We Can Vote!
The following anecdote shows the application of democracy to places it usually doesn't go:
A few years ago, John Derbyshire said:A group of kindergartners are studying a frog, trying to determine its sex.
"I wonder if it's a boy frog or a girl frog," says one student.
"I know how we can tell!" pipes up another.
"All right, how?" asks the teacher, resigned to the worst.
Beams the child: "We can vote."
I await with interest the coming poll on public beliefs about the Continuum Hypothesis.In possibly-related news, Bill Gasarch is collecting votes on The Axiom of Choice vs. The Axiom of Determinacy.
I'm dubious about the power-set axiom in the first place.
3 Comments:
I'm told the definable numbers can be set in one-to-one correspondence with the integers. I am skeptical of the existence of non-definable numbers, and thus of the reals.
But I'm willing to put it to a vote.
I'm told the definable numbers can be set in one-to-one correspondence with the integers.
... but not in a computable manner.
Right; there are definable numbers that are not computable. So I'm tempted to disbelieve in noncomputable numbers. But that seems a little too, I dunno the word, operational, maybe?
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