[math-fun] Eliana’s Paradox
My 9-year-old said something yesterday afternoon that I tweeted about, and the tweet blew up like NOTHING I’d ever posted on Twitter before: over 400 likes right now, with more coming in by the minute. So I thought I’d share it with you. Here it is: My kid just told me “I have good news and bad news for you.” It turned out that the good news was that there was no bad news and the bad news was that there was no good news. I’m still trying to figure out how many of these assertions were true. Jim Propp PS: My favorite response was from someone pointing out the relevance of the well-known axiom “No news is good news”.
Taking Eliana a bit more seriously than she intended, this feels like an application of deontic logic, where propositions not only have truth, they also have desirability. Unfortunately, a first-order logic won't work, because "there is good news" has a quantifier that ranges over all *propositions*, not all *objects of discourse*. Somebody who knows more mathematical logic than I do will have to take it from there. On Wed, May 30, 2018 at 11:50 AM, Cris Moore <moore@santafe.edu> wrote:
It does seem lately that all news is bad…
On May 30, 2018, at 8:46 AM, James Propp <jamespropp@gmail.com> wrote:
PS: My favorite response was from someone pointing out the relevance of the well-known axiom “No news is good news”.
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participants (3)
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Allan Wechsler -
Cris Moore -
James Propp