i’ve developed a mind virus and have released it, the way it works is through obviousness, the sensation something is so obvious, so immediately obvious that all thought that it shouldn’t be are destroyed, it leaves not a trace of what is lost, no trace within the infected individual of how it works

it’s highly contagious, before long the sensation extends to a feeling that all obvious things should be obvious, there’s a shared category of obvious things, obvious experience, a trajectory of obviousness, an assumed or presumed sameness of what should or ought be obvious, they are obvious, contrary ideas are naturally excluded by this force

related is raging explicitness, because the raging obvious requires raging explicitness

transition said:

i’ve developed a mind virus and have released it, the way it works is through obviousness, the sensation something is so obvious, so immediately obvious that all thought that it shouldn’t be are destroyed, it leaves not a trace of what is lost, no trace within the infected individual of how it works

it’s highly contagious, before long the sensation extends to a feeling that all obvious things should be obvious, there’s a shared category of obvious things, obvious experience, a trajectory of obviousness, an assumed or presumed sameness of what should or ought be obvious, they are obvious, contrary ideas are naturally excluded by this force

related is raging explicitness, because the raging obvious requires raging explicitness

The transition obvious virus doesn’t seem to have reached this forum yet, as far as I can see.

The Rev Dodgson said:

transition said:

i’ve developed a mind virus and have released it, the way it works is through obviousness, the sensation something is so obvious, so immediately obvious that all thought that it shouldn’t be are destroyed, it leaves not a trace of what is lost, no trace within the infected individual of how it works

it’s highly contagious, before long the sensation extends to a feeling that all obvious things should be obvious, there’s a shared category of obvious things, obvious experience, a trajectory of obviousness, an assumed or presumed sameness of what should or ought be obvious, they are obvious, contrary ideas are naturally excluded by this force

related is raging explicitness, because the raging obvious requires raging explicitness

The transition obvious virus doesn’t seem to have reached this forum yet, as far as I can see.

I see the obvious transition here every day.

The Rev Dodgson said:

transition said:

i’ve developed a mind virus and have released it, the way it works is through obviousness, the sensation something is so obvious, so immediately obvious that all thought that it shouldn’t be are destroyed, it leaves not a trace of what is lost, no trace within the infected individual of how it works

it’s highly contagious, before long the sensation extends to a feeling that all obvious things should be obvious, there’s a shared category of obvious things, obvious experience, a trajectory of obviousness, an assumed or presumed sameness of what should or ought be obvious, they are obvious, contrary ideas are naturally excluded by this force

related is raging explicitness, because the raging obvious requires raging explicitness

The transition obvious virus doesn’t seem to have reached this forum yet, as far as I can see.

consider, media delivery, and hunger of the audience, hunger for the obvious, an expectation that way

eventually you might desire the obvious to the extent you’ll get just that, obvious stuff that shouldn’t happen at all

transition said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

transition said:

i’ve developed a mind virus and have released it, the way it works is through obviousness, the sensation something is so obvious, so immediately obvious that all thought that it shouldn’t be are destroyed, it leaves not a trace of what is lost, no trace within the infected individual of how it works

it’s highly contagious, before long the sensation extends to a feeling that all obvious things should be obvious, there’s a shared category of obvious things, obvious experience, a trajectory of obviousness, an assumed or presumed sameness of what should or ought be obvious, they are obvious, contrary ideas are naturally excluded by this force

related is raging explicitness, because the raging obvious requires raging explicitness

The transition obvious virus doesn’t seem to have reached this forum yet, as far as I can see.

consider, media delivery, and hunger of the audience, hunger for the obvious, an expectation that way

eventually you might desire the obvious to the extent you’ll get just that, obvious stuff that shouldn’t happen at all

contextual inoculation obscuring deeping furrow

Ian said:

transition said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

The transition obvious virus doesn’t seem to have reached this forum yet, as far as I can see.

consider, media delivery, and hunger of the audience, hunger for the obvious, an expectation that way

eventually you might desire the obvious to the extent you’ll get just that, obvious stuff that shouldn’t happen at all

contextual inoculation obscuring deeping furrow

Detonates relatives and flies to Dover.

transition said:

i’ve developed a mind virus and have released it, the way it works is through obviousness, the sensation something is so obvious, so immediately obvious that all thought that it shouldn’t be are destroyed, it leaves not a trace of what is lost, no trace within the infected individual of how it works

it’s highly contagious, before long the sensation extends to a feeling that all obvious things should be obvious, there’s a shared category of obvious things, obvious experience, a trajectory of obviousness, an assumed or presumed sameness of what should or ought be obvious, they are obvious, contrary ideas are naturally excluded by this force

related is raging explicitness, because the raging obvious requires raging explicitness

You mean like propaganda. “Comminism is bad” sort of propaganda?

