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It’s a funny thing how often paradoxes seem to pop up in our lives, ya know?
The universe works in very mysterious ways, my friends…and we’re about to see a bunch of examples of exactly what I’m talking about.
AskReddit users talked about their favorite paradoxes.
Let’s dig into their responses!
1. A good one.
“Actually, there are two kinds of people in this world: those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better.”
Tom Robbins”
2. Caught by surprise.
“The surprise hanging – a prisoner was sentenced to death by hanging, but as an additional punishment he was told he’d be hung sometime in the next week, but he’d not be told until the morning of.
He reasons that it can’t be friday, because that’s the last possible day, and so it wouldn’t be a surprise, which means it also can’t be thursday, because it can’t be friday and so if he’s alive by thursday then he needs to hang that day, apply same reasoning to the other days of the week…
He died wednesday, caught by surprise.”
3. Open your mind.
“The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know.
Every time you gain a greater understanding about something, it creates even more questions than it answers.”
4. Fun with numbers.
“Statistical paradoxes are cool. For example, Simpson’s Paradox where a statistical trend is reversed when the population is partitioned into groups:
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was supported by 61% of Democrats and 80% of Republicans. However, both Southern and Northern Democrats were more likely to support the Act than their Republican colleagues.
White murderers in Florida are more likely to receive the death penalty than African-Americans. However, African-Americans whose victims were white are more likely to be executed than whites, as are African-Americans whose victims were black.
Median wages in the US rose by 1% between 2000 and 2013, yet wages of every educational subgroup (school dropouts, school graduates, college graduates and higher degrees) fell during the same period.
The overall survival rates for third class passengers on the Titanic were higher than those for the crew, yet those for both men and women were lower.
The batting averages of baseball player David Justice were higher than those of Derek Jeter in both 1995 and 1996, but not in the two years combined.”
5. I’m still holding out hope.
“If time travel was invented in the future, we would have it now.”
6. Ponder this.
“Pilots can get out of combat duty if they are psychologically unfit, but anyone who tries to get out of combat duty proves he is sane.”
7. So true.
“The paradox of being a parent: the days & nights are long & hard, yet the years fly by.”
8. You’ve heard this before.
“I don’t like that place.
No one goes there anymore because it’s always too crowded.”
9. Sad, but true.
“You need job experience to get a job, but to have the experience you must get a job.”
10. Motion.
“Zeno’s paradox of motion.
If you shoot an arrow at a target, at some point it’s halfway there, then halfway of the remaining half, etc.
Since no remaining distance cut in half can ever equal zero, the arrow never reaches the target.”
11. The wormhole.
“Polchinski’s Paradox.
Polchinski raised a potentially paradoxical situation involving a billiard ball sent through a wormhole which sends it back in time.
In this scenario, the ball is fired into a wormhole at an angle such that, if it continues along that path, it will exit the wormhole in the past at just the right angle to collide with its earlier self, thereby knocking it off course and preventing it from entering the wormhole in the first place.”
12. We’re living in one.
“The one we are currently living in; where the ‘Information Age’ has somehow ushered in the ‘Age of Morons’
If you would have told me 25 years ago that giving people near limitless access to almost any data from almost anywhere on the planet in the palm of their hands would make people dumber than they already were I would have called bullsh*t till I was blue in the face.”
13. The poison well.
“The poison well paradox
A town is worried that their well is poisoned by chemical X, so they hire three scientists to test it. They ask each scientist two questions “is chemical X above level Y in our water?” and “if chemical X is above level Y, should we stop using our water supply”, the answers were as follows:
Scientist 1 answered yes to both questions.
Scientist 2 answered yes to the first and no to the second
Scientist 3 answered no to the first and yes to the second
The paradox: If you take each scientist’s final conclusion, you’ll have a majority of scientists saying that you don’t need to close the well; but if you combine all the scientists responses to individual questions, you’ll have a majority of responses telling you to close the well.”
Okay, ladies and gentlemen, now we want to hear from you.
In the comments, tell us about YOUR favorite paradox.
Please and thank you!
