Bertrand Russell Is the Pope (2010) | Hacker News Reader

Bertrand Russell Is the Pope (2010)

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186 pointsisaac21259121 comments

Quotation (related only because it's from Russell):

"The fundamental argument for freedom of opinion is the doubtfulness of all our belief... when the State intervenes to ensure the indoctrination of some doctrine, it does so because there is no conclusive evidence in favour of that doctrine .. It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions make it impossible to make a living."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell

This is from, at least partially, "Free Thought and Official Propaganda." https://users.drew.edu/~jlenz/br-free-thought.html

"Both these obstacles exist in every large country known to me, except China, which is the last refuge of freedom."

Good to see how well that worked out ;-)

It's depressing how bad early 20th century China fucked it up

Compared to some paradise that was 19th century China?

If anything, they improved a lot, in sovereignity, wealth, education, infrastructure, commerce, science, and tons of other fields besides...

As well as concentration camps.

If we are to believe the same "enemy of the day" embedded reporting that gave us WMDs, the Nayirah testimony, the Steele Dossier, and other such truths...

The evidence is overwhelming, unlike the case with Iraq's WMDs.

"Evidence" like satellite photos of school complexes, markets, and such being reported (in mainstream media nonetheless) as "concentration camps" and debunked by on-the-field checks?

I'd love to see that "debunked" evidence, sadly there's more than sattelite imagery, such as survivor's testimonies and on-the-field images. The most incontrovertible evidence is: if there's no genocide, why don't you allow a team of reporters free unmolested access to Xianjing.

Of course, you know this. Why you seek to deny it it's anyone's guess.

I hear that a lot. Wealth, science, infrastructure are better ergo the political system and decisions were good. I hear that from such diverse sides as Bill Gates and capitalism apologists as well as Soviet apologists.

The truth is things improved in general in the last century because technology improved in the entire world in the last century. More efficient production, better medicide, massively more know-how in all fields of human endeavour. Yeah things got better in the entire world, but probably despite the system, not because of it.

Not saying I agree with it, but: A frequent answer to that from proponents of a strong unitary state (e.g. China, but also Russia and a few other countries) is that society there is too divided for the state to survive without a heavy hand. And then, once the state breaks down and the country splits into fiefdoms ruled by warlords, the collapse of infrastructure and violence means that the average person wouldn't be getting much benefit from modern technology. Just look at Somalia.

Or states where the strongmen were toppled by "democracy by bombing (and get their resources)" operations, that turned half a century stable places like Iraq, Libya, etc. into civil-war hellholes...

>The truth is things improved in general in the last century because technology improved in the entire world in the last century.

Available level of technology doesn't magically improve things, and doesn't make you #2 global economy from a distant developing world one.

Just check other developing world countries that had 1/1000 the success, regardless of 20 and 21st century technology being what it is.

>More efficient production, better medicide, massively more know-how in all fields of human endeavour. Yeah things got better in the entire world, but probably despite the system, not because of it.

There are tons of countries that don't even have running water and stable electricity, never mind "more efficient production and better medicine". Technology and infrastructure improvements don't apply magically by themselves.

conclusive evidence

Can you please expand on your point?

Has there ever been any evidence for anything that has ended debate on the topic for everyone, universally?

Of course not.

Russell meant "conclusive" with respect to a small group of right minded people, that should be deciding things.

He wasn't against an arbitrary group of elites deciding what is true, he was just against the wrong group vaguely identified as "the State".

I'm not saying I'm pro or con anyone censoring things, my point is that people who talked about censorship traditionally took for granted that someone responsible was in control if the people they didn't like weren't.

Your analysis doesn't seem to affect the most important part of the quotation, which is that free thought is impossible when some opinions too dangerous to express.

And that will be used by shrill persons to claim censorship, etc, etc.

However, I claim that the profession of certain opinions should make it impossible to make a living.

EDIT: for certain values of "profess", which I'll expand as "go around telling everyone you frequently converse with"

I remember the days, just 15 years or so ago on Slashdot, people from a similar community as ours would have in their signature the quote:

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

I wonder how things changed so quickly and where this may lead us...

