Talk:Zero

I thought the Mayans found it first. Did we not get it from the Mayans? If I can bring myself to do it (maybe with some extra ritalin), I'll look it up and maybe add it to the article.-- 03:57, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Did we not get it from the Mayans? If I recall correctly, the zero was discovered independently by the Mayans and the Indians. 04:01, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm sorry...-- 04:05, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

La iglesia catolica
Estaba en contra del numero cero por siglos. Hay que añadirlo al articulo ¿no creen? Worzelpete (talk) 01:48, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

The alleged obligation of God to inform people of this
Okay, let's discuss this in the talk section. In Christian theology, God's primary concern is saving our immortal souls, not educating us about math, especially when we'd eventually educate ourselves about math anyway. God is no more obliged to educate us about the number zero than an emergency room surgeon is obliged to educate the infant they're operating on about object permanence; it'd be pretty odd to worry about such things while their well being is at stake and requires immediate attention, especially since they'll eventually figure that out on their own anyway.Skadooshbag (talk) 21:56, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Strawman, False analogy. Moving on... 21:58, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
 * But why would God let nonChristian majority in the East get educated first? If God is just about saving souls, why does he write books requiring people to read or translate? God's not a mere surgeon, he's supposed to be an all-powerful being who can certainly zap education on those that bring up the rear for him. 22:08, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
 * God is an Asset flip Dev who can't code. 22:11, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Are you saying that our universe this entire time was just a template on the Unity storefront that God bought, replaced elements with other crap he bought, and then sold it on the wordly gaming storefronts? 22:16, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, that's why it's shit. 22:18, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Because a bible that was immediatley understandable to us westerners would require just as much translation for the ancient Hebrews as their Bible does for us. A Bible that was equally understandable by everyone everywhere ever would either be so vague as to be completely useless, or else so comprehensive that it wouldn't fit through the front doors. You might as well ask why it wasn't written in an alphabet that's equally legible to everyone regardless of their language background.Skadooshbag (talk) 22:19, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Aha, assuming the Bible isn't vague, confusing, self-contradictory to begin with. Lawyers didn't exactly write it. 22:21, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
 * It was written by a culture separated by our own by thousands of years and miles. ANything we wrote would look equally vague, confusing, and self-contradictory to them. Let's take accuracy of translation, as an example. A hypothetical passage meant to read "Many people can suffer for one per'son's mistakes" might get mistranslated as "the many shall be punished for the sins of the one," which as you can imagine would result in all sorts of issues. Another problem is that the chapter and verse format encourages people to Quotemine the Bible, which is no more valid a procedure for the authors of the Bible than it is for anyone else. Another of the biggest issues is that most people fail to take the fact that the Bible's authors used mundane idioms, hyperbole, and figurative language, just like everyone else ever. Imagine if some scholar two thousand years form now dug up your conversation with grammar commie right here, and were left with the impression that you guys genuinely thought that God actually coded the universe on a game engine, then pointed to how everywhere else you guys talk like how you don't belive in God at all, and so pushed this as evidence that rationalwiki is a vague, confusing, and self-contradictory ancient website with no value.Skadooshbag (talk) 22:35, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Yeah, but it's pretty obvious from context that I don't think God is real, and that the point is going completely over your head. 22:43, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
 * If the Bible was proof of God's existence, then why is it such shit? Why doesn't he provide better evidence? Fucking A! Suspend the laws physics in the fucking book, that might be a good start. Or you know, just come out and prove the skeptics wrong. Like, the fact that there is ambiguity in this matter is itself points against the idea of a person who knows literally everything and do fucking literally anything. 22:47, 13 May 2020 (UTC)


