Recently I talked about cutting the space of probability in half. Somehow this metaphor stayed with me because I kept coming back to the Achilles and tortoise paradox. And it dawned on me that there's a lens through which the notion that it's a paradox is somewhat laughable.
A refresher: Achilles gives the tortoise a head-start. To catch it he must first run to the tortoise’s starting point; by then the tortoise has inched ahead, so Achilles must next run to that new point; and so on ad infinitum. Zeno concludes that because there are infinitely many legs of the chase, Achilles can never overtake the tortoise, even though he is faster. There’s a slowing down at the core of this setup. Each of these legs represents a shorter duration - and distances - than the previous one.
Suppose I send you a short video clip in which Achilles overtakes the tortoise. And tell you that it happens sixteen seconds in. As eight seconds pass you decide to tap the magic button: playback 0.5×. So the next four seconds of video take eight in real time. You click playback 0.25×, then 0.125x and so on and so on, every 8 seconds. Never getting to time in the video where Achilles overtakes the tortoise. Welcome to Zeno’s Problem Exists Between Chair and Keyboard. There is no paradox, only user error. If you keep slowing down the clip, you won’t get to the good part.
Radiohead already wrote the footnote: you do it to yourself, you do, and that’s what really hurts.