> before long the sensation extends to a feeling that all obvious things should be obvious, there’s a shared category of obvious things, obvious experience, a trajectory of obviousness, an assumed or presumed sameness of what should or ought be obvious, they are obvious, contrary ideas are naturally excluded by this force.

For me, I have a method of thought called “first principles”, working from the obvious towards the dubious.

In physics, first principles includes obviousness like gravity and mass.
In politics, first principles includes obviousness like motive and money.
In biology, first principles includes obviousness like food and death.
In statistics, first principles includes obviousness like likelihood and average.

Now let’s take an example of the obvious “climate exists”. There’s no particular reason why that soiuld be true.

The cure for the obviousness virus is solipsism. Start from the existence of self.
But in more general the cure is metaphysics. How we know what we know.

I guess if there is the raging obvious there must also be the calm, restrained obvious

transition said:

I guess if there is the raging obvious there must also be the calm, restrained obvious

Is that obvious? :-)

There have been a few scientific experiments probing the limits of what is wrong but so obvious to us that we don’t question it.

I suspect that more should be done in this regard. Finding a chink in the armour of the obviousness virus.

In a sense that is what brianstorming is supposed to do, to circumvent conventional thinking by withholding information. The classic example of this was a brainstorming exercise on the word “white” which led to “glass”. The client wanted a white road, and making the road of glass was the solution. The obvious “but glass is brittle and sharp” proved to be wrong when the glass is designed to be sufficiently strong, as in small glass spheres.

Other than brainstorming, is there another way to overcome the obviousness virus? Think of relativity for example. It is “obvious” that relativity can’t work, that space and time are fixed and unrelated.

Perhaps the cure to the “raging obvious” virus is the “what if” virus. What if averages don’t exist? What if there’s a number larger than infinity? What if no scientific experiement can ever be repeated? What if God is a fungus?

>What if God is a fungus?

Using this religious term to represent some scientific concept is not “original thinking”, it’s an annoying and pointless cliché.

Bubblecar said:

>What if God is a fungus?

Using this religious term to represent some scientific concept is not “original thinking”, it’s an annoying and pointless cliché.

I think there is more value in questioning things that are accepted without question.

The mysteriousness of quantum mechanics for instance.

The Rev Dodgson said:

Bubblecar said:

>What if God is a fungus?

Using this religious term to represent some scientific concept is not “original thinking”, it’s an annoying and pointless cliché.

I think there is more value in questioning things that are accepted without question.

The mysteriousness of quantum mechanics for instance.

That gets accepted without question? Sorry, I thought everyone questioned the truth of quantum mechanics.

The part of quantum mechanics I have trouble with, that really sticks in my throat, is that between sender and receiver, whether it be electron or photon, a particle traverses all of space and time, even outside the boundaries of the universe. eg an electron travelling in a CRT tube between sender and receiver goes backwards in time before the origin of the universe. I have real conceptual problems accepting that one.

mollwollfumble said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

Bubblecar said:

>What if God is a fungus?

Using this religious term to represent some scientific concept is not “original thinking”, it’s an annoying and pointless cliché.

I think there is more value in questioning things that are accepted without question.

The mysteriousness of quantum mechanics for instance.

That gets accepted without question? Sorry, I thought everyone questioned the truth of quantum mechanics.

The part of quantum mechanics I have trouble with, that really sticks in my throat, is that between sender and receiver, whether it be electron or photon, a particle traverses all of space and time, even outside the boundaries of the universe. eg an electron travelling in a CRT tube between sender and receiver goes backwards in time before the origin of the universe. I have real conceptual problems accepting that one.

Remember I’m talking pop-sci here, since I don’t get to chat to real quantum physicists very often.

I was more thinking of the sort of thing that Schrödinger’s cat represents some unexplainable mystery, that requires a new infinite universe for every quantum interaction, or was that just every observed quantum interaction.

transition said:

i’ve developed a mind virus and have released it, the way it works is through obviousness, the sensation something is so obvious, so immediately obvious that all thought that it shouldn’t be are destroyed, it leaves not a trace of what is lost, no trace within the infected individual of how it works

it’s highly contagious, before long the sensation extends to a feeling that all obvious things should be obvious, there’s a shared category of obvious things, obvious experience, a trajectory of obviousness, an assumed or presumed sameness of what should or ought be obvious, they are obvious, contrary ideas are naturally excluded by this force

related is raging explicitness, because the raging obvious requires raging explicitness

I’ve been racking my brain for days trying to think of examples of the obvious virus in action, without success. I have to concede that “not a trace” is left behind to get a handle on. The best I can do is to list some things that were obvious at the time, but false. Now they’re so well known that they have become obvious in retrospect.

