0% of the phrases of the original Wikipedia "Ship of Theseus" article remain

https://twitter.com/depthsofwiki/status/1735800801455419697

by fortran77 • 3 years ago

516 123 3 years ago

twitter.com

sowbug• 3 years ago

It's hard to say whether it's even the same article at this point.

deelly• 3 years ago

Naturally.

politelemon• 3 years ago

Was this done deliberately by the editors? (If that is addressed in Twitter comments, that is not visible.)

mtmail• 3 years ago

Unlikely. I'm counting 1816 revisions since the article was created 15 July 2003‎. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ship_of_Theseus&a...

duskwuff• 3 years ago

And the first version was pretty rough. It was only a couple of sentences long, and included a bizarre, irrelevant tangent ("a modern embellishment"). It's no surprise that every part of that has long since been replaced.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Permalink/1154003

TBH, the same is probably true of most Wikipedia articles which were created early in the site's history. It took a while for editors to settle into the writing style that's now characteristic of the site.

gmuslera• 3 years ago

Now its time to add a new article to Wikipedia with those original phrases and words rearranged to talk about something totally different, and then debate which one is the real Ship of Theseus article.

AndrewKemendo• 3 years ago

Is that possible without immediately displacing the existing article?

twodave• 3 years ago

They can argue about it on the disambiguation page.

porphyra• 3 years ago

To be fair, the original article was rather terrible. Like what the heck is with the "modern embellishment"?

pooper• 3 years ago

That is the secret of writing. Usually, everything is written in private. Edited, refined over time. And then published. The key is you have to start writing. Something might sound wrong or feel like sand in your socks. This is probably the most difficult part of learning to write. You can't edit and improve what you haven't written yet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ship_of_Theseus&o...

BLKNSLVR2• 3 years ago

Well said.

Every well-written piece of text is, in itself, a ship of theseus. And only a ship of theseus piece of text can float, having had all the leaky boards replaced.

stevenwoo2• 3 years ago

I read The Wager earlier this year and it’s implied that every active wooden ship eventually is a ship of Theseus, for a trip from England to the passage around South America at that time many of the ships had to be repaired along the way, though they didn’t start with all new ships.

maxbond2• 3 years ago

Are they repairing every board though or is it mostly the same boards in vulnerable areas getting replaced?

ClassyJacket2• 3 years ago

Define "the same board"...

stevenwoo2• 3 years ago

IIRC all the wood was vulnerable to either ship worms or rot eventually, they had to replace masts and rudders and scavenge from the least seaworthy ships (and scuttle if necessary) and opportunistically get wood from any island they could make landfall on to make the journey described in the book.

Ekaros2• 3 years ago

I somewhere heard that smaller ships were expected to pay themselves back in couple of years. As they really rotted or other ways did not last very long. And actually maintaining and keeping one operational is massive undertaking, even if you do not actively use it too much.

airstrike• 3 years ago

Just like a ship would be "christened" before its maiden voyage, it feels like the very first blob of text added to a draft of an article doesn't really constitute "the original" article. It's still "being built" until it gets a sufficiently decent grade. Right now it is still rated C, even though it's been around for decades. It's like an abandoned half-built ship

(Which is not to say this tweet isn't uninteresting... but it's funnier than it is insightful)

manicennui• 3 years ago

Without the walled garden: https://wikis.world/@wikipedia/111587024591220062

subwrmodblocker• 3 years ago

What?

seeknotfind• 3 years ago

Because Twitter limits interactions unless you're logged in.

sixothree2• 3 years ago

It’s common practice at HN (this site) to make articles accessible to everyone. In this case twitter limits your ability to read an article if you are not logged in. The link provided lets you read it regardless of whether you have an account or whatnot.

extraduder_ire• 3 years ago

If it's the same person running both accounts, I think it's funny that she snagged the @wikipedia handle, even for that domain.

jeroenhd• 3 years ago

According to https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/@Wikipedia, the account is official and community-run.

https://wikis.world/@wikipedia also shows verified ownership of the Wikipedia homepage on the account page.

DiscourseFan2• 3 years ago

From the first reply to the Mastadon post linked by u/manicennui:

@mori@mastodon.au @wikipedia And yet, the Ship of Theseus page remains, thus proving a bird in the hand is worth two stitches in time.

tiffanyg4• 3 years ago

Would have been better if they hadn't bungled their mixed metonymy...