 * How is it a false analogy? We did eventually figure the number zero out on our own, didn't we?Skadooshbag (talk) 22:19, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
 * "Because a bible that was immediatley understandable to us westerners would require just as much translation for the ancient Hebrews as their Bible does for us." God could just write it in a magic language that auto translates, or better yet he could just poof in and explain shit to everyone through lectures. Again, he can literally do fucking anything. "A Bible that was equally understandably by everyone everywhere ever would either be so vague as to be completely useless, or else so comprehensive that it wouldn't fit through the front doors." As to the former, it's already that, as to the latter, see my point about lectures. Or he could make the book magically bend the laws of time and space. You know, like a miracle... "You might as well ask why it wasn't written in an alphabet that's equally legible to everyone regardless of their language background." I mean that is the obvious solution, which like an idiot you reject. Or you know, magic lectures. 22:24, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
 * I'd bring up the whole Tower of Babel thing as a wrench God introduced to the whole thing but please hold off the insults. 22:28, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Yeah, but God's the GameMaster, the Developer. He can rewrite the rules as needed. Like, he can literally do fucking anything. 22:32, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Just because God is omnipotent doesn't make them obliged to make up for your scholarly laziness. A parent is not obliged to carry around a child who refuses to learn to walk themselves. Especially since all the professional Biblical scholars are already doing the hard work for you, so that you need only look up their results. You turn away the answers God has provided in the form of the work of these scholars, then ask why God hasn't provided any answers.Skadooshbag (talk) 22:56, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Scholarly laziness? Fucking A! It's like you've done zero research into philosophy or the basics of how evidence works. Can I call him a moron now?  23:05, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
 * I mean we turn away from the work because the answers are vague, there are no adequate answers for some hard questions, is contradictory in many many spots, and the morals espoused are rancid. It's not hard. Well as for "moron" just better to display your exasperation as you're currently doing. 23:10, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
 * It's pretty obvious to us. Language and cultural norms change a lot in a few thousand years, to the point where all future generations will be able to see is you saying one thing at one point and then saying the opposite thing at another point. Some people right here and now have trouble detecting sarcasm in text, do you think that someone who lives in a time where sarcasm has undergone thousands of years of linguistic and cultural mutation will have it any better? Let's use Shakespeare for example. There is a point in the play where the titular character breaks up with his lover, and he tells her "get thee to a nunnery." Now if oyu read that by yourself, you'd probably go the whole play without finding any reason to think he was doing anything other than telling his lover to become a nun and protect herself from men. But any Shakespearean scholar will tell you that in his day, "nunnery" was slang for whorehouse, and so the intended meaning would be obvious to the intended audience. Or take another example from another one of his plays. There's a group of criminals trying to overthrow the government, and one says at one point "first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." This is not in fact a joke about how even treasonous terrorists hate lawyers, since in Shakespear's day, lawyers were perceived as guardians of the truth, so the intended implication was that these were dishonest men who hated those who exposed them for what they were, and to Shakespeare's immediate audience, this would've been obvious. And that's 'still within the bounds of the English language''. The Bible is many times more ancient and in a different language altogether.Skadooshbag (talk) 23:28, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
 * I never claimed that the Bible was proof of God's existence. Atheists like you fine folks weren't a thing in that time and place, and it would seem pretty weird to the folks at the time if Paul went on a tangent trying to debunk a weird position that nobody actually held at the time, so of all the original intents behind the various independant documents that owuld eventually get piled together under the name "Bible," proving God's existence wasn't on the list. So for modern issue God has given us modern scholars and theologians.Skadooshbag (talk) 23:28, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
 * But constantly rewriting the rules kinda defeats the purpose of having any rules in the first place, now doesn't it?Skadooshbag (talk) 23:28, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
 * This is like playing pigeon chess with a moron. Please provide evidence of God's existence. Because from where I sit, without the Bible you have jack fucking shit except empty assertion. 00:18, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Okay, you've got two options there. The first is a very comprehensive but extremely long proof spread throughout the works of C.S. Lewis. Asking me to provide that here would be like asking me to prove the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem here. (Though I will say that the evidence is philosophical, rather than empirical. We could no more hope to find empirical evidence for the existence of God than Hamlet could hope to find empirical evidence for the existence of William Shakespeare.) The second is to first prove that Jesus existed, and then to prove that he actually performed his miracles. Arguing against the Resurrection, for example, is actually so hard for actual atheistic Biblical scholars that some of them have resorted to bizzare "well maybes" like that his body was stolen by necromancers. This too is not something I could be reasonably be expected to fit here. But anyway, we veered seriously off course with this discussion. I was originally trying to discuss why, assuming they exist, God would be obliged to inform everyone about the number zero. Can we get back to that?Skadooshbag (talk) 02:23, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
 * So you have jack all except conceptuals. As for the zero matter, that's obvious. It would help prove he exists, like say if the Bible contained vast swaths of information that ancient civilizations couldn't come up with on their own and bent the laws of space and time (kind of like a miracle...) to do so. At the very least it would raise more eyebrows than "Book said so, but I can't prove I'd know any of this shit without book, thus my claim circles back to book said so." 04:11, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
 * What's the fact that it's conceptual got to do with anything? Proof is proof. our | conspiracy theory checklist is nothing but conceptual evidence against the concept of a nebulous cabal that controls the world form the shadows, so why can't there be conceptual evidence for God? Also, if I make argument A, and you reply with counterargument B, it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense for me to respond to B by simply repeating A back at you now would it? I've already explained that The Bible isn't a single book written by God to prove God's existence, it was written by humans who were already religious, for other people who were already religious, but each document had different intentions in mind. 1 and 2 Corinthians, for example, were the personal correspondence between the Apostle Paul and the City of Corinth to give them advice on ethical behavior. Leviticus was a set of instructions for escaped slaves on how to survive as a society in the desert wilderness. etc. It's basically a miniature library, so ti talk about the autorial intent of The Bible collectively is like asking about the authorial intent of the Library of Congress. As for the number zero, Even if there were a culture that received an understanding of the number zero via divine intervention, the skeptics would try to argue something like that they came up with it themselves, and that the stories of it coming from the heavens were invented after the fact to reinforce the authority of those in power at the time.Skadooshbag (talk) 01:00, 16 May 2020 (UTC)
 * You know, I would respect you if you didn't try this "We have more than the Bible except we don't" crap. like, if you were just honest about that, I'd probably respect you. Also, the burden of proof in that case is on the people making the claim of a conspiracy, which is debunked by going over the needed factors, so... Apples and oranges. A better comparison would be that since you don't have jack all in the way of evidence, and since people making the same as you have been consistently proven wrong on every testable scientific claim they've ever made, and your explanation violates Occam's razor, that you are wrong until you prove otherwise. Which you don't, you just default to "Bible says so." 01:12, 16 May 2020 (UTC)

