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This Message Does Not Exist

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Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#201

Post by runlaszlorun »

dfabulich wrote: post #151

I think this is an example of the "answering machine paradox," which philosophers have been writing about since the 1970's. https://philpapers.org/rec/SIDTAM > According to an intuitive semantics for 'I,' 'here' and 'now,' 'I am not here now' should always be false when uttered. But occurrences of 'I am not here now' on an answering machine seem to be true (when the speaker is not home). (If you're interested, you ca…

Absolutely off topic, but does remind me of a Mexican movie ‘I Am No Longer Here’ that I’d seen not long ago was astonishingly good for something I hadn’t heard of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_No_Longer_Here

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#203

Post by mannykannot »

goatlover wrote: post #192
skyechurch wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively: placing finger on the peak of Olympus Mons on Martian map "I am not here now". I'm not seeing the problem. There are a lot of philosophy 'problems' like this, which leads me to think philosophers lead blessed, problem-free lives.

You probably haven't thought deeply about the problems. Usually they expose some issue with our concepts or assumptions. Things we take to be obvious and simple aren't always on careful reflection.

On the one hand, these puzzles often arise as counter-examples to a theory within analytical philosophy, and unless you understand what they are a counter-example to, they seem pointless and even ridiculous. For example, when Russell posed his famous paradox to Frege, he was not trying to find out who shaves the barber.

On the other hand, perhaps we should consider whether analytical philosophy, following the linguistic turn [1], is creating problems for itself when it tries to find metaphysical truth by analyzing human language as if it were a formal system. For example, when David Chalmers says "even God could not create a male vixen", is he mistaking an accidental lexicographical fact for a metaphysical insight?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_turn

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#204

Post by dahart »

goatlover wrote: post #192
skyechurch wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively: placing finger on the peak of Olympus Mons on Martian map "I am not here now". I'm not seeing the problem. There are a lot of philosophy 'problems' like this, which leads me to think philosophers lead blessed, problem-free lives.

You probably haven't thought deeply about the problems. Usually they expose some issue with our concepts or assumptions. Things we take to be obvious and simple aren't always on careful reflection.

Hehe, you’re replying to a comment that exposed issues with the stated assumptions behind the so-called paradox.

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#205

Post by fweimer »

gpvos wrote: post #164
cortesoft wrote: post #36

Oh, finally a chance to put my Philosophy degree to use! The error says the "message" does not exist, but the message is not the same as the text. The message is an object that can be saved or discarded, and it contains text. The text still exists and can be copied, but the message is gone and can't be saved anymore.

The question remains: how can something that does not exist contain anything?

Example: You are editing a table row with some application, but when you try to save the changes, the system discovered that the row has been deleted from the table. The business logic does not permit you to create rows arbitrarily, so a new row cannot be inserted instead of updating existing one.

The behavior admittedly does not make sense for files (although I suppose you could rename or delete the directory that contains it), but it's sort of unavoidable if you don't want to take locks while some client application you don't control may or may not make changes.

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#206

Post by spuz »

edanm wrote: post #156
Too wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but hard disagree on this one. This increasingly popular assumption that users are clueless cavemen is very condescending. Help the user self diagnose instead. WHY can’t it be saved? Is the internet not connected? Check your WiFi. Is the server full? Talk to admin. Is the message deleted by another user? Talk to your team about ways of working? Is it an internal application error? Tough luck, maybe the error co…

> This increasingly popular assumption that users are clueless cavemen is very condescending. Sorry, but no. And this idea that everyone else is condescending is offensive nonsense. I understand where you're coming from, but the people who understand how actual users behave and what actual users want, in the real world, are not condescending - they're empathic. They recognize that the majority of people in the world…

> This is even on the off-chance that the user has even read the message, which is incredibly unlikely. I can't count the number of times I've had developers tell me they had an error message and don't know what to do, and my solution was "let's read it, it says this is the error" and that being revelatory for them.

I agree that the problem with technical and non-technical users alike is one of motivation. Like you say, someone who is not technically minded won't care that the server is out of pace or their wifi is disconnected and developers who just want to get their code to compile don't care about learning how some new framework works.

But in all these cases, the users do care about doing whatever they were trying to do when they got the error. And the best way to help them is to give them all the relevant information they or someone else needs to fix it. Giving some generic error like "sorry your file could not be saved" neither helps those who are motivated to fix it, nor those who aren't motivated.

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#207

Post by mtVessel »

ranger207 wrote: post #152
mkl wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how do you explain to a non-technical user that their data has been deleted on the server, but that their client still has a cached copy that they might want to try to salvage somehow? How about: "This message has been deleted from the mail server, but Outlook still has it in its temporary cache on this device. You can copy the message contents, or discard it from the cache, at which point it will be permanently de…

Does anyone have any real studies about whether users will "have their heads explode" when presented with technical language? Apple and Microsoft did user studies for this sort of thing in the 80s and 90s, right? Has anyone done similar in the 00s, 10s, and 20s?

Do we really need to? I'd lay odds that the effect remains the same: users dismiss the error/warning without reading it.

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#208

Post by mtVessel »

caseyy wrote: post #112
lisper wrote: post #85

Everyone is snickering at this and talking about philosophy, but there is actually a legitimate point being made here, albeit obliquely: how do you explain to a non-technical user that their data has been deleted on the server, but that their client still has a cached copy that they might want to try to salvage somehow? I submit that this is a nontrivial problem worthy of serious consideration.

> how do you explain to a non-technical user that their data has been deleted on the server, but that their client still has a cached copy that they might want to try to salvage somehow? “The message has been deleted, but your app still shows it. You will not be able to see the message again if you discard it, and it will disappear soon.”

"What do you mean 'it's been deleted?' It's right here! Stupid computers..."

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#209

Post by skyechurch »

goatlover wrote: post #192
skyechurch wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively: placing finger on the peak of Olympus Mons on Martian map "I am not here now". I'm not seeing the problem. There are a lot of philosophy 'problems' like this, which leads me to think philosophers lead blessed, problem-free lives.

You probably haven't thought deeply about the problems. Usually they expose some issue with our concepts or assumptions. Things we take to be obvious and simple aren't always on careful reflection.

I was being glib, of course. Presumably there's some legitimate technical philosophical issue, and actual philosophers are capable of using answering machines and even landline telephones without having all their assumptions about reality collapse around them like a PKD novel (those born prior to 1980, anyway). But, like Jay Z, I've got problems of a more pressing nature, and legitimately don't see how this matters.

(See also the 'Problem' of Induction, which I had to spend a great deal of time on in college, and even after reading centuries of debate about it, is the least problematic 'problem' I've ever encountered. Maybe this is a linguistic issue, and philosophers should stop calling things 'problems' when the rest of us have to make rent.)

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#210

Post by dahart »

cortesoft wrote: post #36

Oh, finally a chance to put my Philosophy degree to use! The error says the "message" does not exist, but the message is not the same as the text. The message is an object that can be saved or discarded, and it contains text. The text still exists and can be copied, but the message is gone and can't be saved anymore.

> the message is not the same as the text.

Like people who’s bodies are gone but who’s souls are still here? I see dead messages… :P

That distinction might be worthwhile, and it’s certainly true from a technical standpoint. But the real problem here is the message is not the same as the message. If that was referring to a single message it’d make a great philosophical problem. Unfortunately we’re just talking about a more boring problem of two different messages with two different texts where the text of one of them accidentally referred to the other one as ‘this’.

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