The simple definition of a paradox is this: a statement that contradicts itself or a situation which seems to defy logic.
These are all around us every day, and range from something mundane like saying “I always lie” and the complexities surrounding the idea of time travel.
If you’re into reading things that really bend your brain, I present these 12 paradoxes, designed to do just that.
12. When did it cease to be?
The Ship of Theseus always kind of fucked me. So, there’s this Greek dude called Theseus, and he’s on a very long boat trip home. His ship needs repair, they stop, replace a few rotten boards, and continue. Due to the particularily strenuous nature of this very long trip, several more of these stops for repairs are made, until, by the very end, not a single board from the original vessel remains.
Is this still the same vessel? If not, when did it cease to be?
11. Simple but not.
Pinocchio says “My nose will grow after I finish this sentence”
Does it?
10. The more traffic, the more traffic. Or something.
Braess’ paradox.
From wiki “the observation that adding one or more roads to a road network can end up impeding overall traffic flow through it. The paradox was postulated in 1968 by German mathematician Dietrich Braess, who noticed that adding a road to a particular congested road traffic network would increase overall journey time.”
9. Just stop it, people.
That “this page is intentionally left blank” page.
The page isn’t even blank anymore!
8. Triple make you crazy.
The UK ‘triple lock’ that people moving to the UK experience:
Need proof of address and photographic ID to open a bank account
Need a bank account and photographic ID to rent a place
Need a bank account and an address to get sent your photographic ID
7. The Legend of Zelda.
What about the song of storms from the legend of Zelda?
In the legend of Zelda ocarina of Time, you travel though time between child and adult by using the master sword, and doing so you can come back to certain areas to get different items from both times.
Well one song the you learn is called the song of storms and you learn it by going to the adult time and talk to a guy in a windmill. He tells you about a kid that came in 7 years ago and played a strange song and messed up the windmill and teaches it to you. After learning the song you can now go back to being a child and go to the guy in the windmill and play the song to him, despite not knowing it before as a child.
So questions are where did the song come from and who taught who the song? Did the windmill guy teach it to link or did link teach it to the windmill guy?
6. And around and around forever.
Jim is my enemy.
But it turns out that Jim is also his own worst enemy.
And the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
So, Jim is actually my friend.
But…because he is his own worst enemy, the enemy of my friend is my enemy.
So, actually Jim is my enemy.
But…
5. Where to put the hooks?
So i know this is just a silly thing but…..
At my old work, my department was food service. In our prep room, you had to always wear an apron. Always, no exceptions.
When leaving the preproom, you had to take your apron off to prevent cross contamination.
The bosses were trying to figure out where to put the hooks. Inside in the back of the door, or outside on the wall.
4. Definitely hard to explain.
The Banach Tarski paradox is one hell of a mind fuck.
Its basically taking something, and rearranging it to form another exact copy of itself while still having the complete original. Like taking a sphere, which has infinite points on it and drawing line from every “point” on its surface to the center, or the core of the sphere. Then you seperate the lines from the sphere, but because there is infinite points you now have an exact copy of the original sphere.
Its kind of hard to explain here so just watch the Vsauce video on it for a more in depth explanation.
3. The coastline is always growing…or something.
The coastline paradox.
The more accurately you measure a coastline, the longer it gets… to infinity.
2. But you do, in fact, reach the door.
One of my favorites is Xeno’s Paradox.
In order to leave my apartment, just for example, I have to walk half way to my front door. Then I have to walk half the remaining distance. Then half that distance, ad infinitum. In theory, I should never be able to reach the door.
Now I love this paradox, because we’ve actually solved it. It was a lively, well-discussed debate for millennia. At least a few early thinkers were convinced that motion was an illusion because of it!
It was so persuasive an argument that people doubted their senses!
Then Leibniz (and/or Newton) developed calculus and we realized that infinite sums can have finite solutions.
Paradox resolved.
It makes me wonder what “calculus” we are missing to resolve some of these others.
EDIT: A lot more people have strong opinions about Zeno’s Paradox than I thought. To address common comments:
1.) Yes, it’s Zeno, not ‘Xeno’. Blame autocorrect and my own fraught relationship with homophones.
2.) Yes there are three of them.
