Logic! (And why it is liked/disliked)

[georgie_leech]

There's also selection bias. I change my mind on thigs all the time. The people who convince me often don't care though; I roll with it. They prove me wrong and I say, yah okay. Oops. And that's it.

The result is often that because I am not contrite, I do not openly declare my faults and recant my previous sins, that no one cares. They often don't want me to be right, they want me to feel bad and be sorry. So when I simply adopt the correct opinion (theirs), they don't notice. I don't have the proper surrender flags.

This is alien to me, most times. The purpose of an argument is to spread the correct understanding. If the other person adopts the correct understanding, I win! If I am proving wrong and adopt the correct understanding, I win! If someone reads the whole things and adopts the correct understanding, I win! I don't have to base winning off my personal sense of satisfaction, but seemingly all other people do. And they don't notice, which is frustrating.

But sometimes, sometimes someone will stop and say "hey, you're right, sorry", and the best I can manage is to tell them that's good but I'm still upset and still want to yell at them, so I should probably not talk to them for a while Even though we made up.

I think this is my favourite description of why seeking understanding over victory is so awesome. Everything is so much more interesting when you're looking to spread understanding over your own viewpoint, even if it means changing your own to better suit the other persons.

On a different note entirely, to those arguing that the assumptions for the premises of logic are inherently correct, is it possible to prove that 1+1=2?

[Duck999]

For April fool's, 2 of my friends disproved that 1+1=2, and that it instead equals pi. That is a whole other story though...

[warty goblin]

On a different note entirely, to those arguing that the assumptions for the premises of logic are inherently correct, is it possible to prove that 1+1=2?

Yes, under some assumptions and in some systems. I've also worked in systems where it could be demonstrated that 1 + 1 = 0*. Which were also perfectly logical.

Regardless, Godel pretty much wrapped up the whole premises of logic thing eighty odd years ago now. If your logical system is complex enough to do arithmetic with, there are true results you cannot prove, one of which is the consistency/inconsistency of the system.


*Although not for very long, because groups of size 2 are boring.

For April fool's, 2 of my friends disproved that 1+1=2, and that it instead equals pi. That is a whole other story though...

If one takes pi to be the ratio of a circle's diameter and circumference* this is not terribly difficult. You just need a sufficiently curved space.


*As opposed to the usual modern definition of pi as the results of certain infinite sums that just happen to coincide with the ratio of the circumference and diameter of a circle in Euclidean space. This lets pi be a well defined mathematical constant without needing to reference a particular geometry.

[Duck999]

They went kind of overboard with the proof. They used toothpaste. Part of it went something like this:
Draw auxiliary turtle theta. Using the constructive turtle property, we know that turtle theta coincides with the 4th dimension perpendicularly. They then went into some crazier stuff to prove 1+1=approximately pi-because of Newton's laws of gravity.

And that is where being illogical becomes a joke.