I don’t think my teachers ever explained why. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Because you are multiplying the absence of a absence. So, if a DON'T have two debts (the first -2) of $2 (the second -2) this means that I have $4.

🍷🥸look what you made me do.... research pre-algebra philosophy (personally, I do declare, I love how this flips linguistics if you're not careful or if you intentionally intend to😈) >https://youtu.be/rK4sXm_MPWo

I don't really know, math is math

This is a myth. The number of adding procedures cannot have a sign, multiplication is only a short form of writing down a number of adding operations. As such an index is giving the number of such operations. It cannot have a sign since a sign is meaningless in that context. So 4 x -4 equals -16. -4 x -4 has no meaning. :)

I don't know exactly but I can say that if we know that n * 1 = n and n * -1 = -n , and n can't ever be equal to -n, then the product of -n * -1 can't be the same as the product of n * -1

Arithmetic/math in general wouldn't be self-consistent otherwise. :p

I guess two wrongs really do make a right?