1. Nasty tricks by malicious people.

• Living room stinks. A malicious person had put a fish inside the curtain rod. Drove the owners mad looking for the source of the smell. It couldn’t be the curtain rod, obviously.
• Lawn repair person is the house owner. His dog keeps tearing up the back lawn. But nothing buried there. Impossible, obviously, dog must be mad. Malicious person had tossed beef stock cubes on the lawn and let the rain soak them in.
• Some chemicals dry to make explosives. Coating it on toilet flush lever so that the toilet goes bang then flushed. The obvious is that operating the toilet lever will flush the toilet, nothing more.
• As a child, I accepted a 5c piece as change. Only it wasn’t a 5c piece. It was a 1c piece that had been dipped in mercury. We see the size and colour and feel of our money without necessarily taking note of the details.

2. Creatures that obviously couldn’t be deadly, until they were found to be deadly.

• Snails are obviously harmless. Except the cone snail.
• An octopus might give you a nip, but nothing worse. Except the blue ring octopus.
• An invisible sea creature almost too small to see can’t kill you. Except the Irukandji.
• A harmless looking little mushroom was found recently to be the dominant cause of mushroom-related fatalities in China.

3. Now-familiar examples of the false obviously impossible made up by psychologists.

• A father and son are in a horrible car crash that kills the dad. The son is rushed to the hospital; just as he’s about to go under the knife, the surgeon says, “I can’t operate—that boy is my son!”
• My mother is older than my grandmother.

4. Examples in fiction books where the author sets it up so you never see it coming.

5. When in high school, a desktop calculator had paper stuck in it. It was obviously going to take ten minutes to wind the whole roll through to recover it. Until a friend typed “print<cr>”. And the whole role ejected automatically in 3 seconds. I was in awe. Printing nothing in an infinite loop.</cr>

6. In mathematics. It is possible to cut a sphere into four pieces that can be reassembled to make two balls each having the same volume as the original. Obviously impossible. But true. Banach-Tarski.

mollwollfumble said:

5. When in high school, a desktop calculator had paper stuck in it. It was obviously going to take ten minutes to wind the whole roll through to recover it. Until a friend typed “print<cr>”. And the whole role ejected automatically in 3 seconds. I was in awe. Printing nothing in an infinite loop.</cr>

Reminds me of my self-replicating Lotus 123 macro code:

/C~{D}~{D}

This makes a copy of itself on the line below, then moves down to the line below, where it reads and acts on the code it finds there.

To the end of the Universe.
About 8000 lines later, if I recall correctly.

mollwollfumble said:

6. In mathematics. It is possible to cut a sphere into four pieces that can be reassembled to make two balls each having the same volume as the original. Obviously impossible. But true. Banach-Tarski.

On a slightly less off-topic topic, I think I must be missing something about Banach-Tarski.

What is so paradoxical about cutting a surface into pieces, stretching them, and reassembling into two copies of the original?

Same for solids, if it’s about solids.

The Rev Dodgson said:

mollwollfumble said:

6. In mathematics. It is possible to cut a sphere into four pieces that can be reassembled to make two balls each having the same volume as the original. Obviously impossible. But true. Banach-Tarski.

On a slightly less off-topic topic, I think I must be missing something about Banach-Tarski.

What is so paradoxical about cutting a surface into pieces, stretching them, and reassembling into two copies of the original?

Same for solids, if it’s about solids.

Given a solid ball in 3‑dimensional space, there exists a decomposition of the ball into a finite number of disjoint subsets, which can then be put back together in a different way to yield two identical copies of the original ball. Indeed, the reassembly process involves only moving the pieces around and rotating them without changing their shape. However, the pieces themselves are not “solids” in the usual sense, but infinite scatterings of points. The reconstruction can work with as few as five pieces.

The reason the Banach–Tarski theorem is called a paradox is that it contradicts basic geometric intuition. “Doubling the ball” by dividing it into parts and moving them around by rotations and translations, without any stretching, bending, or adding new points, seems to be impossible, since all these operations ought, intuitively speaking, to preserve the volume. The intuition that such operations preserve volumes is not mathematically absurd and it is even included in the formal definition of volumes. However, this is not applicable here because in this case it is impossible to define the volumes of the considered subsets. Reassembling them reproduces a volume, which happens to be different from the volume at the start.

