So there’s nothing ironic about not being allowed to smoke on your smoke break?
“Smoke break. No smoking.”
A paradox is something that you don’t understand well enough to realize that it’s not a paradox.
It’s very weak. I mean, with a bit of backstory, maybe it could be fleshed out into something ironic. But in situational irony I think there really has to be an element of a things being turned on their head and creating a situation where you are “mocked by fate”. It’s not as though “No Smoking” signs are unusual.
Contrary to Mr Shine, I do think the lottery one can be interpreted as irony. Live 80 years on the edge of poverty, finally win a life-changing amount of money… but your life ends before you can get your hands on it. The juxtaposition of astonishing good luck extinguished by terrible bad luck.
Exactly. I think in colloquial usage it does not need to be a strict paradox. You can just infer that what people usually mean when they say paradox is apparent paradox.
One of the first famous paradoxes was one that DID have a logical mathematical solution, albeit one that wasn’t available to Zeno.
The paradox was something like this "A hare is 100 times as fast as a tortoise. They decide to have a race, and the hare gives the tortoise a mile head start. The race begins, and the hare reaches where the tortoise began- but by then, the tortoise has gone 1/100 of a mile. The hare reaches the point where the tortoise was, but by then, the tortoise has moved forward 1/100 of that distance. and so on and so on and so on. “Logically,” the hare can never catch the tortoise! he can only keep closing the gap forever, but the tortoise will retain a shrinking lead eternally.
Of course, once you have a basic knowledge of simple calculus, there’s no more “paradox.” You can predict exactly where and when the hare will catch and pass the tortoise.
My take comes from a different angle. Almost all paradoxes are things that people just set up badly. I.e., they are the results of mistakes (or pointing out that errors can arise).
E.g., the barber who shaves all men who don’t shave themselves. The ruler who has each person entering the city make a statement and if false gets hanged. Etc.
If rational thought is applied ahead of time then the statement should not have been phrased like that.
But some things are deeper. Like Russell’s Paradox (the set of all sets that don’t contain themselves). Avoiding this issue leads to some really deep stuff that is important in Set Theory. Which is exactly what Russell was pointing out.
A good paradox tells people that there’s something deep going on that needs to be addressed. Here be dragons.
“It’s like rain on your wedding day” - if you’re a TV weather forecaster (who’s research had forecasted sunshine) I’d say it was ironic.
To me a paradox is going back in time and killing your father before you’re born.
Might both be incorrect…
A paradox, pretty much by definition, implies a need to reconfigure your axioms. Something isn’t what it seemed, however straightforward that definition once appeared. You can’t genuinely have contradictory truths. You can, however, have contradictory almost-truths.
Light is both a particle phenomenon and a wave phenomenon because it is neither a particle phenomenon nor a wave phenomenon insofar as the criteria that previously made sense for assessing something as a particle phenomenon, and those for assessing something as a wave phenomenon, were not sufficient to get a real handle on light.
Or in the case of “The only thing you can be certain of is that certainty is an impossibility”, “certainty is an impossibility” appears to be a premise that is worth adopting as the best available model that allows you to go forward, and that’s as certain of anything as you’ll ever get. Or so I think, for now. It’s just cuter when expressed as a paradox.
ftg, I don’t think that we’re actually disagreeing. Russel used his paradox to point out that mathematicians didn’t have as strong of an understanding of set theory as they had thought. Subsequent mathematicians were more careful, and now understand set theory better, and so for them, Russel’s paradox is no longer a paradox.
(actually, I’m pretty sure that Russel had multiple paradoces, another one being “the power set of the set of all sets”. But they all led to the same re-understanding)
How so?
Maybe in a cosmic irony, gods-fucking-with-ya sort of way?
I used to argue with a buddy over philosophical subjects at late night diners. One debate was when he insisted that there were no absolute truths in the universe. I tried to come up with a counter example but couldn’t offer one he’d accept. Finally I pointed out that if there were no absolute truths, then that statement itself was an absolute truth. He couldn’t resolve that paradox.
Eventually I compromised and suggested that maybe the only absolute truth is that there is only one absolute truth.
Sometimes irony is in the eye of the beholder. To a very religious person, who thinks there’s a “right” way to raise a child, it would probably be ironic when the minister’s son became a badass atheist rebel, or a Hell’s Angel, or just a workaday criminal. To me it would be totally predictable.
The main criterion of irony is that something is not what you’d expect. So irony may even be culturally biased as well.
Irony is not merely something quirky or worth pointing out, although it usually is that as well too; a lot of things are unexpected but not ironic. Something ironic usually inadvertently calls attention to some greater thing, or makes some kind of statement by being unexpected. It’s the opposite of expectations to have a baby stillborn at term, for example, but hardly ironic, unless the mother is a well-known OB who has never had a patient lose a baby, say.
A paradox is something that seems contradictory at first glance, but if you study it, it actually illustrates a truth.
For me, irony is when something bad happens as a direct result of taking some deliberate but unnecessary action to avoid it. For example, he had an obsession with cleanliness due to fear of disease, so he ripped up his drains to clean them thoroughly, and got ill from exposure to all the muck. She was very sensitive about creating a good impression, so she was very careful what she posted on the SDMB, to never cause offence, and got a reputation for insincerity.
They were desperate for good weather on their wedding day, so hired a cloud seeding aircraft. They didn’t realise that is used to create rain, not prevent it.