> It’s a sentiment eagerly embraced by The Dull Men’s Club. Several million members in a number of connected Facebook groups strive to cause dullness in others on a daily basis.
Apparently I'm too dull to even have a FB account. I know it's a bit tongue in cheek, but in the name of maximum dullness, something with UX closer to this site seems much more appropriate than a Facebook group.
It's also marked by doing what other people do better than they do.
Lonerly contrarianism is not a cornerstone of brilliance.
Come on, the Graun is the epitome of dull middle class.
Gentlemen, have you heard The curious tale of Bhutan's playable record postage stamps (2015)? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44054775
>Australian member Andrew McKean, 85, had dullness thrust upon him.
Perhaps the minimal element should be removed from the set; there will be plenty of members that still remain.
the smallest member of the original set of uninteresting numbers
the second smallest member of the original set of uninteresting numbers
the third ...
...
That version of "interesting" quickly becomes "not interesting". The concept simply defies mathematical logic.
The criminal knows it can't be Sunday, because he would wake up on Sunday and know he was going to be executed that day. But if Sunday isn't possible, on Saturday he would know he was being executed that day; so Saturday wasn't possible either. The same reasoning can be repeatedly applied to every day between now and Sunday.
It's obviously flawed reasoning (Surprise! they execute you on Thursday), but the flaw is difficult to articulate.
When you get to the point in a proof of the irrationality of root two where you've demonstrated that if it is expressible as a fraction p/q, then both p and q have to be even, you don't then need to proceed to prove that if they're both even, then they both have to be divisible by four, and then if they're both divisible by four, that means they're both divisible by eight...
I mean, you can, but you don't have to.
You can just say 'if it's a rational number then it has a reduced form where p and q have gcf of 1, so if p and q would both have to be even, that is a contradiction'.
Same with the 'set of uninteresting numbers'. If 'being uninteresting' is a property numbers can have, then the 'set of uninteresting numbers' exists, and it has a least member. Being the least member of the set of uninteresting numbers is interesting.
You don't have to infinitely regress from here and get tied up in knots saying that surely there is some 'first truly uninteresting number' to prove that the set is actually empty - you can just see that you must have gone wrong somewhere. Either:
1) Being the least member of the set of uninteresting numbers isn't as interesting as we assume.
or
2) 'Being uninteresting' is not a property numbers can have
I think actually of the two, 1) is more likely the case.
But that doesn't defy mathematical logic. It is a consequence of mathematical logic.
We could start by defining a set of "all numbers that are uninteresting other than by membership or position in this set".
That describes the set the proof naively called "interesting numbers" without the contradiction.
Then we could create a second set with all members of the first set except those that are interesting because of where they are in that set (smallest, whatever). This is a new version of "interesting numbers" that approaches the version in the original proof but is, in human terms, less interesting. As you said, "Being the least member of the set of uninteresting numbers isn't as interesting as we assume."
We could repeat that, making a sequence of sets that approach the definition of interesting in the original proof, but the definition of each set is progressively less interesting in human terms.
Then if we really want to be rigorous, we could talk about "first degree interesting" (what most people mean), "nth degree interesting", or "asymptotically interesting", but the last one is an empty set.
i found this particularly confusing because we all know that “over” is the only sane choice.
What traits are correlated with overing?
Do underers look at the world differently?
And it is a false dichotomy. Some people just don't care what direction when they replace the roll - what's a suitable name for that clade? And then there's the people who use the floor and ignore the holder.
underers are frantically trying to fix their broken lives.
nihilists lacking opinions are empty shells.
I have friends that play DnD which I personally find very dull but hearing them talk about it, it's clear they do not see it the same way. Conversely I love cars and talking about cars and I can talk with another gearhead for hours on the topic, but the times my wife has listened in on my conversations she said it was the most boring thing she has ever heard in her life.
You are most certainly right, but I don’t think that this is in contradiction with how the Club works. Everyone is dull and interesting depending on the situation and the audience. The Club is for when you found or saw something interesting and important to you, but your audience disagree, does not notice, or does not care.
Nobody is fundamentally dull, but everybody is being dull at some point.
"There are many men in London, you know, who, some from shyness, some from misanthropy, have no wish for the company of their fellows. Yet they are not averse to comfortable chairs and the latest periodicals. It is for the convenience of these that the Diogenes Club was started, and it now contains the most unsociable and unclubbable men in town. No member is permitted to take the least notice of any other one. Save in the Stranger's Room, no talking is, under any circumstances, allowed, and three offences, if brought to the notice of the committee, render the talker liable to expulsion. My brother was one of the founders, and I have myself found it a very soothing atmosphere."
zh3•6h ago
andyjohnson0•5h ago
I immediately thought of the interesting number paradox
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox
kergonath•2h ago