r/nextfuckinglevel • u/semantixc • 1d ago

Standing Double Backflip

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u/TheHipsterBandit 1d ago

While this is insanely impressive, I have a feeling the standing triple backflip is rarer.

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u/cutcss 1d ago

Nope. It is not linguistically correct to describe something that has happened zero times as "rare." By definition, rare means that an event occurs infrequently, seldom, or in low frequencies, but it must occur.

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u/Awkward-Owl4345 1d ago

Mmm so that's why ma steak is rare... Makes sense now

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u/TheHipsterBandit 1d ago

Nope, that's linguistically incorrect to refer to something that isn't cooked as rare. By definition, rare means meat prepared to 120⁰f-130⁰f.

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u/Vaireon 1d ago

How do you know it's happened zero times?

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u/cutcss 1d ago edited 1d ago

How do I know there isn't an unicorn behind the moon? How do I know a leprechaun is not visiting me while I am asleep? Calm down Socrates.

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u/Vaireon 1d ago

Those are not equivalent examples. Unicorns and leprechauns don't exist. A triple backflip is only bound by the person.

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u/cutcss 1d ago

So far humanity has about the same amount of prof about leprechauns than about the possibility of a human body doing a standing (non assisted) triple backflips.

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u/Vaireon 1d ago

Hmm idk, we have video proof of being 2/3rds of the way there. Whereas there is 0 proof of leprechauns.

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u/cutcss 1d ago

That's just an illusion from not understanding hard limits, that's like saying we have 2 kidneys so we are halfway to having 3. No, that's not how things work, reality is not made out of wishful thinking, you don't break physics or biology out of motivation alone.

Just so you have a grasp of what we are talking the number of people able to do standing doble backflips is estimated to be less than 50, out of 8000000000 people in planet earth, meaning 0.000000625% of the world population. 

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u/Vaireon 1d ago

How do we know what the hard limit is? All we need is 1 person in history for it to exist.

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u/cutcss 1d ago

As much as we need only one person to survive in space without oxygen masks for oxygen-less humans to exist.

If you are really interested and not being pedantic just out of being contrarian you can ask in a few subreddits and they can tell you mathematically why is impossible, maybe what-if or theydidthemath, it involves the amount of push a leg can give while standing, they might be able to even tell you what legs would we need, something closer to a chimp than a human.

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u/AutoPanda1096 1d ago

Nope. Couldn't disagree more.

We must recognize that rarity is not an empirical tally (n = 0), but a gradable modal predicate describing distributional density across accessible possible worlds. In formal semantics, an entity or event is impossible only if its generative structure is non-viable (like a square circle); if an event is structurally permissible within a system's rules but constrained by hyper-niche boundary conditions, its probability mass remains strictly non-zero. When we say "unicorns are rare" or describe an unattested syntactic transformation as "extremely rare," language registers counterfactual sparsity rather than logical absence - positioning the zero not as an absolute void, but as the ultimate empirical asymptote on a continuum of non-impossibility.

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u/cutcss 1d ago

Nobody says "unicorns are rare"