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German city offers $1.1M to whoever proves it doesn’t exist
- mc32 7y agoThis is too funny. Someone mocked conspiracy theories by spinning an undoubtedly and obviously fake theory which was in turn promptly absorbed by actual conspiracy theorists and also became a bit of pop culture absurdity and now the city is taking this supposed non existence as an opportunity to promote itself back into the real world of money, tourism and goodwill. Nice turnaround.
- bhaak 7y ago"promptly" :-) It started in 1994 on the German Usenet. Edit: this is the original posting http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=2r570dINNahh%40snofru.informatik.uni-kiel.de http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=2r570dINNahh%40snofru.i... You'll notice the usenet group is de.talk.bizarre so it is completely understandable that people think this is just a hoax.
- em-bee 7y agoit's not clear that the joke started on usenet or offline and was just reported there. reality is that at one point all highway exits to bielefeld were closed (that's what i was told), and that triggered the joke. that this joke is still alive is astonishing. source: i have been to a conference in a city that claimed to be bielefeld. now i am not so sure anymore...
- jhony1104 7y agoThe competitions FAQ (in German): http://www.bielefeldmillion.de/zum-wettbewerb/#faq http://www.bielefeldmillion.de/zum-wettbewerb/#faq
- zaarn 7y agoBut if they don't exist, doesn't that meant they can't pay the million euros?
- mieseratte 7y agoPromises you know you'll never have to keep are the best kind!
- krylon 7y agoBielefeld native here: Good luck!
- Havoc 7y ago>Bielefeld native here Impostor clearly
- saalweachter 7y agoI heard anyone whose documentation shows they're from Bielefeld is actually an undercover BND agent.
- maze-le 7y agoThat's what THEY want you to think anyway...
- tastroder 7y agowaves same here. I'm slightly annoyed though, wouldn't mind travelling on the other side of the earth once without hearing that silly joke. Not sure why the city-PR felt the need to further solidify that.
- Havoc 7y agoWhat's the going rate for a medium yield nuke?
- JeanMarcS 7y agoNot sure if it works with « doesn’t exists anymore » And who will pay ? Too bad, it was a good idea out-of-the-box !
- Havoc 7y agoTiming on history is way more fungible than existence of towns. Got downvoted to hell so clearly hn didn't appreciate/understand my town no longer exists joke
- Kaiyou 7y ago"..und sehen wir uns nicht in dieser Welt, so sehen wir uns in..."
- glenvdb 7y agoBefore reading the article I thought this was going to be PR for a grant/fund of philosophy research.
- gibba999 7y agoHere's the basic problem: They gave a month deadline. That's not enough time to get permission for time off from work, book a ticket, take photos to show there is no city there, and submit, at least with the required degree of integrity (e.g. confirming GPS coordinates in some temper-proof way, etc. -- they'll just say you took the photos elsewhere). There is no city there. Pretending it's a fake conspiracy seems to be convincing people otherwise, though. A contest with an unreasonable deadline seems, well, like a not very good attempt to prop this thing up.
- emiliobumachar 7y agoPresumably there's plenty of people nearby, even if you are not.
- InitialLastName 7y agoThe fundamental tenet of conspiracy theory is that anyone who gives eyewitness testimony in contradiction of the conspiracy is, by definition, part of the conspiracy. One can only trust testimony if it's formed as a pseudoscientific lecture on Youtube and leads back to biblical numerology.
- close04 7y agoPoppycock! :) You can’t cry wolf for 25 years and then say you didn’t have time to collect evidence. This was the thing to do before making the claim. After ~25 years of this running conspiracy if none of the evidence was collected we can call it evidence that the conspiracy theory is indeed fake.
- dustfinger 7y agoIt wouldn't be a theory if they had proof, it would be a fact ;-) Of course you are talking about evidence which is not the same as proof. However, if we do think in terms of proof for a moment and following that line of reasoning, is it even possible to have a fake conspiracy theory? That is to say, is it possible to have a fake theory? I think the notion is absurd. The moment someone makes a hypothesis the theory is real and by definition, pending proof to qualify as fact. If someone provides evidence disproving the theory, then the theory would be wrong, but not fake. I like your comment though :-)
- asadhaider 7y agoTom Scott did a video [0] on Bielefeld a few years back which was how I found out about this. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvHcZciihJw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvHcZciihJw
- gberger 7y agoPet peeve: converting currencies from the original makes for awkward headlines, as well as making the article future-incompatible (because of exchange rate fluctuations). They should keep the original €1M in the title. It is what they offered.
