Bruce asks:

> >> Subject: 25 Shortest Books
>  >>
>  >> 17. AMERICA'S MOST POPULAR LAWYERS
>
>  This is reminiscent of an interesting logical paradox.
>
>  Suppose that you were to list all the people in the world, in order from
>  most to least interesting. Then somebody, somewhere, would have to be the
>  least interesting person and would be placed at the end of the list. But
>  the fact that they're the least interesting person is in some sense
>  interesting, and therefore they should be moved to a higher place.
>
>  So: is it possible to construct such a list?

Every paradox exists because you change the rules somewhere in mid-stream,
perhaps so subtly that no one notices. In this case, the definition of
"interesting" is what changes. In the original premise, "interesting" applies
to the intrinsic qualities of the people themselves -- and is the metric used
as the ordinate axis on which sorting occurs.

But in the second part of the statement, "interesting" has been subtly
redefined to mean the phenomenological condition of "what could make a person
so dull?" That question exists outside of the original universe in which the
sorting decisions were made and is therefore unfair (or at least
inapplicable).

All paradoxes have this quality. To create a paradox, you simply step outside
the universe in which the original rules were postulated, in God-like
fashion. Paradoxes are a property only of mathematics, logic, and language;
they don't (and can't) exist in the physical world, simply because there is
no way to exit physical reality.

Wirt Atmar