3.) If you’re getting hung up on the walking example, think of an arrow being shot at a fleeing target. First the arrow has to get to where the target was. But at that point, the target has moved. So the arrow has to cover that new distance. But by then, the target has moved again, etc. So the arrow gets infinitesimally closer to the target, but doesn’t ever reach it.
4.) Okay, you think you could have solved it if you were living in ancient Greece. I profoundly regret that you weren’t born back then to catapult our understanding two millenia into the future.
5.) Yes, I agree Diogenes was a badass.
I hope this covers everything.
1. Just take a shot and pick a box.
Newcomb’s Paradox:
There are two boxes, A and B. A contains either $1,000 or $0 and B contains $100. Box A is opaque, so you can’t see inside, Box B is clear, so you can see for sure that there is $100 in it.
Your options is to choose both boxes, or to choose only Box A.
There is an entity called “The Predictor”, which determines whether or not the $1,000 will be in Box A. How he chooses this is by predicting whether or not you will choose both boxes, or just Box A. If the Predictor predicts that you will “two box”, he will leave Box A empty. If he predicts that you will “one box”, he will put the $1,000 in Box A. He is accurate “an overwhelming amount of the time”, but not 100%. At the time of your decision, the contents of Box A (i.e. whether or not there is anything in it) are fixed, and nothing you do at that point will change whether or not there is anything in the box.
It is a paradox of decision theory that rests on two principles of rational choice. According to the principle of strategic dominance:
There are only two possibilities, and you don’t know which one holds:
Box A is empty: Therefore you should choose both boxes, to get $100 as opposed to $0.
Box A is full: Therefore you should choose both boxes, to get $1,100 as opposed to just $1,000.
Therefore, you should always choose both boxes, since under every possible scenario, this results in more money.
BUT:
According to the principle of expected value:
Choosing one box is superior because you have a statistically higher chance of getting more money. Most of the people who have gone before you who have chosen one box have gotten $1,000, and most that have chosen both boxes have gotten only $100. Therefore, if you analyze the problem statistically, or in terms of which decision has the higher probability of resulting in a higher outcome, you should choose only one box. Imagine one billion people going before you, and you actually seeing so many of them have this outcome. Any outliers became insignificant.
In terms of strategic dominance, two-boxing is always superior to one-boxing because no matter what is in Box A, two-boxing results in more money. One-boxing, on the other hand, has a demonstrably higher probability of resulting in a larger amount of money. Both of these choices represent fundamental principles of rational choice. There are two rival theories, Causal Decision Theory (which supports strategic dominance) and Evidential Decision Theory (which supports expected utility). It is pretty arcane but one of the most difficult paradoxes in contemporary philosophy.
Robert Nozick summed it up well: “To almost everyone, it is perfectly clear and obvious what should be done. The difficulty is that these people seem to divide almost evenly on the problem, with large numbers thinking that the opposing half is just being silly.”
EDIT: I made some edits…to make it clearer.
EDIT: There are also an offshoot of Newcomb’s Paradoxes called medical Newcomb’s Problems. I’ve been in a situation like this before, I’ll describe it:
I went on an antidepressant, and there’s a history of manic depression in my family. My psychiatrist told me that for some people, antidepressants bring out their manic phase, and they find out they have manic depression. They already did have manic depression, so it doesn’t cause it, it just reveals it. She told me to watch out for any impulsive decisions I making, as that can be a sign of a manic phase.
I was in line at a convenience store and thought: should I buy a black and mild? I don’t really smoke, but for some reason it seemed appealing. Then I realized, that seems like an impulsive decision. But, if it is an impulsive decision, and I go through with it, and do indeed have manic depression, then I should just do it anyways. After all, it’s not making me have manic depression, it’s simply revealing something to me that I already had. On the other hand, if I don’t do it, then I have no evidence that I have manic depression, meaning that there truly is less evidence, and therefore I have no reason to believe that I have manic depression.
Expected utility = don’t buy the black & mild Strategic dominance = buy the black & mild
These situations aren’t quite as easy to see, but they’re interesting anyways.
I’m doing quite well now and all indication is that I do not have manic depression.
I’m off to take a nap to recover.
Do you have a favorite paradox? If it’s not here, please leave it in the comments!
Yes, we’re asking you to mess with our head once again. Because that’s how we roll.
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– @radiantone7
