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How do you all feel about job referrals? I. E. leveraging friend networks for career success.
Pro: probably actually works.(gets good employees for companies)
Pro: good for people who benifit (duh?)
Con: May be too much about social connections
Pretty much all my friends are people I have worked with over the years.
It’s really the only good way to hire people. And everyone hiring knows it.
Interviews can at best give you a half decent idea of what a person is like to work with. Actually working with them for a year is an infinitely better data point.
Conclusion: Make sure you’re the kind of coworker your coworkers would like to bring in for their next jobs.
Yeah, I’m aware of the “bias” angle. There is of course something to it, but the candidate quality difference is just too big to ignore.
The real problem with referal hires is that it doesn’t scale. Your employees only knows so many good people that can be lured over.
It’s weird that a lot of people here who hate credentialism also hate networking, because networking eliminates one of the biggest motivations for insisting on credentials. If you can get someone you trust, or multiple someones you trust, to personally vouch for a potential hire’s character and work ethic then you are taking much less of a risk hiring them. If people can’t point the finger at specific people within the company who recommended a bad employee for the job, they’ll want to be able to point the finger at a top school instead.
No, not particularly weird. Both systems predictably fail to accurately match people to jobs because they are twisted into primate social status games where other factors than employment suitability dominate; accordingly people who don’t like one are likely to dislike both.
Seems like you’re assuming proficiency at monkey games doesn’t predict job performance, and I suspect it does.
Depends on the job.
Between the utter vagueness of the terms “proficiency at monkey games” and “job performance”, I wouldn’t care to come down on either side of your suspicion.
The majority of jobs, even back-end technical jobs, require a baseline level of competence dealing with coworkers and supervisors. Given that these people are almost always fellow primates, this is a relevant qualification.
You can’t actually sort an applicant pool for “baseline competence dealing with coworkers and supervisors” by demanding a college degree.
Sort? No. But you can put a loose floor on candidates’ ability to follow instructions, navigate bureaucracy, and avoid getting kicked out for e.g. sexual harassment or habitual drunkenness, which might be good enough.
There are people with different backgrounds who have those skills, but there aren’t many graduates without them.
@Nornagest
And then, faced with the observation that the whole American university system is an incredibly and expensively wasteful system for setting such a loose floor, what can you do but agree?
The best available response is, “Well, we currently don’t have anything better”. Which justifies using it, but doesn’t immunize it from criticism.
Oh, I absolutely agree that it wastes a ton of money doing that. But being bloated and wasteful is one thing and not actually doing what people use it for is another.
Both systems may “predictably” fail to do this, but in my experience as an engineer and a manager of engineers, both systems actually succeed quite well in doing this. Particularly when used in flexible combination. Your prediction is in error.
Both systems overlook the socially-inept autodidactic nerd demographic, but socially inept autodidactic nerds aren’t actually capable of doing nearly as many jobs as they think they are, and I can hire all the first-rate engineers I need without digging into that pool anyway.
Forgive me for doubting a claim that you actually manage to reliably hire genuinely “first-rate” engineers, as opposed to engineers that are competent by the standards of the industry you work in.
You might be an exception, of course, but I expect that if you were hired by the same methods that pretty much everybody else uses, and in turn hire people by those methods, you’re probably getting results of the same quality as everybody else. If you left your job to go into the same job at a competing firm, would you really expect the general level of competence of your co-workers to be discernibly below what you’re experiencing at your current job?
That a system produces results of the level the system generally produces is not proof that the system is competent. The US electoral system, for example, consistently produces officeholders of the demonstrated average level of competence and integrity for officeholders. This does not actually mean it’s any good at selecting officeholders for competence and integrity.
Yes, absolutely. I work closely with those companies, I know the mix of people they have working for them, and in the case of competing(*) companies in the same area, we get to hire their best people to come work for us.
Word of mouth and personal recommendations go both ways, and the best people don’t want to work for crappy employers. That’s why I work where I do now rather than where I did ten years ago, and it’s why the people who work with me or for me, work here and not one of the companies down the street.
* My employer is in a niche that doesn’t really compete with anyone, but we do collaborate with most of the major companies in the same industry.
Can confirm as a someone who has worked for several of the companies that John’s is pulling from/working with and from interactions with current and former members of his organization that this is a pretty accurate description of how his organization works (it is a bit of an oddity, and the rest of the aerospace world is nowhere near as clubby from a hiring perspective, but his organization explicitly is designed to pull the best people and has a broad mandate & the budget to do so, plus the people they want usually want to work for them for several pretty good reasons beyond just money)
Both of them seem negative when you favour actual meritocracy. While networks probably provide results more comparable to a meritocratic ordering than credentialism,
social status and social skills play a (much) bigger than capability. On one level that is understandable, as everbody prefers to work with people they like.
On the other hand the whole getting hired by networks fundamentally intransparent and dishonest, as participants still pretend that hiring is all about skills.
At least credentialism is fairly honest and straightforward: As long as you have that (sometimes horribly expensive) paper, you get in.
How is it dishonest? It seems like it’s all out in the open
Every recruiter, career services officer in either undergrad or grad school, and nearly every person I’ve spoken to working in industry or academia all take great pains to emphasize how important networking is to landing a job. It’s pretty much the first piece of advice that anyone will give you if you ask about finding a job.
This isn’t some big secret, the preference to hire people who can get someone to vouch for them is completely out in the open. Many companies even have an explicit system for current employees to refer specific applicants and fast-track their resumes.
So what happens when you recommend Bob, who was a great guy in his last job where you worked with him? And Bob was, but in this job he’s a disaster?
It seems a bit unfair to fire the guy who recommended Bob, who did it in good faith and is a good worker himself, but on the other hand hiring Bob on his recommendation really screwed up a lot of things?
This definitely happens.
This definitely happens regardless of how you decide who to hire. Hiring people for a new job based on their performance in their old job involves a risk that they may not have skills or aptitudes uniquely necessary for the new job. This is particularly true for promotions to a new type of job, e.g. from engineer to engineering manager. And it is a big part of the recipe for the Peter Principle.
What’s the alternative? You can’t just say “we only hire veteran engineering managers for engineering manager jobs, so we can look at their performance in their last engineering manager job”, because eventually all the veteran engineering managers grow old and retire. Eventually you have to hire someone whose only previous experience was as an engineer. Or as a college student, or as something else, but not as specifically what you are looking for.
With a personal recommendation, you get someone with experience and judgement saying “I’ve worked with Bob for years, and so I know he has the engineering skills, and since I know you’re hiring an engineering manager this time, I think he’s got the management skills”. This might turn out to be an inaccurate assessment, and Bob might be a disaster. It is an educated guess at best.
What do you have that makes for a better educated guess, than someone with relevant experience of their own (ideally as e.g. an engineering manager) who has known Bob for years and who has at least a bit of his reputation tied to the recommendation he is making?
@ John Schilling
I think that it is significantly worse than that, you aren’t even hiring the same person. Sure you worked with Bob 2 years ago and you think he is a fine worker, but right now Bob is going through a separation from his wife and he just isn’t now. Even if Bob spends 38 years of his 40 year career as a good employee some one is absorbing those two bad years, and hes probably more likely to be changing jobs during that period than any other year.
Then there is the whole ‘how is X going to react to Y’, for some employees the best time to hire them is right after they get fired. It works as a wake up call for some, and is a first step on a spiral for others, or getting a large pay raise might instill a sense of responsibility for the new job or instill the thought that they can coast now that they have finally made it. One person I am thinking of got a nice severance package as a manger, took a long vacation and came back at a sub manager level and just showed no motivation to get what needed to be done.
@baconbits: My question remains: What do you have that makes for a better educated guess?
You might have many applicants with effectively the same credentials. You still need to know which ones work the hardest, which ones have the best attitude, the best creative problem solvers, and which ones will fit in with the team best. Some of that can be hinted at in an interview, barely, but mostly those are things you only find out after working with someone for a year or two.
@ John Schilling
Nothing, I was just adding on variables to show how difficult hiring is, and how algorithms (basically the only other option to nepotism) end up failing to exceed other methods.
John Schilling, right now in my job people often ring up and ask the boss for references, and they won’t give them except in the most general and generic ways (I often get landed with writing up those references even if I never knew or worked with the person*), something along the lines of “yes, Joe Schmoe worked here at the time they said they did” – all from fear of “if I recommend Joe for the job and then he is a total failure or embezzles or has an affair with a married co-worker or burns the place down, I’ll be liable and the organisation will be liable”. And this is not the only job where it happened (when I was looking for a reference myself from a past job, it was like pulling teeth just to get “yes, Deiseach worked here at the time stated”).
So I do see people being very, very cautious about personal recommendations not because the person in question is bad – if they were a bad worker, there would be no problem straight out refusing a reference – but simply from fear of incurring legal culpability, either from telling the truth about “Joe worked here and he was terrible” and then Joe gets his lawyer involved in suing you for him not getting the job, or the company hires Joe on your recommendation, he gets the head of the accounting department pregnant with triplets then abandons her and runs off with half a million he embezzled from the company sock-purchasing fund and they sue you for convincing them he was trustworthy when you knew he stole from the petty cash when he worked for you.
*I don’t know if it says something good or something bad about my personal character that I can obfuscate sufficiently to find six different ways to say nothing at all about “Joe worked here during that period” other than that but still make it sound as if I said something?
I’ve always heard that this was due to fears of lawsuits against past employers who give bad references to bad employees. But I don’t know whether this is true, nor whether this fear is a reasonable one or is addressed by this measure. Superstition and rational astrology of this kind is absolutely commonplace in modern workplaces.
That’s fairly standard for employees asking for written reference letters, for the liability reasons you note. There’s a fairly standard form letter for “Yes, Bob worked here from 20XX to 20YY with job title ZZZ and we didn’t fire him for cause”, and as you note people can sometimes shade that a bit positive or negative.
The recommendations that matter are usually literal word-of-mouth or sometimes personal email, between colleagues who already trust one another. The formula is “know someone who knows someone…”, not “know someone who will write you a letter”.
We were explicitly told not to provide references for our employees by HR for exactly this reason, so I’m fairly certain this is correct. We were instructed to have them contact HR who would provide the same generic employment confirmation that has been mentioned.
It is possible that some industries it is done to protect the company from failed positive reviews of employees who didn’t work out, but I highly doubt that is the norm and I’m not confident that is ever a legitimate motivating factor. Hard to imagine there would be any grounds for the new company to sue the old company when an employee doesn’t work out.
They have problems for different reasons. Credentialism fails because the credentialing system gets gamed in various ways, and the solution seems to be to always add another credential, which then gets gamed, resulting in an enormous waste of time and money for an almost worthless credential.
Networking results in the same glib extraverted <expletive-deleted>s who succeed at every other area in life also succeeding in areas where technical skill should matter more. Most people here probably aren’t that type.
Break out two things:
1) “That’s my buddy let’s get him a job.”
and
2) “I know this guy who busts his ass at every job he gets and he’s qualified for this position.”
Filing both as “nepotism” mixes this up.
True, but the business hiring is relying that you are recommending based on (b) and not on (a), and it’s often as likely that you’ll recommend based on (a) because “Mike is a great guy and he’s going through a tough time and really needs this job”.
I’m just assuming everyone is honest. After that it just becomes a factual question.
The issue is that this isn’t binary. “That’s my buddy” could mean ‘my productivity is going to crash if you hire him because we will talk about GoT all day’ or it could mean ‘I’ll be happier at work, less likely to quit and we work well together’ with a whole range of inbetweens. Number 2 isn’t a sure thing either as ‘yeah he works hard, but am I glad I don’t have him in my department’ is definitely a thing.
Outside of ‘hire this guy because he is going to kick back 10% of his salary to me for getting him the job’ there is little pure nepotism.
I laid out the categories in a general sense to make the point. Please don’t nitpick the exact language, it misses the point.
My point is that there are no real general categories. If the foreman hires his son for a position is that nepotism or is that an understood perk of being the foreman? If hiring friends and relatives of your best employees keeps them around is that nepotism, or is it a form of maximizing productivity of your current workers? There are relatively few jobs where an individuals productivity isn’t tied to how everyone else in the company is doing.
I’ve gotten work through friends/former coworkers. They know more about you than you can communicate in an interview.
The more job experiences I get and the more time I spend seeing the staffing/hiring side (and I haven’t seen tons of that so far), the more I think there’s a huge inefficiency because of information where you just can’t find the people you want/figure out they’re the people you want, and luck plays a really big role.
Like, I’m seeing the process of hiring right now for a position where we want a specific technical skill. It’s not incredibly difficult to pick up, but the last person wasn’t able to, so now we’re looking for someone who already has it. I know a guy who can totally learn this, but he never would have applied because he doesn’t already have it. (And the salary is much higher than you’d guess from the job description, so it doesn’t even look worth it to teach yourself.) And the hiring manager doesn’t know anything about technical skills, so instead of saying ‘you need to be able to do x, y, z’ in it, where someone could honestly teach themselves in a week, they’re just ask how years you’ve been using it as a proxy, unless I can convince them that my person is really good and can totally do this.
Also, the last three jobs I’ve had, the actual job was only tenuously related to the job listing. The accurate information I got – to the extent that I got any – was from the interview. I’ve seen job descriptions for jobs I didn’t take say you need to be proficient in a 10-year-old version of a software that I knew the employer didn’t even have licenses for and certainly wasn’t using. In that environment, it’s a lot better if you have someone already working there reach out to people they know and have real conversations about what the job actually entails than have people apply to a job that’s not actually the job and go from there. Which is to say, think the information issue goes both ways — getting better information about the candidate, but also the candidate getting better information about the job.
It’s basically the only way I can get work. I’m underqualified for the everything I’m not overqualified for*, so I can only get hired if I have an in or they just need bodies.
*Meaning I have above-average intelligence and below-average credentials, so the places that won’t dismiss me as unqualified per my resume dismiss me because “He’ll find something better soon”. I have actually been told I was overqualified by the owner of one of the companies I did work for before I got hired (since we were friends, that was my in).
If all the top people get jobs, and there are more applicants than jobs, then you end up with an upper class who gets all the jobs and a permanently unemployed underclass who never gets the jobs. In other words, having employers be able to perfectly hire the optimal employee is not a good thing; we want a world where the person who is only 95% as efficient at the job doesn’t have a 0% chance of getting the job because the employers all hired from the top down.
(In theory, employers can just hire the 95% efficient employee at 94% of the pay, but employers don’t behave that way. Pay is only negotiated after the hiring choice is made, barring extreme circumstances. And the employer probably has a fixed pay budget, in which case they’d want to hire the most efficient employee that fits within that budget; hiring a less efficient one for less pay won’t work.)
There is not some set number of jobs, nor some set job with set responsibilities in most cases.
If there are significantly more applicants than jobs, in some particular category, and if we really can define a subset of the applicants as universally inferior for jobs within that category, shouldn’t the objective be to quickly identify that subset and tell them “these aren’t the jobs you’re looking for”? That way, they can most readily start looking for whatever sort of job they are good at.
If there are people who can’t find jobs in any category, even as the economy expands due to the increased efficiency of putting the right people in the right jobs, then you’re effectively dealing with the same problem we already have to deal with re e.g. disabled people. I don’t think the answer to that one is to rotate everyone through a process that leaves even the top people unemployed 5+% of the time, and at least 5+% of the jobs at any given time filled by people who are categorically inferior, in pursuit of some misguided brand of “fairness”. In part because the inefficiencies associated with that will mean that it won’t stay at 5%.
This just isn’t how jobs work. Most employers are willing to compromise on one dimension or another, particularly in a job market like today’s, because there are no Purple Unicorns out there. There’s a LOT of people who aren’t even 95% efficient at their jobs. Hell, I’m like, 75% (Generously), and I’m still running all the books, because there’s no one else available.
Also because SAP is dumb, and I’m sick of hearing about FERTigs and HALBfabrikat.
If employers are perfectly able to assess how well a prospective employee will do his job, there will be some line where people above the line always get hired and people below it never get hired, even though they are not dramatically different from people above it. The 95% doesn’t refer to being at 95% of the maximum possible efficiency; it refers to being at 95% of the efficiency of the people above the line.
Employers being willing to compromise doesn’t affect this. If the line is at 75%, someone whose ability to do the job is 95% of the 75% person will still never get hired. We’re better off if the measure is inherently noisy, so employers aren’t able to perfectly figure out how good the employee is and hire suboptimal employees sometimes.
(Of course, what’s worse is if the employee is perfectly able to compute some measure, but the measure doesn’t accurately depict ability to do the job. Then the employer gets worse employees *and* employees below a certain line never get hired, with the line based on the measure instead of actual ability.)
Employers rejecting employees below a certain threshold makes a good deal of sense, it means that there is a super-high opportunity cost to that employee, and they are probably better matched to something else. The person who can do 30% of my job is basically not doing my job, he’s doing a different job at a lower level, and should get different job responsibilities.
If you actually gave him my job, not only is he at best not doing anything 70% of the time, you’re actually losing out on another employee who can perform better and grow in the role. Plus, he probably is at least trying the other 70%, and is really bad at it, which means he is, on the margin, destructive.
No, it doesn’t. The opportunity cost exists, but there is no reason why it has to be super-high. It can be extremely low. That’s the problem–if the people under the threshold are very close in ability to the people above the threshold, they still never get hired.
@Jiro
The line you seem to consider fixed is variable.
The line where people gets hired varies and if the better people are hired it drops. In some boom conditions the line drops to where the people simply can’t do the job like oil workers during oil booms and construction workers in the area affected by the California fires.
People’s position vs the line is not fixed and they can train so they rise above the line.
People’s position vs the line varies according conditions so the construction worker may be below the line in cold weather construction and above the line in warm weather construction. Accountant B might be technically below accountant A but B has a pet dog, bird and snake so the pet supply company rates B higher.
Unless the line varies all the way down to the bottom of the list, that doesn’t help; there’s some person below the lowest point where the line varies. And there’s no guarantee that that person is drastically different from either the people right above him, or the people some distance up.
The line is high for some positions, like playing for the New York symphony. We only need so many symphony players regardless of how many talented symphony players there are.
At some lower level positions, the line probably fluctuates close to the bottom when all the better employees are hired.
If you are insisting that there are fewer jobs than applicants, then there is going to be an underclass and you might as well hire the best people possible to generate the most income to be taxed to pay welfare as oppose to hiring less qualified people and paying slightly less welfare.
Anyway, this whole discussion stared because people were talking about how to hire better and employers are far from being able to perfectly able to assess how well a prospective employee will do his job. If they had that ability that would probably increase the number of jobs. An entrepreneur might have a good idea that works if the right 5 people were hired but fails if one of them doesn’t work out. Having a 20% chance for each hire to fail makes starting the new business a bad bet, perfect ability to assess a prospective employee allows the business to succeed.
