I’m sorry if this seems dumb. I tend to take things literally and “mutual” and “exclusive” seem to be antonyms but mutually exclusive is a term used a lot and it confuses the crap out of me. I’m a native English speaker also.
Does it mean that the two things CAN exist together? I feel like my brain does gymnastics trying to understand the term; I’m not a dumb person but this term just totally eludes me!
Please don’t attack me, just trying to not feel stupid.
In: 49
It is a way of saying pick one or the other but not both. This is good for things that exist on a binary: On/off, heads/tails, bachelor/married, etc. Picking one excludes you from picking the other (Also works for things like a single dice, if you roll a one you can not have rolled any other number simultaneously).
In common English, this can sometimes just be the regular “or“. You can have ice cream OR you can have a hamburger (Implicit, pick one of them, you cannot have both). When you start talking about logic and Boolean logic, evaluating whether a proposition is true, an “OR” can be true if either statement is true.
“The children ate either spaghetti or dragons” is true if the children ate a bowl of spaghetti and is true if the children ate dragon-on-a-stick and is true if the children ate both a dragon and spaghetti; it is only a false statement if the children ate neither thing. In this example, mutually exclusive “or” (XOR) would be “The children ate spaghetti OR the children ate a dragon, but the children only ate one thing. In this case, it is true if and only if the children ate spaghetti or a dragon (but not both), and false if they did eat both, and false if they did not eat spaghetti OR dragon.
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