Comment by dewster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dewster | Hacker News Reader

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Thank you for expressing that better than I could ever do. Outside of JS sucking but being saved by extensibility, and academic interests, I've never heard a concrete reason why LC is important in a practical sense to most programmers. Can't swing a dead cat on the internet without hitting an LC article lately, and I really don't get the sudden interest and insistence that we all must learn it.

Looking into LC I was led to Curry's Paradox, the natural language version being "If this sentence is true, then Germany borders China" which (again, I'm probably just an idiot) doesn't strike me as paradox material.

This isn't some random reverse snobbery rant, I'm all for digging deep and really understanding things (I do this all the time, probably more than most engineers). But I can't see the Emperor's clothes everyone seems to be admiring, and it isn't for lack of looking.

"If this sentence is true, <false thing>" is a paradox like "this sentence is false". Implication is trivially true when the condition is false. But that would make the condition true and the sentence false.

So once again I try to interpret OP:

I think it's clear that this is a paradox in the field of logic - but only there. Few people not trained and/or thinking of "logic" (that math thing) will find this sentence paradoxical, more like "useless/meaningless". Normal people use paradox more for things like the "French paradox" (the French are health despite eating "unhealthily"). Which isn't a paradox in any logical sense, and even on a human level I myself see the paradox more in the fact that some people see a paradox at all instead of just admitting that what they think is true about nutritional science just isn't (that French phenomenon can be shown to be true in statistics, it's not just imagination).

> Normal people use paradox more for things like the "French paradox"

Maybe. Certainly, common use (and traditional use, e.g. Zeno's Paradox) include things that are not strictly a logical paradox. But I think that most people (and certainly overwhelmingly most programmers) consider "this sentence is false" to be a paradox - which is part of why I picked it as a point of reference.

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