Perhaps you’ve heard the old gag:
A hundred logicians walk into a bar. “Does anyone want a beer?” asks the bartender.
“I don’t know,” says the first logician.
“I don’t know,” says the second logician.
This repeats until the 100th logician, who concludes: “No, no beers for us.”
The joke is that each logician is operating with bizarre literalness. It’s not “Do you want a beer?” (to which each person could easily answer “yes” or “no”). It’s “Does anyone want a beer?” So if you personally want a beer, you can just say “yes,” because someone wants one (namely, you). But if you don’t want a beer, you can’t yet answer “no.” Someone else may want one. All you can say is “I don’t know.”
But by this reasoning, 99 “I don’t knows” is enough information for the 100th logician to conclude ,at long last, that no one wants a beer.
This kind of logical absurdity can give mathematics a bad name. (That name: “mathematics.”) Why not act like a human being, and say, “Not for me” or “I’ll pass” instead of the weirdly literal “I don’t know”? Are you an alien? An NPC? Or just opposed on principle to normal social interactions?
Anyway, I retell this joke because I recently lived it.
I was in a conference session when the speaker asked, “Is my mouse visible on the screen?”
There was a momentary pause.
Then, as a chorus, everyone in the room–a room of perfect logicians, each aware that they personally could not see the mouse, but needing the moment’s silence to affirm that no one else could see it either–answered, “No.”
Suddenly the joke didn’t seem so wild. In fact, I don’t think you even need proper logicians to get this behavior. It’s surprisingly natural in the context. “I can’t see it,” you think, “but maybe it’s just me?” Then, when no one else speaks up, you feel emboldened: “Okay, it’s not just me.”
Maybe the joke–and the logicians, living or dead, to whom the joke bears more than a coincidental resemblance–ain’t so illogical after all.
ADDENDUM 10/4/2024: An old math joke comes back to undeadness.
My friend Roz, in an email, raises a fair objection: It’s pretty obnoxious for 100 logicians to walk into a bar and not order anything. (Though maybe, he points out, “they were all going into the bar to accommodate suspected drinkers, which is a nice gesture, albeit very dorky.”)
Anyway, as usually told, the joke has them all ordering a beer. But Roz proposes an even better alternative:
Tony, fleeing a zombie apocalypse, takes refuge in a conference hall. He ducks under a half-collapsed banner that says “Logicianpalooza 2028.” In the shadows, it seems safe.
Then, suddenly, he hears shuffling steps. A figure is silhouetted in the low light.
“Who’s that?!” shouts Tony. He lights one of his flares and holds it up. One rumpled academic is squinting in the sudden light — no, there are six of them — no, oh no, he pans around revealing maybe 100 in total. Some have ominous sores on their faces. None are overly aggressive, but he’s completely surrounded.
“Hello,” Tony says, cautiously. “Have we all avoided the infection?”
“I don’t know,” says the first logician.
“I don’t know,” says another one.
It goes like this, until the final logician, who says: “No.”
It is the last thing Tony ever hears.
“Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom…The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”
— G K Chesterton
You characterize it as “bizarre literalness,” but I honestly don’t find it so bizarre — a little anal-compulsive maybe, but really quite sound and reasonable! I’ve spent my whole life calling myself, by nature, a ‘literalist’ who recognizes the extreme ambiguity of language and automatically looks for the most precise meanings I can derive from words. I remember another mathematician, Evelyn Lamb I think(?), once writing about her foibles in always tending toward literalism, so while we’re a minority your example demonstrates real-life application and logic! 🙂
I’ve seen this happen in real life, too — I was on a coach that was swelteringly warm. Someone had asked the driver to open the windows but he said it couldn’t be done, so we just kept going. Eventually, someone else went up to talk to the driver, but passed out just behind his seat.
There was a pause, and in that pause, I think we were all doing a version of the “everyone leaves the island on day five” bit — we all mentally converted how good we thought we’d be at helping the unconscious man into a period of time, then waited for that amount of time, on the basis that that way the best person at first aid would be the one to go help. I mean obviously most of us weren’t thinking of it in those terms, but that’s the effect of the “fine, I guess *I’ll* do it then” system for choosing someone. Luckily, someone else’s calculation came out lower than mine, and he got help from a very competent-seeming woman sat a little way in front of me.
Eventually we pulled into the next service station where he could get proper professional help, and a new driver took us the rest of the way. Although not before opening all the windows.
How well I remember the times of studying mathematics, where mathematical jokes were heard every day. How sad it is to no longer remember those jokes
Logic jokes always fail in the most miserable way.
“a l w a y s” ?