> "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

People say this, but I've never seen it. Free speech absolutists weren't out there defending protest rights, lgbt activism, or union advocacy. The speech rights of the powerless have been consistently crushed by the powerful while the first amendment is used as a power defense of those who seek to harden existing power structures.

This quote often feels like a justification to support the speech rights of bigots while dodging the question of moral responsibility.

> I’ve never seen it

A Jewish lawyer at the ACLU famously fought for the rights of Nazis to demonstrate in Skokie, Il.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_...

The other way around. What I want is to see a Nazi free speech absolutist defending the rights of Jewish people.

There are no Nazi free speech absolutists, even if some Nazis pretend they are for pragmatic reasons. Freedom of speech is not valued highly in fascist belief systems relative to nationalism, social cohesion, etc.

That's rather the point, though. There are many who hold it essential to defend free speech for Nazis, even though Nazis would remove their freedom to speak. If you balk at that thought, then you don't support free speech at all, just speech within your personal boundaries of acceptability.

I conclude something of the opposite. I question the effectiveness of our current approach to free speech to actually protect people's lives. Mass violence can absolutely be enacted by fascist groups without ever crossing 1st amendment protections. And I would not expect to be granted the right to speak out against a fascist regime should it ever have a legislative majority.

Hate speech scales more effectively than individual threats of violence. The 1st amendment will do nothing to protect me.

> Mass violence can absolutely be enacted by fascist groups without ever crossing 1st amendment protections.

But there are many other laws that prevent people from "enacting mass violence". Speech is not violence. Violence is violence.

Plus, the same laws that would lock-up fascists for inciting violence could be used against BLM and other left-wing groups. The 1st amendment ensures everyone can say what they like. Speech limiting laws can be abused to suit the preferences of whoever is in power.

It hasn't been that long since gay people could be thrown in prison for having sex. This was mass state violence against an entire population. The law failed to prevent people from "enacting mass violence" for ages. Progress is made over time, but this history of the US is the history of the law failing to prevent the powerful from enacting mass violence against the weak.

We already have laws that are abused against BLM and other left-wing groups. I'm not confident in the ability of the state to protect these groups, despite the state claiming that the US stands for certain values. This makes me skeptical of the free speech absolutist claim that the policy helps all groups equally.

Prospect of violence is enough to keep people in check.

And what about the Palestinians?

What do you mean?

My claim is that "free speech absolutism" is more consistently used to protect the rights of those belonging to traditional power structures than the rights of the downtrodden. I am skeptical of it as a viable ideology when there are populations who enjoy the benefit of this ideology who'd waste no time throwing me in prison if they were granted a legislative majority.

This is why I don't find examples of historically oppressed groups (Jewish people) defending the rights of historically powerful groups (white supremacists) to be a compelling argument that free speech absolutism will actually protect my rights if it came to that.

> "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

Paradox: if I say: "I don't want freedom of speech for anybody but myself". Why would anyone defend my point of view?

I don't think all ideas are defendable, but then I cannot make a list of what ideas deserve to be defended are what not: this always seemed to me like the notion of love (you don't know how to define it, besides the chemical reactions in our body, you don't know how it got into you, but you'll know when it happens to you).

That's not a paradox. People will not defend your point of view, they will defend your right to express it even though they think you're wrong.

This is a remarkably disingenuous distortion of what the phrase actually states: disapproving with a statement should not in good faith be equated with denying one the agency to express it--unless one is hiding cards up their sleeves about their motives.

they would defend your right to say it, not to put your idea into practice.

if you ask me I would defend your right to express that opinion, but I would also expect that if you ever come close to having the power to make it real, you would be stopped.

I blame the education system, the government and other authoritarian institutions which instill in young people weakness and a constant need to appeal to authority.

Young people seems to believe freedom is a solved problem - something you memorised in history class - and are blind to the evil authoritarian regimes of our times (like China, North Korea, Cuba): they don't realise we're one step away from those realities and edging closer every day.

