The extremely broad metaphor the guy gives us for trying to imagine this is -- the actual positive numbers that we add up in 1+2+3+4... can't give us a real sum The number keeps getting bigger, it leads us only toward ∞, and ∞ isn't a number, so the sum just doesn't exist
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Like the motto of Stephen Fry's show QI, "If you can't be right, be interesting" At every step along this process someone could have, like Dostoyevsky's coxcomb, blocked the path and waved their arms and said "No you can't do that turn back"
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(Hell, the ancient Greeks, who believed you could not in fact do that, were still pretty lax traffic cops and didn't *enforce* not doing that because they didn't have the rigor, which is why Archimedes was allowed to discover a limit-based method for approximating pi)
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But it's always more interesting to just ignore him and keep walking anyway I mean what's the worst that can happen? You try to say something makes sense but everyone just looks at it a while and goes "Nah this is stupid" and moves on? You gotta at least try
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