- ghaff 7y agoThe problem is that you and I may know the rough exchange rates for Euros, pounds, and dollars (and the fact that we can more or less treat them as equivalent at this level). But a lot of US readers won't. I probably wouldn't have any idea if this were some other European non-Euro currency. I'd agree with you if they didn't have Euros in the article but the headline is really just there to entice readers. And it doesn't really do that with a number that's essentially meaningless to the reader. "Germany city offers 50 zorkmids to whoever..." ADDED: If you don't want a conversion then just say offers reward.
- soneca 7y agoReading your point and GP's point, I understand your reasoning, but I agree with GP
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- harperlee 7y agoI agree about keeping the original currency, but I don’t buy the future- incompatibility argument. Even comparing current dollars to past dollars needs to be taken with a grain of salt and some reflection (though, granted, inflation is not so quick as forex), but when the specific news event happened, the dollar equivalent number had the same value as the euro-denominated one.
- tlarkworthy 7y agoOr they just abbreviate to 1M dollars, they offered slightly more, but they also did offer 1M dollars worth of euros.
- 7y ago
- k__ 7y agoProbably just have to watch flat earth theorists how they do it.
- gcmrtc 7y agoIn Italy we have an entire region (Molise) that doesn't exist. Do other countries have their own non-existent places too?
- Usu 7y agoYes, my girlfriend and I routinely refer to it as "Molisn't" every time it pops up in a conversation.
- ohduran 7y agoIn Spain, we have Teruel. Even IKEA did a commercial on the topic called "Teruel does exist!"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxBvvQ2GeEc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxBvvQ2GeEc
- Scarblac 7y agoThere is a weak meme that the US state North Dakota doesn't exist, but it's not widely known and might be inspired by Bielefeld.
- edcastro 7y agoIn Brazil, it's a very well established fact that the state of Acre doesn't exist.
- Ididntdothis 7y agoWhole New Zealand doesn’t exist https://www.reddit.com/r/MapsWithoutNZ/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MapsWithoutNZ/
- nickpsecurity 7y agoI don't see any mention of that on the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molise Why does it not exist to Italians?
- Fnoord 7y agoA reverse one: Scarfolk. See the book Discovering Scarfolk by Richard Littler [1]. "Scarfolk is a town in north-west England that did not progress beyond 1979. The entire decade of the 1970s loops ad infinitum. In Scarfolk children must not be seen OR heard, and everyone has to be in bed by 8 p.m. because they are perpetually running a slight fever..." [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20493657-discovering-scarfolk https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20493657-discovering-sca...
- lota-putty 7y agoWhy limit the prize to just €1M? Why not "pick a number youself" instead!
- t0astbread 7y agoThey're scared obviously!
- dangle1 7y agoRemember Moab.
- didymospl 7y agoDo they expect something along the lines of: "Assume a spherical cow in a vacuum, uniformly emitting milk in all directions..."?
- PeterStuer 7y agoIts existence relies on formal documentation such as a deed declaring its existence as a city. Proving it doesn't exist would rely on proving the absolute absence of the documentation, and absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. This is a logical proof of non-existence fallacy. But surely the German city officials would not make a mockery of such things by frivolously asking for something they know would be logically impossible. So thereby the only conclusion that we can draw is that the proof of non-existence does both exist and yet by logic can not exist. This would have been a curious case of a macro superposition had it not been for contest communication from Bielefeld insiders leading to an observation of the phenomenon collapsing said superposition were it not that with the collapse a new instance of the superposition is created without delay out of the logical fallacy and the now created instance of the past communication which makes this an even more curious case as we are now facing an endless series of both collapsing and superimposing states of Bielefeld's existence. We thereby incontrovertible proved that the only possible state is that Bielefeld does in fact perpetually both exist and does not exist fulfilling and exceeding the requirements for claiming the offered cash price. We realize that this proof could be refuted if the city officials were able to proof the absence of the offer's communication as in that case the superposition of Bielefeld's existence could remain intact and unobserved, in which case I will gladly refund them their $1.1M minus expenses.
- chousuke 7y agoSurely you can prove that something doesn't exist if you can show that assuming its existence leads to a contradiction? I'm pretty sure the whole "can't prove a negative" thing is a meme, or I'm just misunderstanding it.
- PeterStuer 7y agoSame as below, You can prove that something can not exist, typically by proving its existence would lead to a contradiction. You can also prove exhaustively that some thing that can exist does in fact not exist if the set of potential evidence of existence is finite. where you run into trouble is in cases were something could exist, but the set of potential evidence is infinite or for practical purposes beyond the means of exhaustive coverage. IMHO, not a professional philosopher