In which I attempt to answer the question "What even is a number?" for a friend. https://notebook.drmaciver.com/posts/2019-02-18-08:58.html …
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Replying to @DRMacIver
Nice! The original is this by
@ESYudkowsky I think. I too have written a variant (not yet posted).https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X3HpE8tMXz4m4w6Rz/the-simple-truth …1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes -
Replying to @Meaningness @ESYudkowsky
Yeah,
@mcallisterjp also just suggested this. I don't think it is the original, but could easily be wrong (it's definitely not where I got it from, as I haven't encountered this piece before, but there could just be intervening steps that I just didn't see).1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Oh! I’d be very interested to know the original if anyone can find it, then! Would like my version to point there.
@ESYudkowsky, do you know?2 replies 0 retweets 1 like -
I have a vague impression that my first encounter with this was as a story about something people actually did (albeit not because numbers hadn't been invented yet), possibly in a James Herriot book. This might be a false memory though, and Google is being uncooperative.
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Replying to @DRMacIver @Meaningness and
Plausibly it's a version of Yan Tan Tethera (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yan_Tan_Tethera …), which uses stones to count off multiples of 20, that has been simplified in the retelling/remembering.
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Replying to @DRMacIver @Meaningness and
Worth noting that even without the stones, counting relies on one-to-one correspondences: you're setting up a bijection between {sheep} and the set of sounds {"yan", "tan", "tethera", "methera"...}.
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And, in the real world, there is no Truth about how many sheep, or how many pebbles, you have.pic.twitter.com/84uJJbWfnK
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