u/MythicalBeast42

You're clearly strawmanning the atheist position by assuming the presentation would be as brutal and dry as possible. If you can't fathom that one could be compassionate and atheist at the same time, there's no possibility of changing your mind.

If you describe the events that take place in Leviticus the same way, you'd likely be traumatizing the child.

80 years feels like a lot, for sure, but even as a person, once you're dead it's death for eternity.

And to be clear, I'm arguing from a stance of efficiency. Living for a little while longer might suck and it might be torture if you do nothing. But if you do something, it might make the suffering worth it. And if it doesn't, you can still end it.

I'm not telling you you can't kill yourself. Obviously that's up to you. I'm just saying it's smart to exhaust your options first. Try a bunch of stuff, meet a bunch of people. Give it a go. If it doesn't work, you can always end it. But if you end it you can never go back.

All I'm saying is we get one shot. Might as well give it a good run just in case, before you never get that shot again

Thank you for considering and looking into it in more detail. It is an interesting question, and there is a lot more to be understood here than just the grade-school rule most people are taught and take as gospel. It's an interesting topic!

I would agree that it's not entirely arbitrary to favour one side over the other, but it's not the only logical choice either.

However I would still like to be adamant that 5 is the midpoint, and I'll give three justifications why I believe this to be the case.

1. Most obvious, metric. We say a point is the midpoint between two others if the distance from the midpoint to each of the other points is equal. And we determine distance through the standard euclidian metric, d(x,y)=|x-y|. Thus 5 must be the midpoint of 0 and 10 since d(5,10)=d(0,5)=5. If you disagree that 5 is the midpoint of 0-10, then either you disagree with my definition of midpoint, or you disagree with my definition of distance.

2. (really just and addendum to 1) Limits. You mentioned above

When you consider [0,10) then 5 is closer to the lower limit

But it's not. I think what you're imagining is that there's more stuff to the left, but that's not quite the case for two reasons. First, because the limit to the right is still 10. Specifically, the supremum (or infimum) of a set does not have to be in the set itself. The "limit" or, to be precise, the supremum (the least upper bound) of [0,10) is indeed 10. It's not some number arbitrarily close to 10, it is exactly 10. And so to say that 5 is closer to the lower limit is to say that 5-0 < 10-5.

Secondly, and this is a little more justification for what I just said, opening and closing the interval does not change the length. This is a fundamental criteria in measure theory - for a measure to be valid we must have M(a,b) = M[a,b) = M(a,b] = M[a,b], that is to say, all of these intervals have exactly the same length. This may seem counterintuitive at first, but I promise you it is the case. It is a criterion of measures that they be countably additive, which means unioning a measure-zero set like {0} or {10} cannot change the totalt length. Thus the legnth of (a,b) is the same as the length of [a,b]. And so, the length of [0,5] is equal to the length of [5,10). It has to be by the definition of a measure. You can also prove this through translation-invariance. A relatively simple proof in every measure theory textbook.

1. Counting. Another day we can overcome this issue of middle-ness is by being fair in including neither side or both. 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 has a middle number, 5. 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 has a middle number, 5. I propose this as the rounding rule: 0 and 10 remain unchanged ) as they should, 1,2,3,4 round down, and 6,7,8,9 round up. And what shall we do with 5? You propose always rounding it up, but I propose rounding it up half the time and down half the time. I think since there are four numbers to the left and four numbers to the right, it only makes sense to do 5 half up half down to be fair.

And I understand your method in trying to do unbiased rounding, but rounding up to 9 is not rounding to the nearest 10, it's rounding to the nearest 9. Which, if we wanted would be simple enough. 4.5 is half of 9. Everything in (0,4.5) rounds down, everything in (4.5,9) rounds up, 0 and 9 stay the same, and 4.5 goes up half the time and down half the time. Easy peasy

In elemenary school I was taught 5s always round up, but in highschool physics our teacher and textbook addressed it more thoroughly and taught us the rule about evens and odds, but he said he wouldn't really care if we kept rounding up exclusively.

So I think it is becoming more commonplace through the years, which is cool, but it's still not super widely known.