> China, North Korea, Cuba

Freedom is not a solved problem, but your examples don't help your cause as much as you think.

None of those countries ever had anything close to a working democracy. Or a large middle class, for that matter.

And in the developed democracies another lesson has been forgotten: prosperity beats freedom/liberty. Empty bellies don't care how they get filled, be it from a dictator's hand or from a well paid job in a market economy functioning under the rule of law of a democracy.

That's what's eroding democracy. The hollowing out of the middle class. Not "freeze peach", though that part having issues isn't helping either.

I still hold that opinion (except part about death), but who cares. You need to make a poll regularly if you want some kind of conclusive evidence that public opinion changes. Otherwise you're making conclusions based on few comments here and there.

One possible reason is the advent of social media demonstrating how free speech coupled with easy access to large amount of the population can make free speech dangerous very quickly. It is easy to tell a lie, much more difficult to disprove it.

I don't mean it should be illegal to hire someone based on what they say. I mean that people should face the social consequences of holding and sharing opinions that sound similar to "all $identity_group should receive $abuse".

My guess, Internet commentariat shifted away from live-and-let-live attitudes like (actual) liberalism or (actual) libertarianism. Don't know why, but I see an awful lot more busybodies on here, reddit etc than before. I suspect regression to the mean, aka eternal September, since the Internet and Internet social networks stopped being niche thanks to social media and the startup boom.

I think that the type of intellect is the issue. Why?

At the start, only highly technical types dominated the Internet. Other types existed, but were the minority.

And at the start, the Internet had more, tech only content. Sure, there were funny memes, other silly things, but cat videos didn't take up 99.99% of all non-porn traffic.

This type of personality tends to do lots of research, read a lot, where as most of the population never picks up a book, and very rarely reads. And while the Internet forces the average Joe to read, reading a headline is all they do. And can even tolerate.

(Note that UN national literary rates, are based upon what a 7th grader can read. An average one too, not a particularly bright one.)

Couple this with tiny smartphone displays, where a three paragraph news article looks like a massive wall of text...

And, no text reflow in mainline phone browsers due to agendas...

And most Internet commentators aren't even able to listen, or understand, the other side.

One of the most popular communication methods forces tiny little sentences, forcing even the highly literate to write like Captain Kirk, in halting, disjointed sentences!

Then, couple all of this with something else readers / those who enjoy learning, do? Why, they learn history! The history of why you never do this or that, or why thing $x leads to bad outcomes time and time again, which provides significant context to the world.

In short? The Internet now belongs to the masses, and that is why it changed.

I think we're describing the same effect. Our conclusions about regression to the mean are identical, and I believe the people who most want to learn are also most likely to be of a live-and-let-live persuasion, because they want to be left alone to explore information at their own discretion, and hate for the information available to them to be limited. It's basically a bargain - "I'll leave you to do what you want to do if you let me do the same".

As someone who grew up in a right wing province of southern Austria with neo nazis (and old original nazis) nextdoors I can tell you precisely what changed.

Fighting for the other persons right to speak their thought is a good and noble thing as long as the other person doesn't fight against your right to say what you like and as long as their words don't turn into actions. The more of this happens the more tolerance becomes a luxury only those not directly involved can afford.

Let us substitute something else for right wing/fascist extremism for a moment: Dschihadism. When do we stop tolerating Dschihadists? And when do we start treating every Dschihadist as a potential terrorist, which should be surveilled, silenced, imprisoned and ultimately even killed? The answer is very clear: when the frequency with which people violate other peoples fundamental rights in the Name of Dschihadism starts to rise too much. Be it their children or women who are at times forbidden basic human rights, be it the victims of their violent attacks. This is way beyond being just speech, this is anti-humanistic ideology and it should be stopped just at the point where words become actions.

Now if you ask how things changed so quickly: A significant part of the US public came closer to these actions (with a strongly visible part trying to stop the counting of a democratic election with violence). During the Trump years it wasn't just speech that was problematic. People got killed, people got attacked, people got their rights violated in many ways based on that speech. And there is a threshold beyond which tolerance makes you complicit.

