Hacker News Reader

What does naming have to do with AC though? This seems completely tangential to the axiom. It’s about the nature of sets, not the semantics of how you make the selection and reference it.

AC says: if there is a set of non-empty sets y with length x, I can construct a new set z of length x by taking a member from each set in y.

How does being able to name the constituents z or any member of y matter to the logic of the axiom?

View on HN

This is all in response to a comment which basically said "why do people think AC is obvious - if you can't even name all elements of the set, why would you expect to be able to choose them". (Which is handwavy, of course, and leads to the wrong intuition about uncountable-but-well-ordered sets, and depending on how you look at it it may even lead you to conclude that you can't ever choose even a single element from an uncountable set.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com