[Haskell-cafe] Foldable for (,)

I sent the following post to the Beginners list a couple of weeks ago (which failed to furnish an actual concrete example that answered the question). Upon request I'm reposting it to Café: I've seen many threads, including the one going on now, about why we need to have: length (2,3) = 1 product (2,3) = 3 sum (2,3) = 3 or (True,False) = False but the justifications all go over my head. Is there a beginner-friendly explanation for why such seemingly unintuitive operations should be allowed by default?