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Well, outside of math, "paradox" is not a fundamental ontological category. What is a paradox now may not be so in a hundred years, and hindsight is always 20:2
by Sharlin 7y ago
Well, outside of math, "paradox" is not a fundamental ontological category. What is a paradox now may not be so in a hundred years, and hindsight is always 20:20.
Paradoxes of this type are definitely paradoxes if they contradict something that appears to be common sense and a consensus position of some sort, irrespective of the level of rigor. The Monty Hall problem confuses even career statisticians, but that's not because the common but wrong answer is somehow based on sound statistical knowledge; it's simply because answer seems so intuitive and self-evident that we don't bother to "shut up and calculate".
It seems to me that to count as a paradox, a result has to be both contradictory—not just different—from what is expected; and, the result has to be especially surprising; in Bayesian terms, the expected outcome must have had a high prior probability.
- jamesrcole 7y agoI'm saying, for reasons given in my initial comment, that it does not appear in any way contradictory or surprising to people like me who don't hold certain assumptions. Of course other people may find it paradoxical. We're in agreement that it's not a fundamental ontological category, i.e. that it's part of a map not the territory. And it's possible to argue about whether a particular map is flawed or not, such as it being flawed because it contains certain flawed assumptions. If we can show that a map in which it seems paradoxical is flawed, and show that a different map, in which it doesn't seem paradoxical, is more accurate, then this can be grounds for arguing that the phenomenon is no deserving of being called paradoxical.