The options were binary yes/no and most people hit “yes”
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i’d wager that you are a sad little boy trapped inside a bird cage who has not yet seen the world
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however i am still not over a plurality of tumblr thinking 1 is prime
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why is it a binary yes or no
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it was a majority before mathblr found it
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At the time. I think now it’s like 51% no
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Because Tumblr users hate nuance. I didn’t make the poll somebody else did
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I think it’s bad practice to go “well technically we haven’t proven the negative” about super populr misconceptions when every major example of such a misconception has been disproven and there’s zero evidence had has held up to scrutiny. I think it’s irresponsible and wastes a lot of people’s time
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There are a lot of negatives we can’t prove, but that doesn’t mean anyone should believe in them or give the idea much credence. Ghosts are a good example. It’s difficult to have evidence against them because ghosts are poorly defined and not easily testable. Importantly, however, there’s no empirical evidence for their existence which means we should, by default, not believe them and look for alternative explanations for weird bumps in the night until we have overwhelming evidence that it has to be something like a ghost.
Like watch a ghost hunting show and they’ll say that temperatures drop when a ghost is present. Why? Where is that heat going? How is it displacing that heat? What’s even the hypothetical here that makes any kind of sense? Ghosts are supposed to be able to move things around, but again, what implications does that have? If we don’t throw out the laws of thermodynamics, where is that energy coming from? Like so quickly all of the phenomena that people attribute to ghosts ask questions about physics that are not easily explained, and would require outlandish explanations that have no basis in reality other than fitting a very specific unexplained event that often do have plausible explanations that don’t require exotic energy and matter to exist.
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“that is extremely unlikely” is a catch-all i’d use
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tutuu did you wait to answer the poll so you could say the wrong answer after i revealed which one was right
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i feel like benguined discovered the phenomenon we’re all falling to a few moments ago
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I … didnt … I learnt 1 is a prime number in school. Why isnt it a prime number?
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oh no i am staunchly against proving a negative. i just think the no option entails rejecting the existence of ghosts even if there was sufficient evidence they did exist. like they would be in the plot of ghostbusters and say “must’ve been the wind.” i would probably vote no in a binary yes/no poll
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there are several approaches to this, but the most compelling is that if you let 1 be prime the fundamental theorem of arithmetic breaks down
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1 does naively meet the definition of being a prime number most people have in their defense.
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…thus exposing the flaws of the naive definition, and of math education in general. but i digress
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I also dont think ive ever explicitly heard “1 cannot be prime because it breaks the fundamental theorem of arithmetic” until now
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