. I just think they're citing the wrong statistic. That's why I'm also uninterested in the factors you mentioned that might influence the number up or down. The actual number doesn't matter for this criticism: even if the number in the article happens to match the right statistic, they're still citing the wrong statistic.
My point is that you’re trying to use some sort of odd pedantic mark trick to shift the conversation from your experience of “There is a group that I personally don’t care about” to “Math dictates that this is not actually a problem worth addressing.”
Your position that the important takeaway here is actually the importance of scrutinizing pointless minutiae rather than text rendering being fundamentally broken isn’t empirically based. Your entire argument is “look at how clever I am!”, which is fundamentally off-topic when talking about rendering text properly.
Like lol, how are people supposed to learn the script if their examples are all messed up? As a maths genious surely you could see the issue with how “impacted people” is somewhere between “fluent people” and “fluent people plus an unknown number of others.” What hard number did you land at when adding unknown variable x to the number of fluent speakers you googled?