Most people will be delighted to give your resume to their recruiters, because they get a bonus if you get hired.
Most people will find it faintly irritating if you offer to give their resume to your recruiters, because if they wanted to go through job interviews and changing jobs, they would’ve just asked you for that.
Most recruiters will ask: “how many years have you worked with this candidate?” and if you say “zero years but they’re a friend”, the recruiter knows how much your referral is worth and will prioritize accordingly.
The State of Michigan would like to register its deep disappointment that you used Florida to illustrate “Openinsula”.
He just needs to make the next one “Openinsulas” to make up for it – Michigan is not the state of a single peninsula after all!
Yes, but Michigan is the state whose motto is “Si quaeris peninsulam amoenam circumspice”, while Florida’s is “Hold my beer!”
(Okay, technically Florida’s is “In God we trust”, but, really, isn’t that just a higher-class version of “Hold my beer!”?)
“In God We Trust” > “Carpe Diem” > “YOLO” > “Hold My Beer”?
Yes, but only California contains a Yolo County.
TIL Peninsula State Park is in Wisconsin.
Just ignore the images that Scott posts and use the ones from “https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/26/ot109-opulent-thread/#comment-662636” instead then.
When Scott gets around to using “Opanhandle” it’s going to be a bench-clearing brawl.
I have this loose theory about certain kinds of relationships, where people need each other, but also don’t fully have the same goals for the relationship.
This creates an interesting dynamic where groups of people both intensely desire and resent each other. The group pairs I mostly think of are Men/Women, Employers/Workers, and Landlords/Tenants.
The dynamics in each group pair is well known, but what interests me is that all three look similar! Maybe there is a unified theory of push/pull DesiResentment to be made here? More likely, it already exists under a better name?
Also: What are some more examples of this dynamic?
Extra credit: In what ways am I wrong to think this is even a thing?
Game theory is all about that, I think – need to “play” together for some reason, but goals don’t align perfectly. Are you asking from a psychological perspective?
In what way?
Hegel got into it a couple hundred years ago.
Men/Women seems like an odd inclusion, because it doesn’t define a relationship.
It’s not exactly the same, but principal-agent problems are a class of situations where two actors’ incentives are partially but not totally aligned. You might read up on those.
I think Men/Women is going to be the odd one out. The others are economic relationships with explicitly different goals. My landlord wants my money. If they could get that money without giving me an apartment, they would. I want a place to live, if I could get that without giving them money, I would. This is the same with employer/employee. I want money from my employer. My employer wants labor from me.
There is no clear demarcation with Men/Women. Even if Men and Women want different things, they don’t view each each other as means to an end in the same way. Men may care more about sex and less raising children on average. However, many men still want children and want to be involved in their lives.
I disagree a lot about Employers/Workers. Both sides have a strong common interest in the company being successful, but there is conflict in how to split the fruits of success. This is clearer in small companies. In large ones, an individual employee’s contribution to the success of the company becomes negligible.
For Landlords/Tenants I’ll agree it’s simpler and more adversarial. Yet, both parties really need each other. Over the years, I’ve heard a lot of stories from both landlords and tenants, both horrific and great stories. And it just strikes me that those stories feel so much like dating stories!
Again, when the landlord is a big corporation rather than an individual, it’s probably different.
People brought up variations on the infamous self-driving car trolley problem in the comments on the recent “Update To […] Animal Value And Neuron Number” post. I’ve most often heard it posed as some variation on, “A self-driving car must decide whether to swerve onto the sidewalk to avoid a collision with an unexpected obstacle (e.g. a crashed semi) ahead. If the car stays on the road, it will hit the obstacle, likely causing severe injury or death to the passenger. However, if it swerves onto the sidewalk, it will likely hit and severely injure or kill a pedestrian. Should it swerve onto the sidewalk or stay on the road?”
This is often followed by variations like “what if the pedestrian is an elderly woman”, “what if there are 4 passengers in the car”, “what if the AI predicts a 70% chance of killing its passengers but a 90% chance of killing the pedestrian”, etc, etc. This is always framed as a Serious Problem because self-driving cars are Actually Being Developed Today. However, virtually all of the scenarios (including the most basic) seem to me like they should never occur in the first place, let alone require special “moral logic” to be coded in any way.
My impression is that if a car is going fast enough that it can’t safely respond to an obstacle ahead by braking, then there’s no conceivable way that swerving onto the sidewalk could be safer for anyone involved. Best case, you plow into a telephone pole instead of a semi. Another example I found in the first article from Google was:
to which my answer is, maybe it should slow down before it gets near the damn crosswalk in the first place.
Of course, it’s possible that pop sci/tech writers are just awful, and there are actual moral issues here (beside “get these things on the road as soon as possible, human drivers kill SO MANY PEOPLE”) which get simplified down to whatever makes the most eye-catching cartoon illustration. So I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who works on autonomous vehicle AI or adjacent fields, or has just looked further into this than me: To what extent are “trolley problems” like the ones above and in so many news articles an actual issue when working on driving AI? (In programming, not in press conferences.)
The thing that bugs me about the hype around that scenario is how incredibly irrelevant it is. How many fatal car accidents per year involve a choice between the life of the occupant and someone else’s life? The articles are written like this is something every driver faces on a weekly basis.
Every driver doesn’t, but every self-driving car model probably would. Except as toastengineer notes (I think it’s Astro Teller he’s paraphrasing), current self-driving cars aren’t even operating at that level.
Why would you imagine this, when the obvious solution to the self-driving car problem is “decelerate to a stop before you have to collide with anything; do not ever accelerate to a speed where you cannot predict a reliably collision-free path?” Which path, as noted below, will almost always mean staying in the same lane because you(r programmer) is far less likely to be sued into oblivion if you stay in your lane.
Self-driving cars will still do things like run down and kill pedestrians, but they will do so because they are too stupid to recognize that a thing is a pedestrian that they ought to even consider not colliding with and so will not even try to slow down.
I don’t think that’s quite the issue in the case of Elaine Herzberg. From the linked Wikipedia article:
Sounds to me like it recognized an obstacle, but due to some truly idiotic programming, neither alerted the human operator (because it wasn’t designed to [?]) nor stopped itself (because stopping for unexpected pedestrians would induce “erratic behavior” [???]). So it seems the programmed strategy for “imminent collision with pedestrian” is “think about how nice braking would be right now”.
I certainly hope this harebrained error was exclusive to those particular cars and has since been remedied.
I don’t know squat about driver-less car programming so the following might be way off, but that accident sounds like a really basic error in design. A few days ago a ball bounced into the road in front of me and I immediately slowed down, now logically you can say that it is smart to slow down because a ball = probably kids = maybe kids chase after the ball in the street, but realistically my brain was just running ‘uncertain, slow down as first response’. I’m pretty sure that I have slowed down for a gust of wind blowing a swirl of leaves in the road multiple times in my life when it caught my eye in a certain way. I don’t know how the default of ‘see x, slow down as first response’ isn’t natural unless you just have to much noise in the world and the sensors can’t filter enough out.
I don’t remember who I’m paraphrasing, but to paraphrase a very upset self-driving car developer on Twitter I read years ago: “The car doesn’t know any of this. It will brake, and stay in its lane. It it a machine, it can’t see, it does not think, all it knows about the world comes from a laser rangefinder that can’t tell a person from a bollard, the programmers do not want to decide the relative worth of people. They will program it to do what the law expects and requires from it, which is to brake, and to stay. in. its. lane.“
I seen have similar responses from others, but this is unacceptable and not what the law expects or requires. The premise is that the car will always brake and stay in its lane, which implies it will do so even if it could safely swerve. The first time a self-driving car kills a pedestrian it could have avoided by swerving, self-driving cars are getting banned. It is no defence for a human driver who hits a pedestrian to say that he was in his lane, and it won’t be a defence for a machine either. If self-driving cars are happening at all, they simply must be able to perform emergency manoeuvres when required to avoid injury.
I’d be surprised if any of that is true
“I was in my lane, had the right of way, and was traveling a safe and legal speed when a pedestrian stepped in front of me without sufficient time for me to stop” is a perfectly valid legal defense against hitting a pedestrian. You have no legal requirement to make heroic efforts to avoid people who aren’t supposed to be there, and you definitely aren’t required to cause a different accident to avoid the one right in front of you.
Sure, if there’s an open, legal lane, a car can be programmed to swerve if it can safely do so. But hopping onto a sidewalk, let alone swerving into another object, is not something either human or AI drivers are, or should be, expected to do.
That’s not even a legal defense against entering the crosswalk without hitting the pedestrian, as jurisdictions who run stings where they have cops step into the intersection when cars have just about reached it demonstrate. (some of them do it at Christmas time with cops dressed as Santa. Ho Ho Ho, here’s a $250 fine plus $1500 “dangerous driver” surcharge plus an extra $500/year in insurance)
That’s because in that scenario (a crosswalk) the pedestrian technically has the legal right of way, and the cops are abusing the spirit of the law to make up some revenue. Do you have any evidence of how often this actually happens when the driver wasn’t doing something otherwise naughty (not paying attention, driving too fast approaching a crosswalk, etc)? I have never seen or heard of this.
In any case Santa is still going to cite you if you swerve out of the lane onto the sidewalk or ram a parked car or do any of the other alternatives to “brake and stay in your lane” that have been suggested, so I don’t think this really changes the argument much.
There are two very different possibilities here:
“I was in my lane, had the right of way, and was traveling a safe and legal speed when a pedestrian stepped in front of me into a crosswalk without sufficient time for me to stop”
in which case you were not traveling a safe and legal speed, since when approaching a crosswalk you should be able to stop for pedestrians.
Scenario 2:
“I was in my lane, had the right of way, and was traveling a safe and legal speed when a pedestrian stepped in front of me in the middle of the road without sufficient time for me to stop”
In this case, the pedestrian has violated the traffic laws by jaywalking, and (IANAL) you are probably not legally responsible for hitting them if you weren’t driving recklessly.
No, this is just cop logic. I could be driving at walking speed, and a pedestrian (who had been standing near a crosswalk for as long as I’ve been able to see him) could jump into it just as my tire reached the line.
I think there might be a difference between what you’re legally required to do (i.e., what a cop or judge will give/uphold a citation for, or can be upheld in a criminal court) and what you are liable for (what a jury can be convinced to give a victim or their next-of-kin a big pile of money for).
Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m not sure that just because a court would find that you didn’t violate any criminal or traffic laws doesn’t mean that a civil court is prevented from finding you civilly liable. And, right, wrong, or indifferent* a deep-pocketed car company is much more likely to get nailed for a huge judgement because they’re expected to be staffed by engineers and experts who should have accounted for more situations (and it’s a nice thing to give a grieving family a bunch of “free” money), whereas they’re less likely to find an individual driver responsible to the same degree.
I’ve actually had this same question regarding some of the arguments going on right now regarding barricade devices for classrooms intended for use. Model codes (written by national non-profits, which do have construction industry reps on the committees) forbid them, based on two considerations: 1) they generally violate the rules for egress that require one operation to unlatch a door and no special knowledge, and are therefore a danger if the building is on fire; and 2) they can’t be unlatched by authorized responders, so the barricade device can be used by people looking to keep others out while they assault other students (or even the teacher). They can also be used by a mass shooter to keep the cops out and victims in while he executes more people at his leisure.
The model code organizations maintain that fire can (and has!) caused far more casualties than even the worst mass-shooter incident, and that the barricades being used for nefarious purposes by classroom occupants is far more likely than a mass shooting, as tragic and visually-compelling as those may be. They have special classroom locksets that allow egress with one motion, allow the door to be locked from the inside by the teacher (or, in the fancier setups, electronically from a central location), and can be opened from the outside with a small number of keys or fobs in case the cops need to get in. The problem is that these typically run $500 or more per opening, compared to the ~$100 for a typical barricade, or less if you’re making them in shop class.
Some states have debated overriding the model codes and permitting these devices (I don’t know what the current status or outcome of these debates). If that’s allowed, then neither the fire marshal nor building inspector would be able to deny their use. What’s not clear to me is if the school could still be sued for gobs of money, because even though these devices are “legal” in their state, the industry consensus is that they’re dangerous. Given the bias towards technocracy overriding democracy I could easily see the latter happening, but I don’t know the real chances of that.
* I think it’s firmly in the “wrong” bucket, but we’re discussing “is” not “ought” here.
If cops are playing those kinds of games, I want to be in a car with cameras everywhere.
@Catcube:
I might be out of the loop here, but what exactly is the reason for having a classroom barricade in the first place, that a state government would want to pass laws permitting them? Are they designed for school shooter situations?
@Procrastinating Prepper
Sorry, I guess I jumped past the important “tell people what the hell you’re talking about” part of the post. Yes, they’re for active shooter situations. One example would be a cut up firehose (excessed from a fire station) that can be slipped over the closer arm. There are as many designs as people who think they can make a buck selling them, though.
Hitting the brakes is often the stupid thing bad drivers do. But it is also the minimally acceptable thing that lots of drivers do and probably always get away with if they could show they were driving safely prior to the accident.
I think computer-driven cars can and should do better. Moloch may stop that, and while that sucks, the number of lives that could have been saved each year are probably not that many.
As a programmer with moderate interest in computer vision, having the car recognize the obstacle as a human is quite an engineering feat, nevermind solving trolley problems and factoring in the human’s characteristics.
The actual behavior I’d expect would be braking, keeping in lane, and MAYBE swerving in case no obstacles in the swerve path were registered. The latter part might still be disabled for liability reasons, even if technically feasible.
Sharks can’t even recognize surfboards from seals. Can cameras or lasers?
https://xkcd.com/1958/
Most people simply aren’t suicidally malicious so these scenarios aren’t going to happen pretty much ever. I think philosophers keep talking about them to force people to address the Trolley Problem.
Oh for fuck’s sake, not this shit again. The question is about accidents. People getting hit by cars by accident is, in fact, something that happens.
Calm down, man. There was a discussion about people intentionally stepping out in front of cars without time to stop and how that would screw over self-driving cars.
I wanted to point out that people could do that now
What that comic strip forgets or ignores is that most people aren’t murderers but some people are fucking idiots who would think it absolutely hilarious to paint fake lines on the road or drop a cardboard cutout in order to make a self-driving car swerve and crash.
You think a bunch of young idiots wouldn’t make a game of “who can get the most swerves, extra points for a crash”?
Kids dropping stones from overbridges is already a thing. As well as placing signs on the road to stop the cars so they can throw the stones. It’s even an international fad. And people get killed.
It still holds that most people aren’t murderers (or deadly idiots). And that changing the drivers from humans to AIs doesn’t really make anything worse, seeing is AI-confounding techniques are also human-confounding.
I do think there’s an important difference in likely response. If someone did that today, drivers are likely to slow down or stop, think for a little bit, then decide that there’s something obviously wrong with the fake markings and ignore them. This limits their entertainment value to malicious actors. Autonomous cars can’t do that, and so are probably a lot more satisfying to mess with.
Although now that I think about it, the bigger problem might be existing roads that are poorly marked, and that require drivers to move in ways that are technically violations of the rules. Things like solid white lines (US for “traffic going the same way, do not cross”) that start way too early. They’ll probably get fixed fairly quickly, but I expect that early autonomous cars will have low-speed manual command modes for dealing with such things.
changing the drivers from humans to AIs doesn’t really make anything worse, seeing is AI-confounding techniques are also human-confounding
We live in a world where swatting is a thing. If you’re trying to convince me that there is not at least one stupid young man out there who, in response to the first company having self-driving cars on the mass market boasting their vehicles are absolutely the last word in safety and can handle any and all road conditions, would go “So this fancy new self-driving AI is foolproof, oh yeah? Watch me make it do what I want!” and put the resulting video up on Youtube or whatever social media is the fad of the moment to brag about it, with resulting copycats trying for bigger and better hoaxes until they do cause a fatal crash, this just won’t happen, sorry I’m not so sanguine.
@Deiseach
Oh sure, there’ll be some idiots, and they should be thrown in prison if they’re stupid enough to brag online about intentionally causing accidents. But if autonomous vehicles actually progress to the point where they get in, say, half as many accidents as a human driver, the pranksters will be a high-profile rounding error.
I have three answers to the self-driving car trolley problem that take most people by surprise.
These answers may be mutually exclusive at points. They are just three lines of thought for how to approach the problem, they are not prioritized in any particular order. If I was designing self-driving cars, I would attempt to satisfy all three where possible and I am not sure how I would address the occasion where these three come into conflict. That said.
First solution to consider: prioritize the lives of the inhabitants, subject to the same constraints currently facing human drivers. When I get into a self-driving car, I should be confident that there are NO situations whatsoever in which the car will make a conscious decision to throw my life away, regardless of what it’s trading off against. Even if this isn’t utilitarian optimal from an objective social planner point of view. Because when I buy a tool for me to use, I don’t buy it to increase global utility. Most people do most of the things they do to increase their own personal utility, not to increase global utility. The tools I buy, the things I invest in, should have something of a duty towards me, even at the expense of other people. Of course, within the bounds of the law. The law does not allow me to mow down pedestrians in order to get somewhere slightly faster, and nor should self driving cars make similar decisions. But, in the event of a catastrophe, where no matter what, somebody is getting hurt, the car should try to ensure it’s not the occupants.
(Note: I don’t believe the concept of global utility is well-defined enough for there to be a total ordering over potential outcomes)
Second solution to consider: The car should attempt to maintain the principle of least surprise, and as much as possible it should try to behave in a predictable fashion. Consider a situation in which, for example, there are five pedestrians in the roadway and the car cannot stop in time, but the car can swerve into the sidewalk and hit only one person instead. The car should not swerve. Why? Because the tradeoff isn’t just five lives vs one life. There is another element here. Right now, when people walk down the street, they can be broadly confident that cars and people will obey the rules of the road. If I’m walking on the sidewalk, cars might zoom by me at 50mph but I am not afraid, because I know that the road is for cars and the sidewalk is for people. But if we normalize a regime in which cars might randomly swerve into the sidewalk and hit pedestrians, if the cars think this is the optimal thing to do, suddenly it is not so safe for me to walk on sidewalks. In fact, I’d assert that the net utility lost to society from the increase in uncertainty is worse than the positive increase in utility from saving the occasional life. (Or, I would, but I don’t believe that global utility is well defined blah blah blah)
More generally: we want people and things in public to behave in consistent, well defined, understandable, and predictable ways, because that helps us all go about our day. If the car is programmed to make all these utility calculations constantly and then take what it thinks is the optimal course of action, I can’t predict that. I, as a pedestrian, or another motorist, or whatever, have no idea what the car sees, what it thinks, and what it plans to do. This will put a significant burden on me when I’m out in public in a place where I might interact with these cars. On the other hand, if the cars are ‘well-behaved’, even in crises, then I can rely on certain assumptions about those cars and act appropriately. I can be confident that I can walk down the sidewalk safely. I can be confident that when I cross the street when the traffic is stopped, it will stay stopped. I can also be confident that if I violate these rules, then I am putting myself in significantly more danger. This helps me understand what the dangerous situations are, and avoid them.