SCIENCE said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

mollwollfumble said:

6. In mathematics. It is possible to cut a sphere into four pieces that can be reassembled to make two balls each having the same volume as the original. Obviously impossible. But true. Banach-Tarski.

On a slightly less off-topic topic, I think I must be missing something about Banach-Tarski.

What is so paradoxical about cutting a surface into pieces, stretching them, and reassembling into two copies of the original?

Same for solids, if it’s about solids.

Given a solid ball in 3‑dimensional space, there exists a decomposition of the ball into a finite number of disjoint subsets, which can then be put back together in a different way to yield two identical copies of the original ball. Indeed, the reassembly process involves only moving the pieces around and rotating them without changing their shape. However, the pieces themselves are not “solids” in the usual sense, but infinite scatterings of points. The reconstruction can work with as few as five pieces.

The reason the Banach–Tarski theorem is called a paradox is that it contradicts basic geometric intuition. “Doubling the ball” by dividing it into parts and moving them around by rotations and translations, without any stretching, bending, or adding new points, seems to be impossible, since all these operations ought, intuitively speaking, to preserve the volume. The intuition that such operations preserve volumes is not mathematically absurd and it is even included in the formal definition of volumes. However, this is not applicable here because in this case it is impossible to define the volumes of the considered subsets. Reassembling them reproduces a volume, which happens to be different from the volume at the start.

Shrugs

Presumably they have some strange definition of “without any stretching”.

The Rev Dodgson said:

SCIENCE said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

On a slightly less off-topic topic, I think I must be missing something about Banach-Tarski.

What is so paradoxical about cutting a surface into pieces, stretching them, and reassembling into two copies of the original?

Same for solids, if it’s about solids.

Given a solid ball in 3‑dimensional space, there exists a decomposition of the ball into a finite number of disjoint subsets, which can then be put back together in a different way to yield two identical copies of the original ball. Indeed, the reassembly process involves only moving the pieces around and rotating them without changing their shape. However, the pieces themselves are not “solids” in the usual sense, but infinite scatterings of points. The reconstruction can work with as few as five pieces.

The reason the Banach–Tarski theorem is called a paradox is that it contradicts basic geometric intuition. “Doubling the ball” by dividing it into parts and moving them around by rotations and translations, without any stretching, bending, or adding new points, seems to be impossible, since all these operations ought, intuitively speaking, to preserve the volume. The intuition that such operations preserve volumes is not mathematically absurd and it is even included in the formal definition of volumes. However, this is not applicable here because in this case it is impossible to define the volumes of the considered subsets. Reassembling them reproduces a volume, which happens to be different from the volume at the start.

Shrugs

Presumably they have some strange definition of “without any stretching”.

Indeed, re-reading the Wiki-words, it appears that since the sub-sets do not have a defined volume, it is impossible to say whether they have been stretched or not.

The Rev Dodgson said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

SCIENCE said:

Given a solid ball in 3‑dimensional space, there exists a decomposition of the ball into a finite number of disjoint subsets, which can then be put back together in a different way to yield two identical copies of the original ball. Indeed, the reassembly process involves only moving the pieces around and rotating them without changing their shape. However, the pieces themselves are not “solids” in the usual sense, but infinite scatterings of points. The reconstruction can work with as few as five pieces.

The reason the Banach–Tarski theorem is called a paradox is that it contradicts basic geometric intuition. “Doubling the ball” by dividing it into parts and moving them around by rotations and translations, without any stretching, bending, or adding new points, seems to be impossible, since all these operations ought, intuitively speaking, to preserve the volume. The intuition that such operations preserve volumes is not mathematically absurd and it is even included in the formal definition of volumes. However, this is not applicable here because in this case it is impossible to define the volumes of the considered subsets. Reassembling them reproduces a volume, which happens to be different from the volume at the start.

Shrugs

Presumably they have some strange definition of “without any stretching”.

Indeed, re-reading the Wiki-words, it appears that since the sub-sets do not have a defined volume, it is impossible to say whether they have been stretched or not.

aha

so there really is stretching after all

of the definitions

good

Don’t know if this has been posted here before, but this youtube has an animation of the B-T process, plus some other stuff about infinities:

Banach-Tarski

The Rev Dodgson said:

Don’t know if this has been posted here before, but this youtube has an animation of the B-T process, plus some other stuff about infinities:

Banach-Tarski

is it just a fractal thing or is there more to it than that

SCIENCE said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

Don’t know if this has been posted here before, but this youtube has an animation of the B-T process, plus some other stuff about infinities:

Banach-Tarski

is it just a fractal thing or is there more to it than that

I suspect there is less to it than that.

But what would a mere engineer know about these things?