Don't become the kind of person that tolerates the NSDAP party rise while closing your eyes to all the clearly visible actions that follow their Brandreden (=German for "inflamatory speech").

You can totally say something I don't agree with and I will fight for your right to do it, but as soon as you step over the line and violate other peoples rights, you waived your right to be tolerated by me.

We already know how to solve that problem. Freedom of speech doesn't cover violent threats. There is no need for hate speech regulations.

Jihadism is not covered by free speech, nazism is not covered by free speech but racism is covered by free speech.

You also seem to conflate jihadists with muslims - that's not the case.

Jihadists are terrorists and they want war, other muslims integrate with other societies.

There is definitely a point to be made that Islam may employ a long term strategy of integration followed by politically controlling an entire country once they reach a majority (which could start happening in Europe in 50 years or so). That could be seen as a non-violent jihad (pardon the oxymoron), but that's a scenario that would be perfectly legal and not violent. Written or unwritten constitutions in western countries should be able to protect religious freedom even in such an event - or maybe countries will decide to change and become stricter in the religions they allow (whether by becoming islamic or anti-islamic).

> naziism is not covered by free speech

Are you not familiar with https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_...

Nazism was specifically defended by the ACLU and won. Speech is speech. And it was a Jewish lawyer who fought the case.

We already know how to solve that problem. Freedom of speech doesn't cover violent threats.

This is a very childish way to look at the world. Unfortunately there's more "violence" than physically bonking people over the head. State oppression is violence, societal oppression is violence, widespread racism is violence; Hitler didn't have to openly call for violence against the Jews for quite some time. All he had to do was say that they're rats, traitors, subhuman, they're why Germany lost the war, etc. Every day the state and capitalism wield their violence on the people: if you don't comply they will kick you off your home. Point being there is more violence than simply saying "I will now proceed to punch this person".

What is a violent threat? Why is it taken as an axiom that this is where the line is drawn for free speech? I am personally less concerned with individual violence than with political violence enacted by hate groups who gain legislative power.

For a long time, gay people could be thrown in prison for having gay sex. This was mass violence against gay people. It was absolutely within free speech rights to advocate for these laws and to vote for legislators who supported these laws. This, IMO, was far more violent to the gay community than an individual saying "let's go kill that f*g". So I question whether "violent threats unacceptable, hate speech acceptable" is the right boundary.

I can agree with your examples of truly extreme and hostile behaviour (even though the level of which hasn't changed much in the last 15 years where I noticed the change? In fact, the post-9/11 dschihadism scare was, in retrospect, overblown and of course exploited politically)

OP however just seem to hint vaguely to unwanted opinions that should lead to loss of work, implicitly handing the power to a social media mob (or possibly organized groups posing as such) that enforces unwritten rules and targets people with precarious employment or small influencers who depend on their sponsors.

I'd prefer if we'd spell it out in a law and keep the enforcement to the courts, thanks!

Agreed. The problem with this stance though is verification.

How do you verify that someone is stepping over the line and violating the rights of others.

We rely on various NGOs and media reporting for the raw data and the law courts for independent verification.

So it’s no surprise of course that these are early targets for people with malign interests.

It’s a simple litmus test. Both of those functions should be made far more independent of political control.

Easier said than done.

(grammar edit)

>as soon as you step over the line and violate other peoples rights

What specific right is it that could be impinged by someone else's speech act?

>Fighting for the other persons right to speak their thought is a good and noble thing as long as the other person doesn't fight against your right to say what you like and as long as their words don't turn into actions.

>People got killed, people got attacked, people got their rights violated in many ways based on that speech.

Do you apply this logic to also justify being intolerant to anti-liberal, hate-filled, and potentially violence-provoking speech that comes from the left?

Also: how do you feel about possible harm that comes to people as a result of speech not being tolerated? For example, if openly saying that some demographics are on average more violent than others makes the people who say it unemployable, then some people probably will get injured or killed because out of ignorance, they fail to take precautions that they would have taken had speech been more tolerated.