Third solution to consider, and probably the most important one when I think about it: the car should do nothing. Just, nothing. The car should not even have a strong enough understanding of these problems to coherently choose a course of action.
Why? Well, two reasons. The first, the lesser reason, is that in almost every scenario I can think of, doing this also achieves my second solution. But the main reason is because complexity is a risk all on its own.
If I program a car to go straight on roads, at the speed limit, and to stop at red lights, this is a very simple system. It is exceedingly unlikely that it will malfunction. Of course, “go straight on roads, at the speed limit” is a bad thing to do when there’s children in the middle of the road, so this level of simplicity is too extreme and we should strive for more sophistication
On the extreme other end of the spectrum: Say the car is in some obscure situation where it has to either hit someone or swerve and hit another person. Say the car is trying to reason through some super complex utilitarian calculation. Maybe one guy is wealthier than the other guy and the car wants to optimize total societal wealth. But maybe the rich guy is wearing thrift store jeans and the poor guy has a gold necklace, so the car runs facial recognition and cross-references the faces against last year’s tax returns. But the poor man just had a child while the rich guy is childless, and so killing the poor man will ruin more than just one life. And so on and so on and so on. The more complicated of a reasoning process the car is going through, the more complexity there is in building it. That complexity introduces risk, risk that things will break and go wrong. It makes the system harder to understand, harder to test, harder to debug, harder to repair. It takes more resources to build such a complex system. Maybe the car company had to sink some absurd amount of money, like $50B, into this decision engine, when $50B invested in eg materials science would have resulted in better brakes that would allow the car to stop in time.
Maybe the more globally optimal thing is for the car not to do any kind of optimizing like this. Maybe the car should just be programmed to follow the existing rules of the road, behave in as predictable a fashion as possible, and try to avoid the more common dangerous scenarios (eg person in road, look farther ahead and slow down earlier). Perhaps that’s the best thing to do
It’s more important to act predictably (that is, braking and staying in your lane) so that everyone else involved can take correct emergency action.
My favorite variant is this: “A journalist can get ten thousand clicks by writing an article about a situation that is incredibly unlikely to happen. By highlighting this situation, the journalist makes people think of self-driving cars as killers, which postpones the date at which we all switch to them. Every year we postpone this date kills thirty thousand people in the US alone. How many deaths should the journalist be willing to cause in order to get clicks?”
More interesting than the AI trolley problem to me is the basic ‘should the cops have a button that tells an AI car to stop’, problem.
Followup question: was Tom Cruise the hero or the villain in Minority Report
In the last post I made a somewhat flippant comment on democracy, my skepticism of it, and how I observed that expanding voting rights seemed to me to usually result in worse outcomes.
People asked for proof, and I had none because it was simply based on my observation the the US 1780-Present.
Indeed there is no real scholarship on this that I could find, probably because no one can really define what “good government” is objectively. So this is a mini-retraction with some sources I enjoyed when pursuing the proof.
The best thing I’ve found is some studies that recite that expanded voting (while usually desirable by the author) is dangerous because the newer voters are often less intelligent. Here are a few:
1. If Democracies Need Informed Voters
2. Against Democracy
3. Voter ignorance
The problem is that the argument against expanding the possible amount of voters is the same every single time that someone is skeptical of it, whether it was women’s suffrage or freeing the slaves. [insert disenfranchised demographic here] is too impressionable, too simple-minded, too rash, too likely to vote in only their own self interest. But like all generalizations, that’s not true of everyone. Every expansion of suffrage increase the proportion of politically literate, intelligent voters, because the ingredients that make someone a good citizen aren’t held by any one race, gender, or ideology. Are there people who, when choosing who to elect, make the objectively wrong decision? Probably. But if you make your filter too fine, and place it in the way of individual citizens, you will eventually catch someone who had every right to vote. Or worse – you might disproportionately empower a malefactor.
This is why we don’t place the filter on the citizen level. We place the filter on the government level, by putting in a system of checks and balances, that, in an ideal world, would counteract an elected official overreaching their bounds. This doesn’t always work in practice. But that doesn’t mean the answer is reverting to the ways of yesteryear and introducing some kind of voting filter, because you’re addressing the problem from the wrong end. If the problem is bed people in power abusing their authority you shouldn’t give them another authority to abuse.
I might be barking up the wrong tree here, given the whole “against democracy” thing. If the disconnect between our two perspectives is that you don’t see why the opinions of the masses matter at all, we’re at an impasse. I don’t really want to spend all night searching for select quotes from The Republic, but if you have some free time, I suggest you read through it. Maybe the Federalist Papers as well. If you ever think the way the word works is nonsensical, remember that 90% of the time (not an accurate figure), things are the way they are for a reason. The world is overwhelmingly dominated by countries that use universal-suffrage democracy in one form or another, when merely 300 years ago that was unthinkable. That paradigm didn’t come into being by accident.
The bigger problem is that the opinion of a mass is undefined. You can easily get a group to arrive at any decision you want if you control the method by which the decision is made. E.g. Arrow’s impossibility theorem
But obviously we still believe that some people shouldn’t vote. Children. Felons. Dead people. People from other countries.
There are philosophically consistent stances in support of extending the right to vote to any of those groups.
Sure, but in most cases the principle is “It will get my side more votes”.
Dead people aren’t people; certain adjectives, such as “dead”, imply that the following noun no longer describes a class that includes the subject (“a triangle is a truncated square” doesn’t mean that a triangle is a square).
Tell that to several counties in Illinois and other states.
On the other hand you could make a case that I shouldn’t lose my vote in November “just because” I got hit by a bus in October, if I’m some degree of certain enough about my vote. After all, I’m allowed to completely specify the dispensation of all of my property, so it’s not 100% obvious that my vote isn’t something that I could control after my death, rather than it just disappearing.
Is George Washington a person? If not, what is he?
@Don P.
Well, there’s the argument that your moral claim to participation in a democracy expires with you.
@Paul
A corpse.
The idea of people pre-registering their votes in case they die before they can vote is intriguing. I would say it isn’t obviously reasonable *or* unreasonable. It would presumably only add a rather small number of votes, though I suppose a sufficiently large disaster could make a difference.
There would be security problems.
How much in advance would you want people to be allowed to pre-register their votes?
One of my worldviews is that this is mostly just puffer. A dictatorship is usually also an expression of the will of the people. Sometimes the dictatorship strays from the people more than the American system or direct democracy would, but also sometimes it aligns even more than those systems would. But in the end Demos is destiny and the people pick their dictator.
There’s no historical basis for that claim.
Most dictators currently enjoy significant popular support. Putin in Russia, Xi Jinping in China, Chavez/Maduro until their terrible government collapsed, Hamas in Gaza, Mullahs in Iran. Those that don’t have much support face domestic rebellions like Assad does. This trend goes back to at least Roman times.
The last time the Chinese started a democracy movement, the government massacred them. Maduro arrested his political opponents and rigged elections. Hamas murders anyone who speaks out against, and there are secret police in Iran who beat and disappear dissidents. Any claim of “popular support” ignores the “or else” that is a daily reality in these societies.
You are assuming that restriction of suffrage has to be by race, gender or ideology.
The alternative is some restriction that selects for being a good voter. I don’t know of any that I am confident works, but I can think of a number that could be argued to work.
1. In Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, the requirement for voting is that you have volunteered to do something that benefits the society at serious risk to yourself. The main example is volunteering for the army, but it’s made clear that there are other ways of qualifying. In the military case, you get to vote only after your term of service is over.
The argument is that you want someone who gives considerable weight to the welfare of the society over his own welfare, and this rule selects for such.
2. A property franchise–to vote you have to own a certain amount of land.
This rule would be most defensible in a society where geographic mobility was easy. If you vote for things that make the society work less well, you can always avoid the cost by moving. But your land can’t move, so if the society starts working less well either you remain on your land and suffer the consequences or you sell the land at a loss and leave.
3. A poll tax, perhaps defined as one percent of your income. The argument here is that people who care about an election are more likely to have looked carefully at the candidates and issues.
4. A literacy requirement. Being able to read gives you access to more information relevant to political choices. It makes somewhat less sense now, since we have more convenient ways of conveying information without literacy than in the past.
I expect other people could offer other candidates for such a rule.
Was that really the argument in Starship Troopers? As I recall, there was a claim that it was a way preventing revolution because all the people who were capable of revolution were co-opted into the system.
There was also a claim of historical accident– the government was started by veterans after a collapse, and they only trusted other veterans.
I have a notion that Heinlein started with the story he wanted to tell, then designed governments which suited the story. I don’t have evidence for this, it just seems plausible to me.
I believe it was made pretty explicit.
I believe Johnny made that argument and was told he was wrong.
It looks to me as if the argument that was rejected as wrong was that veterans were smarter than civilians. (Offered by another cadet rather than Johnny.)
The H&MP instructor in OCS first offers the “it works satisfactorily” pragmatic justification, and then offers the social responsibility theoretical one. “Since sovereign franchise is the ultimate in human authority, we insure that all who wield it accept the ultimate in social responsibility — we require each person who wishes to exert controlover the state to wager his own life — and lose it, if need be — to save the life of the state.”
(The same segment also has the bit about how potential revolutionaries are coopted by the system, offered by yet another cadet.)
But I agree that Heinlein tended to use government forms and political philosophy as thought experiments and plot drivers, and that he didn’t have to believe in a system himself in order for one of his Wise Old Man characters to confidently make the case for it. ST is probably one of his more didactic works given the circumstances under which it was written, but I think that’s more reflected in the paean to the infantry and to military service than in the specifics of how the Federation is governed.
The students make various suggestions of personal virtues selected or created by the military that the teacher rejects. Then he gives David’s answer:
(LHN, I don’t think he makes any concession to uncertainty. “No guessing, please; this is exact science…Now continued success is never a matter of chance. Bear in mind that this is science, not wishful thinking; the universe is what it is, not what we want it to be.”)
But also:
And does the book say it works?
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say by this, but I know this can’t be true. Expanding suffrage increasing the PROPORTION of good citizens means that there must be a higher proportion in each newly enfranchised demographic than in the previous, more elite citizenry as a whole. Felons are unlikely to be better citizens than the average (by the very nature of their selection process), likewise with children to a lesser extent. You can’t just cherrypick the expansions of the electorate that you want (race/gender/ideology) and then stop at age, criminality and mental health.
Besides, the system you advocate would be very unusual if applied to any other system, seeing as it precludes an integral right to political representation, a pretty absurd belief on balance. Why should Aristotle/Locke/Newton’s vote be equal to the chain-smoking, tax-evading, drink-driving, wife-abusing mass murderer of the hypothetical? People agree that one knows more about government, that a citizenry composed of one would be better than the other. If I had to choose between a government run by Moderate Good or Severe Evil, it’d be pretty obvious which one I’d pick.
No, this is the integral problem with expanding the electorate. Once you let people vote, you can’t kick them back out again without dramatic changes. Can you not imagine a society where incredulous people are swayed by charisma and propaganda and elect someone to solve all the problems, who ends up making things a lot worse? Expanding the electorate empowers malefactors as well.
As I see it, you argue that the opinions of the masses are important in and of themselves, not as a route to stability or any other end. Why? You need the support of the people to make things happen, to avoid a revolt, but why else should they be tolerated? If the people want lower taxes, higher social spending and lower deficits, (which they always do) what is to be done? If the people want war with scary foreigners, should we rev up the tanks? If they want peace, if they want to ignore the very scary foreigners who are making rapid gains on multiple continents, should we leave our war industry idle.
There are many situations where the people are wrong and shouldn’t be listened to.
As for your last point, the data presents a different story. https://ourworldindata.org/democracy
I don’t think you can focus solely on the proportion of good voters (for whatever definition of “good” you choose) while ignoring the absolute number. Taken to extremes, that suggests that the best democracy would have exactly one voter who’s known to be good (say, the most intelligent voter in the country). That gives you an electorate where 100% of the voters are literate, intelligent, and good citizens. You can’t do any better than that! In fact, adding more people to the electorate would be guaranteed to make things worse!
…Or maybe it matters that a democracy represents people even when they aren’t the best citizens they can be.
I’ve been warming to democracy in my personal beliefs. I’m still not for it, but here’s something I’ve been thinking about.
Democracy is not about making laws. Most arguments about democracy are about the laws it produces. Sometimes democracy is good because it makes better laws and foreign policy. I find these arguments questionable. Sometimes being democratic makes the decisions morally better than identical decisions arrived at by non-democracies. I find these arguments reprehensible.
One of the best arguments for democracy is an argument almost no one makes. Democracy is not about making laws. Lots of people want societal change. Many changes, even popular ones, are bad or should not be forced by governments. In a democracy, someone who wants change is expected to vote, lobby, or even run for office. This doesn’t work, but its controllable. Democracy is about keeping those interested in societal change from causing too much chaos while the same corrupt elites keep on ruling. In a non-democracy they have to have disruptive protests, boycott, disobey laws, or resort to violence. These are very disruptive and unpredictable. In a democracy, someone who wants change is expected to vote, lobby, or even run for office. This is more controllable. It even works sometimes, but any changes forced by the democratic process could be forced by non-democratic means.
If democracy isn’t about laws, expanding the franchise isn’t about getting better laws. The franchise was expanded to stop groups that desire changes (some of them bad) from causing trouble. Minority groups got the vote because their attempts at change were causing problems. After they got the vote, most of this energy was redirected uselessly into the democratic process. This also made the most electable (and thus the least disruptive) reformers popular and marginalized the radical reformers.
Wow. This comment puts all those economics arguments about how “your vote doesn’t really matter that much because ____” in a new light.
People’s votes not mattering isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.
When people’s votes matter there can be some real problems. Brexit is the big recent example.
@Furslid
You ignore the ability of democracy to replace one corrupt elite with a (somewhat) different elite, thereby keeping them somewhat in check.
That only works until the elite finds out how to coordinate into two equally bad groups, and make you vote for one of them otherwise the other one would win (which of course will happen anyway, only a few years later).
Okay, maybe this still improves the situation indirectly, by making the elite more intelligent. The elite groups that can’t win at the game of democracy get replaced by those who can.
The elite have a limited ability to keep out outsiders. They are mainly good at influencing competition by moderates. If they really make a mess of things in the eyes of voters, they will literally or figuratively revolt. The latter can be by voting for radicals out of desperation: communists, Roosevelt, Hitler, Trump, etc.
So part of the game of democracy is that the elite does have to be sufficiently responsive to the actual needs of the people. They can only diverge from the desires of the people to a limited extent*.
* The truly smart elite therefor indoctrinates the people.
FDR didn’t run as a radical. He accused the incumbent of spending too much, not too little.
I was actually referring to Theodore.
More optimistically, democracy enfranchises your citizens both literally and figuratively.
While it’s true than no individual vote matters, a sufficiently large number of votes can have an effect. IMHO, this has two good consequences:
1) It offers the possibility that if you convince enough people that you are right about an issue, you can change policy on that issue.
2) In the best case, if you lose a vote, you need to come to grips with the idea that it’s not just some shadowy rulers who disagree with you, it’s a substantial portion of your fellow citizens. (Yes, you may just convince yourself they’re being fooled by the shadowy rulers, and it may make you hate your fellow citizens instead of finding a way to live with them, but sometimes I’m optimistic.)
The wider the franchise, though, the less a given franchise-holder has in common with his fellows. Bad enough as someone in Gen-X, any preferences which I happen to have in common with my generation is going to be overridden by the much larger Boomer and Millennial generations; start adding high school kids and felons and I’ve got even less in common with the “average” voter.
So you’re saying democracy is the opiate of the masses?
Yes. It limits the nastiness to a largely irrelevant area. Without democracy, there would be a much higher risk of terrorism. People who want change check a box every couple of years and then whine or gloat. They don’t generally blow something up or shoot people.
I think your explanation is more accurate than the typical one. Like you said, without a vote or any way to hope to achieve it, people at the worst are going to engage in violence (which may occasionally be justified, but sucks) and at best are forced to engage in mass economic action like boycotts or nonviolent disruption of various things (which is more often justifiable and sucks less, but still sucks). Voting provides a relatively less harmful channel for political action.
I also agree with Aapje that the possibility of replacing the elite with a new elite peacefully and relatively smoothly (even if the new one is worse) is a big improvement over a lot of other forms of government.
As far as things like policy decisions go or whether or how many people’s preferences are fulfilled politically, democracies look better than the other options so far, but I kind of doubt that is caused by democracy. I think it’s more of a correlation with what places became democracies first.
I basically agree with the above.
Our elected officials don’t have nearly the power that they pretend. The gov is the 99% that doesn’t jump in and out of office every x years, not the puppets that we replace when we get salty.
Because of course these things never happen in democracies. Your thesis seems to be that democracy prevents violence, etc, by offering the people who would otherwise engage in violence a non-violent path to achieving their goals, but you explicitly acknowledge that the non-violent path does not work and that we should not want it to work. Is the plan that the potentially violent agitators for social change will simply never notice that the path you have laid out for them does not work?
No, it still happens. However it happens less when people can vote, and those who do are more marginalized. Before women got the vote, there were some very disruptive protests. These protests were really pushed back. The civil rights movement became a lot less disruptive after voting rights, and the black panthers were pushed to the fringe.
The mechanism is likely that the option of voting drains support. If a population wants change and can’t vote, they will support those who promise change by any means necessary. If they can vote, a large number will support voting for change instead.
Your argument is one that sounds convincing, but I think you’re wrong about it. Extremely wrong. Wrong on the level that I don’t really know where to start going about my post here.
Democracy had the US ban any and all alcohol because people lobbied for it – something you call ineffectual. The modern welfare state, such as it is, was built up in the 19th and 20th centuries because people were a wee bit scared of the left gaining votes. The shoe is on the other foot nowadays, and centrist career politicians scramble to pretend they care about immigration because they hate losing votes. Democracy currently has an island off the coast of Europe rending itself apart, all because people decided to stick it to the man, whether you like the outcome or not – and their leaders are carrying that decision through, bitter as though they are.
People’s votes matter all the time; they get their way all the time, and those who don’t are able to keep trying to get their way without being shot or cut down. That ‘any changes by the democratic process could be forced by non-democratic means’ is a ridiculous argument; any political system can arrive at any given conclusion. You don’t need to follow Margaret Mead around in thinking that only small groups of committed citizens can change the world, but they’ve done a hell of a lot of changing despite it, and I can’t really conceive of the cynical point of view that all of it is somehow a sham.
