this is confusing

[Aurelia]

If you try to fail, and succeed, which one have you done?

[annis]

If you try to fail, and suceed, which one have you done?

You have failed.

You're mixing different senses of the word "fail" I think, one personal, one conventional. If your goal is to not accomplish some goal other people would consider a success, I'm not sure it's correct to call it "failing" in the first place.

So if your goal is to not pass a test, not passing the test is success and passing it is a failure... of your intent, if not your parents'.

[Timothy]

semantics but...

...you've both tried and succeeded...to fail.

You might be more (or less) sucessful in not trying.

- tim

[Lynxx]

I agree by the sense of the word "suceed" means an act of accomplishment, this is a reverse point..its like asking...

"Is nothing something?"

[cweb255]

nothing is something, otherwise nothing wouldn't exist. Can you have nothing? I surely felt nothing touch my skin.

Because not anything is nothing, and anything is something, nothing is also not something. He does not have anything and he has nothing are the same, so in essence, nothing is both something yet not anything and therefore nothing, or 0 = 0 and 0 = n.

[Timothy]

Nothing is not something. Nothing is not anything. No other thing is anything like nothing. Why must nothing exist? If nothing exists then no thing exists. You will not have anything? Well, you won’t have nothing then either! Why should you have nothing? What you felt wasn’t nothing; that was anything. And though he doesn’t have anything, he still has something, and that’s not nothing!

[Lynxx]

tis a paradox

FUN FUN

isnt nothing just the absense of something? There for a thing in itself? But if the absense of anything is absolute there is no form in which to assosciate anything or nothing there for nothing is nothing, in my opinion.

i luv this stuff

[Democritus]

there is no form in which to assosciate anything or nothing there for nothing is nothing, in my opinion.

i luv this stuff

Nothing lasts forever, too.

You'll never need a replacement!

[primitive]

It's impossible to explain this. Why?

Because you can't try to fail. That's missing the entire point of failing. Failing requires no effort at all. So, if you try at all, you aren't really failing, you are succeeding. Therefore, it is impossible to try and fail. But one can easily not do a damn thing and fail. But nobody tries to fail. That's just ridiculous.

[Eureka]

I think you’re failing to distinguish between the description of a thing and the thing itself.


If you try to fail, and succeed, you know full well what you have done. It’s just a matter of how to describe it. The words, “I tried to fail, and succeeded” convey the facts perfectly, as would a million other sentences.

Also, nothing is not something. However, the word “nothing” is something. Zero is nothing, but the symbol “0” is something.

[primitive]

To try and fail is simply to NOT do what you set out to do. You cannot fail, because...you never tried to succeed. I want to get an A in math. To try and fail would just be to intentionally do horrible on the test. So really, you just changed your goal from getting an A, to getting anything but an A. Same for tying your shoe. You change the goal from tying your shoe, to doing anything but tying your shoe.

But if you want to be truly pendantic and insist that you can "try to fail" then the answer to this useless word problem is that you successfully failed.

[MyIlium]

If you've tried to fail and succeeded then you've failed anyway because then you've failed your goal failing, even if you really failed at what you were trying to succeed at orginally because your goal that time was to fail and you rather failed it.

Classic chicken or egg. At, ut omnes sciunt, the egg came first.