> Do you apply this logic to also justify being intolerant to anti-liberal, hate-filled, and potentially violence-provoking speech that comes from the left?

Uhm, yes?

What happens when it's your opinions that are unpopular?

Opinions are not innate, can shift, and are often wrong.

Yes, but when somebody has an unpopular opinion that is "wrong", silencing them isn't the way to change their minds. The best thing in the whole world is hearing a debate between two people, and having your mind change as a result of the arguments given.

Declining to continue to employ someone, or be associated with them in public, is not silencing them.

Exactly, that's discrimination on the grounds of political views.

Congratulations, you're against European human rights and against the law of some US states.

For the records, even if you hold this opinion, I personally wouldn't care and I would hire you based on how you perform at the interview (or keep you hired if you're an employe of mine). I definitely wouldn't associate with you in public, though (nothing personal, I just don't share your values) - and that's my right.

> Congratulations, you're against European human rights and against the law of some US states.

Possibly, BUT, if you can prove that a certain employee holding a position causes brand damage and financial losses, I think they can still not hire you, nobody can force them to do that.

Being a literal nazi or a member of the kkk or being pro-eugenics is a political viewpoint, and I think those are entirely in-bounds for reasonable employers to discriminate against.

Sure opinions are often wrong. However their correctness is often uncorrelated with their popularity.

What we should do though, is to learn to distinguish holding opinions that some people may find offensive, from offending people with the excuse of just voicing our opinions.

It's a hard balance. On one hand it is true that you're not free to profess an opinion if that opinion lets you be fired. On the other hand are your employees / colleagues / fellow citizens supposed to be forced to tolerate anything you say? There's no easy answer.

Woo, this one was a little unpopular, huh? But only just a little. I think a lot of people realize that I mean "no one will hire you", not "it will be illegal to hire you".

I love Bertrand Russell's writing style.

His piece on writing is a must read:http://personal.kent.edu/~rmuhamma/Philosophy/RBwritings/how...

He translates this:

"Human beings are completely exempt from undesirable behaviour-patterns only when certain prerequisites, not satisfied except in a small percentage of actual cases, have, through some fortuitous concourse of favourable circumstances, whether congenital or environmental, chanced to combine in producing an individual in whom many factors deviate from the norm in a socially advantageous manner"

Into this:

"All men are scoundrels, or at any rate almost all. The men who are not must have had unusual luck, both in their birth and in their upbringing."

I think that philosophers like Judith Butler write impenetrable prose to sound intelligent and to make it almost impossible to argue against their positions. Anything worth saying can be said simply.

It feels like we are falling away from the ideal of speaking plainly. That was a product of idealistic journalism, Strunk & White, and mid-century writers like Hemingway.

You will frequently see Tyler Cowen call out “Straussian” prose. Strauss suggested that original ideas could rarely be said simply. Wiki:

> In 1952 he [Strauss] published Persecution and the Art of Writing, arguing that serious writers write esoterically, that is, with multiple or layered meanings, often disguised within irony or paradox, obscure references, even deliberate self-contradiction.

I blame Heidegger for this. I'm sure someone can cite someone previous, but that was it for me as an undergrad.

It was so alluring at first. It sounds so smart, complex, and nuanced. But then it started to really kick in and I realized it was just opaque, vague, and unapproachable.

My CS/Math side kicked in. Complex statements should be able to be broken down into compositions of simpler ones. You have the Descartes and Rawls of the world, that were able to distill a topic to the point any college student could understand without knowing anything about Philsophy. Kant and, even more, Spinoza weren't exactly approachable, but were able to construct their work by deeply composing simple structures.

I came to agree that this artistic writing with overly complex sentence (or in Heidegger's case, compound word) structures, overuse of haughty philosophic jargon, etc. is mostly a large scale defense against argument. It becomes the gnosticism of philosophy: you think it's wrong because you just don't get it.

One could argue that anything worth seeing can be said simply, but it might require vocabulary that has a large corpus of knowledge behind it.

For example, scientist couldn’t make quick progress if they couldn’t speak succinctly about Fourier transforms, but that concept is quite difficult for a large portion of the population to grok.

and jordan peterson. I wish I knew if it was intentional and for what reasons or if they just think that way.

