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CronoDAS comments on Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism - Less Wrong
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As a mathematician, I offer my services for anybody who wants arguments (mathematical arguments, not philosophical ones) that 1+1 = 3. But beware: as a meta-contrarian mathematician, I will also explain why these arguments, though valid in their own way, are silly.
1.3 + 1.4 = 2.7, which when reported to one significant figure...
As the "old" computer science joke goes, 2 + 2 = 5 (for extremely large values of 2).
The physicist-typical version is that 3=4, if you take lim(3->4).
This reminds me that the difference between a physicist and astronomer is that a physicist uses π ≈ 3 while an astronomer uses π ≈ 1.
I remember someone in a newsgroup saying the average person is about one metre tall and weighs about 100 kilos, and when asked whether maybe they were approximately a bit too roughly, they answered “I'm an astronomer, not a jeweller.”
(And physicists sometimes use π ≈ 1 too -- that's called dimensional analysis. :-) The problem is when the constant factor dimensional analysis can't tell you turns out to be 1/(2π)^4 ≈ 6.4e-4 or stuff like that.)