Oscar_Cunningham comments on Rationality Quotes October 2011 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: MinibearRex 03 October 2011 06:41AM

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Comment author: Oscar_Cunningham 31 October 2011 06:40:43PM 0 points [-]

What do you mean by "hydrogen atom" and "have" and "exactly" and "proton". ("One" I can deal with for now, but quantum physics makes the rest of your sentence meaningless (i.e. it makes your sentence an inexact high level description.))

Comment author: MixedNuts 31 October 2011 07:11:52PM 1 point [-]

By "proton" I mean a thingy that creates a potential well where an electron bops around, and by "hydrogen atom" I mean a single of these with a single electron in it, and by "have" I mean that when the electron has high enough energy you don't call it an hydrogen atom but "a proton here and an electron over there". This is of course a tautology.

By "one" I mean S(0) (and by "0" I mean the empty set), which is also a tautology. And if you don't know what I mean by "exactly" then you don't understand the parent quote anyway.

Admittedly a good counterexample would involve an exact truth that is not a tautology.

Comment author: Oligopsony 31 October 2011 07:44:23PM 4 points [-]

There are exactly zero unicorns.

Comment author: DoubleReed 31 October 2011 06:48:54PM 0 points [-]

But you can construct rigid, exact definitions for all of those things.

Though I suppose those definitions would have to be approximations. So Mathematics gets to have exactness to it, but of course Mathematics is typically not considered a science.