Annoyance comments on Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale - Less Wrong

107 Post author: Yvain 13 March 2009 01:41AM

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Comment author: Nominull 13 March 2009 02:41:13AM 0 points [-]

The absurdity heuristic does work well. Almost every possible absurd claim is false. Like most heuristics, it only becomes a problem when you continue using it outside its realm of usefulness.

Comment author: Annoyance 13 March 2009 02:24:05PM 3 points [-]

"Almost every possible absurd claim is false."

Ah, I see you have adopted Douglas Adams' argument which demonstrates that the population of the universe is zero.

Comment author: thomblake 13 March 2009 03:13:45PM *  9 points [-]

Aha - I knew this sounded familiar. For those not familiar with it, here it is:

Although you might see people from time to time, they are most likely products of your imagination. Simple mathematics tells us that the population of the Universe must be zero. Why? Well given that the volume of the universe is infinite there must be an infinite number of worlds. But not all of them are populated; therefore only a finite number are. Any finite number divided by infinity is zero, therefore the average population of the Universe is zero, and so the total population must be zero.

Retrieved from http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Universe

EDIT: note that this doesn't work, for several obvious reasons, notably that a subset of an infinite set can be infinite.

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