> He gave me various simple rules, of which 1 remember only two: "Put a comma every four words", and "never use 'and' except at the beginning of a sentence".

And some wit to boot!

"I am allowed to use plain English because everybody knows that I could use mathematical logic if I chose."

I love Bertrand Russell man. His essays are so beautifully written.

In praise of idleness is a banger. The conquest of happiness is a joy to read. His writings are so clear. The way he elucidates his thought process is sublime. What a cool guy.

He is so famous of his other achievements that people are frequently surprised to learn that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (1950).

His writing is clear and his thinking is clear.

if only principia mathematica could have been as clear :P

so that's how you do ? you put all the cryptic complexity in one book and pour the rest in your poetry compilation ..

Pope? Perhaps not.

Cardinal in pectore? No one could know!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_pectore

Thank you for posting this, I will now forever wonder who, if any, of the people I meet throughout my life will have been secret cardinals. The answer is almost certainly "none at all", but you're right, how would I know!

> who, if any, of the people I meet throughout my life

including yourself!

I remember one of my high school theology teachers had a placard placed above the wall with a Russell quote:

> most people would die sooner than think—in fact, they do so

The principle of explosion!

To me, no greater proof of the existence of truth and the value of truth, and the concept of truth.

If you think "Well, maybe this truth thing isn't really necessary, things are all absurd anyways, isn't everything just an arbitrary construct?"

Well, assume me a falsehood and I will explode your world.

Could you give a definition of this "truth"?

There's something about the cardinality of that set

By the same reasoning, assuming that 1=0, I too am the Pope, and I am therefore also Bertrand Russell.

Hence “a false proposition implies any proposition“ ... and around we go.

Why does this site open Wikipedia when I double-click?

Presumably because of the JavaScript implementing that behaviour in the footer, charmingly pasted in from one of those JavaScript library sites and even still including the original credit:

    <!-- Original:  Nick Simonov (nicks@iln.net) -->
    <!-- Web Site:  http://www.iln.net -->
    <!-- This script and many more are available free online at -->
    <!-- The JavaScript Source!! http://javascript.internet.com -->

Neither of those sites seem to be available though.

The code below that comment is -

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Well yes, I assumed that anyone interested in the actual implementation could go view-source it for themselves. Obviously this was cut-and-pasted into this website's generic footer many, many moons ago, and the fact that it remains long after the original source is gone is part of the charm.

In the version I heard, Russel says: "I am one, the pope is one, therefore the pope and I are one." I doubt he ever said that, but it sounds like him.

Any suggestion about a course or online material to be able to understand this? Would like to understand it but quite lost to be honest.

I don't see how the conclusion must be that he's the Pope. It containing just him and the Pope but actually only just him is a contradiction that could just as easily be resolved by saying "it contains me and the Pope but actually just me so there is no Pope." Even if I accept the false proposition, the conclusion doesn't necessarily follow.

It's not the conclusion, it's a conclusion: remember that one can prove everything, so yours is just as (in)valid as his.

it's not that difficult to follow:

    let B = {set made of "Bertrand Russell" }, P = {set made of the pope}
    let BP = B ∪ P

    |B| = 1, |P| = 1 (trivials)
    |BP| may be 1 or 2
    if |BP| = 1 it means B=P -> Bertrand Russell is the Pope
    if |BP| = 2, and 2=1, it means B=P -> Bertrand Russell is the Pope

But since |BP| is both 1 and 2 it means Bertrand Russell is both the Pope, and not the Pope.

... yes. That is indeed what is meant by ex falso quodlibet. It does not make the example invalid.

The point was merely that it cannot be used to prove "anything" since the actual conclusions do not necessarily follow, leaving the original claim that you can prove anything with false axioms unproven.

The conclusion "Bertrand Russell is the Pope" does necessarily follow from 1=0. I'm not sure why you think it doesn't.

The conclusion "Bertrand Russell is not the Pope" also follows. Yes, this is a contradiction. So is 1=0.

