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felipec  unbelief  2yr ago (felipec.substack.com)   3599 thread views

2+2 = not what you think

felipec.substack.com

Changing someone's mind is very difficult, that's why I like puzzles most people get wrong: to try to open their mind. Challenging the claim that 2+2 is unequivocally 4 is one of my favorites to get people to reconsider what they think is true with 100% certainty.

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I assume you didn't read the post very thoroughly, then, because the paragraph immediately below where your quote ends contains a distinguishing case.

This is an equivocation fallacy. You are using a different definition of "assume", in particular using it exactly as "suppose". In my view assuming and supposing are two different things, even in the colloquial sense.

I see the false assumption was "that you are intelligent enough to comprehend those kinds of comparative asides and familiar enough with conversational English to understand that loading them with caveats would draw too much focus away from the point they are supporting."

Wrong. I can comprehend the notion without accepting it. This is a converse error fallacy.

Asides of that type are implicitly restricted to the general case, because they are intended to quickly illustrate a point by way of rough analogy, rather than present a rigorous isomorphism.

This is obviously a cop-out. If you were aware that your claim applied only to the general case, but you merely did not make it explicit, then the moment I mentioned there was an assumption you would immediately know what assumption I was talking about, because you were fully aware.

But you didn't know what assumption I was talking about, because you were not aware of the restriction. Now you want to pretend you always knew you were making an assumption, you merely didn't say it when I pointed it out, for some reason.

This is precisely what everyone does. Before they say they aren't making an assumption, and after I point it out to them they always knew. You did exactly what I said people do, and you went for one of the options I listed: "everyone would have assumed the same".

It seems like you don't, actually, understand what that comparative aside was doing, so let me restate it at more length, in different words, with the reasoning behind the various parts made more explicit.

I described a situation where a person generated object A by means of process B, but due to their circumstances the important part of their activity was process B, and object A was important mostly insofar as it allowed the engagement of process B. Since I judged this sort of process-driven dynamic may seem counterintuitive, I also decided to give an example that is clearly caused by similar considerations. Writing Hello World in a new language is a nearly prototypical instance of trivial output being used to verify that a process is being applied successfully. The choice of assembly further increased the relevance of "moderately experienced programmer checking that their build pipeline works and their understanding of fundamentals is correct".

In this context, the existence of the general case - and the fact that it is the typical example brought to mind by the description, as indicated by the name you selected - suffices to serve the purpose of the aside. I did not claim and did not need to claim anything about all instances of building Hello World in assembly; the idea that I was trying to is an assumption that you made.

I did not claim and did not need to claim anything about all instances of building Hello World in assembly; the idea that I was trying to is an assumption that you made.

This is obviously not the case because this was not an aside, but an analogy to another point that you were making. You were clearly saying that a) "coding Hello World in assembly" is never b) "coding Hello World in assembly", and always c) "coding Hello World in assembly", and there was no other possible way to interpret that.

You used that to substantiate your claim that Bertrand Russell didn't actually want to prove 1+1=2, but wanted to do something else using the proof 1+1=2 as a tool.

But in both cases you made assumptions: what you claimed is not necessarily true.

My assessment of you has shifted far enough towards "troll" that I won't bother replying to you again.

Then don't reply, rather taking a parting shot.

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