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We Take Ourselves And Everybody Else Far Too Seriously
Can we all be right? Can we all be wrong? Does it matter?
My high-school history teacher told us how Galileo admitted to being wrong about heliocentrism after being threatened with torture at the hands of the Inquisition. Subsequently, he told his close friends that he knew he had always been right. Whether the anecdote is true or not, it is undeniable that most educated folk during the famous scientist’s time were sure that the Sun revolved around the Earth instead of the other way around. In short, most people were wrong, and many of those who weren’t died for being right.
A popular meme that does the rounds on social media depicts two men staring at a number from opposite directions, one claiming it is a 6 and the other maintaining it is a 9. Some social commentators use the meme as a metaphor that contradictory arguments might be simultaneously correct. Others reuse the image to explain that only one of the two men could ever be right, for whoever inscribed the number on the ground had a 6 or a 9 in mind. While I would generally subscribe to the latter point of view, I cannot help but wonder about the intentions of our number writer. What if he wanted to have a laugh and intentionally wrote the equivocation? Or better still: what if it had never been meant to be a number? A child…