Comment on Dolph is prime human

WrenFeathers@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

• Agent641@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  This is science, not math.

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• mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  I, too, spent longer than I ever should have thinking about this. My first thought was, they’re just using it in a linguistic sense, so it doesn’t matter that the exponent would have to be something very small to go from 1 qualification to 4. But then I thought, hm, I guess since there’s only 1 qualification for Bill, no exponent would be enough. But then I realized that grammatically the value in question is “qualification” and not “number of degrees”. The number of degrees is merely standing in as a heuristic proxy to illustrate qualification. This “qualification” scale makes the most the most sense if it’s between 0 and 1, representing percentiles or qualification. Therefore, the exponent applied to Bill’s qualifications must also be between 0 and 1 in order to increase the value to Lundgren’s. For a moment I thought this was the nail in the coffin for the original text, but of course the word “more” there again refers to the qualification, not to the exponent itself. This interpretation has the nice benefit that no matter what the exponent is, we always get a qualification value between 0 and 1. Hence I can conclude this is the only viable headcanon for this post.

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