I agree with this evaluation. Voters get their way with or without the vote. They also get violent with or without (Iraq was less violent under dictator Saddam Hussein). The problem is a correlation/causation issue. Lots of rich, smart, post enlightenment countries use democracy, and viola they also don’t have a huge ISIS problem. But if Syrians lived in England, there would still be ISIS in England.
Yeah. Democracy doesn’t work without a middle class; it’s no coincidence that it pops up when and where it does, or even that it begins to show flaws when and where it does.
Brexit was not democracy done right or usual. Britain normally elects representatives, who don’t make changes like this. They gave the people an actual vote that mattered. It was clear that they wanted the referendum to fail, but it didn’t.
It’s shaping up to be a disaster. The best course of action for England (in my non-English opinion) would be to say “We can’t get a good deal, the EU is working out reasonably well, we don’t even know what deal we want, let’s stay.” However they can’t do that without appearing non-democratic. If Brexit is the type of mess that letting people have meaningful votes causes, it’s a good thing that functioning democratic governments don’t give very many.
As for welfare states. Those aren’t a uniquely democratic phenomenon. The first modern welfare was set up in Prussia under Bismark. The US welfare state took off under FDR, and it was at least as much an economic stimulus as an attempt to appease the radical socialists.
I think that the main issue with Brexit is that everyone forgot about Northern Ireland until after the referendum.
You can’t have an independent Britain without a border between Britain and the rest of the EU. However, you can’t have a border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, because the open border is part of the peace deal. You can’t leave Northern Ireland in the EU without making Northern Ireland independent (or merging it with Ireland), which also violates the peace deal and is otherwise unacceptable.
So in hindsight, the referendum was like offering to make a deal with one party to put a building on part of your land, while you have a right of way agreement with another party. You can’t both leave the right of way intact and have the building, so either the right of way agreement needs to be renegotiated or you have to forgo the building. You can’t have both.
So from my perspective, the Brexit problems are not an issue with direct democracy, but instead, that voters were given a choice that they couldn’t actually have. The people holding the referendum should either have made implementing a Brexit contingent on a successful renegotiation of the Good Friday Agreement, or should have renegotiated that first.
A similar conflict of commitments could have happened without direct democracy. For example, the British government could have made a law allowing fishermen to fish the entire British waters and also a law banning fishermen from the vicinity of sea-based wind turbines.
There’s the tidbit where many Scots voted not to become independent from the UK because they didn’t think the UK would leave the EU, too.
It’s shaping up to be a disaster because most of Parliament is stuck on Politician-mode, that is, “How do we do what we want while making it look like the voters got what they voted for?”
I don’t see why not. Declare Northern Ireland a Special Economic Zone. Now there’s no need of a border for goods, and an excuse for Irish Sea customs checks.
(no doubt there are other reasons why this would be Completely Unacceptable for all involved)
It may be Completely Unacceptable for the EU on the grounds that the EU wants Brexit to be a bloody fiasco, pour encourager les autres, and could require that Ireland impose a hard border while claiming that this disruption is All England’s Fault, We Had No Choice. And you’ll almost certainly find some IRA hardliner to insist that even the softest border enforcement is Completely Unacceptable, how the fact that a copper dared ask his sister a few questions on the ferry means that it’s time to start planting bombs again.
Where reasonable Englishmen and Irishmen are concerned, you’re probably right that the border England cares about can probably be enforced in a way that doesn’t impose the border Ireland fears.
My understanding is that a border in the sea is acceptable to the EU and the Republic of Ireland, but is unacceptable to the Unionist party whose support Theresa May needs when she botched her chance by calling for a second election.
@ana53294
I think your understanding is correct. EU is ok with border in the Irish Sea; it is UK that does not want it.
The EU proposal seems to have been a border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, no border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, no border between Ireland and the rest of the EU, and Northern Ireland falling under EU customs rules. No surprise the Unionists don’t like that one.
That’s quite different from what I’m proposing, which is no border enforcement going from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, no border enforced by the UK between Northern Ireland and Ireland, and UK customs rules applying for trade to Northern Ireland other than overland from Ireland. The sea border would be only for going from Northern Ireland to Great Britain; this would likely be fairly soft for people but a hard border for goods.
This leaves no controls on UK goods going into the EU via Ireland… but that’s not the UK’s problem. The EU could demand Ireland enforce a border, and I’m sure they’d get around to it, someday.
@The Nybbler
Are you saying that the deal would be that goods from the UK go to NI without any checks, but goods from NI go to the rest of the UK go through a border?
That sounds unfair and unilateral, the kind of have the cake and eat it too attitude Brexiteers have. Besides, it still wouldn’t be acceptable to the unionists.
There’s no need for controls going from the rest of the UK to Northern Ireland, because under this proposal the rules are laxer in Northern Ireland. In return, Northern Ireland gets the benefit of free trade with Ireland (and via Ireland the rest of the EU) for local Northern Irish consumption.
@The Nybbler
If I understand your proposal correctly, you suggest that Britain should accept border in the Irish Sea and then unilateraly drop its enforcement for (some) goods and people coming from Ireland, while goods and people coming from Britain to Ireland will be subject to border enforcement? That seems totally consistent with a deal that EU offers, but I suspect not with what current British government wants.
@AlezZiegler
The difference is that the previous EU deal left Northern Ireland subject to EU customs (which would have to be enforced by UK officials, which would be a mess), whereas my idea puts it in a special zone of its own, subject to UK customs from all countries except overland from Ireland and from the UK. I don’t think the EU would accept this in a deal, but I would suggest it as part of a no-deal exit. The UK government doesn’t know what it wants anyway.
@The Nybbler
A Special Economic Zone means that Northern Ireland will have to accept many EU rules and regulations, just like the four nations that are part of Schengen, but not part of the EU: Switzerland, Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein. After all, being in Schengen requires being part of the European Economic Area.
So it means that only part of the UK will be fully independent, while Northern Ireland won’t be. I also think that this requires customs between Northern Ireland and Britain. I don’t see how the EU can accept a free inflow of non-compliant people and goods from outside the EU.
It’s probably the best solution given the restrictions, but customs between Northern Ireland and Britain may still blow up the peace deal due to protestant anger and it’s not actually a full UKexit*.
* Note that ‘Brexit’ is technically incorrectly named, because the referendum asked whether the UK should leave the EU, not just Britain.
@The Nybbler
Yeah, I think you are right. That would be essentially hard Brexit with unilateral opening of Irish border by UK on its side.
(I have “s” in my name)
@Aapje
Special economic zones can be set up unilaterally; there’s no need for the EU to agree, and thus no need for any EU regulations to apply in Northern Ireland. There would be customs going from Northern Ireland to Britain; this is the biggest issue, as internal customs are not generally well received, though there are limited things like livestock inspections.
That’s not the UK’s problem. One answer would be to institute customs between Ireland and the rest of the EU, but that’s quite unacceptable to both the EU and Ireland I’m sure. Another would be to unilaterally enforce a land border, but that’s unacceptable to Ireland. I don’t actually see any good solution, but the key point is it’s not the UK’s problem.
@AlesZiegler: Xorry!
You could have a soft border, like the one between the US and Canada.
Speaking of the US, it would be interesting to see the Venn diagram of (1) people who think that Trump’s attempts to enforce the US’ southern border are racist and that people have a right to come and go as they please, and (2) people who think that Brexiteers are culpably endangering the peace process by wanting to leave the EU because obviously a soft border is impossible without total regulatory equivalence between the two sides.
@ The original Mr. X:
Do you think Brexiteers would accept a sufficiently soft border? Rejection of the free movement of persons was a pretty explicit part of the appeal.
Not sure I follow the point of the Venn Diagram comment. We have a couple of people who support (1) here, I think, but (2)’s pretty bad strawman.
@The Nybbler
If Northern Ireland is no longer part of the European Economic Area, it is no longer part of Schengen. Then EU regulations say that Ireland has to close and control the border with Northern Ireland.
You seem to be suggesting a bluff, where the UK tells Ireland and the EU that if they close the border, they are responsible for the consequences.
It would be an interesting play, especially as the EU is known for not adhering to its regulations due to realpolitik. So there is a chance that it would work, at least in the short term.
However, the EU could also bluff the bluffer, by correctly arguing that the Good Friday Agreement set a goal of a united Ireland, with the consent of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland. So they could back a unification referendum and set a deadline, where they close the border if no solution is found. So then they can toss the hot potato back.
@The original Mr. X
In Brexit discussions, “hard border” usually refers to a border without freedom of movement for goods and workers. So something like border with US and Canada will probably be an outcome of no deal Brexit and in a context of Western Europe it is a hard border.
How is that a “bluff”, as opposed to a simple statement of fact?
Independent sovereign nations or federations are allowed to open or close their borders as they chose. If the European Union closes an intra-Irish border that the United Kingdom kept open, then the European Union is responsible for the consequences of the closure and whining “look what you made us do!” won’t change that.
@ John:
Because the UK wants the border more than the EU does. And it’s a bad bluff, because everyone knows this.
Nybbler’s proposal tries to maneuver the EU into enforcing a border in a location inconvenient to the EU, but it accomplishes this by downplaying the amount of enforcement necessary for the UK to fulfill its own goals, i.e. portraying the UK in an unrealistically strong position. Bluffing might be a strong word, but it’s not inappropriate.
The EU calling the bluff would consist of refusing to enforce any but the lightest trade barriers on the I-NI border, and finding ways to ratchet up the pressure on the NI-GB internal border. I’m not familiar enough with the DUP’s position to call the fallout, but I doubt it’s an even game of chicken.
If the EU enforces even light trade barriers on the I-NI border, they’re going to be seen as the border enforcers (and of course the EU has to get Ireland to do this, and the only real leverage they have is threatening to kick Ireland out of Schengen… which gets you an Irish Sea border all around). I don’t see how they could “ratchet up pressure” on the NI-GB internal border.
@ The Nybbler:
Britain and Ireland have been closely linked since before either joined the EU, and I’d hazard a guess that most British people hardly even consider Ireland a foreign country. So I don’t think this would cause a problem unless Ireland became a funnel for illegal immigrants to enter the UK, but this isn’t very likely since once Britain’s outside the EU there’d be no requirement to give EU citizens the same benefits as British citizens, meaning that moving to Britain will be less attractive.
I was just referring to positions I’ve seen from people in general, not to anyone specifically here. Guess I should have made that clearer.
Does it? So far, the pressure for a hard border has come pretty much entirely from the EU side. The cynic in me suggests that this is a deliberate attempt to make Brexit as hard as possible pour discourager les autres.
@ Aajpe:
That wouldn’t be a correct argument, though. The Good Friday Agreement says that, if a majority of the people of Northern Ireland wish to be part of a united Ireland, the British government has to let them, but it doesn’t set up a united Ireland as a long-term goal the British government has to work towards.
If the EU tries meddling in internal British affairs that way, I can’t see it being anything other than a huge PR disaster for the EU. “Do what we say, or we’re closing the borders!” is not generally a good look, and people are more likely to blame the country issuing the demand than the country it’s being issued to.
Ireland is not and never has been part of the Schengen zone. Movement of goods has very little to do with movement of people.
If France says that Ireland should block pedestrians because they might have cheddar in their pockets, it would be crazy for Ireland to say anything but fuck off. The gray zone is a checkpoint for personal cars.
Ireland’s not part of Schengen? Then there’s no problem. The only issue is preventing UK goods from being shipped from Ireland to the rest of the EU (or incorporated in products so shipped) without payment of tariffs, which seems like a feasible thing for Ireland to enforce (though I’m sure there’d be a ton of cheating in practice).
This would leave Ireland in the same state with respect to the EU as Northern Ireland would be with respect to to the UK, which the EU wouldn’t like (because it effectively means one EU country has a free trade agreement with one non-EU country). But they could live with it.
@John Schilling
It’s a bluff because the UK wants an open border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, but makes decisions that would logically lead to a closed border, if the EU adheres to its rules.
The bluff consists of maneuvering the EU in a position where adhering to the rules causes very bad outcomes & optics, to coerce them to change the rules to allow a solution that is very beneficial to the UK.
Imagine a relationship that was explicitly monogamous from the start. One partner who met a person they want to have sex with might stop liking this agreement. They can bluff by stating that they are going to have sex with the third party, but that breaking up with them is going to severely harm the children. A successful bluff then gives the philanderer a benefit without having to do a proper quid-pro-quo alteration to the relationship agreement.
@The original Mr. X
Yes, you are correct about the Good Friday Agreement. Wiki lied to me about what it says. Still, the EU could push for a unification referendum based on the claim that the Good Friday Agreement established broad support for doing that. Furthermore, they can point to the unification of Germany for precedent and argue that unification is fundamentally different from splitting up countries (several EU countries really don’t want a precedent that can be used by regions to fight for independence).
@Douglas Knight
Yeah, incorrectly arguing that they are in Schengen was my mistake. That does increase the room for a non-border solution, although I don’t see how the EU can allow for a lack of customs if Northern Ireland is not in the European Economic Area.
I’m not sure whether “that” here refers to uniting Ireland or just to holding a referendum, but either way it’s wrong: there’s always been a majority in NI for staying part of the UK, and it’s been over twenty years since the Good Friday Agreement and nobody’s been pushing for a referendum.
Northern Ireland is a part of the UK. Hence for Northern Ireland to become part of a united Ireland, it would have to be split up from the UK. The unification of Germany isn’t a precedent, because neither half was part of a bigger country.
As I understand it, the border that the UK(*) wants is the one that makes it so there aren’t bignum Polish laborers living in London without having been invited. That doesn’t require closing the Irish border, or anything else that would violate the spirit of Good Friday. Even making it so that there aren’t bignum Polish laborers in Belfast wouldn’t require closing the Irish border, unless the Brexiteers go full Trumpist and refuse to believe in any sort of immigration control that doesn’t involve walls.
Borders are not limited to Fully Open or Fully Closed, and there is almost certainly room for a solution that would meet the core demands of both Brexit and Good Friday. Satisfying all three of Brexit, Good Friday, and EU demands may be right out, but that’s the EU’s problem.
* Or at least the Brexiteers therein
@ Nybbler:
Targeted enforcement of the NI-I border already exists.
The level of NI-GB border controls you’ve proposed is probably already enough to get rejected by the DUP – they’ve certainly objected to less in the past. It doesn’t take much.
@ Mr. X:
The Irish might not agree, especially when it comes to the English trying to dictate their foreign policy. There have already been talks about the controls necessary for limiting the number of EU nationals entering the UK via Ireland (even with post-Brexit economic assumptions), and Ireland’s not doing all the work for them. The Common Travel Area is a thing, but it’s very pointedly nonbinding.
My stance is that it’s a bad idea to import arguments you don’t respect. The rare exception might be a case where the argument is so important to public discourse and SSC the only sane place to combat it, but that has approximately a 100% chance of being misused for CW.
I might actually be taking a more cynical position here, but my impression has been that the EU is perfectly willing to let hard borders snap back into place, but it’s not necessary for any of their political goals. (And in some cases, is a price willing to pay.) More or less the whole point is that the UK was unsatisfied with the status quo – the EU doesn’t need to go out of its way for a win, it just needs to deny the UK one.
@ John:
While the Brexiteers don’t seem to have gone full Trumpist yet, I definitely think there’s the standard political decoupling between “effective policy” and “visible policy”. I highly doubt the UK can manage the former for immigration, barring a nasty recession. The latter results in a straightforward paradox of looking like something is being done (but not the wrong kind of something). I’m not in charge of appealing to UKIP, but I doubt the nuanced technocratic approach would solve that problem.
Hey, that’s my line. As I commented to Nybbler above, targeted enforcement has already been policy for years. Various other options have been floated in the past decades to tighten the border but they tend not to get past internal UK politics, let alone anything international.
The EU picks Good Friday and its own demands. How did the political impossibilities of Brexit become their problem?
Given that I was explicitly talking about the UK, that’s not really relevant.
Who’s trying to do that? The Irish government is quite welcome to say “We want a hard border with the UK, so we’re going to put up border guards whether you want us to or not.” Of course, this would make it harder to blame Britain for any resulting nationalist troubles, which I suspect is why the Irish government isn’t doing it.
I guess that makes sense if you view the negotiations as a zero-sum game where the goal is to screw the other side over as much as possible instead of trying to find a mutually-beneficial solution. But then if the EU’s going into negotiations with that attitude, that’s not the fault of Britain or Brexit, it’s the fault of the EU.
If Good Friday means “Anyone can drive from Dublin to Belfast or vice versa without stopping for customs” and the EU’s demands include “Anyone driving from Belfast to Dublin has to be stopped and searched for mislabeled cheese” or the like, then that sounds a lot like an EU problem and not a UK problem.
If the UKIP forces the UK to set up mandatory customs inspections for Polish laborers hiding in the boots of cars driving north, then that would be a UK problem. If London can manage to avoid that, then the intra-Irish border is soft/open until a dictate from Brussels lands in Dublin saying “set up mandatory customs checkpoints on the Irish side”, and that shouldn’t be a UK problem.
@ The original Mr. X:
Perhaps I’m talking past you then, but the point is that there doesn’t appear to be a clean way for the British to exclude specifically non-Irish-citizens. Ireland isn’t willing to shoulder that burden, and the UK can’t do so unilaterally without issues at their border.
By fixating the topic on “here’s why the EU is going to be the one at fault”, you miss that the UK actually wants something, and has a reason to break the status quo regardless of what their opposites do.
Anyone who told you Brexit wasn’t bound to be negative-sum was selling something. It isn’t a pure defection, but it sure as hell isn’t an attempt to maximize value for all parties.
@ John Schilling:
Agreed, but two important points I think you’re glossing over:
1) There is a distinct asymmetry between flow of goods and flow of people. In terms of response to incentives, sacred v. secular values, visibility, existing legal frameworks, etc. this strongly favors the EU’s position.
2) Status quo is a win for the EU, and a political crisis in the UK. We already saw who blinked first. Sure, there are things the UK can do to shift the pressure, but action is harder than inaction especially given the Conservatives’ fragile coalition.
Assuming this is a reference to Brexit, “their leaders are carrying that decision through” is incorrect. Britain was supposed to leave the EU several weeks ago, and yet it hasn’t.
Congratulations, you re-invented Straussianism.. Now keep it quiet so the rest of us can enjoy our technocratic oligopoly. Your skull and bones robe and matching cufflinks are in the mail.
This point was made frequently in Zinn’s People’s History of the United States.
If you believe the best critiques of a system come from the outside (but you don’t find Filmer’s “divine right of kings” arguments very compelling) you might look at criticisms that other 19th and 20th century ideologies make about democracy. As near as I can tell, most of these criticisms are pretty valid, but critiquing the current system is easy: finding a better system is where all the work is. One excellent piece of literature in this vein is “The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy”, by Carl Schmitt (yes, I know who that is). I imagine you can find other good works if you look for Marxist or statist or reactionary critiques of democracy.
