this post was submitted on 06 May 2025
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Science Memes

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Do you know the answer? (feddit.org)
submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 day ago (2 children)

It's 0%, because 0% isn't on the list and therefore you have no chance of picking it. It's the only answer consistent with itself. All other chances cause a kind of paradox-loop.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

Correct - even if you include the (necessary) option of making up your own answer. If you pick a percentage at random, you have a 0% chance of picking 0%.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I agree with 0% but disagree there's any paradox - every choice is just plain old wrong. Each choice cannot be correct because no percentage reflects the chance of picking that number.

Ordinarily we'd assume the chance is 25% because in most tests there's only one right choice. But this one evidently could have more than one right choice, if the choice stated twice was correct - which it isn't. So there's no basis for supposing that 25% is correct here, which causes the whole paradox to unravel.

Now replace 60% with 0%. Maybe that would count as a proper paradox. But I'd still say not really, the answer is 0% - it's just wrong in the hypothetical situation posed by the question rather than the actual question.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago

Completely agree! In this case there is no real paradox, 0% is a perfectly consistent answer.

I think if you replace 60% with 0%, you'd get a proper paradox, because now there is a non-zero chance of picking 0% and it's no longer consistent with itself. It's similar to the "This statement is false" paradox, where by assuming something is true, it makes it false and vice versa.