User:RD/9k/Q29,18

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5453. Existentialist math error / Existentialist math errors

Math review

2918. 2918

      What is 8 billion times 8 billion?

      / What is eight billion times eight billion? / What is eight billion factorial? (question used to imply order of magnitude of possible ways to arrange world population) -> 8,000,000,000! (pronounced eight billion factorial) is a really, really big number. this is the number of, or at least the proper order of magnitude of, ways to arrange eight billion people into social graphs and historical periods. if you can look at the number 1×10^75,750,364,046 (pronounced one times ten to the seventy-five billionth) and think there are no more possible historical periods or major changes to the rest of world history after the ones that exist right now — including new "colors" of countries not commonly seen before, changes in the "colors" of specific countries, or nationalities splitting apart or joining — then you simply don't have any imagination.
2925. 2925

      What is one eighth times one eighth?

      / What is one-eighth times one-eighth? -> one sixty-fourth. now, say that when told an issue is important, people hypothetically have a one in eight chance to be convinced. if that person goes over to another random person and tries to convince them, the one in eight probability rolls again, and there's now a one in sixty-four probability that at the moment you convince one person yourself you are going to successfully convince two people.
      

      Existentialists get this terribly wrong, and Trotskyists get this terribly wrong, by expecting that ten countries which are totally unaffiliated with each other in daily life have dependent probabilities to all go off at once rather than independent probabilities that get lower and lower as each country is added. really, mainstream Marxist-Leninists get dangerously close to the same fallacy when they assume that the terribly divided and pluralized United States population is actually undivided rather than being physically separated.

5449. Can Bob Stills choose who is president? / Can some random individual Bob Stills or Bobbie Stills freely choose as an individual what the result of an entire election will be? -> this question sounds laughable but it is a very real and widespread fallacy across all of center-Liberalism. it's become that the major engine of center-Liberalism is telling everyone that they can individually choose who is president if they only vote. but if you think for only a couple seconds about that it isn't logically true — you voting doesn't directly affect the way 5 other people will vote or a million other people will vote. your vote only matters to anything if the process that actually decides the outcome of the election decides that it matters. worse, most cases of you not getting the result you wanted don't come from some conspiracy to throw away votes (regardless of what Tories may think). they come from other entire subpopulations of people potentially numbering in the millions not caring about your vote all at once. that's what an election is. that's how elections work when they're even working in the first place.

Errors

5429. 5429Inequalities in the number of people each person knows do not exist -> this seems to be an important ingredient in the "Bob/Bobbie Stills" fallacy.
5430. 5430You only need to affect 150 people to change a whole country [1] -> this is some prime Existentialist bullshit (pronounced [BS]). this is not just wrong, this is actually dangerous. like, if 150 people join together and tell each other about forming East Germany why don't they get the whole Germany? you need to think this through.
      it's.... not even sound under graph theory. average people probably know about 5 people, while the kinds of people who come to be in control of corporations and certain skilled trades might know thousands and thousands of those 5-people people depending and will have disproportionate influence. this is before we even get to the idea of the people with a lot of connections having more money and more ability to take action.
5427. 5427Inequalities in the amount each individual can donate do not exist
5428. 5428Inequalities in the amount each individual can pay in taxes do not exist
5440. When two people have information, everybody has it / When information is available to a few people, it's available to everyone / When two people know something, everybody knows it / printing press fallacy -> dreadfully common in every single discussion of "culture" and "prejudice". in fact, it's vastly more common to find people who believe this than people who don't. but, it's demonstrably untrue in the physical world. all you have to do is locate somebody who has never head a thing and you've shown that information doesn't spread instantaneously.
5446. Calling something "culture" stops it / Putting "culture" after a bad phenomenon will make it stop (cancel culture; woke culture; purity culture; hustle culture) / The best way to call attention to a social problem is to label it "culture" (rape culture; feminism) -> there is such a strange lining-up between the notion of "call for better behavior in the furry Community to bring better perception", "call for only sensible identities in The Whole LGBT Community to get Liberal-republican representatives", and the general "non-peacer" phenomenon of Tories or Christians uniting people together supposedly around individual morality when if they even succeed all they achieve is getting raw blobs of people to fight each other for existence.
      the bright side of this motif is that it shows us that culturocracy doesn't make any sense. if culture can be "cancel", "hustle", "purity policing", or even "rape", how can culture possibly ever force people to be better people?
5445. Random individual Bob Stills can puppet four million people / Random individual Bobbie Stills can change the behavior of four million people
5442. Random individual Bob Stills is critical to all movements / Random individual Bobbie Stills is critically important to movements -> fallacy that occurs based on "information can move faster than light" and "I believe that everybody" statements

Physical consequences

5441. Knowledge cannot teleport / Knowledge cannot travel faster than a photon -> what actually appears to be true, and was depicted in XKCD 1053.

Ideology codes

• ES / Existentialist-Structuralist tradition
• MX / existential materialism
• MX / mechanical existential-materialism; one-step existential materialism
• MX / dialectical existential-materialism