PS: thanks for all the comments! Didn't realise the double negation would work too. (Trying to show a bug you found in a meeting/to an audience but then it turns out it actually behaves unexpectedly as originally intended. No bug.)
No. Vorführeffekt is used for anything that suddenly behaves differently when an audience is present. Be that features that suddenly don't work when observed, or bugs that suddenly don't reproduce anymore, etc.
I think I get what you're trying to say, but by definition an observation requires an audience, even if it's an audience of 1. Maybe say an increased audience size?
The translation is wrong because it makes things unnecessarily complicated. The term Vorführeffekt is used when something suddenly behaves differently in a not desired way when shown to others. The argument about double negation is logically right, yet entirely theoretical, as no sane person would ever describe or translate the effect in such a doubly-negated way to someone else.
Excatly. German speaker here, parent is correct. I looked for a description in English, I found this exchange on reddit which IMO describes it exactly:
"What never works exactly as it's supposed to?" "Opening YouTube videos on a PowerPoint" "It works fine until the actual presentation"
But it can also refer to a bug that usually happens not happening when you try to show the bug to someone else. E.g. having no TV reception for some reason and getting someone to look at it, but when they show up, the reception is perfect.
Sooo was the famous Windows 98 BSOD a case of the Vorführeffekt or not? Plug'n'play functionality for the scanner did not work when demonstrated to the audience in that instance.
Yes, if what usually happens in private (and what you are hoping to demonstrate to another person or an audience) is different from what happens when you demonstrate it, you can [0] call it Vorführeffekt.
[0] since it's not an actual effect [0a], kinda like Murphy's law isn't a real law, you can call it that way, but you're not required to.
[0a] other than maybe nervousness of the presenter affecting things, but I don't think Windows is ever nervous about crashing.
If you abstract "non-function" as the thing that is meant to be demonstrated, then it surely is a Vorfuhreffekt (literal translation: demonstration effect). More formally, the Vorfuhreffekt is "I just observed X so I wanted to demonstrate it, but then while demonstrating it, X did not occur". Now just substitute X for "non-function" and resolve the double negations by DeMorgan's law.
I'm wondering whether the Vorfuhreffekt can be explained in terms of statistics, similar to regression to the mean. I.e. the observation that something worked or worked very well is often an outlier, so when repeating the experiment, one get a worse outcome in expectation. It is a kind of selection bias.
When you can't type the umlauts the correct way is using an additional e after the vowel, like this: Vorfuehreffekt. One more example: "schoen" instead of "schön" and not "schon".
Vorfuhreffekt is different and just sounds wrong. The German ear tries to understand this like this: "the effect of having gone ahead", but in German you don't conjugate substantives, so using the past of "fahren" ("fuhr") doesn't work here. This is irritating, at least for me.
For "schön" and "schon" however it does really matter because these words are in English "beautiful" and "already".
I just realized that my post could be interpreted as suggesting that I personally had immigrated to the U.S. from Germany. In fact, my grandfather did. But the two-syllable interpretation has affected every subsequent generation.
I've been thinking patience might play a role; I had this issue often as a kid.
When you have a computer problem and do some things to fix them, it doesn't work, you call a parent over and they do exactly the same thing and it does work... hm.
Maybe the computer was just stressed by my constant attempts and clicking and going away for a short time gave the system time to sort its internals and be ready for input again? shrug (a kid's reasoning)
I'd guess it's similar to using a lot of English words to make compound nouns, except it is slightly worse to read, so if the word is new you'd usually slow down a bit to properly parse it.
On the upside, you don't have to guess where the compound noun ends end the rest of the sentence starts, which can also cost time or cost confusion.
i learned a bunch of German years ago, and while i don't really know what the particular components mean, it's pretty easy for me to decompose the word into parts. do you see a "ge-" or a "be-"? its probably the beginning of a verb; an "-ung" or "-eit" are usually noun endings; etc. and this happens pretty much subconsciously
No, typically you've set up everything for failing. Then you show it in front of customer support, to demonstrate the problem. The thing then beautifully works the first time. That's still the Vorführeffekt.
Definition incomplete. It's also used for the other way around. like when something broke, you call the help desk. Technician shows up and it works then!
The answer also has a great piece of wisdom in its footnote:
> "That's why we prefer to use power point presentations and (maybe even faked) screen shots to present software in early stages of development, instead of really running a live installation of the program."
When I was giving speaker training, I was always telling people to avoid live demos. There are many things that can go wrong and ruin your presentation with the main culprit being the WiFi connection at the venue (or lack thereof).
