3 ms·
Yet the way we represent numbers is also a human construct. 1 = .999... is hard for people to understand because we think and write in base 10 rather than base
by bcrosby95 7y ago
Yet the way we represent numbers is also a human construct. 1 = .999... is hard for people to understand because we think and write in base 10 rather than base 3. There's nothing that is fundamentally hard to reason about here.
- schoen 7y agoOf course in base three, they'll have a hard time with .222...
- throwaway894345 7y agoOof, I meant to write "numbers are fundamentally hard to reason about", not "numerals". Missed the edit window. The point I was trying to make is that numbers are very often fundamentally counterintuitive irrespective of notation. E.g., is the set of natural numbers larger than the set of decimal numbers? Or the other way around? Or equal? The complexities of time are almost exclusively inferring and converting between (often ambiguous) representations.