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ThisSpaceAvailable comments on Open thread, August 4 - 10, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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A lot (in fact, all of them that don't involve a rigorous treatment of infinite series) of the "proofs" that it does equal 1 are fallacious, and so the refusal to accept them is actually a reasonable response.
You seem to making an assertion about me in your last paragraph, but doing so very obliquely. Your analogy is not very good, as people do not try to argue that one can logically prove that "marble" does not mean "nucleotide", they just say that it is defined otherwise.
If we're analogizing ".9999... = 1" to "marble doesn't mean't nucleotide", then "
Apologies for that. I don't think that that specific failure mode is particularly likely in your case, but it seems plausible to me that other people thinking in that way has shifted the terms of discourse such that that form of linguistic relativism is seen as high-status by a lot of smart people. I am more mentioning it to highlight the potential failure mode; if part of why you hold your position is that it seems like the kind of position that smart people would hold, but I can account for those smart people holding it in terms of metacontrarianism, then that partially screens off that reason for endorsing the smart people's argument.
It looks like you submitted your comment before you meant to, so I shall probably await its completion before commenting on the rest.