Invariably, people would not listen to the recommnedation, to only have their presentation fail miserably exactly for that reason. Even those with no live demos where not immune, since they hosted their presentation online.
Scheiße works in every kind of situation. Sort of like блядь in Russian. (Still amazing that you can have both strings in one message, as well as my dribble in what goes for English, thanks unicode!) I wonder how other languages handle this kind of situation (I am vaguely aware of merde)
Dutch has the word "kut" for those sort of situations, it pretty much has the same role as "fuck" in english. (Though these days "fuck" is a perfectly well understood word in dutch too)
I'd be highly surprised if there are languages out there without such a universal word.
I like to call it the Admin Effect. It got so bad to the point where anytime I approached a user to fix an issue, the first thing they said was "It'll probably just work now that you're here... yep, there it goes, thanks I guess".
Back when I was doing tech support at a school I'd be getting calls just to come over so it'd work. Oh well, at least it's an excuse to go for a walk and have a bit of a chit chat.
I really enjoyed learning the word "verschlimmbesserung" from my colleagues (the act of by trying to improve something, making it worse). In the context of programming it works really well.
Definitely, this blimped into my mind. The Bonaldi effect is more like « demoing something with great hype, that was working perfectly at rehearsal time, will ultimately fail with an audience, in proportion with the hype/reality ratio », but yeah it ended up being generalised enough to be a superset of Vorführeffekt.
For non French readers, the Bonaldi effect is generally understood as having catastrophic side effects, causes, or downright coincidences way beyond the intended demo not working: the climatic example being a demo of a vacuum cleaner that was met with the studio’s mains breaker triggering and outright killing the live broadcasting, millions of TV viewers being suddenly met with static (post mort en showed the vacuum cleaner was not in cause). An analogy would be demoing some totally harmless piece of code and encounter a kernel panic or a LAN/WAN takedowns.
In spite of Bonaldi trying increasingly hard for such events not to happen, they still did, and the audience was increasingly watching the show both for the often cheesy devices demonstrated, the comedic effect of the hype of such obvious cheesiness and the unexpected ways things would go sideways.
One thing learned growing up in a German household (my parents are from there, I was born in the US) is that there are special words and phrases and putdowns in German for almost anything. My grandmother also spoke Yiddish which confused the hell out of me as I thought some things I heard were German but weren't. My favorite putdown was always "Brat mir einen Storch und macht die beine recht knusprig" (spelling might be wrong).
In russian this is called "General's effect", where general is an army general. Basically, something is working as long as a higher rank official is present and not working otherwise.
That's the opposite. The soldiers make it work for the general whereas the German word would be used if it works 'in general' but doesn't when it's demonstrated to the general during an inspection.
(German here) "Heisenbug" is not the same at all! That's... about a bug (also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenbug -- although I dislike being a "definition fanatic", here it's even in the word itself - "...-bug")
"Heisenbug" does not have anything to do with the main feature ("Vorführ-Effekt" -- meaning "demonstration[/presentation] effect"), that you try to present it to others. It also occurs when you debug it on your own and even when you are not looking, unlike the Vorführeffekt which specifically happens when you demonstrate something (not a bug, but can be a bug - anything).
If it is something that is supposed to work but it does not when you demonstrate it, there does not have to be a "bug" somewhere for this effect! It can just be that the power goes out city-wide. Which does not have to be due to a bug in that outside system either, you could just have overlooked scheduled maintenance. Or somebody trips over the power cable. The reason for the failure can be completely external and outside the thing you are trying to present.
Vorführeffekt is much more general. The other comments have quite a few good examples and explanations.
Inverse:
"A schrödinbug or schroedinbug . . . is a bug that manifests itself in running software after a programmer notices that the code should never have worked in the first place."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenbug
I told my co-workers that Murphy’s law only fails when you try to demonstrate it - they were all from India and had never heard the term before, thought I was being serious and dedicated a guy to learning all about it. I like this word better though, sounds very cool when you say it. I think this is going replace Murphy.
Vorführeffekt is when you are trying to show something works (for example to an audience/in a presentation) and it does NOT work in said presentation.
Remember this oldie but goldie for USB Plug and Play on Windows? https://youtu.be/IW7Rqwwth84
PS: thanks for all the comments! Didn't realise the double negation would work too. (Trying to show a bug you found in a meeting/to an audience but then it turns out it actually behaves unexpectedly as originally intended. No bug.)