General

Moved to this new page.

I have had this experience several times in my life; I come across clear enough evidence that settles for me an issue I had seen long disputed. At that point my choice is to either go back and try to persuade disputants, or to continue on to explore the new issues that this settlement raises. As Eliezer implicitly advises, after a short detour to tell a few disputants, I have usually chosen this second route. This is one explanation for the existence of settled but still disputed issues; people who learn the answer leave the conversation.

–Robin Hanson

Let’s say you’re writing some documentation, and need to point people to a comment on a web page. Keep in mind that more comments may be added at any time. If you need to point people to the second (or third, or fourth, etc) comment, you have an easy time; you just say:

“See the second comment on <X>”

But if you need to point to the first comment, and at this time there is only one comment, you need to sound like a pedant:

“See the first (and possibly only) comment on <X>”

In English, “the second object” does not imply that more objects exist, but “the first object” does imply that more than one exists. Why would you have written “first” if there’s only one? If you wrote just “see the first comment”, and the reader saw only one comment on the page, they might wonder if a comment has been deleted, or if they’re even in the right place. If you wrote “see the only comment”, and soon another comment appeared, you would cause similar confusion.

I don’t expect this to catch on, but with a new word we can express doubts about the existence of more than one object:

“See the firsteth comment on <X>”.

If anyone out there is designing a human language, please make it easier to express things about changing environments.