The Empty Set
The empty set is canonically designated by Ø or { }. There is an alternative symbol, however, part of Peano and Russell's notation, which preceded Bourbaki's Ø, that symbol is Λ. Despite this being largely irrelevant to the article, it may be of interest to anyone who has sympathies for the cause of Logicism, and anyone who has an interest in rare notation. I personally prefer the use of upper-case Lambda for the empty set, it is a more elegant symbolism that has unfortunately been superseded by the ugly symbolism of the formalists. Leucippus (talk) 16:48, 3 December 2020 (UTC)
 * I understand your somewhat aesthetic point. I remember having the same discussion elsewhere about notation for a derivative: Leibniz vs Newton vs LaGrange. For the sake of effective communication, I suggest the canonical version, but am totally cool with a detour to talk notation. That said, I don't understand how you propose to integrate the empty set into this article. It'll be cool to see. MarmotHead (talk) 03:42, 17 December 2020 (UTC)
 * - Tbh I didn't have any intention of adding it to the article. The article is far from the tallons of missional content as it is anyway. me thinks SuRElY the empty set will be of UsE in defeating superstition, bigotry and pseudoscience. Be my sarc as it may, the discussion you mentioned about derivitive notation is, from the naturalistic point of view, very important for science as it concerns proper applied mathematics worthy of respect. Calculus and Analysis are bastions of rigour and where applied in our best scientific theories it is both fascinating and indispensable...period. Those are my views on the matter anyway. Leucippus 04:06, 17 December 2020 (UTC)