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Comment by myhf | Hacker News Reader

It's more interesting than that. If you take the labels at their face value, evaluating the red label either causes itself to be correct (flip-flop), or causes itself to be incorrect (#REF!), based on the state of the world.

    treasure in green | treasure in red | green label   | red label
    ------------------+-----------------+---------------+-----------
    no                | no              | false         | flip-flop
    no                | yes             | false         | flip-flop
    yes               | no              | true          | #REF!
    yes               | yes             | misquantified | #REF!

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i'm so confused. the red label doesnt convey any information yet it rules out the ability that the green label is true.

so how can the green label still be true?

or is the author saying that the symbols on labels dont mean anything? if he says that, it's tautological. what can we get from discussion if we dont conventionally put meaning in symbols? are what we typing now in all these comments also jibberish??

The contents of the green box make the labels paradoxical; but it's OK because paradoxes exist.

Consider a paradox such as "This sentence is false". There's a problem with deciding if it's true or false. Countless articles and books have been written about it, and there exist different ways of dealing with this "difficulty". However, nothing prevents you from actually writing these letters on a piece of paper, and nothing prevented me from typing them a few seconds ago. The puzzle we're talking about makes the same point in a more amusing fashion.

hm, isnt that obvious? if it's just "we do whatever we want regardless of whatever", then we dont need to go that far: elaborating a nonsense puzzle to prove nonsense.

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