There are infinitely many real numbers between 0 and 1. Are there twice as many between 0 and 2, or are the two amounts equal?

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I know the actual technical answer. I’m looking for a witty parallel that has a low chance of triggering an infinite “why?” procedure in a child.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Pretty much everyone else in this thread is wrong (as of the time of me posting this).

The correct answer is: it depends what you mean by “amount”.

If by “amount” you mean cardinality, then they have the same.

If by “amount” you mean Lebesgue measure, then there are twice as many between 0 and 2.

If you’re talking to a child, or any adult who has not yet learned Set theory, then they don’t know what either of those words mean, or even that there can be different competing definitions that could match the English word “amount”. But when they use that word they probably are thinking of something closer to the Lebesgue measure than cardinality (which is weird and unintuitive and less useful in simpler problems related to the real world that non-mathematicians face), in which case the correct answer would be that there are twice as many between 0 and 2.

If you’re talking to someone who has learned Set theory but not measure theory (usually undergrads/bachelors and/or math-adjacent majors, since measure theory is usually taught much later), they will confidently assert that Cardinality and “amount” are synonyms, or just bake the assumption into all their explanations without even thinking about it.

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