But I want to know what you would replace it with, if you could? If you were made dictator of the United States for long enough to reorganize it, scrap its laws, and replace them with better institutions of your own making, but after that you would have to abdicate (and live comfortably!) and let the institution you organized govern itself… what would you do? How, in broad strokes, would you build the national apparatus?
My theory is that that would never work because a given population swings the government towards its whims, which I generally will dislike, whether or not its a dictator or democracy in charge.
I”m not sure that even if I grant ‘new voters are generally less intelligent’ that it follows that adding them would be, on the net, a bad thing.
Like, by and large, dumb voters are going to vote for the most shrewd advertiser, right? I’m not convinced that that is more or less likely to be the one with the best positions. It seems orthogonal, or maybe loosely correlated (in the ‘competent people are better at both finding out the proper positions + advertising’ kind of weasel way).
I think the actual governing is done primarily by the unelected functionaries, and that that will be the same in pretty much any system you set up. Like, regardless of who is on top, your day to day interactions with the gov will be with bureaucrats in offices, doing their tasks in exchange for a salary.
I therefore view electoral democracy as a kind of distraction or insurance, a way to keep ruinous instability at bay while the hierarchy beneath it runs stuff. On that score, I’m satisfied with our system. There hasn’t been a civil war, despite a very polarized electorate, for a long time, and the gov is, by and large, not corrupt. More I could not ask for.
> Like, by and large, dumb voters are going to vote for the most shrewd advertiser, right?
No. They are mostly going to vote for whomever promises them the most “free” stuff. As an approximation, dumb people don’t do useful things, thus don’t get paid, but are envious of those who do without understanding how or why they get paid what they do. So instead, they vote for people to take the stuff away from the people who have it and give it to them. Because that’s easy.
Alternatively, dumb people don’t seem to understand that alternate preferences exist and allowing people to fulfilling them is a lot easier than establishing the conditions under which they would be equally-happy using only dumb-people-approved methods, and so seek to control the lives of others.
Allowing dumb people to vote means, at a distance, a world more optimized for dumb people.
It kind of feels like your theory proves too much, yeah? Like, why aren’t elections just auctions, where each candidate takes turns bribing the electorate a little harder than the other guy?
We’ve been at this a long time, and UBI is only now just starting to be brought up. If you were right about it being a political silver bullet you’d think someone would have deployed it way earlier in our history.
You seem to have ignored the existence of non-dumb people in your calculation. Under such a theory the rise of UBI as a viable idea is evidence of an increasingly gullible demos.
I think your belief in an increasingly gullible demos is much more interesting and controversial.
How is it controversial? Its an explicit strategy of a major party in America that has been made into major books like The Emerging Democratic Majority.
@Clutzy
Show your work on “gullible.”
I suspect that any such thing gets into discussion not suited for this thread.
@Clutzy
Agreed. So perhaps it’d have been better not to intimate it?
I realized that only after the edit period ended.
Well, since most people are dumb, this is good from utilitarian perspective.
My related opinion: the more people vote, the less voters get to decide.
Look at the US, 1920-present: in 1920, the pool of voters was 1/3 of what it is now–but if it was a government policy, it had to be decided by voting. Now, 3 times as many people can vote–but a large portion of the significant policy-making is done by administrative agencies, courts, and other bodies that are designed to be unresponsive to voters.
I disagree with the notion that less intelligent voters would necessarily result in worse outcomes.
Given that the expected value of any net impact assessment of any large scale social program is zero, neither the stupid voters nor the smart voters nor the government has any idea whatsoever about what to do.
Democracy is a good thing because it makes governing harder. Since governing is a horrible thing to do, anything that prevents it should be good.
Well, there is selectorate theory, which posits that the primary goal of a leader is to remain in power, and that to do so, they provide benefits to their winning coalition (essentially, the smallest group needed to stay in power). When the winning coalition is small, as in autocracies, the leader will tend to uses private goods to satisfy the members of the coalition, basically through various forms of corruption, providing members with lucrative monopolies, etc. In contrast, when the winning coalition is large, as in democracies, the leader will tend to use public goods to satisfy the coalition, eg, by providing roads, schools, public safety, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selectorate_theory
I’m reading a couple of books right now (The Power of Habit and Breakdown of Will – yes, I’m in a self-improvement mood) and it hit me how much stuff we actually know about self-improvement, as a society. The knowledge is there – imperfect, fragmented, but we have a huge amount of solid, evidence-based, empirically tested stuff.
Problem is, I can’t freaking see any easy way to access it. Last year for example I was looking for fitness info, and I ended up investing about 8 month in an (extremely good) fitness course. The knowledge problem is solved, and my body shape is rapidly moving towards a triangle with abs. But the effort expended was disproportionate – it will probably take me less time to actually get into shape than I spent learning.
Next on the list is probably a CBT certification. The immediate need is insomnia, but my very brief attempt in finding a CBT therapist went horribly bad. And the more I read about what info is out there, the more I think at best I will find a decent professional, but far from the limits of what’s actually possible. So again I’ll carry the mountain to Muhammad.
On the other hand, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that contemporary prophets have a background of clinical psychology. Peterson, Scott. I’m thinking that knowing enough stuff, plus having a decent amount of experience allows you to work on a different level.
I’m thinking in particular of the self-improvement angle here, not mental health (with the addendum that they do tend to mix) – if you want to be a much better person, where can you go for help? Problem is, therapy doesn’t scale. You might be lucky to get one of the really good therapists, or have a good mentor, or you might have very good parents, but that’s it. Other than that the only other option I can see is reading an inordinate amount of books and spending like 30 minutes with pen and paper to understand exactly why hyperbolic discounting curves are special, because your IQ isn’t really that great, and even so there’s nobody to tell you which books to read.
Any ideas?
I’m not sure about the premise here, at least if one adds “non-obvious”. If you’re right about that, you can probably make a few bob writing The Big Book of Evidence-Based Self Improvement.
A long time I was very frustrated that the guy holding the fitness course doesn’t write a book. Then I took the course.
On any simple question you have a series of 3-4 answers with “but” in between, and depending on what you want from it the decision tree branches with each of them. You just can’t write a book – the printed course is about half a meter thick. Sure, you can make it shorter, take out the study summaries, some of the negative examples and so on, but then you’ll end up with 500-1000 pages of extra dense stuff.
And that’s just fitness.
That’s kind of my question – is there a quicker way than actually becoming able to write that book?
Choose your own
adventurefitness website?Seconded. Unfortunately and as the replication crises has made perfectly clear, science is currently just not capable enough to provide solid evidence and recommendations as how to improve yourself.
I am still not sure if will power depletion is actually a thing or not. If you add how incomparable laboratory experiments are to the difficulty of changing your life in a sustainable long term way,
I would not bet on any comprehensive scientific recommendations evolving soon.
Maybe you mean that many people have actually self improved, and thus knowledge about how to do that exists *somewhere*. Even if we make the (big) leap of faith that these people can reliably pinpoint the factors that made them able to improve their life, then indeed the problem becomes how to access this fragmented knowledge. But here the problem is that an idea’s visibility and discoverability is not at all related to its effectiveness. When people read that it only takes 21 days to form a new habit, they feel optimistic and share that on reddit/their blog or with friends. What they however very much do not do is to first try forming a habit for 21 days only to discover that it takes much longer than those 21 days.
What we would need is a community that is very focused and has a method to evaluate advice. For some definitions of self improvement, body builders are kind of such a community,
and maybe pick up artists are another.
> For some definitions of self improvement, body builders are kind of such a community, and maybe pick up artists are another.
Funny, but true.
That’s why my thoughts go more towards clinical psychology than, for example, cognitive. Being empirically tested counts for a lot, even if the whys are fuzzy.
Regarding the fitness course:
I am somewhat surprised that you assign such a high value to a comprehensive course when it comes to *getting* in shape. My superficial impression was that for most people
the by far most important step would be to just follow any semi-popular weight lifting or HIIT program. Everything else, like nutrition, how much cardio etc.,
is just chasing very small improvements at this point. Only after 6 to 12 months of solid training those things become however important.
A course like this might of course be helpful if it focuses on psychological tricks to stick to the training routine, but I would be surprised if there are enough tricks
to fill a week long course, not to mention an 8 month long one.
Sure, there are things that are more important than others. If you want a 3 bullet point plan: get enough protein but don’t dirty bulk, progressive overload, and volume matters. That’ll probably take you halfway, and guess what: I didn’t know any of them when I started the course. They aren’t secret – since then I started following other (new-generation, evidence-based) experts, and with the stuff they disagree on you could actually write a book, and a short one at that. But somehow it just didn’t get filtered to my level, and I was doing weightlifting for a couple of years already. You have to remember there’s not just getting the good advice, but knowing its relative importance vs all the other advice (guess what… intermittent fasting isn’t all that great).
And yeah, there as a chapter on psychological tricks as well 🙂
Anyways, in this particular case the problem is basically solved, and I could’ve (but should’ve?) taken the short path of just getting online training from the guys doing this. In case anybody’s curious, that’s a good collection of gurus, and that’s the PT directory of guys that did the same course and teach for a living.
How could you not know about progressive overload? Isn’t that the basis for all exercise programs?
And unless you’re vegan, who doesn’t get enough protein? A normal diet is completely sufficient.
*shrug* in the generic, “weights should get heavier” way, sure, I knew. But like I said, part of the problem is knowing which of the 100 things you know are the important ones. Turns out tracking your progress from session to session, in writing, is one of the essential ones.
And protein yes, it’s not particularly difficult, unless you’re a vegan, or vegetarian, or you’re dieting, or you have a shitty diet. And this already covers 50% of beginners 😀 For example a common mistake (I was guilty of) was to have “healthy” periods, when I both ate less and went to the gym. And eating less without counting macros makes it very very easy to be under your protein quota, so you basically go to the gym to sweat and waste time. Now I’m the opposite – gym day means damn good dinner, and definitely breakfast the next day.
Funnily enough back in the early days of lesswrong Lukeprog wrote about this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/33KewgYhNSxFpbpXg/scientific-self-help-the-state-of-our-knowledge
That’s probably where I found The Procrastination Equation. Most depressing book I ever read – talks a lot about why, and way not enough on how to do anything about it.
But thanks for the link, I’ll re-add stuff from there to my reading list.
Request for bakkot! I notice a “reverse order” link was recently added to the comments. Could it be made so that (like logging in) it doesn’t affect your last-viewed time? Like if I reverse the order of the comments, this shouldn’t un-green any comments. Thank you!
(Yes, this is reposted from the previous whole-numbered open thread.)
Request is for @Bakkot , I presume he uses his reply notification script.
Oh, didn’t know about that, thanks!
Programmer-musicians and maybe mathematician-musicians: is it just me, or is it insane that interval sizes aren’t zero-indexed? Seems like whoever decided on that one committed a gigantic fencepost error, no?
That is, the gap between C and E in C major, for instance, two steps diatonically, is called a major third. Ugh. So we have the appalling situation that two thirds sum to a fifth, a fifth and a fourth sum to an octave, etc. 3 + 3 = 5? 5 + 4 = 8? What planet were these guys on? If they were named for the size of the gap they actually represent then we’d have 2 + 2 = 4 and 4 + 3 = 7 and all would be well. As a bonus, the octave could be called the heptave and we could stop being confused about why there are only 7 notes in it.
Have I missed something?
What other nasty bits of illogic are there in music theory? (I used to feel this way about naming the twelve notes with seven letters plus sharps and flats, rather than just using twelve letters, but I’m kinda over that one now.)
2^(7/12) = 3/2. But there’s nothing to be done about that one.
Ah, good one.
Well, not nothing—there’s always just intonation. But that screws up other things, and yes, we seem to have settled on equal temperament.
Ugh, this has bothered me since I was learning music theory as a twelve year-old. Of course I couldn’t express my frustration back then as clearly as you have.
It also annoys me a little bit the way compound time signatures work. Like, admittedly 6/8 time does literally have six quavers in a bar, but it’s not “six quaver beats in a bar” it’s “two dotted crotchet beats in a bar”. It should be 2/something. I care less about the bottom half making the time signature make sense as a fraction than about having the whole thing indicate something useful about the music.
Yes, when I was reading about time signatures recently I started to get a hunch that something was up with the numbers expressing them. But I don’t know them well enough to actually work it through, so I (uncharacteristically) decided to suppress my natural hubris and lend the system the benefit of the doubt.
The overly simple explanation is that you can’t treat time signatures like fractions, because they aren’t fractions. Like if I say “Bob is short/fat” the “short/fat” part (sorry Bob) is not a fraction, it is two distinct pieces of information joined together. Same with time signatures.
Time signatures do currently make sense as fractions. I’m saying that they needn’t.
What would you propose, 2/(3/8) ? I guess that…kind of makes sense, except for the fact that it’s a “dotted quarter”, not a “three-eighths note”. It’d be more of a pain to type though…
Oh, I’ve got it! (2 * 3) / 8! Expresses the fundamental interplay between 2 beats to a measure and 3 subbeats to a beat, while still clearly showing the fundamental note-unit and not being too difficult to typeset.
Something tells me you’re not a fan of “common time” and “cut time” symbols.
Yeah, the second one works. Or just 2/[symbol].
Haha, let’s just say that I used to have more of a problem with common time and cut time than I do now.
The longer you actually play more complex music, the more you realize that time signatures do not, can not, and should not run on logic. They’re basically just there as a guideline for conducting motions (in one, in two, in three, etc.), and even then, music will often complicate things. In the case of 6/8, you may be flipping back and forth between the 2-beat and the 3-beat or a 1-beat groove, or even a 4-beat polyrhythm across 2 measures, and different instruments will be running different grooves on top of each other simultaneously. Or consider a section that keeps flipping between 2+3 and 3+2 rhythms. It’s silly to keep changing the time signature every measure to reflect this, so you just use 5/8.
You might think that a waltz should stick with 3/4…but on a broader level, they might be stable in a “4 measure” phrase, so you might use 12/8 instead, so that you don’t have to keep including triplet markings over the groups, as well as making it easier to count rests.
Tangentially, 7/8 is probably my favorite “normal” time signature.
Generally, very much this. “The time signature is X, but I’m going to conduct it in Y” or some such is pretty common. Especially at lower levels where changing the way a piece is conducted can help younger/less experienced players deal with more complicated rhythms.
Of course, but some music is not complex. Time signatures are always going to struggle to tell you anything useful about complex music, but they could at least be as clear as possible for simple music.
@fion
The absolute simplest marking of time would be to a run a metronome at the lowest beat division for the entire piece. There are easy reasons not to do this.
Any sort of measure/phrase grouping (and therefore the time signature you choose) is a means to achieve a certain interpretation, and different conductors may transition through various interpretations as an ensemble learns a piece, or the broader case of everyone taking a slightly different approach to a piece. There is no real “clarity,” because there are always different choices of notation you could use to demonstrate different things about the piece.
Tell me, should the Star Spangled Banner be in 3/4 or 12/8? Why is 4/4 the norm instead of 1/1, 8/8, or 16/16? Why write a particular piece in X/4 instead of X/8?
@AG
I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said, but the vast majority of conductors in the vast majority of circumstances will conduct 6/8 in two, not six or three.
I don’t know what the Star Spangled Banner sounds like, but I accept that there’s no unique “best” choice of time signature for every piece. There are certainly bad choices, though. I could in theory write the Star Spangled Banner in any time signature, but most would be thoroughly uninformative. I’m guessing that 3/4 and 12/8 are both acceptably informative, so I’m guessing that I wouldn’t have strong opinions about which was better.
The Star Spangled Banner is obviously in 3/4.
Before I start, let me clarify that I’m about to talk about real arrangements of the Star Spangled Banner that actually have a military-sounding rhythm (like this one) as opposed to the soup of excessively high notes and convoluted ornamentations that singers will show off with before football games. (though I’ll give the “Singing Sergeants” a pass)
I don’t know how you could listen to the star-spangled banner and hear the primary beat as anything but the quarter note.
Dun-da DUN DUN DUN DAAAAaaaa…. *crash!*
In the first phrase, the melody and everything accompanying it hammer out that solid quarter note line. Any subdivisions below that aren’t even consistent, you’ve got the dotted eight / sixteenth “swing” on some pickups, and straight eighths through others.
Equally obvious is that the beats are in groups of three. “Oh, say can you see… / by the dawn’s ear -ly light?… Strong beats on every third note, and when the melody’s not so strong on the downbeat, the bass drum clears things up for us.
Now, the only time signature I could make a case for other than 3/4 is 6/4, since the melody comes in neat two (3/4) bar phrases throughout, one for each line of the song. Notating it in 6/4 would be less traditional, but wouldn’t seem too awkward, and would just amount to deleting every other barline in any case.
No clue where you’re getting 12/8 from.
@fion
A lot of music from the 1900s on start playing with that assumption of 6/8 in two. As I said above, there are often cases where they’ll have one instrument play a 3-beat pattern while another plays a 2-beat pattern, or flip back and forth between the two. The conductor will go with whichever pattern they want to emphasize to the audience, or whichever instrument they think needs the help more.
And conducting in 6 is a matter of tempo. Something really slow, or something that involves an acceleration/deceleration will often lead to the conductor switching to one. Sometimes they might even do a mid-measure change, like the first 3 eights in one grouping, but the last three beats individually. You also get stuff like going from 5/8 to 6/4 with “eighth not equals quarter note”, which really highlights how arbitrary it all is.
Could composers stand to standardize things a little bit more? Maybe. You’d have to ask them why they choose to notate things how they choose to.
Other than stuff like G# and Ab being different notes, what always struck me is that much of musical theory is definitionless.
Nobody has a bulletproof definition of what “consonance” and “dissonance” mean, for example.
Different notes as in having different names but being the same, or different notes as in different frequencies in different intonations?
Depends on whether you’re playing a piano or a violin. For a piano, G# and Ab are the same key, but named differently depending on the harmonic context. On a violin, since you have freedom of intonation, you can actually finely tune the pitches of G# and Ab slightly differently to fit better with the key you’re playing in.
I thought consonance/dissonance was about what fraction of the two notes’ harmonic series overlap.
G# and Ab are different notes in the same way that “through” and “threw” are different words. Sure they sound the same, but they mean different things.
As far as consonance/dissonance, why do you feel it isn’t clearly defined? I don’t think there is any gray area there, can you point me to what you consider ambiguous?
I have one reaction to the @#$%ing composers that put me in a flat-based key signature and then put sharps in the measures, or vice versa: ಠ_ಠ
This is perfectly normal! If I want a sharp sixth i’m not just going to write it as a flat seventh just because it is a key with flats!*
*Not a composer
Side note: Musicals are the worst because apparently vocalists are only capable of singing in brutal, terrible keys (at least for non-C instruments) and like to frequently switch between different terrible keys seemingly at random.