It's a stitch in the bird is worth a pound of eggs off a duck's back, as everyone knows...*

* Courtesy of the excellent "Field Guide of Egregious Mixed Metonomies", soon to be published by Penguin Random House Simon Schuster Merriam Webster Britannica, I'm told

thiht2• 3 years ago

Tiny heads-up: it’s "MastOdon" not "MastAdon". Seems like a common mistake

DiscourseFan2• 3 years ago

Thanks

gitgud2• 3 years ago

Is this an important metric? I’d imagine a lot of articles across Wikipedia change over time and barely resemble the original article… which is a huge benefit, as opposed to printed encyclopaedias

All that matters is that the content is factually accurate, which this seems to be

dan-g• 3 years ago

It’s not an important metric, but relates quite strongly to the content of the article…

ggm• 3 years ago

Its importance is contextual. Semantically, if the replacement text says the same things, it has less importance than if the replacement text understood to meaning says something different: one is just "we liked saying it better this way" and the other is "we changed our mind(s)" -they aren't the same.

The field of change over a topic is itself a subject of study. It feels like a join over politics, Ontology and Epistemology.

jwond• 3 years ago

It's more of an amusing fact, given the topic of the article.

gitgud2• 3 years ago

Ahhh okay, I can't believe I missed the irony of this post

irrational• 3 years ago

Do you know what the Ship of Theseus is?

LeonB• 3 years ago

Is it even possible, though, to know what the ship of Theseus is?

irascibeth• 3 years ago

Is the replacement of boards in a ship an important metric?

ukFxqnLa2sBSBf6• 3 years ago

quickthrower2• 3 years ago

We are all Ships of Theseus.

deadbabe4• 3 years ago

The solution to the Ship of Theseus is obviously that there is no Ship of Theseus. All things are just events in time, long moments where matter is organized into some structure for a while and then breaks apart again, and we assign names to those events. Some happen so quick that naming them is pointless and others are so slow to dissipate that a name becomes useful.

winwang2• 3 years ago

This hilariously sounds like a possible "defense" in court after being caught stealing said ship. Was it really Theseus's ship?

tiffanyg4• 3 years ago

Now that is the kind of "modern problems require modern solutions" thinking I like to see!

Kudos - excellent examination of implications / change of perspective / viewing from another angle.

The kind of thinking that, more seriously, really can be essential in developing insight(s) etc. ... and, finding (proofs by) contradiction(s) etc.

philwelch• 3 years ago

Here’s a real mystery for you. You’re a worker at a dry dock where you are maintaining a ship. You periodically remove perfectly good parts of the ship and send them away, replacing them with new parts and making falsified records claiming spurious damage that needed to be repaired. At a second facility, the pieces from the original ship are reassembled. Did you steal the ship, or has it been sitting there in drydock all along?

willis9362• 3 years ago

And so it is with consciousness. People place mysticism on consciousness because the idea that we are simply matter capable of knowing it is matter is disturbing. Season 1 of WestWorld used Anthony Hopkins to make this point well.

zeristor• 3 years ago

A sentient Ship of Theseus?

deadbabe4• 3 years ago

Yes!! :D

cscurmudgeon2• 3 years ago

Not really. Your stance is something that people take when they don't understand the Hard Problem of consciousness.

They don't try to understand hard problem of consciousness and just try to strawman the whole thing down by tying it to mysticism.

Physicists like Penrose are not morons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

I seriously doubt Westworld writers were aware of the hard problem of consciousness.

echelon2• 3 years ago

Some structures are quite repeated. The 16S rRNA genes.

A hydrogen atom.

An STL file.

Maybe they're all the same Ship.

deadbabe4• 3 years ago

Nope. The time and space in which they exist acts as a unique identifier.

procgen• 3 years ago

The ship is a pattern that persists in time.

AlecSchueler• 3 years ago

Not if the overall design is completely altered through the work done on it.

prometheus765• 3 years ago

So are you saying that an identity cannot persist beyond the original physical elements that composed the identity?

mankyd2• 3 years ago

The opposite. It's identity is really an "event" called the ship of Theseus. The effect continues to happen regardless of the specific matter.

ARandomerDude• 3 years ago

If that assertion is true, I can’t even respond to the person who typed it. The “event” that typed the comment has passed and “you” are already gone.

The organization of matter is constantly changing. If Heraclitus was right it’s hard to even say which organization of particles counts as Heraclitus.

tiffanyg4• 3 years ago

I believe the solution was given by the great philosopher Pratchett*:

"Wen considered the nature of time and understood that the universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew. Therefore, he understood, there is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, he said, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it."

- Terry Pratchett

(from Thief of Time - a remarkable book, IMO)

* / Wen the eternally surprised

npteljes2• 3 years ago

If that assertion is true, I can’t even respond to the person who typed it. The “event” that typed the comment has passed and “you” are already gone.

I think that's exactly right. For the general sanity of the human mind, we make and share assumptions about our experiences.

