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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30471 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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before you attempt to correct anyone, you should first attempt a definition at the word "imply" which is generally agreed upon

that isn't what "imply" means

it doesn't matter if it's possible for something to happen

something can be possible and yet it is not "implied" by it or the vis-a-versa

"imply" isn't a word for possible/impossible, it's a word which means suggests to varying degrees

you are simply misusing the word

I don't think I was misusing it. With respect to questions of logic, imply generally means, as the Free Dictionary has it, to 'involve by logical necessity'. X implies Y means that Y is always a logical consequence of X.

well, I think we spotted our disagreement

In mathematics, "implies" is how we pronounce "⇒". Your statement was mathematically false, which was a useful thing for him to point out.

If you were trying to speak a language other than mathematics, like English, in which there are more and fuzzier definitions, either use a less fuzzy word like "suggests" or "hints", or make your context clearer by avoiding other words with both math and English meanings like "variables" and "correlation".

yes, I will

In hindsight mathematicians should have swiped jargon from a dead language, like the doctors and lawyers mostly did, or at least used more proper names instead of generic words.

I might not even have remembered that "implies" was one of the important words repurposed with a significant confusing distinction in meaning, if I'd been making a list from scratch. There's "or", "in general", just about every word in topology, ... and "significant", ironically.

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