…you have something against g and d minor? You also need sharps in flat-based key signatures with some secondary dominant chords, and there’s almost certainly some other circumstances where it would be wrong to convert sharps to flats…
Edit:
Also, yes, musicals are the worst. It doesn’t help that musical sheet music is, in my experience, much more likely to be copied handwritten music rather than anything nicely typeset and readable.
I should add that when I first started learning music I was confused by the idea of things like “C flat” (it is just a B!) until I started to learn some of the theory behind it.
And then there’s doublesharps and doubleflats! (Because naturals aren’t cool enough!) They literally exist for purely theory reasons, as far as I can tell. God forbid the d sharp harmonic minor scale have both D sharp AND NORMAL D.
@rubberduck
Well, it’s certainly much better for reading music than having lots of accidentals…
You can just write what note it is in the original key for reading purposes! Why torture the players with unnecessary extra mental conversion steps!
I don’t have much experience reading chord sheets, so maybe sharps in flat key (or vice versa) makes more sense there, but I don’t see how.
I do a lot of gigs where I’m sight-reading, and when these cases happen I almost always just write what the note is in the original key on the paper so I don’t have to think about the extra step in the wonky conversion.
@rubberduck
I know you’re being sarcastic, but I wholeheartedly agree! You get the seventh note in the D# harmonic minor scale by raising the C#, not by lowering the the D#. So, it’s a C double-sharp, not a D-natural.
I’ll admit that double sharps and flats are the bane of sight-readers everywhere, myself included, but I’m willing to sacrifice easy reading or the sake of the music making sense. This is why we even have key signatures in the first place, as opposed to explicitly writing in every accidental.
Plus, not every instrument is an equal-tempered piano. On the viola, where I have fine control of intonation, a C-double-sharp and a D-natural are going to sound slightly different, and also depend on what key I’m in. (Or so my my teacher tells me. Please don’t ask me which one’s actually slightly higher.)
Which isn’t to say I don’t have the same knee-jerk reaction of “OH DEAR LORD WHY” when I see a double-sharp in a new piece.
@thevoiceofthevoid
I kind of wonder if the assumption of a difference is placebo, though, or an artifact of the instrument build (that is, how the finger press can be applied in different ways). To my perception, it would be nonsensical to claim that there’s a difference between the two for just about any other kind of instrument, or if a difference could be programmed into synth waveforms that aren’t emulating a string family instrument.
@AG
It isn’t an assumption. Just Intonation is a real thing. I think typically to reach just intonation you go something like 10-20 cents sharp/flat for certain notes in a given key. This isn’t just possible on fretless string instruments, although it is certainly easier there. Wind instruments can bend their pitch slightly to reach just intonation (some even have built in mechanisms for managing this, like the finger slides on a trumpet). The trombone also obviously has no trouble achieving this. It probably tends to happen naturally for vocalists without any real effort assuming they have a good ear.
The problem is that not all instruments can control pitch like that (pianos, various tuned percussion, etc). For instruments where each note is a fixed pitch, like a piano, equal temperment is used. You can tune fixed-pitch instruments to use Just Intonation, but then you are pretty much stuck playing in one key, because they other keys won’t sound right.
Alternatively, try this video and maybe you can hear the difference.
Also, something something overtones mumble mumble.
Edit: I should note that the person who made the video seems very anti equal temperment.
@acymetric
I watched the video, and it isn’t making the argument we’re discussing here. That isn’t an issue of pitch, but timbre, that the tempered has more noise. The waveform envelope is different, but that’s not the same thing as claiming that they’re different notes entirely.
But are you really going to tell me that for a pure sine wave synth, C double-sharp, D-flat sharp, D, D-sharp flat, and E double flat have a quantitative difference in frequency?
And are there any pieces of music where the difference of intonation makes such an audible difference that you definitely want to use one of the above accidental abuse instead of just writing “D” in the sheet music or MIDI software? Show me a video where a violinist plays the same melody notated with different accidentals and the change matters.
(As for musicians instinctively going for the correct intonation, I can tell you that an orchestra will get more and more sharp over the course of a long piece.)
(Whoops, my browser setup doesn’t preserve the edit envelope if I close out of the tab.)
In addition, modern composers are often explicitly assuming that these notes are equivalent, in transitioning between chords and keys. What is a double sharp in one key is a natural in the next, so they use this particular note and chord in the transition between the two, deliberate ambiguity that can only occur by treating the two as the same note.
That’s not a well-defined question. To understand why, you have too look at where the frequencies for notes come from. Given some reference frequency for a note (e.g. A = 432 Hz) it turns out that frequencies that are simple integer ratios of that frequency will have nice harmonic relationships with it (for instance 3/2 * reference frequency gives a note a perfect fifth up, i.e. E, and 4/3 gives a perfect fourth). Using this, for example by multiplying a 3:2 ratio 12 times (i.e. following the cycle of fifths) you can get a set of 12 notes that correspond to the 12 pitch classes that e.g. a piano can produce.
But although the 12 notes produced this way *correspond* to notes of a piano, they aren’t actually the same! This is because for a piano to sound the same regardless of which key you’re playing in, the frequency ratio for an interval must be the same regardless of the start and end notes. This can only be achieved by dividing the octave (a 2:1 ratio) into 12 equal parts, so an n semitone interval has a ratio or (2^(1/12))^n:1. But obviously 2^(1/12) isn’t a nice small integer, so these frequencies can’t exactly correspond to the ones we originally derived! A perfect fifth on a piano is actually 1.498307:1 rather than 1.5:1.
This way of tuning a piano is called equal temperament. It’s very convenient, but it’s not the only possibility. Indeed, if you are playing an instrument like a violin where you can continuously vary the frequencies, then there’s no reason you would end up using it rather than the simple ratio based system (just intonation)*.
So the answer to your question is that if you’re in equal temperament, those notes are the same (except for flat sharps and sharp flats not being a thing). But if you’re using a different intonation they’re not (and exactly which frequencies they are depend on which note you are using for reference).
*or at least something approximating that
@rlms
Thank you, I was struggling to form a response and you worded it much better/clearer than I probably would have.
@rlms
Thanks for that explanation, it was very educational.
But then, that still implies that our synth-based digital music making ecosystem would still be equal temperament based, despite having the quantitative capacity to produce perfect frequency ratios, because you would have still have to designate some reference point to which melodies that jump keys have to match.
Shouldn’t MIDI+synth programs force digital music programmers to notate using a double sharp/flat, since it makes a difference, or are they readjusting frequencies on the fly for every note played based on the previous note played/the current simulaneous notes being played? Instead, they nearly universally just offer a keyboard layout for their grids.
@rlms
It is, who is suggesting it isn’t? Synths are (with probably some extremely rare exceptions) set in equal temperment just like pianos, so they don’t generate perfect ratios.
@AG
You’re welcome! I’m not sure I understand your question. As acymetric says, basically all synths use equal temperament. Most of the time the difference between just intonation for the key of a piece and equal temperament is basically imperceptible unless you’re particularly sensitive to intonation. The main situation in which temperament is relevant is for pieces composed for keyboard instruments before the invention of equal temperament.
@rlms
It also comes into play in smaller ensembles…I am most familiar with it from the time I spent in a brass quintet.
I would say that imperceptible is probably a bit strong. Hearing a chord in equal temperment and then the same chord on the same instruments with just intonation I think most non-music inclined people would say the second chord sounded “better” they just wouldn’t be able to quantify what was better about it other than that it sounded “nicer”.
There is also “well tempered”, which is sort of a compromise between equal temperament and just intonation. I believe several famous composers wrote pieces with well tempered keyboards in mind…Bach for example maybe?
This entire thread began because I was indignant about composers sticking sharp-flats and/or double sharps/flats on sheet music. The response was that they are actually different notes, and for theory purposes it’s better to notate the intended interval. The linked video makes a point about how synths make just temperament possible to a new degree, such that Bach pieces can be played with their proper harmonies.
But then if our digital music making just defaults back to equal temperament, what’s the point of differentiating these notes again? What advantage is there to put the intended interval on the sheet music instead of the “equivalent” in-key note? It seems that musicians are instinctively finding the correct intonation anyways.
For what it’s worth, I just linked the video so that you could hear the difference between a chord in equal temperament and just intonation (i.e. that there is a difference). I didn’t really notice (or care) about whatever the narrator said about synths. It was the first video I found that demonstrated that difference. Maybe that was the source of some of the confusion here.
As far as why we would still use double-sharps etc. in equal temperament where a C double sharp is the same as a D? Because that’s how the theory works. It isn’t necessarily important to the individual player in that context (although it could be if they have the sufficient knowledge of theory, as it tells them how their part fits in to the overall sound of the piece which is a useful thing to know), but it would be quite important for anyone doing an arrangement and a bunch of other things related to interpreting/analyzing the piece. Back to my through/threw example from elsewhere, they sound the same but mean different things and that is going to be important for some people.
What advantage is there to spelling “pace” with a ‘c’ instead of an ‘s’? It isn’t about advantage, it is about rules of the language.
You’re right that intonation isn’t really relevant to why double sharps exist. The rationale behind those is to make notation express the role of notes. Say you have a piece in G harmonic minor. You’re going to write the seventh as F# not Gb because in any key with tonic G the seventh will be some kind of F (either natural or sharp depending on the quality of the key). Then, for some reason, you decide to transpose the piece to G# minor. The same thing applies; the tonic is some kind of G so the seventh must be some kind of F, and in this case it must be F double sharp. Or put another way, it’s nice to notate music such that whenever you transpose it so the tonic changes note name, all the other notes do too (and correspondingly if the tonic doesn’t then neither do the others).
This is because the names of the intervalls are older than the concept of zero (at least in Europe at the time). And it shows why the concept of zero is so natural when you are counting steps, like when you have arrays and are counting the steps from the first entry.
I definitely agree.
Transposing instruments are named the wrong way. The trumpet being in Bb means when a trumpeter plays what they call C, the actual note produced is a Bb. So if you want to play music written for a concert pitch instrument on trumpet, you have to take everything up one tone (i.e. reinterpret C as D). This is confusing when you’re transposing from e.g. music written for an Eb instrument to a Bb one. More sensible would be to say that the trumpet is in D, and the alto saxophone is in A (rather than Eb).
Yeah, this kind of drives me nuts. I tried transcribing the end of Wagner’s Die Walkure in concert pitch a few years back (for fun, to try out this program I bought called StaffPad). What was *really* confusing, though, is that in German, B means B flat and H means B.
I assumed it was just mapped to the numbers of notes in a scale, and it would feel weird to start numbering a scale from zero. C is the first note of the C major scale, which has 8 notes including the final C. Not the 0th note of a 7-note scale. E is the third note in the C major scale, so the interval from C to E is a third.
I guess that’s how we got here, but the thing is that we count with them, add them, etc., often enough that it really makes more sense to think of them as relative distances between two things (in which case they should start with zero) than as absolute magnitudes standing alone (in which case starting with one can be justified). They are called ‘intervals’ after all!
Do we really? Maybe if you’re dealing with just theory but I’ve played piano for years and never saw this as a problem. It’s more about intervals between adjacent notes and even if you’re concerned with the interval between two non-adjacent notes, you’re not going to figure it out by adding the two other notes together.
Each interval sounds, feels, and looks distinct. I taught piano for a while and when teaching children to recognize intervals, it was by showing “this is what a Nth looks and sounds like”, so the kids recognize patterns in the sheet music while training their hearing. Sometimes you get kids who have no musical hearing at all and never learn to recognize intervals by ear, but anyone can do it by sight- I’d argue that at some point when learning music, most people read sheet music primarily by intervals rather than note-by-note.
If you were taught music differently and regularly need to use intervals the way you use regular numbers, I would love to hear it.
Yep. If I have to produce a sixth interval by ear, I use Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, which starts with a fifth and then “adds” a second. But at no point am I actually using math in order to produce the sixth interval.
And, of course, you’ve got your Circle of Fifths/Fourths that underline a whole lotta pop songs. Again, we’re theoretically adding intervals, but practically, the math doesn’t matter, only the sense of sound.
+1. I had a group piano teacher for about 5 years who did ear training for the intervals almost every lesson, and I credit him with developing my ability to play things by ear and to fake perfect pitch based on knowing what a C sounds like.
I’ll stand up for the traditional interval names.
As rubberduck mentions, the name of an interval isn’t based on “how many chromatic half-steps from the bottom to the top”, but rather, “which diatonic scale degree is the top note, if the bottom note is the root/tonic.” In virtually all music based around diatonic structures (i.e. virtually all Western music), I say that this is a more meaningful and intuitive way to name intervals.
Each note of a diatonic scale is numbered. In the key of C, C is 1, D is 2, E is 3 … up to B as the 7th note of the scale. Intervals as currently named align with this, so e.g. the interval from C to G is a fifth, and G is the fifth note of the C scale. When the intervals are compressed or expanded slightly, the names change accordingly: C to Eb is a minor third; C to F# is an augmented fourth. This is especially helpful for naming jazz chords; a 7 chord has a 7th scale degree in it; a 13 chord has the 13th (i.e. 6th an octave up) scale degree in it.
So, the intervals aren’t zero-indexed because the scale isn’t zero-indexed. As for why the first degree of the scale is numbered one and not zero:
* No one would ever even think to call it the “zeroth” degree before computer science was invented.
* There’s no Roman numeral for zero.
* Fifths are really important, and are currently a nice, stately looking V. VI just doesn’t seem as…fundamental.
I think this is the key. How often do people zero-index in daily life? The fact that people have to be taught zero-indexing and that failing to zero index is a common source of bugs in code suggests that it doesn’t come naturally to lay-people, and doesn’t even come entirely naturally to people who code.
In addition, I don’t think that having to do “arithmetic” on intervals…actually happens all that often? Like, if I’m sight reading, and the melody line starts at C and jumps up by a third and then another third, I don’t have to say “a third plus a third is a fifth”. Instead it’s “a third above C is E” followed b
A third plus a minor third is a fifth :-p
In addition, I don’t think that having to do “arithmetic” on intervals…actually happens all that often? Like, if I’m sight reading, and the melody line starts at C and jumps up by a third and then another third, I don’t have to say “a third plus a third is a fifth”. Instead it’s “a third above C is E” followed by “a third above E is G”. (All this further facilitated by my being able to read the absolute pitches of E and G by themselves in addition to seeing the relative structure.)
Similar logic holds if I encounter, say, a 2nd inversion F chord in the left hand. Bottom note is a C, then there’s a fourth above that (F!) and a third above that F (A!) I don’t have to think “a fourth plus a third is a seventh–wait no, a sixth!” Or I can just see the relationship between the top and the bottom as a sixth to start with, or more likely read the entire simple chord as a unit.
I admit I’m kind of a clueless autodidact and I don’t really ‘do’ that much theory, so I’m quite happy for a real musician to step in and tell me I’m doing it wrong. But I feel like it does sometimes come up. One example would be chords—you used an example of a simple chord that you can recognise as a unit, but what about analysing a really gnarly one, an 11th chord or something? It seems that that would involve counting an individual’s relation to that chord’s root, and possibly also to the piece’s tonic.
Another one: I sometimes find myself trying to work out which intervals are which interval’s complements. i.e. if Y is a 6th from X, what does that make X in relation to Y? This is equivalent to finding the interval that sums to zero with your first one modulo an octave, i.e. the one that sums to an octave with it. This one might be just me, though—I don’t know this is the kind of thing that regular musicians end up doing very often. Moreover, it’s trivial enough that probably all serious musicians have it memorised that, for instance, a fourth is a fifth’s complement (though perhaps not in those terms). But it would still be nicer if it were nicer.
But thanks for defending the current situation against my mad contrarian hubris.
The more I think about this, the closer I come to “yeah, scale intervals SHOULD be zero-indexed! Too bad that’s counterintuitive at first glance and didn’t occurred to any important musicians historically.” Although “zeroth degree of the scale” will never roll off the tongue no matter what.
For really gnarly chords in written-out music, I almost always fall back to reading one note at a time, building it up by putting the individual notes together, trying fingerings until I find one that’s not terrible, and then playing it over and over a few times to get the sound of it in my ear and build the muscle memory. Supplementally, I’ll try to piece together what in god’s name kind of chord that jumble of sharps and naturals is supposed to form, and write in the harmonic symbol to give me a sense of how it fits into the harmony.
For weird jazz chords, I’m far less experienced, but I generally figure out the higher extensions by first building up the chord in root position (which usually comes down to “stacking thirds”), then trying out weird inversions of it until I get something that sounds good and is accessible from the surrounding chords. It’s almost always just “1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13” with varying varieties of sharp and flat, and all of those are a third (of some variety) apart. Unless you throw in a 6th for color, but that’s kind of just a third below the root.
I think the technical term is the “inversion” of the interval, and it’s definitely an important thing in music.
….yeah, 4ths go to 5ths, 3rds go to 6ths, 2nds go to 7ths, major goes to minor, perfect goes to perfect, and vice versa for all of those. Not too hard to memorize, and it never occured to me until now that all the pairs add to 9 (and would add to 7 if the scale started at 0, since the intervals by definition make a “septive”). OH and minor e.g. 6th goes to major 3rd because when you bump a number down a half step, you bump its complement up a half step! That just clicked for me.
True, but we can just call that ‘root’ or ‘tonic’.
Building chords by stacking thirds is actually probably a better everyday example of doing interval math than the ones I mentioned. Pretend I mentioned that instead.
Is changing the indexing and calling an 11th chord the 10th chord really going to make anything easier for anybody while playing?
I’ll point out again only to illustrate that this is prone to error, that a third plus a third isn’t a fifth. A third plus a third is a minor 6th.
An example where arithmetic on intervals comes up is that the V of V chord comes up a lot (especially as a dominant 7th chord). You can memorize, of course, that V+V = II, but it will resolve to the V, so from a theory perspective, it’s the V7 of V resolving to the V.
Ok, to be precise, a major third plus a minor third is a perfect fifth. You’re right that two stacked major thirds would give an interval enharmonic with a minor sixth, but by note names you’d probably call it an augmented fifth. (or call one of the “thirds” a “diminished fourth”). It’s a less common situation since there’s no point in the major scale where you get two major thirds on top of each other. If you did build up that chords, it’d be…an augmented triad. So yeah, I’m calling that an augmented fifth.
In general, the way I learned it , the base degree of the interval is how far apart the notes are on the staff, quality is determined by sharps/flats/naturals.
Yeah, you’re right about secondary dominants. I usually figure them out by memorization or note names.
This is incorrect. A third plus a third is ALWAYS a fifth. Let’s use examples in C major and start on the root note of C. A major third up is E. A minor third up from that is G, a perfect fifth with C. A major third above that is G#, NOT Ab, NEVER Ab, and G# is an augmented fifth with C. A minor third above C is Eb, and from there with thirds you can get either G, or Gb, a diminished fifth above C.