The claim was that if you accept a false premise, you can prove any false thing to be true. What we've actually seen is random claiming of contradictory things that supposedly follow by people trying to appear clever. It so obviously doesn't follow that it's a little strange we are having this conversation. If the conclusions themselves can be seen to be contradictory, anyone can dismantle your proof and show that it's bogus, even if you do accept the original premise. So the claim is bogus, and it's probably not a real story anyway.

The most wonderful thing about mathematics (and by extension logic) is that we don't have to give a shit what random people like yourself want to guess on the internet. We have actual proof checkers. They can show the correctness of proof terms for exfalso from more basic, more obviously correct principles. Those proof terms can't be "dismantled"; they're proved correct no matter how much you whine that you don't like them.

I didn't have a difficult time following it, it's just not correct.

The conclusion is that if the set containing "the pope and bertrand russell" has only 1 member, then it must follow that the pope and bertrand russell are the same person/member. An implicit axiom is that, since the pope is in a set, it exists (or at least in that set), so that other conclusion of yours does not follow directly.

Another implicit axiom is that if there is a set of at least two people which contains him and the Pope, one of them is not the Pope. And if the set is reduced to just Bertrand Russell then he must not be the Pope.

THAT would have been interesting....

A more traditional argument might look something like

Axiom 1: ((1=0 && 1!=0) -> Pope(Russell)

Proposed axiom 2: (1=0 && 1!=0)

1&2 modus ponens: Pope(Russell)

The proof Russel gives is better though, because it captures something essential in why "0=1" and "1=2" are wrong via a natural example in sets. Meanwhile you're effectively invoking in Axiom 1 the principle of explosion, which has some intuition to it—being that since there can be no valid proofs of falsehood, we can derive anything on the basis of case analysis on the possible ways (of which there are zero) we could have derived a falsehood—but not quite as nice as what Russel shows.

Is this standard DSL for formal logic? What's it called?

If I’m understanding your question correctly, this is symbolic logic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_logic_symbols

Not at all standard I'm afraid. "Modus ponens" is a common term to describe inferring B from A->B and A, but that's about as far as I'd be willing to say it resembles any common notation for formal logic.

Can you explain why Axiom 1 is an axiom? I don't understand this

I mostly just figured it was plausible-looking. The axiom-scheme could be "(X && !X) -> Y" for any expressions X and Y. Basically a partial definition of logical implication. The expression LHS->RHS is true when LHS is false, so it should at least be a theorem when the LHS is a contradition, and maybe an axiom depending on your taste. I suspect common taste is for small sets of axioms that don't tend to include this statement/scheme though.

Using the rules of inference from here[1], plus an assumed starting point for arithmetic, another deduction might be

1. Proposed axiom: (1==0)

2. Maybe some arithmetic axiom, humour me: !(1==0)

3. 2, negation elimination: (1==0) -> Pope(Russell)

4. 1, 3 modus ponens: Pope(Russell).

That "negation elimination" rule of inference looks kinda like what I did earlier I guess, but less questionable.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propositional_calculus#Example...

This is funny, but I will forever love Russell’s Paradox better.

You can add infinite to both sides, then you end up with:

infinite + 1 = infinite

> You can add infinite to both sides

No you can't, it's illegal.

It's legal for both cardinal and ordinal numbers, as well as slightly more exotic number types.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_plus_one

What if the Pope has appointed the number a cardinal only in pectore?

Where is that law written?

Laws don't all have to be written.

Thank you. However, in this specific case, the question, "where is that law written?" was asking about the incorrect statement that the GP made.

It's an illegal operation

"Infinity plus one" is completely legal and well-defined in multiple mathematical formalisms [0], not least of which (and my personal favorite) are the surreal numbers [1].

[0] https://blog.plover.com/math/infinity-for-kids.html

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surreal_number#Transfinite_ind...

I meant adding infinity to both sides

Working in the surreal numbers, you can, in fact, add "infinity" (specifically, the one usually called ω) to both sides of an equation, and everything is rigorously defined and works correctly.

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