this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2025
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But you actually can assign a unique person to every number, you just need an infinite number of people. You literally mathematically can't do that for uncountable infinities.
Really? Isn't the point that when you assign a natural number to every real number you can always generate a "new" real number you haven't "counted" yet, meaning the set of real numbers is larger which is also is the point of the image.
No, thats not what I mean and that's not the case. Even though there are infinite natural numbers, you can count them all. More accurately you can define a process that eventually will count them all. This is entirely different from decimal numbers which there is no process you can define that will exhaust all decimals. In this way the decimals are uncountable.
When talking about infinities this makes the infinity that contains all decimals larger than the infinity that contains only whole numbers.
My disagreement with the meme is that assigning an individual to each decimal is essentially a process of counting and this is a fundamental contradiction. As such the comparison to the set of natural numbers is nonsensical and the implication that there are less people assigned to the smaller infinity is incoherent.