This is significant, because of what it implies for the scales, which in tonal music always simply contain some version of all the notes A-G, whether natural, sharp, flat, double sharp, etc. If you see an Ab in the context of C major, you know that you are borrowing a minor interval, leaning into the parallel minor, and it may step down into a G. A G# probably indicates a tonicization of the note above, and it will likely step up into the A. But an Ab can’t step into an A normally. Even when you get notes outside of your key, in that moment there is still some scale you could posit which you are pulling from, and it will not have two types of A. The exceptions are when dealing with symmetrical scales/chords, such as the most common octotonic scale, or the related fully diminished seventh chord. Symmetry tends to break these things, and then you may not be able to construct a scale with steps simply using A-G.
I think I got confused because, for example C is a third above A flat, whereas a third above G# would be B sharp and in my head I was thinking about getting back to the tonic wth 3 thirds (I-III-vi-I looked right in my head). Granted, as you point out, this isn’t right, but the last time I took a music theory class was about 14 years ago, though, so I should have thought a little more carefully.
Still, whether it’s formally called an augmented fifth or minor sixth, zero-indexing doesn’t solve our problem at all. 2+2 = 4, after all, which is the same way you would write a major fifth.
Yeah, this jumped out at me as being similar to the objections about not having a year zero. When they came up with the system, they didn’t number the years per se, they named them, using ordinals. That is, A.D. 1 is the year of our Lord the first, A.D. 2 is the year of our Lord the second, 1 B.C. is the first year before Christ, 2 B.C is the second year before Christ. Even with the concept of zero, trying to define a “Year Zero” in this conception has no meaning. You can still see this in the formulaic ending to presidential proclamations: (The first one on whitehouse.gov):
Once we hit July 4th, we’ll then be in the 244th year of Independence. July 5th, 1775 – July 4th, 1776 would be the “first year before the Independence of the United States” if you were inclined to use that year reckoning, not the “zeroth” year of independence.
The reason we get wrapped around the axle about it now is because it’s easier for a computer to use zero-based indexing. As @acymetric noted, it’s not “naturally” obvious if you’re not trying to get a pile of circuits to do the math for you.
It doesn’t just come from computing, though. I’d argue that starting with zero is the natural choice whenever you’re talking about the distance between two entities, rather than numbering the entities themselves.
It seems that intervals are a tricky case because they have half a conceptual existence in their own right and half as a gap between notes.
Not if you count inclusively 😉
Slightly more seriously, consider:
“It is the third house on the right”
And then
“It is the third note in the scale”
Shortened to “the third” (or “a third”).
I think we had a discussion here just before Easter regarding “On the third day He rose again” where it was pointed out that it was originally written in a language (I think Koine Greek) where you typically count inclusively, so Good Friday was the first day, Saturday the second, and Easter Sunday the third.
I know you said you’re over it, but one good reason for this is the same reason we don’t have 100+ (1000+?) letters in the alphabet, one for each distinct sound that can be made when speaking. Especially since music doesn’t generally work chromatically, having it optimized for the chromatic scale probably isn’t useful.
If Eb and D# are now just called “F” (F would now be H), you no longer have context for what key a piece is in or when key changes are being made. The end result would be that for each note to have a single distinct identifier you have to reinvent a bunch of other parts of music theory/notation in a way that is probably way more complicated.
Agreed.
Even if you limit yourself to 12 letters, it would be annoying and completely un-intuitive to list the notes in any key or scale without sharps and flats. In the simplest key (C major), you would go from C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C with the current system (which a three-year-old can learn) to A-C-E-F-H-J-L-A, and figuring that out turned my hair grey.
Well, if you keep “A” as “A”, our “C” would actually now be “D” for:
D-F-H-I-K-A-C-D
…Not that this helps the matter at all (and yeah I just aged about 10 years doing that).
Kinda true, but is part of the reason we’re so hung up on the scales we are (major and minor, and to some extent the modes) because those are the ones that are easiest to express by sharpening and flattening degrees from C? I’m curious about what wild and wacky directions western music might’ve gone if all possible scales were equally easy (or equally difficult) to express.
That is: saying ‘this conceptual system/notation neatly expresses the music in our tradition’ doesn’t exhaust the question, because the music in our tradition was shaped by what could be expressed in the conceptual system/notation.
Except the causation is backwards…the music came first and the notation second as a “language” to express it.
My hunch is that there was influence in either direction, but I know nothing about early music and will happily defer to anyone who does.
There’s 2 definitions of “scale” at work here:
a. The scale corresponding to a particular key (ex: a minor), or
b. A specific combination of intervals (which would include also blues scales, chromatic scales, modes, etc., maybe arpeggios if you’re being really generous with definitions)
The complicated notation would make all scales (besides the chromatic) equally difficult to express so it might change things with respect to what key pieces are played in- no longer is every beginner lesson book full of pieces in CM, GM and am- but the change would be very boring, just the same effect as transposing any given piece from one key to another. While maybe it could change things with regard to definition B- new “types” of scales would be easier to create, and no more difficult to use than the clunky old ones- I doubt it would create that much new variety in music. There’s only so many ways you can rearrange your up to 12 tones, and most of them not especially interesting. So much music has already been composed that I think even with the current notation system, somebody has probably written a piece containing every single possible scale (“scale” here being defined as a sequence of notes spanning an octave and going only in one direction).
This is all as long as we’re working in the framework of 12 keys. What could be more interesting would be if there were more or fewer, but that goes beyond simply reworking the current system of music notation.
To my (basic) knowledge, there were actually 8 primary scales (the Gregorian modes) in early church music.
Each corresponds to playing 8 white keys on a piano, but starting at a different point.
actually reads article I linked
Wait, turns out what I thought I knew was a vast oversimplification. WTF is a “hypolydian?”
Ok so I think the modern modes are the “white keys only” ones, and share some names and very tenuous links with actual historical church modes.
See this wikipedia if you’ve got more free time to puzzle this over than I do.
It’s complicated, but I think that things like notation and theory come more out of an attempt to analyze. They encode things which are already common practice, and THEN they shape the thinking of people who use them. I would look much more to instrument building as something which has a push/pull with what kinds of music people want to create/can conceive of.
It always annoyed me that, while a seventh chord is a triad with the note a seventh above the root added, a sixth chord (in traditional usage) is not a triad with the note a sixth above the root added, but rather one of a variety of different chords which happen to have the interval of a sixth in them.
…it’s not? that’s how I use the term.
[wikipedias]
Huh, apparently “sixth chord” is also an archaic way to refer to inverted triads.
I did the exact same thing. I don’t recall ever seeing “sixth chord” used in the archaic sense, but my experience is just high school/college so I can’t say how “professionals” or higher end music schools do it. It is weird that they would use “sixth” for that instead of just calling it an inverted triad, but maybe there was good reason for it a couple hundred years ago.
You’re more likely to have heard it in the context of a Neapolitan sixth chord.
I assume it’s because the what-you’d-expect sixth chord wasn’t used very much before jazz came along. I will admit that I find “6/3” and “6/4” easier than trying to remember which inversion is which.
Yikes! Hadn’t heard of this one. Nasty.
Also, different groups of musicians have different conventions about whether a seventh chord adds a major seventh or a minor seventh. (I think in jazz, blues, and sufficiently old rock contexts it’s understood as a minor seventh.)
I think this mostly boils down to “different groups of musicians use different shorthand for the things they do most often”. I don’t think its much different than “pop” vs. “soda” or those psychopaths who call water fountains bubblers.
I learned music theory before I learned programming so this never bothered me. This type of stuff happens when systems form “organically”, it’s why natural language is so inconsistent.
Really the interval names make more sense as shorthand for the notes. So with C=1, D=2, E=3…B=7, then E is note three so we call it the third note, and the interval between C and E a third. Whoever said performing arithmetic with intervals was supposed to be easy or straightforward? Typically they all make reference to the common root.
Consider the most “intuitive” way people learn music theory: on the keyboard, using your fingers.
Major chord (C-E-G, for example) is usually thumb, middle finger, and pinkie, or 1-3-5.
You can see how easily it is to derive the existing notation from those intuitions.
I’m a piano teacher, and this always creates obnoxious communication issues with my students. Most of them are younger than 10, so even if there was a rational music theory, I suspect it would be more complicated than they could absorb. Generally I use it only as a loose vocabulary, not a rigid system, and focus on developing their musical intuition. It’s interesting to see which kids make a rule out of consonance and dissonance, seeing one as “better,” and which use harmony in an open-ended way.
This is definitely weird from a math perspective, but it allows for an easier way of thinking about intervals as parts of things like scales and chords. For most musicians, it IS better that it’s this way, and I will explain why. So, there are three weird things here: privileged notes (why are some notes letters and some are sharps/flats), inclusive intervals which don’t add nicely (a third plus a third is a fifth), and inconsistent intervals named not according to absolute distance (there are two kinds of third, why not just use the number of semitones in an interval for a simpler system?). Let me first say that when you are dealing with music from a post-tonal standpoint in a system which looks more like a mathematical model, most notably serial twelve-tone composition such as that of Schoenberg, we change almost all of this to the mathematically simpler model! The note names are generally too ingrained to touch, but intervals are referred to in terms of number of semitones and are counted normally such that they add normally.
BUT, we use a tonal system, and the root of this is the heptatonic scale which we most commonly call major/minor. I assume you are familiar with this, and how the notes named without sharps or flats form one of these scales, A minor/C major. So, consider this: you are playing in this scale, which acts as an assurance that everything will stay relatively consonant and sound pretty good. You know the notes well, but have access to all of the others which you will avoid; you are sitting on some note of the scale, let’s say D, and based on your intuition you wish to ascend but not by step, instead you will skip a note. The inconsistent intervals serve you well, for you simply think of that as a third (why not a second we will come to later) along the scale to F, without having to remember specifically the exact number of semitones you will cross; and you could quickly express this to another musician who knows what key you are in just using our name for the interval. In fact, if we only played in one key and did not use notes outside of it or change to others, it might even be unnecessary to differentiate intervals as major or minor. In any case, note that this inconsistent system is geared towards moving along a scale and thinking of THAT as your basic measure, even though its steps do not form a consistent or symmetrical pattern. There are pretty deep reasons that we have twelve semitones in our octave, and that the heptatonic scale is so powerful, but if you can accept that it is so, and the history of music serves as evidence enough of this, then I think this should serve to explain two of our problems, the privileged notes and the inconsistent intervals.
So, on to your main issue, the inclusive intervals and difficulty of arithmetic with them. I admit that having to learn that 3+3=5 is a burden; however, it is one which, if borne, makes other things much easier. Remember that in a tonal system, we not only have a scale to restrict our music, but a way to orient the scale, a tonal center. Let’s use A minor, where our center is the note A. Now, consider that if you start on A, and move up your scale what we call a third, you end up on the third note of the scale, C. This should make it clear, but it is much more useful than that. Go up another third and get to E, the fifth of our scale. The arithmetic is troubling, but the interval from A to E is a fifth, from the root to the fifth note of the scale. Now consider the perspective of chords. The most commonly used ones are built by stacking thirds, specifically two of them (and for most other formulations, this system would work the same way in any case). We play all of these notes and get the chord A minor (A C E), but the third between C and E could be repurposed should we use C as the root, and we can use C E G to play C major. The notes of these chords relative to the root are called root, third, fifth, consistent again with our scales. And even if we should change keys, they will hold; in the closely related key of E minor we can still use an A minor chord, and the C is the third of the chord and the E the fifth. You can then construct any chord you want, either by knowing the scale you are playing in well and building with notes from it, or by reference to a scale that starts on the root note of the chord. All of this then becomes self-reinforcing. Although the number of scales, modes, chords, intervals, which you might need to know to be a fluent musician seems daunting, learning even a tiny bit of it almost implies the rest. A last thing to note: referring to intervals as major and minor (and sometimes diminished and augmented) means that we have a mathematically consistent system which can refer to any interval you might want, but it also grounds you naturally in a key. There are overlaps, but even though they can sound the same in isolation, there is a musically significant different between the interval F#->A, a minor third, and Gb->A, an augmented second, which, should all of this be applied according to good musical practices, will be audible in context.
I think that any mathematically inclined and experienced person who goes into music will be baffled by its systems at first, but I also hold that should they persist at it long enough and think on it, they will find that it has not at all been to their disadvantage to learn a slightly contrived system, as it does everything to aid their thinking along musical lines with greatest speed, and self-reinforces all of its concepts. Another angle to consider: a concept of 12 equal tones which can be used in whatever combination is obviously contrived. However, it was contrived AFTER a theory more based around other tonal practices had already coalesced. It is a modern privilege granted by many musicians and engineers who came before, but the relation of the keys and the 12 equal steps are not the truth of the system, they are not actually fundamental. It all flows, very conveniently and with only a little squashing to fit, out of the more basic unit of the scale and the sound of the intervals.
You can probably tell, but should anyone want to know some of the deeper reason for the importance of the heptatonic scale, its intervallic content, or the fact that there are 12 notes and not some other number, I’d be happy to talk about that.
I was going to comment thanking you for the first post, but in light of this I’ll just encourage you to feel free to continue!
I studied music to a small extent in college (Music Technology, so less theory than a music ed major but still some) in addition to my own personal studies, but that was a long time ago and my theory knowledge has atrophied quite a bit. This whole thread has been a fun excuse to remember things I had forgotten, and suddenly understand things that didn’t quite make sense to me 10 years ago.
I think the most interesting theory stuff is the real theory of music, i.e. theorizing on WHY our musical system is set up in the way that it is, and not in terms of notation. It’s a really strange field where it can be almost impossible to differentiate whether some axiom is an observation of a natural occurrence or just a rigorous analysis of an arbitrary system which humans have constructed. Anyway, at some point I could do a top level post on something like the harmonic series or intervallic content in scale construction, but possibly topics somewhere in between like key relations would be better. For now, I’m just going to go a little deeper into a point about the construction of intervals which tends to confuse people (as can be seen elsewhere in this thread). First, let me link this: https://np.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/acybw2/eli5_why_do_musical_semitones_mess_around_with_a/edez5w6/ which went unnoticed when posted, but is a lengthier version of what I posted above. This is better and worse in certain ways, but it contains a better summary of what I’m going to clarify below. One point I make in it which is worth mentioning: our musical system IS mathematically self-complete and consistent. Just because there are mathematically simpler ways to be able to fully describe an ordered, repeating series of twelve things and their relations, does not mean that we have chosen one which is inadequate to describe anything we might want to do with it. It will become a little tortured under certain circumstances, but in most normal uses it is more helpful.
So, the confusion I’m referring to is the difference between different ways of writing and naming intervals which are actually identical in sound, e.g. C->F# is an augmented fourth, and C->Gb is a diminished fifth, yet F#/Gb are the same note (only in rarely used systems or tunings is it truly helpful to dispute this). In an example elsewhere I note that C->G# is an augmented fifth, whereas C->Ab is a simple minor sixth. The first important thing to know is that no matter what key we find ourselves in, we ALWAYS use only the notes A-G to form our scale, and each of these only once. The different ‘key signatures’, or sets of sharps/flats applied to each note simply allow you to start on different notes and yet always get a scale that sounds the same, because the series of intervals is always the same. So, if we change from C major to G major, our scale is written G A B C D E F G, but also we know that we always end with a half step, so we will change the F to F#. Do this using a transposition (relevant to the riddle posted elsewhere) based on the C moving up to G seven semitones or a perfect fifth, and you end up with the same thing; all of the notes in the C major scale map onto these notes in this order, and all but one of them maps onto a note already in the scale. I’ll write this out:
C->G, D->A, E->B, F->C, G->D, A->E, B->F#. Because all things in music are relative and consistent, this is a general principle and illustrates the Circle of Fifths, which is based on the idea that the closest key is found a fifth away, because the greatest possible number of notes map to notes already in the original key. There is also an implication for intervallic content: if you harmonize a scale in fifths (i.e., play e.g. the notes of a C major scale starting simultaneously on on C and G, so you play CG at the same time, then DA, EB, etc.) all of the intervals will be identical perfect fifths except for the last, which will be the diminished fifth or tritone. If you invert the intervals, you get fourths (whether you simply play the starting G below C to get G->C, a fourth, or harmonize in fourths above the starting C, CF, DG, EA etc.) and the same thing happens although you will end up with F->B, an augmented fourth. The tritone is special because it is symmetrical, it is six semitones and therefore bisects our 12 tones. No interval which (measured in pure semitone distance) divides into twelve will ever be too foundational for music because it will cause us to use a smaller subset of our system. Going up by tritones isn’t interesting because in two steps you are back where you started. However, we’ve just seen how moving by a perfect fifth (seven semitones) gets us to the next closest key, and note that seven does not divide into twelve, which means that if we continue moving is fifths we will cover every note before we get back where we started.That is all interesting enough, but it’s mostly a digression. Let’s now talk about counting intervals. We know that it’s inclusive, but the important thing to know about what I called the inconsistency of the intervals is that you simply count along the letters. So, C->E is a third because we count 1 starting on C, D is 2, and then E is 3. It’s a major third based on the sound, but also based on the context of the key (if a key needed to have a third starting on a C be a minor third instead, either the C or the E would be altered by the key signature). And we like this because we are counting the steps along the scale we’re actually using. Quickly we can do the ambiguous example above. C1 D2 E3 F4 G5 A6, C->G# is some kind of fifth, while C->Ab must be some kind of sixth. Instead of thinking of some pure distance between two tones, we get to ignore the notes we don’t use in the key. The important thing is that you can think of a key transposition as a transposition of each note by the same interval, and therefore you can always simply use the letters A-G once each, with some sharps/flats (only one of these is ever needed at a time in a key signature), to describe any key. So let’s do the rest of this in the worst possible key, Gb. It’s so far away from our chosen ‘natural’ starting place of C that in fact there’s no argument to be made between calling it Gb or F#. One has six flats, the other six sharps, so pick your poison. But, if we choose Gb, C->Gb is a diminished fifth, so we transpose accordingly:
C->Gb, D->Ab, E->Bb, F->Cb(not B!), G->Db, A->Eb, B->FNow, in our system, we count an interval simply along the series of letters, inclusively, so lets see what this gets us. G to C is a fourth no matter what, and in this case we have Gb->Cb is a fourth. The chord based on the fourth scale degree is always major, and in this case we spell is Cb Eb Gb. Looks weird, in fact most people would be more comfortable with the identical B D# F#, but this is necessary for our key. But still the basics help us! No matter how you spell it, C->E is a third, and in this case we know from its position in our key that Cb->Eb is a major third! Let’s say we want to get that Cb to really lean into the Db, because Db is our fifth note and that is a very important one in many types of music; we’re going to raise it so that we bridge the gap, and we change our Cb to a C (natural). This forms an augmented fourth with the tonic of our key, Gb; a momentary dissonance with a satisfying resolution when it steps up. Now we decide we want to do the same in reverse, for whatever reason. Our target note is the Cb. We now take our Db, lower it to lean into the Cb, and end up with Dbb (double flat). We must not write it simply as C natural, because this is the note above Cb which will step down into it, so it is Dbb. Maybe you were already upset with calling a B a Cb, and now calling a C a Dbb is too much, but transpose this example back to C and we would be talking about F# vs Gb. Although the key of C is easier to get the hang of, the same principle which lets you remember that C->E is a third will help you when you modulate to Gb and have to remember that Cb->Eb is a third, because ANY kind of C to ANY kind of E is a third, of some kind. Thus, counting along letters clearly helps with tonal, key-based thinking.
