An Argument I Won Wednesday, June 15, 2005

So I bought a cigar the other day and said to my friend, "This thing will smoke all year."

My friend says, "That's a little bit of an overstatement."

"Not really."

"Not really?" she says, incredulous.

Then I started thinking about it. How much of an overstatement was it?

So the cigar ended up smoking for say about an hour, so the way I see it, I was off by a factor of 8,760. An error on the fourth order of magnitude is a pretty egregious error.

But then let's examine what the question really is about, here. She says it's a "little bit" of an overstatement, a statement to which I disagreed. So the question is whether my estimation of the cigar's smoking time was accurate to the yardstick of some mysterious "bit" in its small variety.

I can quantify my statement with perfect accuracy, as I have just demonstrated. This "bit" here, however, is rather vague.

"How much is a bit?" I ask.

"I don't know," she says.

Since she could not quantify her statement in any way and yet still avers an assumption of some quantity, it was clear that what she was saying was nonsense.

I win.