[POLL] Can you shuffle a list of one item?
8
268
Ṁ100
resolved Aug 12
Resolved as
50%

There is some dispute among my friends. Will resolve to the answer with the most votes at resolution.

I will only count one vote per user, most recent vote only.
To vote you must start your comment with YES or NO.

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predicted NO

Wow, first time smartest money!

I would like to thank everyone for not believing in me, as that gave me extra motivation to preservere.

predicted YES

also, more shares to buy

Counting answers that start with YES and NO I actually get an even count?

@SneakySly True, unless you enforce strict capitalization of "NO" ;P

predicted NO

@SneakySly Resolve to 50%

That's the classic way to handle it, yeah

YES. If you have a general shuffling algorithm for lists then there should be no reason why you can't successfully perform it even on lists of size one (or zero).

To me it's about the "act of shuffling" rather than the outcome of "is shuffled" vs "is not shuffled". In everyday speech we might call a deck "shuffled" to mean "has been randomized such that you can't predict the order of items". In which case you couldn't have a "shuffled" deck of one (or zero) items because the results are always predictable.

Interesting, I would say the exact opposite, that a list can be shuffled no matter its size, but that you can't meaningfully shuffle a list of zero element

bought Ṁ50 of NO

No, the result is predetermined.

@Ibozz91 I would argue the result is also predetermined for a list. If I shuffle 123, then I always get |123>+|132>+|213>+|231>+|312>+|321> no matter what I do.
The fact that I don't know in which branch I'll end up is a different matter

You can roll a D1 -- no one questions that you can roll a marble. The fact that the outcome is a foregone conclusion is not relevant.
predicted NO
@Duncan A marble isn't a one-sided die, because the sides of a die have to be flat.
@MartinRandall Is that a real requirement or did you make it up on the fly just now? I would think that the sides just need to have equal probability of being landed on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dice#Spherical_dice
@MichaelWheatley !!!! what a boring definition! You can certainly buy dice without flat sides: https://www.atomicempire.com/Item/266717 And all kinds of fun dice with sides that can't be landed on at all: https://www.pippd.com/products/the-dice-lab-unique-individual-d3-die-1-piece-or-assortment-choose-your-color There's not a large market for unfair dice (officially) but loaded dice are still dice.
On a more serious note, the idea that any part of a 'dice' concepts is that it be a platonic solid is bunkum. The point of a die is to distribute probabilities in a known fashion (and there are plenty of ways of doing this without having equal probabilities, e.g., average dice). What makes something a die is that it does this and rolls, rather than spins. A marble rolls and distributes probabilities in a known fashion, so ergo, it is a die.
(You can also spin a marble to distribute probabilities in a known manner, so marbles are also spinners. Yay marbles!)
@Duncan Good point, I wasn't thinking about this edge case.
predicted NO
@Duncan @MichaelWheatley I agree that the concept is fuzzy around the edges, like all concepts. Still, a marble isn't a die.
@MartinRandall Very fuzzy. I'd say that a marble is totally a die, as long as you write the number 1 on it, but a countdown die is only sort of a die -- a counter that could be used as a die, if you didn't have a proper D20 at hand. Neither of these would meet the standard of common usage.
predicted YES
YES
YES
bought Ṁ15 of NO
No. For people who answer yes, can you shuffle a list of 0 items?
predicted NO
@BionicD0LPH1N if you're a programmer, does `fun shuffle(X)` accept the empty array?
@BionicD0LPH1N If you can make a list of 0 items, you can shuffle it.
@BionicD0LPH1N Yup, why not?
predicted NO

I know that you can shuffle the empty array in python at least, and I'm guessing that the same is true in pretty much all programming languages. I just think that this doesn't match people's intuition for what shuffling actually is/does. I feel like in the intuitive definition of shuffling, there is an implicit assumption of multiple objects being shuffled, rather than one or zero. This isn't to say you may not have other intuitions regarding that definition, but... I'm guessing we all have the same predictions for what would happen if you gave a single ball to a kid and asked them to shuffle it? Or give them no ball, and tell them to shuffle the lack of a ball? Or even for most adults, they'd just look at you with a blank stare and be internally thinking of you as a weirdo? It feels as though other than in programming languages, the idea itself of sub2 ball shuffling is not only weird, but incoherent.

Anyway, this is ultimately why I answered no, and even though the yes answer sounds smarter (partly because of the fact it's unintuitive), that doesn't make it correct.

predicted NO

My take on finding the "true" definition of words is that it's stupid and incoherent to even try to do so, and that most conversations that try to find out what the meaning of a word is are both useless and annoying, but that when pressed we should assume that the meaning of a word is what the majority of word-users think it means in most contexts, rather than what it means in a single very specific context that doesn't match common use.

I would agree, I also think arguing definition is mostly pointless. I think though that saying "we should assume that the meaning of a word is what the majority of word-users think it means in most contexts" is an over-reaction though.

I see word use as Nature, and that we have to model it. We can make models more or less self-coherent, and more or less fitted. I think there are two cases where going against the most common word use is okay:

- The word use doesn't have any coherent model that is not overfitted.
- The current word use overlaps with other words, and could be used to point at a point in concept-space that does not have any representative yet.

(For me personnally, I feel that the distinction of shuffle-as-action and shuffle-as-supperposition is a useful dichotomy, and that the latter is the property people care about, not about whether I faked taking cards and putting them back in. So I feel okay saying a list of one element can be shuffled)

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