Yeah, words are like right there and you're still misreading them. I think what's going on here is that because you perceive my tone to be arrogant or hostile or whatever, though I think a neutral observer would be able to see that I'm mostly addressing the content while you're going all over the place with personal attacks, that anytime I respond to what you write, you're assuming that I'm attacking what you said and whatever I write must be read as contradicting your prior claim, when that's not necessarily the case.

This is some fine piece of work.

No, let's be honest and rigorous here, since you want to nitpick semantics in an attempt to walk back what you said:

You did not say if the meaning "needs" to be specified, you said if the meaning depends on the base. Those are two different statements. When I say that the number of bits required to represent an unsigned integer can be calculated using the log of the decimal value rounded up to the nearest whole value, I don't "need" to specify that I'm talking about log base 2, it's implied given the context of the problem. But it is also an essential part of the solution. This is a situation where the meaning of my statement depends on base 2 but I don't "need" to explicitly specify base 2.

Your original statement includes situations such as this in the set of absurdities, yes? Let {A}=the set of all statements where the meaning of the statement depends on base 2. Let {B}=the set of all statements where the base is not specified. Let {C}=(A U B) (the set of all statements where the meaning of the statement depends on base 2 and the base is not specified). Let x be a predicate variable such that x is an element of C. Let Q be the statement, "x is absurd." Your claim is "for all x that is an element of C, Q(x)." This is literally what you wrote in logical form. My post, which you quoted in order to refute, claimed "there exists some x that is an element of C, ~Q(x)" using the same logical sets. Our statements are the negation of each other, therefore they can not both be simultaneously true. Also, it shows that you were in fact calling my statement absurd, and the reason you didn't understand that is because you're the one with the reading comprehension issues. Or you don't understand logic. Would you like to see a truth table to prove it? You should also realize that you're setting a very high standard for yourself when you negate an existential statement into a universal statement, which is what you did. It only takes one example to prove your statement false. Furthermore, this example could exist in any setting, formal or informal, since your claim did not explicitly limit the domain in this respect, and implicitly the quote you responded to specified "it depends on the context," which is a strong argument that the entire domain of statements was intended.

What you're attempting to claim in your last post is not the same. "Not to specify something that needs to be specified in order to make statements meaningful" excludes cases where meaning can be inferred from context. If the statement truly needs a specific qualifier to have meaning and it doesn't have it, by definition the statement must be meaningless, which is of course absurd. That's a critical difference that you seem to either not understand, or you do understand but you're attempting to revise your posting history in the hopes that you can shift the argument to a frame where you can defend your posts. It's very dishonest and if you were hoping I wasn't going to call you out for it, you were wrong.

I didn't read this but in addition to learning how to communicate more rigorously when the situation calls for it, you also need to learn how to communicate like a normal person. We're not the inaugural members of the 2p2 logic debate team. I'll leave it as an exercise for other readers where you went wrong.

I mean I totally get that there exists some system of logic under which what I said can be proven to be false. So what does that have to do with the world we live in? What's the point of understanding formal logic if you don't know when to apply it?

Just skimmed that, definitely don't quit your job, lol wow.

You've proven yourself incapable of understanding the logic behind basic arguments when described in plain English. Unfortunately that necessitates breaking down the argument into formal logical statements so that you can either understand the process or point out exactly where the misunderstanding is occurring. You don't get to lol at me when it was your incompetence that created that situation. If you can't understand the previous post, you SHOULD quit your day job, because formal logic has strong ties to computer science. I'll take your inability to offer a reasonable counterargument as a concession that your original statements in this thread were incorrect, but it really doesn't matter to me. You're right, our posts here will stand on their own merits, and I imagine anyone reading through all this probably assumes you're being an idiot. Sorry about destroying your forum cred because it seems to be a big part of your identity and feelings of self worth.

I'm not sure if I understand - can you break this down for me in formal predicate logic?

