German city offers $1.1M to whoever proves it doesn’t exist
apnews.comHere'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.
Poppycock! :) 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.
Who says I didn't have the time?
1) The contest has a very specific standard for evidence. Just because I went there and saw no such city existed doesn't mean that gets me a million bucks. That's my testimony.
2) Even going back, I need a high standard of evidence. They want irrefutable proof. That means I'd need to have some way of, in a photographically-secure way, guaranteeing I was there, and some kind of temper-proof photos or similar. That takes time to figure out.
This contest is great since anything submitted will be discredited. They'll claim they proved their existence. It does no such thing. In the rules, they say they'll only post entries online they find amusing (in other words, not the best ones), they decide if the evidence is irrefutable, and that the contestant waives the right to sue / contradict that judgement.
I hope you see the problem here. They'll claim to have generated proof of existence (hey, no one can disprove it), without providing people time to do so, and with tools to bury any proofs which would convince others. They'll post the comical ones, and be done with it.
> They want irrefutable proof.
You should have been able to provide irrefutable proof even without the $1.1M. Otherwise you just admitted having an unfounded supposition and pretending it's a fact. Again, 25 years is plenty of time to obtain irrefutable proof. I mean it's not rocket science.
Put a camera on your car (or even have a caravan of cars, harder to fake), live stream the video including a GPS, driving along the known route and filming the mile markers until you get to the vast empty field that is that town. Get people on reddit or something to decide at every step which speed to have, if you should flip the wipers, this kind of thing that proves you're live. You can rent a helicopter, I mean $1.1M will cover a lot of expenses.
And once you have irrefutable proof other people will just claim everyone and everything in there is part of your conspiracy setup. I mean that's the go-to explanation for any conspiracy theorist whenever they are presented with any proof, no matter how solid. So if it works for you it should also work against :).
> They'll claim they proved their existence. It does no such thing
You are correct. This will not prove its existence. It will prove that nobody can provide evidence to support the conspiracy theory even after having 25 years to collect it and $1.1M to motivate them to present it.
> they'll only post entries online they find amusing
Of course. The other entries don't exist. And they'll show you irrefutable proof of that only if you offer a prize.
Let's say I go into my wife's room and find her purse on the floor. Do I know she left it there? Yes, barring bizarre circumstances. Is it just an unfounded supposition? No. Do I have irrefutable proof the next day? No I don't. I didn't have any reason to generate it.
Perhaps for some odd reason, a bunch of Germans thought it'd be funny to make up a city, claim a conspiracy theory to cover it up, and posted some things about it to the Internet. Perhaps there's more to it than that and there's a great government coverup. Do I really care? Not so much. There's a bunch of people pretending there's a city. I don't know why, and I don't really care why. It's somebody else's problem.
Now, would I go to Europe for 1.1 million dollars? Sure. If I knew I'd get paid. Everything here screams I won't get paid. For the possibility of getting paid, I might even generate proof next time I'm traveling in that part of the world. But at the end of the day, I'm not dropping work deadlines on a few weeks notice for likely not getting paid.
This will absolutely not prove that nobody can provide evidence to support the conspiracy theory even after having 25 years to collect it and $1.1M to motivate them to present it. It will prove no one decided to drop everything in their life and spend a couple grand for the possibility of maybe getting paid by some marketing ploy, con artist, or otherwise.
It 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 :-)
Presumably there's plenty of people nearby, even if you are not.
The 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.
This 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.
"promptly" :-)
It started in 1994 on the German Usenet.
Edit: this is the original posting 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.
it'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...
Its 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.
Surely 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.
Same 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
I’m no philosopher but this sounds incorrect. You can prove that many things couldn’t exist, and therefore prove that it doesn’t exist.
Like an integer greater and less than 0.
You can prove something could not exist. That doesn't mean you can prove that something that can exist doesn't.
But if they don't exist, doesn't that meant they can't pay the million euros?
Promises you know you'll never have to keep are the best kind!
In Italy we have an entire region (Molise) that doesn't exist.
Do other countries have their own non-existent places too?
A 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-sca...
Whole New Zealand doesn’t exist https://www.reddit.com/r/MapsWithoutNZ/
Yes, my girlfriend and I routinely refer to it as "Molisn't" every time it pops up in a conversation.
In Spain, we have Teruel. Even IKEA did a commercial on the topic called "Teruel does exist!"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxBvvQ2GeEc
I don't see any mention of that on the Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molise
Why does it not exist to Italians?
There 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.
In Brazil, it's a very well established fact that the state of Acre doesn't exist.
"..und sehen wir uns nicht in dieser Welt, so sehen wir uns in..."
Probably just have to watch flat earth theorists how they do it.
Do they expect something along the lines of: "Assume a spherical cow in a vacuum, uniformly emitting milk in all directions..."?
Before reading the article I thought this was going to be PR for a grant/fund of philosophy research.
Bielefeld native here: Good luck!
>Bielefeld native here
Impostor clearly
I heard anyone whose documentation shows they're from Bielefeld is actually an undercover BND agent.
That's what THEY want you to think anyway...
waves 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.
Tom Scott did a video [0] on Bielefeld a few years back which was how I found out about this.
The competitions FAQ (in German): http://www.bielefeldmillion.de/zum-wettbewerb/#faq
Remember Moab.
Why limit the prize to just €1M?
Why not "pick a number youself" instead!
They're scared obviously!
Pet 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.
The 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.
Reading your point and GP's point, I understand your reasoning, but I agree with GP
I 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.
Or they just abbreviate to 1M dollars, they offered slightly more, but they also did offer 1M dollars worth of euros.
There is only one significant figure, saying $1M would be enough. It is an editorial decision anyway.
What's the going rate for a medium yield nuke?
Not sure if it works with « doesn’t exists anymore »
And who will pay ?
Too bad, it was a good idea out-of-the-box !
Timing 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