3 ms·

It's arbitrary. It causes our math to be asymmetrical, dominated by negative numbers. It could be the reverse, positive-dominated, and there's even proposals to

• drdeca 5y ago
  In what sense is it "dominated by negative numbers"? Half of the combinations of multiplying gives something positive and half gives something negative. That's balanced. If someone fails to count (+,-) and (-,+) separately, they're just counting wrong. Complaining that this is asymmetric is like complaining that even/odd is asymmetric, on the basis that "even plus even is even, and odd plus odd is even, but only if one is even and the other is odd, is the result odd. This is unbalanced in favor of producing even numbers".