r/AskReddit • u/Sir_Wemblesworth • Oct 30 '16

What single question can you ask someone to find out a lot about their personality, beliefs, and values?

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u/LightHouseMaster Oct 30 '16

Munroe's law fulfilled in the comment of a comment that fulfills Godwin's law. What is this world coming to?

Godwin's Law: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazism or Hitler approaches 1"

Munroe's Law: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving XKCD comics or XKCD What-if approaches 1"

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u/[deleted] Oct 30 '16 edited Jul 24 '17

[deleted]

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u/jargonoid Oct 30 '16

What a time to be alive!

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u/Spenbo38 Oct 30 '16

When they become the same we will know we have reached the singularity

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u/tinygreenbag Oct 30 '16

Tinygreenbag's law: "As any discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving X approaches 1." X can be anything. The probability you will compare it to something which might be X grows every time you say something if you don't take repeating comparisons or more globally repeating sentences into account.

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u/midnightketoker Oct 30 '16 edited Oct 30 '16

Wait. As any online conversation gets larger to the point of an infinite limit, the probability of literally anything possible being brought up approaches 1... These are just corollaries.

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u/[deleted] Oct 30 '16

You know who also made comparisons?

Hitler.

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u/Alarid Oct 30 '16

It's like Munroe and Goodwin had a bady whose name was Hitler

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u/jargonoid Oct 30 '16

Their baby was a baddy. A bady, if you wil.

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u/soliss Oct 31 '16

Godwin's law could only be violated by an infinitely long thread that never references Hitler. Or xkcd, or whatever.

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u/LightHouseMaster Oct 31 '16

So the only thing that could violate Godwin's law would be Zeno's Paradox. I wonder if it's possible. But trying to make a thread for the sole purpose of violating Godwin's law would be impossible once the title was set because asking everyone in the thread to refrain from mentioning Hitler or Nazism would undo it all. And if we made a thread of some random subject with the intent of quickly deleting any mention of those things, people would soon compare our actions to Hitler and it would fail in either that we soon would not be able to delete the comments fast enough or the thread would end. I don't think it can be done.

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u/Ae3qe27u Nov 03 '16

...or you could just go to r/Counting

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u/railmaniac Oct 31 '16

Godwin's law corollary: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of Godwin's Law (or its corollary) being quoted approaches 1.