Assume v. Presume

I agree, you can't have degrees of dryness any more than something can be three times smaller.

However, "dry" is comparative.
 
Black Hole said:
I agree, you can't have degrees of dryness any more than something can be three times smaller.

However, "dry" is comparative.
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The humidity of the room I am in now is 36%. That is drier than 72% humidity outside. The weather forecaster should have said drier.
 
Mike0001 said:
The humidity of the room I am in now is 36%. That is drier than 72% humidity outside. The weather forecaster should have said drier.
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That depends.
You are talking in relative humidity (since you use %) so the indoor value is lower. However, in terms of absolute humidity (eg. kg/m3) the amount of moisture in the air may be the same, or possibly even less outside as building occupants tend to add water to the air. In which case it is actually drier outside.
This could have the makings of a riddle :)
 
Black Hole said:
I agree, you can't have degrees of dryness any more than something can be three times smaller.
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If A is three times larger than B, then surely B is three times smaller than A (or 1/3 the size). This is not the same thing as e.g. three times colder.
 
prpr said:
If A is three times larger than B, then surely B is three times smaller than A (or 1/3 the size).
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We've been through this before - that seems to be commonly understood now, but is semantically incorrect. And this dryness business is another example.
 
The Times did a budget comparison today. One of the categories was

Family of three, both earning.

Now I know it was easy to see what was intended, but I found it amusing to read because it sounds so wrong.
 
Blair on Brexit:

"No deal" is a bad deal.

To be a bad deal, something has to be a deal.

To be no deal, something can't be a deal.

Contradiction.
 
EEPhil said:
About the same as:

:frantic:
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There is another version. Two chests. A pirate put a fortune in gold in one of them, and wished to protect it from thieves. He inscribed the following on chest 1:

Only one of the inscriptions you see is true.

On chest 2 he inscribed:

The treasure is in the other chest.

So which chest contained the treasure? Chest 2, logic tells us, as follows.

If chest 1 is true, chest 2 must be false, since chest 1 tells us that only one of the inscriptions is true, so the treasure is in chest 2.

If chest 1 is false, then either both inscriptions are true or both false. As we are now assuming chest 1 false, chest 2 must also be false, so the treasure is again in chest 2.

The thief who stole chest 2 was annoyed to find it contained no treasure, and even more annoyed to hear that the treasure had been placed in chest 1 all along.
 
Hmm. Very curious, and I had a hard time seeing through it. Is the answer that, contrary to expectation, the two statements are independently true or false whereas the reader expects them to be linked?
 
I think there is some false logic in the explanation
Mike0001 said:
If chest 1 is false, then either both inscriptions are true or both false. As we are now assuming chest 1 false, chest 2 must also be false, so the treasure is again in chest 2.
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If chest 1 is false, then the requirement that "Only one of the inscriptions you see is true" fails. Hence you don't know whether chest 2 is true or false.
You might as well ignore both inscriptions. Also, how do you know the pirate is telling the truth in the first place? Best solution - pinch both chests!
 
EEPhil said:
If chest 1 is false, then the requirement that "Only one of the inscriptions you see is true" fails. Hence you don't know whether chest 2 is true or false.
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No, if 1 is false, then, we have only FF as an option, since FT and TF have been excluded, and TT is clearly now impossible too.
 
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Black Hole said:
Hmm. Very curious, and I had a hard time seeing through it. Is the answer that, contrary to expectation, the two statements are independently true or false whereas the reader expects them to be linked?
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The fallacy is in an implicit self reference in the first inscription. Self referential statements are excluded from logic. The first inscription is meaningless, not true or false. This in turn makes the second one meaningless, so it is neither a question of honesty nor independence of the inscriptions. If you assume the two inscriptions are independently either true or false, the logic leads you to a ridiculous conclusion.

I like this one, though, because so many people are convinced that it is physically impossible for the pirate to place his treasure in the first chest.
 
Why? Is it locked?
And who said that the inscription on box 1 actually referred to the inscription on the other? Or is that what the gobldy gook above was indicating?
 
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