Are there more wheels or doors in the world? Why we can’t resist an internet debate

The internet is no place for reasonable discussion. This is a lesson that was recently learned in the most painful way by Auckland resident Ryan Nixon, who last weekend made the innocent mistake of asking Twitter whether there were more doors or wheels in the world.

A whopping 223,347 people replied and filled out his poll, with 53.6% of them guessing there were more wheels in the world. One guy worked out a complex formula on a piece of paper. Others argued that a wheel can be a door but a door cannot be a wheel. One particularly deep thinker pointed out that, while wheels are a human invention, doors "are primal - even celestial - in nature". The debate, which will never be definitively resolved, continues. Sorry for putting it into your brain.

This sort of pointless argument has become an important part of online life. Who could possibly forget the palaver about The Dress in 2015, when a woman took a photo of her wedding outfit and then had an argument with her daughter about whether it was white and gold or blue and black? At its peak, 11,000 tweets were posted about The Dress every minute, as friends and families tore themselves apart in disagreement. It became so heated that scientific papers were written about the phenomenon.

As fun as it is to debate colours of things with strangers, The Dress debate had a definitive answer: a cursory amount of research takes you back to where the dress was bought, which quickly and conclusively proved that it was blue and black.

If Doors v Wheels has any sort of precedent, it's How Would A Dog Wear Trousers from 2015, in which a Facebook user asked if trousers for dogs should cover the bottom 50% of a dog (four legs, tummy, no tail) or the back 50% (back legs, tail, no front legs). This is perhaps the hardest question of them all to answer. Logic says that a pair of trousers should cover up all your legs, but your heart tells you that a pair of trousers with four legs isn't a pair of trousers at all. A dog wearing trousers on its hind quarters, meanwhile, looks more human - but, again, that argument is undone by the fact that a dog isn't human.

Humanity does potentially have the resources to carry out a full global audit of the world's doors and wheels. But none of us, as long as we live, will ever possess the ability to ask a dog what sort of trousers it would theoretically prefer to wear. The question itself is a fool's errand. So, despite humanity's inherent need for objective truth, there can never be a conclusive answer - to this, or indeed many of the internet's daftest debates. And that, in the end, is why we love them.