Seriously though, your grasp of formal logic or perhaps English isn't anywhere near strong enough to represent English sentences - interpreted as logical predicates - faithfully. And It would be pointless to try to point out your mistakes in your mistaken pursuit because English sentences should not be interpreted merely as a series of logical predicates anyway. Consider this for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics

I'm not even sure why I'm explaining this - 3-year olds usually understand this just fine.

We both made arguments that could be evaluated as true or false, based on the truths of our statements. Formal logic is entirely appropriate for evaluating the soundness of our claims. If you want to claim your statements had a different meaning than what was written due to context or wtfever, translate your own argument into formal logical statements. I'm not going to sit here and debate with you in plain English anymore if you're going to pull the pragmatics card as a catch all to say your posts can mean whatever you later decide you want them to mean because reasons.

Actually on second thought, don't bother. It's clear the context of both my original post and your response to it are not in your favor. Even if they were, you've had no problem getting nitty about specific language used, so you're a little bit late to be throwing up the context flag. Furthermore the correct response when realizing your argument wasn't logically appropriate would be to acknowledge the mistake and clarify, not blame the reader for misinterpreting. Your whole line here is really disingenuous and I won't entertain it. Everyone can see you're on the wrong end of this debate.

Translate this to formal logic please.

This is quite incredible.

Sure.

All people who repeatedly engage in the same deflection techniques are losers who know they've lost the argument.
Candybar is a person who repeatedly engages in the same deflection techniques.
Therefore, candybar is a loser who knows he's lost the argument.

Not sure why you needed that one broken down, it was fairly obvious.

I just read all this because I thought a discussion of logarithms would be fun, so I think I can evaluate this as an objective observer (if anything, I like d10 a little from what I remember of his posts when I read OOT a long time ago, and I don't known candybar). My view is that the quoted statement is false (ie I'm on candybar's side of this debate and think d10 sounds majorly angry and insecure).

I haven't been either of those things throughout my posting in this thread but let's assume that's been my primary motivation. It's really not relevant to the facts of the discussion. Which, imo, for at least the last half of the thread, has been a question of: have I been wrong about anything that I haven't subsequently corrected? I don't think so. Has candybar been wrong about anything that he hasn't subsequently corrected? Yes.

Why is answering this question important to you?

Yeah this whole thing is pretty amazing, everything from his insistence that everyone can see how right he is, to this sudden fixation with translating what I wrote to first-order logic, which was predictably botched anyway,. Like where is the self-awareness? I totally get that I don't come across particularly well here to a neutral observer either because continuing to feed his rage is probably not the right thing to do and some of the points I was making are a little too subtle and in the grand scheme of things not too important but I'm afraid it's too late and we may end up observing more interesting behavior. What do you think is going on in his mind?

No, you don't come off particularly well because you seem to have a habit of posting arrogantly about things you feel you're an expert on. You make absolute statements about subjects you feel confident in even when it's a subject that can't have an absolute answer. And you have an inability to admit any errors or faults.

And lol at trying to spin this as doing a social experiment to justify your behavior. You're an angry, insecure child who cares way too much about maintaining a reputation as some super smart and superior dude on an Internet forum, that's all. You realize now that tumbling in the dirt with me on so many irrelevant issues makes both of us look bad, but only one of us cares about that.

Definitely not a social experiment - I guess I'm not that nice of a person but I'm not so mean as to deliberately conduct a social experiment that would cause a multiday freakout. It's just how things turned out.

Tell me more about this.

Edit: maybe add some guesses too, like, how did I become such a person? Where did it all go wrong?

log sub candybar d10 = log sub d10 candybar

(I did a CS major and a Math minor in undergrad. It was a while ago (25 years), but I remember with a log, we assumed base 10 unless explicitly stated otherwise, and ln would "naturally" refer to the natural log, with e as a base. We had no issues.)

well, nobody can accuse you of lacking an imagination.

i don't want to interject on the nitfest that this thread is supposedly about, but it's pretty clear op has down syndrome and candybar has way more patience engaging this type of person than virtually anyone else would.