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Thread: The Wizard will bank this bet: 1/6 vs 1/11

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  1. #11
    I'm not sure it deserves the label "paradox." If you read it front to back, with the emphasis on the opening presentation of a single event in present tense, then one arrives at one conclusion. If you read it back to front (why you would emphasize the end is a question in and of itself), then you can draw a second conclusion that it's about multiple events, and it's not referring to a single event that already happened.

    The latter is not how one usually reads English.

    It's a piece of writing, not an equation. Pieces of writing conventionally, in English (not Hebrew), are read as a left top to end right, front to end narrative. So when you read about a single event in present tense, the convention is to accept the opening of the piece of writing as is and not reformulate its meaning after reading further along in the piece of writing. That's why Alan is telling you that you can't read.

    You are ignoring basic conventions of English writing to arrive at your conclusion that this is necessarily about multiple events.

    Let me add another angle to this. When you open a fictional narrative in present tense, and the reader reads it, and then you later continue the narrative, the convention is that what was presented earlier is now in the past, that is, it happened. It's not ongoing, and we didn't miss a bevy of similar events that may or may not have happened. Why didn't we miss them? Because the author didn't present them.

    If the answer is meant to be 1/11, this is a really bad piece of writing, and any decent editor would have rewritten it. If the answer is meant to be 1/6 (which I doubt), it's not much better.
    Last edited by redietz; 06-01-2015 at 10:26 AM.

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