We don't really agree on what makes a person in the first place. When does a person begin? In the US, that's a heated debate. When does a person cease to exist? If you account for feelings, a relative with advanced dementia, or being in a coma indefinitely often doesn't feel like the same person. Or when people discover something really unpleasant about their significant other. A person only exist in a frame of reference. In a legal framework too, for example, which again changes from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

Some cultures theorize an essence of sorts, that's unique per person, so it can carry the identity of a person. Let's call that a soul. This makes it easy to think about another person, as they can inhabit another body, or even an inanimate object or even share a body with another, and yet still be unique and addressable.

goopthink• 3 years ago

“The Silent Transformations” by RANÇOIS JULLIEN tackles this head on by highlighting western thought’s roots in ancient Greek concepts of determined forms of being and Aristotilian logic, compared against the fluidity of non-Western thought and emphasis of change over time from ancient Chinese philosophy.

To put it glibly, the Ship of Theseus problem goes away when you stop thinking of identity as discrete points and instead as a process of change and movement through time. I.e., We are not the same people we were as children, and that’s okay. Or Emerson: “I contain multitudes.”

michaelsbradley• 3 years ago

But, you are you, from the moment you were conceived in your mother's womb through to the end of your days.

Author, thou, of my inmost being, didst thou not form me in my mother’s womb? I praise thee for my wondrous fashioning, for all the wonders of thy creation. Of my soul thou hast full knowledge, and this mortal frame had no mysteries for thee, who didst contrive it in secret, devise its pattern, there in the dark recesses of the earth. All my acts thy eyes have seen, all are set down already in thy record; my days were numbered before ever they came to be.

— Psalm 139, Knox translation https://www.newadvent.org/bible/psa138.htm

enasterosophes2• 3 years ago

To regard Western and non-Western thought as distinct is to again indulge the fallacy of determined forms and non-fluidity. Going back at least to the time of Alexander the Great before 300BC, there were was constant cross-polination of ideas between Indian and Mediterranean cultures, so that Ashoka used Greek Buddhists to spread the dhamma, and there is some suspicion that Nagarjuna was influenced by Pyrrhonism.

elif• 3 years ago

That is simply a one sided reduction of the ship of Theseus dilemma. In it's reduction, it necessarily negates the essence of ontological meaning, including the meaning of the statement you are making.

The dilemma is not in search of a solution but instead it offers meaning exactly because of it's lack of resolution.

Vt71fcAqt7• 3 years ago

The Ship of Theseus was originally proposed as a paradox, not a question of where subjectively to draw a line between the identity of objects. Like most paradoxes it is the result of a flawed assumption. Here the assumption is that there is a Ship of Theseus. If we assign a definition to "Ship of Theseus" then the question of whether a given object is a Ship of Theseus is trivial. But the paradox assumes there is a Ship of Theseus object on its own rather than a definition of Ship of Theseus. The subjective question of "when, generally, should we consider the Ship of Theseus to be gone" is a separate and arbitrary question.

guerrilla• 3 years ago

This is the Early Buddhist position.

ordu• 3 years ago

The solution is to treat the Ship of Theseus not as an object but as a process. I believe it is what you are saying just with different words. It is no help to claim that there is no Ship of Theseus, because it is. Or at least it was. Or some says it was.

escapecharacter• 3 years ago

yeah but how can you be sure things are different if they share the same name?

Too• 3 years ago

Wow, someone took yesterday’s article about event sourcing way too seriously. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38664412

deadbabe4• 3 years ago

I missed that one but generally I think event sourcing is pretty great too :)

toasterlovin• 3 years ago

The solution to the Ship of Theseus is that telos, not atomic physics, is how the vernacular We identify and organize the contents of our existence. I am the same me as the me of 10 years ago, even though we have zero cells in common, because we are iterations of an ongoing physical phenomena the same root cause: my conception.

And so it is with Theseus and his Ship.

pkulak• 3 years ago

You still have lots of cells in common. But point still taken.

thiht2• 3 years ago

Is that Event Sourcing applied to philosophy?

thoughtstheseus• 3 years ago

This article is relatable

sixothree2• 3 years ago

That’s the axe that slayed me. Or was it?

qingcharles• 3 years ago

I get a real kick out of going back to articles I created almost 20 years ago to see how much of them still remains.

I still think I have the weirdest named article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qeqertaq_Avannarleq

ClassyJacket2• 3 years ago

I love Annie Rauwerda (Depth of Wikipedia). So much passion for these random bits of info. Her tiktok is absolutely delightful and she's been good on the Lateral podcast as well.

nobulus• 3 years ago

ironic

tiffanyg4• 3 years ago

I'd be more impressed if it were that case that 0% of the WORDS remain.

Nevertheless, the consonance of this 'weaker result' is still satisfying.

Bravo!

badrabbit2• 3 years ago

Just like the article, the ship of Theseus changes in its constituency but not in its identity. Am I a different person because almost none of my cells at the time of my birth remain in me? Of course not. And the wiki article is the same article.

