Saturday, July 11, 2020

People's Favorite Paradoxes


Someone on AskReddit got a thread going about people's favorite paradoxes. Nothing like exploring some paradoxes to take one's brain down strange and disorienting rabbit holes. 

1.

Text - Xaxos92 • 12h No one goes there because it's crowded. Reply 3.8k ...

2.

Text - BabyParmesanHead • 13h Entry level position requiring 5+ years of experience. Reply 1 3.5k ...

3.

Text - wearekinetic • 14h I hate myself, but I think I'm better than everyone. Reply 1.5k ...

4.

Text - flyingsaucerinvasion • 13h If you send an object into a time loop, (go back in time and give it to yourself). What is the age of the object? Infinite? Zero? Reply 387 ...

5.

Text - leomonster • 13h The human brain paradox. You see, our brains are so complex that we can't fully understand how they work. If they were simpler, we totally could. Except that if our brains were simpler, we'd be more stupid, and still unable to fully understand our own brains. Reply 902 ...

6.

Text - kw87 • 10h The paradox of omnipotent God. God can't make a rock too heavy he can't lift... Or he can make a rock too heavy he can't lift. Either way there's some he can't do. Reply 1 246 ...

7.

Text - Zeta42 • 13h Theseus' ship. You take a ship and replace every single part in it with a new one. Is it still the same ship? If not, at what point does it stop being the ship you knew? Also, if you take all the parts you replaced and build another ship with them, is it the original ship? Reply 2.5k ...

8.

Text - L_Flavour • 4h Gabriel's horn / Torricelli's trumpet It's a (infinitely long) 3 dimensional object, of which the shape can be created by rotating the graph of f(x) = 1/x for x > 1, and should look something like this. The paradox is that this object has an infinitely large surface area, but a finite volume. So no amount of paint would be enough to paint the whole thing, but you can still fill the whole trumpet by pouring a finite amount of paint into it. Reply 17 ...

9.

Text - izackthegreat • 10h Time travel. If time travel was possible, then presumably someone from the future would have already gone back in time to change the past. Therefore, when someone says they, for example, would have stopped Hitler, they actually wouldn't because someone already would have made that correction in time. Instead, that must have been, unfortunately, the best possible outcome out of all possible outcomes. Either that or time travel just isn't possible which seems significant

10.

Text - Jim3001 • 4h There is a time travel paradox that involves a door. So you have a field and there is a free standing door. You are the guard you watch from side on. The door only lets people move 24 hours. Go in one way and it's 24 hours into the future. Go in the other and it 24 hours into the past. One day you see a guy come out into the past. But unlike most people he doesn't leave. He stays in the field near the door. Then, precisely 24 hours after he arrives, he goes into the door. The

11.

Text - bomber665_ko • 13h S E 5 Awards If you ask Rick Astley for his copy of the movie Up, he cannot give it to you as he will never give you up. However, in doing so he lets you down. Thus creating the Astley Paradox Reply 4.7k ...

12.

Text - TheTrueBleu01 • 2h Zeno's Paradox. If you want to reach a wall and you're 10 meters away, then travel half the distance. Then, travel half of THAT distance, and do it again, and again, and again. Mathematically, you will never reach 0, thus you will never reach the walI, but physically, you will. Reply 6 ...

13.

Text - The Fermi paradox, named after Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi, is the apparent contradiction between the lack of evidence for extraterrestrial civilizations and various high estimates for their probability (such as some optimistic estimates for the Drake equation). The following are some of the facts that together serve to highlight the apparent contradiction: There are billions of stars in the Milky Way similar to the Sun. With high probability, some of these stars have Earth-li

14.

Text - kutuup1989 • 10h The heap of sand one. If you have what you agree to be a "heap" of sand, and remove one grain, then it's still a heap, right? So if a heap -1 is still a heap, you should logically be able to keep going until you have a "heap" of 1 grain of sand. Reply 54 ...

15.

Text - Oudeis16 • 4h If you enjoy being taken out of your comfort zone, you can't be. Reply ...

16.

Text - soulreaverdan• 9h There's a version of the Boostrap Paradox I like from a novel called The Anubis Gates. One of the main characters is studying the poetry written by an ancient Pharaoh. Time travel shenanigans ensue, and he comes to realize that he, in the past, is said ancient Pharaoh, and writes down the poetry from memory so it can be written when history says it is. Now, he studied it in the future, where he memorized it. And he wrote it in the past from that memorization. But his fut

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