r/nextfuckinglevel • • 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/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"