Whether something can be identified as a specific thing is a matter of social convention. A transformation of something is not a new thing but exactly the former: a transormation, but still that same thing. When does it become something new? Never. For it to be a different ship, it needs to be deconstructed first fully.

But what if you reconstruct it so that it is identical to the former ship? It's still a new ship because identity is defined at the time of construction, independent of relative comparisons. Similar to how your complete identical clone would be a different person.

BLKNSLVR2• 3 years ago

Yes! This is the discussion starter we've been waiting for.

Then you're admitting that there's something non-physical that defines the identity of the physical thing, is it possible to argue against that?

Or is identity itself meaningless? But it cannot be because without identity there can be no understanding of the universe. Thus, the non-physical is a requirement of the physical. One cannot exist without the other. But where, in what non-physical plane (is there a word for that? ideamension?), does the non-physical inhabit?

Or is "understanding" also only existent in the ideamension, not a requirement of the existence of the physical universe? But if not for understanding, why does the universe exist in the first place? Reason; yet another resident of the ideamension.

badrabbit2• 3 years ago

Then you're admitting that there's something non-physical that defines the identity of the physical thing

It's not a question of being physical but that of independently describable.

Or is identity itself meaningless

Identity is how we frame and contextualize for the purpose of thought and communication. For the purpose of thought I might consider the modified ship the same as the one in the initial state but if the law requires you to rename and re-register as new when you modify so much of a ship then for legal purposes I will start identifying it as a new ship but the people that use the ship will probably consider it that same old ship because for the purpose of thought the independently describable object has not changed.

It is not identity that has no meaning but that physical objects themselves have no meaning to us unless framed in an independently describable context (i.e.: as separate from all other things in the context).

For a computer program, does the letter 'A' exist? It does if the program can decode a byte as such, but does its inability to describe the bits and bytes that way mean the letter 'A' does not exist? Maybe it is 0x41? Identity has meaning but only to those who are able to describe that identity and reason about the context.

amai• 3 years ago

ship of Theseus changes in its constituency

Does it? Atoms and electrons are indistinguishable so much that physicists argued that every electron is actually the same single electron: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe

AnAaaaardvark• 3 years ago

It's almost like intangible social constructs don't really exist or something. As long as you do not know the thing in itself, how do you know it's really there?

prometheus765• 3 years ago

Identities exist and are associated with the material world, but are not directly tied to it. "The king is dead! Long live the king!" illustrates this perfectly. The mortal person who has been embodying the identity of "king" has died, but the identity of "king" persists and will be embodied by a different person soon.

matrix_overload• 3 years ago

If you want to understand recursion, you need to understand recursion first.

Ekaros2• 3 years ago

It is weird that for me it kinda depends on item in question.

Slowly keeping rotting wooden ship alive is probably same ship.

But let's take desktop computer. CPU, GPU, RAM, MotherBoard, Case, Powersupply, A disk. What if I replace each of these components over a year with exactly same model. So exactly same CPU for exactly same CPU. And then finally I clone the disk to new disk, but to exactly same model of a disk.

Some serial numbers have changed, but it operates the same, has the same data and software on. And I could even change the license key of software like OS.

Is it same computer or not? And somehow I feel it is not the same.

npteljes2• 3 years ago

That feeling is the one that's important, I feel. None of these things exist in that way the first place, but we pretend, and we agree on these pretenses. This is how the human mind copes with the stimuli it gets.

With regards to computers, I have different things in my mind. For the feeling part, the computer's role is what matter. "My main desktop computer", "My main server computer", "My work laptop". I can know that they are not the same, but they feel similar enough, because they play the same role for me, so for the most part, I don't make a difference.

hi41• 3 years ago

There is a movie by the name Ship of Theseus which explores the idea in the context of organ donation and transplantation.

I loved the movie. There is one actor by the name of Neeraj Kabi who lost a lot of weight for his role as a monk.

Here is the trailer: https://youtu.be/tzw1ezTTVEY?si=NfsG9sY1R1JjmbVV

m463• 3 years ago

I wonder how much our human body is a ship of theseus.

I was reading about the hb1ac test, and it is a long-term test that analyzes the percentage of your blood hemoglobin chemically linked to sugar.

It is "long-term" because your blood cells have a life span of about 4 months.

(If you manage your blood sugar well, you have to do it for 4 months so that new cells won't be affected and a later test will show improvement.)

so, I wonder how many other cells turn over? You are not you, repeatedly.

LordKeren• 3 years ago

Most of the cells in the nervous system (including the brain), as well as muscle cells, last your entire life time

0% of the phrases of the original Wikipedia "Ship of Theseus" article remain

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