Ep 22: Paradoxes Part II - Buford, Beethoven and Brothers

All handsome people enjoy a good paradox, so we decided to open up our paradox box again and pick out a few new ones for this episode. A lot of paradoxes have to do with the way language works, and how it fails us when we try to describe certain aspects of our experience. Often a series of statements seems to make sense when we analyze them in a vacuum, only to find that they don’t square with our everyday experience of the world around us. This is true in the Unexpected Hanging Paradox, which shows us that there is something wrong with the way we use simple words like “surprise.” In the Paradox of Analysis, we find that statements can be true or informative, but not both. And in the Bootstrap Paradox, we learn that the way we talk about causality can lead us in circles. Along the way we discover Delaware has some dark secrets, that Beethoven might never have existed and that our podcasting studio is now protected by armed guards and is only accessible by footbridge.