False: |Republicans| + |Democrats| = |Voters|. Pragmatically, the missing set: {Voters}/{Republicans}U{Democrats} usually gets dropped somehow, and when it does, elections are won or lost. Another example is |Voters| + |Nonvoters| = |Population| This is what I would call poor-logic, and it's easy to break. What about the disenfranchised? Clearly {Nonvoters} includes {Disenfranchised-T}, but {Voters} does not include {Disenfranchised-F}! Again, elections can be won or lost on this logic. None of this is ever said by politicians, but as far as I can see, it's implicit to what they are doing, especially with United States of America, right now. --Brad On Fri, Sep 4, 2020 at 9:55 AM James Propp <jamespropp@gmail.com> wrote:
Does anyone know of any widely-promulgated bogus assertions of the form “The cardinality of set A plus the cardinality of set B equals the cardinality of set C” (where the C is something like the union of A and B) that sounds convincing until you step back and realize either (a) there are elements of C that are elements of neither A nor B, or (b) there are elements of C that are elements of both A and B?
Here I’m talking about flimflam at the interface between math and culture (not mistakes made by mathematicians in a mathematical context); e.g., fallacious stuff said by public figures.
Jim Propp _______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com https://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun