First contact could turn out well for humanity

You've heard this story before. An advanced alien race comes to Earth. They offer peace and prosperity, but they hold a dark secret. One that could destroy humanity. That dark secret has varied over the years, from stealing ...

Can movie reviews predict box office success?

When one thinks of movie reviews, one might see them as harbingers of success or failure at the box office. Some researchers have previously found that both positive and negative reviews correlate to box office revenues, ...

'Paradox brands' hold strong appeal for bicultural consumers

Bicultural consumers such as Asian Americans or Hispanic Americans are the fastest growing demographic in the U.S., and one of the challenges marketers face is how to build brands that resonate with consumers who have assimilated ...

Applying mathematics takes 'friendship paradox' beyond averages

The friendship paradox is the observation that the degrees of the neighbors of a node within any network will, on average, be greater than the degree of the node itself. In other words: your friends probably have more friends ...

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Paradox

A paradox is a seemingly true statement or group of statements that lead to a contradiction or a situation which seems to defy logic or intuition. Typically, however, quoted paradoxical statements do not imply a real contradiction and the puzzling results can be rectified by demonstrating that one or more of the premises themselves are not really true, a play on words, faulty and/or cannot all be true together. But many paradoxes, such as Curry's paradox, do not yet have universally accepted resolutions. The word paradox is often used interchangeably with contradiction. Literary and other artistic uses of paradoxes imply no contradiction and may be used to describe situations that are ironic. Sometimes the term paradox is used for situations that are merely surprising. An example of a paradox is "This statement is false.", and is explained below.

The logician Willard V. O. Quine distinguishes:

Paradoxes in economics tend to be the veridical type, typically counterintuitive outcomes of economic theory, such as Simpson's paradox. In literature a paradox can be any contradictory or obviously untrue statement, which resolves itself upon later inspection.

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