From Philosophical Research
Main entry / errors
- 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! 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 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 then you simply don't have any imagination.
- 29,25What 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.
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