Some definitions are in order here. By stupid ideas, I am referring to bad ideas for actions that may be put into effect. "I am cold, so I will leap into the sun" is stupid, but impossible. "I am cold, so I will start a fire in the kitchen" is stupid, but possible. The latter would count toward the total, the former not.
The universe may be infinite, or infinite for our practical purposes, but human intelligence can only grasp so much. Therefore we may assume it has an upper limit to its generative capability, which we will call i. The total number of humans to have ever existed to the present moment we will indicate by the symbol h. We will further want the number of dumb ideas generatable by i over the course of the average lifespan (g). That gives us the base formula of:
(i x g) x h = theoretical total of dumb ideas
But wait! Perhaps we want to remove all the redundant ideas -- like, instead of counting each incidence of "I'm going to wrestle that polar bear" as 1, we just count every incidence of that exact idea as a single idea, allowing for similar but not identical permutations of it. I propose that for this purpose we use the amended formula thusly:
(i x g) x h - dittos = theoretical total of unique dumb ideas
Now, if it wasn't obvious before, it will be clear that I am talking through my hat. I can barely make my checkbook balance. So while it might be a nice idea to get a grip on our total number of possible bad ideas, I have no idea how to do that. Plus, in practice, human ingenuity toward bad ideas may actually be infinite.
I'm kind of sorry I started this whole process. Just add this blog entry to the pile of bad ideas and proceed with your day.
4 comments:
It's early, and I was told there would be no math...
Whenever someone says "we made this idiot proof" there is another who is making a better (worse?) idiot.
rbj13
Here is an approach:
1. Assume that a dumb idea must be expressible in English, and the expression of a dumb idea in English must be of finite length.
2. There is a large, but finite number of possible expressions in English (given that any expression must be of finite length).
3. Some percent of these expressions will be dumb, based on whatever criteria we establish for that.
So if we can estimate the number of possible different expressions, and estimate the percent of those that are dumb we'll have a rough idea.
NOTE however that some linguists and logicians (who, IMO should know better) assert that a basic grammar and a finite vocabulary (e.g., English has about 172,000 words) can produce an infinite number (sometimes qualified as a "countable infinity") of different expressions.
But plainly that is a dumb idea.
How do you account for the variable "it seemed like a good idea at the time" ��
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