I considered deleting the post, but this seems more cowardly than just admitting I was wrong. But TIL something!

  • Seeker of Carcosa
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    6 months ago

    Sorry if you’ve seen this already, as your comment has just come through. The two sets are the same size, this is clear. This is because they’re both countably infinite. There isn’t such a thing as different sizes of countably infinite sets. Logic that works for finite sets (“For any finite a and b, there are twice as many integers between a and b as there are even integers between a and b, thus the set of integers is twice the set of even integers”) simply does not work for infinite sets (“The set of all integers has the same size as the set of all even integers”).

    So no, it isn’t due to lack of knowledge, as we know logically that the two sets have the exact same size.