You may plausibly even end up in a situation where you find the interval C#->Eb. This interval is a third, smaller than a minor third. It is a diminished third, and were one of the notes spelled differently it could be a simple major second (whole step), but if you see it written that way, it’s not! This is significant for many reasons, but foremost: you will naturally expect these notes might converge into a D, which you will be prepared for because a D always lies between a C and an E. A trained musician will see a different implication if, for instance, they see a C# and a D# together and then afterwards a D natural. I won’t get into a whole discussion of this, but the most common place to see this is what 20th century analysts called the German 6 chord. This chord has identical intervals to a dominant seventh chord, but it is spelled with a diminished third in it which the dominant seventh spells as a normal major second, and this diminished third has both notes resolve inward to the note between them as in the example above. This has been in common usage since at least Mozart’s time.
Well, that ended up longer than I expected. I think if you’d like me to write more on any subject, it would be best to ask a question or raise a topic. Personally, if you are into the more esoteric-seeming side of all this, I’d just recommend the second chapter of the first volume of Paul Hindemith’s book The Craft of Musical Composition (google search quickly turned up this scan: http://noty-naputi.info/sites/default/files/Musical%20Composition-Hindemit.pdf). He essentially constructs the major scale and its possible alterations (i.e. our twelve possible notes) from scratch using the harmonic series, and it’s even in an ideal, non-equal tempered form (meaning intervals are purer and possibly nicer in a single starting key, but won’t transpose to other keys as cleanly). Anyway, I think there are much simpler motivations for a system of 12 tones spaced evenly to divide an octave, but if you understand even a tiny bit of that chapter you’ll almost certainly figure those out quickly yourself!
Feel free to ramble at your leisure; I’m certainly curious. No idea whether here is the right place, or whether you would now be better waiting until the next open thread and posting a new top-level comment there. (How often do these things go up again?)
Is there some reason for the twelve-note system beyond the coincidental-seeming fact that it approximates some nice consonant intervals? i.e. that 2 ^ (x / 12) approximates 3/2, 4/3, 5/4 and 6/5 for various values of x?
I think the next open thread would come tomorrow?
Only that and the fact that the steps are pretty reasonable; some people have also constructed 43 note scale because that’s the next step up that approximates 3/2 (our perfect fifth) better. But those steps are probably too small for other psychoacoustic reasons.
If you’re trying to construct something that works the absolute most important interval is the octave. If you do something that makes your octaves fail to line up, or create a notation where those are not identical notes, your system will almost certainly fail to agree with basic human perceptions of sound. Next most important is the fifth. From my experience teaching music, if you tell kids with less experience to match pitch, sometimes they end up in a local maximum for consonance without finding an actual octave, and it’s very common for them to think a fifth maybe is the same note. So, it’s also kind of psychoacoustically fixed. If you just started there, and then started looking for places where (3/2)^x~2^n (where n is whatever makes it close, and x is the number of steps you end up with in your scale, but note that here we would be filling out the scale by going up 3/2 intervals), you can derive the 12 tone equal tempered system in minutes, and this is the maximum of modularity/ease of use/good sound that has become the unquestionable basis for almost all music made today. The rise of the digital has codified it and even reified in absolute terms our notes like C, which normally are simply a relative measure.
@danridge, I have another theory question that’s been bugging me and I’ll post it in the next open thread when that appears. I hope you’ll see it!
Great post, thanks. (One of my favourite things about this comment section is that there are better-informed people here than me on anything I’m interested in.) I could follow you on the parts I already agree with you about—note-naming and uneven interval size in the scales—but couldn’t quite follow the thread through the inclusively-counted intervals. I shall try to mull it over again.
I actually looked back over it again, and this write up I did before is actually much friendlier. Verbose, but it’s actually really carefully laid out. An apologia of basic music theory for the mathematically inclined. And I’ll watch for your question in the next thread.
Yeah I’m trying to solve the music puzzle someone posted on this thread (why are black notes on the piano pentatonic) and its much more intuitive for me to think of the first note of the scale is 0. the 12 tone scale is then just the mod-12 number system. 1, 5, 7, 11 are generators where +5 = going up up perfect fourth and +7 = going up a perfect fifth. -5 = +7 because fourths are fifths backwards and +7 + 5 = 12 = 0, which matches the number theory. (And of course +1 gives you the chromatic scale and +11 is the chromatic scale backwards.)
I mean, as danridge says above, “why are black notes on the piano pentatonic” was more likely a back-justification that was developed after pianos had evolved as per what worked for keyboardists. That is, that a major chord for an arbitrarily chosen key was set to be all on one level, and the rest of the notes shunted off to another level, which would help with muscle memory and spatial sense, just as measures and time signatures were developed to assist with rhythmic sense. Having all keys on one level would be like everything in sheet music in 1 beat per measure.
(In other news, the move from buttons to touchscreens is the worst…)
Despite defending the traditional system so strongly, I think making headway on the puzzle probably requires a conversion to this system at least at points. It’s important to understand things like how modulations map notes onto each other. This way of thinking also quickly surfaces all the cool symmetrical chords and scales you can use. Take the interval of 3 semitones (a minor third, but forget that for now). 12 divides into three four times, so after four of these intervals you are back where you started. This also means that there’s no clear basis to find the root of such a chord, since the intervallic content is identical regardless of your perspective. Also, there are only three distinct versions of this chord; you can shift everything up once to get the second, then again to get a third, but once you’ve gone up three semitones, the whole chord maps back onto itself and all the notes are unchanged! The chord in question is the fully diminished seventh chord, and all similarly constructed symmetrical sets (such as a whole tone scale or the simple interval of a tritone) have the same properties.
Fun pop-quiz for yourself if you like geography:
Does the drainage basin for the Caribbean Sea touch the drainage basin for the arctic or does the drainage basin for the Pacific touch the drainage basin for the North Atlantic? (Added: a drainage basin is the region of land where water flows into that body of water).
Added: For the rest of these questions, colonies/non-mainland territories don’t count.
From what country can water flow into the Mediterranean Sea, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Indian Ocean? (You get 3 guesses for this one).
From what country can water flow into the Pacific, Caribbean, and South Atlantic?
Added: What is the largest country where all the water flows into the same ocean?
Name a country from which water does not make it to the ocean.
Answers here.
Ooh, that’s a really pretty map!
Unfortunately I didn’t know what drainage basins were before clicking the link, so the first question made almost no sense to me, and for the second and third questions I was trying to think of countries that had overseas territories in the right places, which isn’t really the point.
I got the last question right, though. 🙂
Thank you for educating me about drainage basins.
Also pretty, maps that show the drainage basins of each river that isn’t a subsidiary of another river, including large basins like that of the Danube, and small ones of rivers near a seashore.
Ooh, I’ve got to get me some prints!
I don’t see any country on that map that flows into the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Indian.
Tanzania, I think
Also the UK.
Sadly, unlike France, we don’t count overseas territories as integral parts of the UK (even the Isle of Man isn’t part of the UK). So while the sun still never sets on our tiny-island empire, we don’t get to claim this particular prize.
1. Ab; lrf. (Gur Thys bs Zrkvpb vf abg cneg bs gur Pnevoorna, ohg obgu ner cneg bs gur Abegu Ngynagvp.)
Does the Gulf of Mexico count as part of the Caribbean?
1. a) Ab, ohg lrf vs gur Thys bs Zrkvpb pbhagf. Va Abegu Qnxbgn naq/be Fnfxngpurjna.
1. b) Lrf, va Fbhgurea Nyoregn nffhzvat Uhqfba’f Onl pbhagf nf gur Abegu Ngynagvp (bgurejvfr ab).
2. Ehffvn, Xnmnxufgna, Hmorxvfgna.
3. Pbybzovn
4. Vaqvn
5. Nmreonvwna
It’s interesting to note the smallness of the Pacific’s drainage basin for such a large ocean – much smaller than the Atlantic’s and almost the same size as the Indian’s. The two countries that do contribute significant area to it (looks like somewhere around 1 million square miles each) are the two great geopolitical rivals of the 21st century – USA and China.
Something I just noticed looking at the map again: there’s more than one “Mediterranean Sea”. I’ve never heard of that before.
From a quick search, it looks like it’s more that there’s the Mediterranean Sea, which is the sea enclosed by Europe’s southern coast, Africa’s northern coast, and a little bit of western Asia, and there’s the oceanography term of art “mediterranean sea”, which refers to…an area of ocean with a distinctly different salinity, where most of the water flow between it and surrounding areas is because of the salinity differences instead of normal currents, I think? Its certainly an interesting naming choice.
I’m going to be in Palo Alto for 5 days near the end of May/beginning June and I need a place to sleep at least some of those evenings. AirBnB prices are out of my range, although I’m expecting to pay something, and/or barter for services within reason.
Any SSCers living in the area (ideally, close to Stanford) have a spare room/bed for a friendly visitor who’s clean and quiet? If so, let’s discuss details via email: nadavzohar [at] hotmail dot com.
Obviously this would double as a chance to do a very scaled-down meetup if you’re interested. No offense taken if you’re not.
A quiz for the MtG fans. Which of these are actual Magic cards?
1. Blood of the Innocent
2. Expunge
3. Drake Familiar
4. Stomp
5. Knight of Autumn
6. Blind Rage
7. Glyph of Warding
8. Necrotic Servant
9. Angelic Page
10. Writ of Dismissal
11. Solar Heresy
12. Coronation
13. Vagabond
14. Mammoth Spider
15. Goblin King
16. Runesword
17. Giant Octopus
18. Twilight Mire
19. Insolence
20. Shadow Door
The fake ones, rot-13ed: snxrjbeq, oybbqbsgurvaabprag, fgbzc, oyvaqentr, tylcubsjneqvat, arpebgvpfreinag, jevgbsqvfzvffny, fbyneurerfl, pbebangvba, intnobaq, funqbjqbbe, vtaberguvf
Managed to be correct on 17/20, and marked two of my three failures as questionable, which I feel like I should get some points for. I only erred on the side of thinking cards existed when they didn’t, I never failed to recognize an actual card.
All of my failures were mentally something along the line of “yeah it’s probably some stupid useless card from Portal or one of those weird story cards from Tempest Block”
I’d like to hear more about these questionable card names, and why you think they are problematic. Use rot13 if you want to avoid giving out spoilers.
I was not critiquing your choices. I was saying as I wrote my answer down for 2 of the 3 I got wrong, I wrote “yes, but I’m really iffy on it”, which I’m mentally awarding myself points for: I was wrong, but I at least wasn’t confidently wrong. I don’t think I marked that for any that I was correct on.
I thought the choices were perfect. Znal bs gur snxr barf unir fvzvyne anzrf gb npghny pneqf: sbe rknzcyr, Oybbq bs gur Vaabprag irefhf Vaabprag Oybbq, Fgbzc irefhf Fgbzc naq Ubjy
I haven’t played in a long time (ice age was my last set), but I’m pretty confident Goblin King and Expunge are real.
Expunge is a Black kill-card with classic cycling. It costs (1) more than Terror but does the same thing.
Goblin King grants +1/+1 and Mountainwalk to all Goblins.
All other Goblins: early printings of the card didn’t give it the Goblin creature type so it wouldn’t affect itself anyway (barring Unnatural Selection or other trickery), but later printings made it a Goblin and adjusted the wording so it wouldn’t affect itself.
I wish I had thought to see how many of these I could get the exact wording for before checking my work.
I did pretty well (16/20), and I managed to catch that number 1 is kind of a cheat.
I only know two of them for sure are: Knight of Autumn and Mammoth Spider. (c’mon, if you were going to guess for yourself you should have done it before reading replies).
But while I recognize others as similar or incomplete names (there’s a savage stomp, not sure about the regular kind; there’s an Angelic Purge, not sure about Page) I wouldn’t rule any of them out and there’s too many sets for me to say for sure.
Without looking, I’m pretty sure Angelic Page is a 1/1 with flying and vigilance for (2)(w)
Close! All told, there are 26 cards with the name angelic_X, from Accord to Wall. (That was after looking)
17/20
Would have been 18/20 if I hadn’t counted the number of rot13 words and revised answers.
16. Missed a few older real cards with no competitive applications (I only started playing with Theros, and am essentially a competitive Spike), so all I could say about cards like Giant Octopus and Insolence was “sounds plausible, but I’ve definitely never heard of it, and in those two cases I guessed wrong. Runesword my reasoning was “that would be an equipment, but it’s also the kind of name they stopped using before equipment became a thing”, forgetting that of course there were a few clunky treatments like that. The one I was wrong hardest about was Glyph of Warding: I really thought that was a card, for some reason. Shadow Door and Necrotic Servant were the most tempting of the other made up cards, but I resisted.
Glyph of Warding sounds like a card because it is a D&D spell.
And also because it sounds really similar to cards like “circle of protection”. But there’s only one cycle of actual glyphs. Runes aren’t much more common, either.
Yeah, I guessed yes for that one because I remembered the Legends Glyph cycle and figured it was part of that.
Glyph of Delusion, Glyph of Destruction, Glyph of Doom, Glyph of Life, and Glyph of Reincarnation are all cards, I think I mentally assumed Glyph of Warding was the white one.
Strangely the glyphs had to wait over twenty years for their Keeper. That sphinx has an old school collection.
Trick question, these are all clearly metal band names.
I don’t think Angelic Page will be playing in any of the cool metal festivals, and Drake Familiar and Writ of Dismissal may be hard to find too.
But yes, a lot of MtG cards would make fine metal band names.
There’s Christian metal, “Drake Familiar” sounds like a power metal band name kinda-sorta, and in a pinch just make the name illegible. Throw “Writ of Dismissal” in extreme-metal font and there you go. Nobody can read it.
“Writ of Dismissal” is a garage band comprised of lawyers.
And in other news, I share my name with a creature on a Magic card:
https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=2872
Doesn’t look much like you, alas.
Wrong colors, too. I’m WUR, not WRG.
Not just any creature: a creature with his own book trilogy!
https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Johan_(novel)
Three questions:
If you could have a life that would make you the world’s richest person, or, on the other hand, you could live life believing both intellectually and emotionally (viscerally) that money will not affect your well being, which person would you choose to be and why?
If you found the bottle with the genie and he gave you two options, one being that you can keep the bottle for life and he will grant unlimited wishes or you can toss the bottle and he will adjust your beliefs so that you have no desires or wants, which would you choose and why?
If you, in one life, could have a first rate reputation like Gandhi or Abraham Lincoln or in another life live with no care or concern about what others thought of you, which would you choose and why?
1. World’s richest person for sure. If I chose the second option, I would find something else to blame for my problems and be equally miserable as if I were blaming it on lack of money. Also, a selfless person could use their riches to help others more effectively than a poor person with a sense that money does not affect their well-being.
2. Unlimited wishes for sure. Both options could make me personally happy, but having no desires or wants would presumably also remove the drive to help others. Assuming the genie is omnipotent and you intentionally omitted a “wishes can only be used for yourself” clause, you could use your unlimited wishes to cure cancer and end poverty and so on. I cannot see why anyone would choose the second option.
3. Second option, because there are very few people whose opinions of me I care about at present and I don’t have any idea what it would be like to have a stellar reputation. Also, didn’t both Gandhi and Lincoln get assassinated?
@rubberduck
You are assuming here that money improves lives which is not true in the second option. If you did not believe that money makes you happier you would not believe that is true of poorer people and therefore would have no need of the money.
If you did not (incorrectly) believe that having more stuff makes us better off there would be no need to help the poor. The poor need no help because they are just as well off as the non-poor
We’re all going to die. One thing is as good as another.
Uh, you just gave me unlimited wishes. We are not all going to die. Not anymore. No one is ever going to die, ever again. Death and suffering (and the destruction of information, for which both of those things seem to be proxies) are going to be permanently eliminated from the fabric of reality. They will not be possible. They will not even be conceivable. They will exist only as remembered nightmares in the minds of the awoken.
Things you can do with money:
Buy food
Buy a home
Buy a car
Go to college
Go skiing
Buy tools and materials for woodworking
Etc etc etc. But if you don’t think that being comfortable and able to fulfill your desires and self actualize and do anything more interesting than sitting on a couch is worthwhile, none of that will convince you.
Try telling that to a poor person. See how well it goes.
After you cure cancer, you can cure all other diseases, stop aging, provide unlimited food and shelter, and reverse entropy. “We’re all going to die” does not necessarily hold in a world with an unlimited wish-granting entity. (Though see the writings of Eliezer Yudkowsky for why it very well might)
@thevoiceofthevoid
Possibly one unanswered question is “what is the effect of having desire?” Buddha says it is the source of all suffering. You seem to think that having desire is a good thing. Why is having a desire for a new car preferable to not having that desire? The whole reason you would get the car would be so that you would not have the desire which seems circular. Yet still you argue that we should have desire?
Poor people just like rich people think that having more leads to a better life. You think Bezos is satisfied? He is no more satisfied than a poor person.
What a nightmare. You think global warming is a problem now, just wait until no one dies. I do not get why people think that a longer life means a better life. Life is only now. Longer is an illusion. I might die tonight or 30 years from now. Whichever has zero effect on my life, so why the big deal?
Anyone who believes money doesn’t buy (at least some) happiness, let alone satisfaction, has always had enough money.
@HowardHolmes
…I don’t think you get the full implications of unlimited wishes; with unlimited wishes, global warming is only a problem if the wisher wants it to be a problem
Well, the general idea is that, if life in general is preferable to not living, a longer life is better because you get more of the things which make life preferable to not living than if you live for less time.
@liate
Oh, I guess it is why life is worth living that I don’t get. Why does it need to be worth living? From where does it obtain this value?
You seem to be dodging/ignoring most of the hard questions in this thread but let me ask you.
Do you believe Bezos is happier or more satisfied than the parents of this child:
http://dujye7n3e5wjl.cloudfront.net/photographs/1080-tall/time-100-influential-photos-kevin-carter-starving-child-vulture-87.jpg
Unlimited wishes remember. he also fixed global warming.
Why do you bother even eating vs just picking up a really really big dose of heroin? After all, it’s all the same at the heat death of the universe after all.
Buddha simply doesn’t seem to be a great source of life advice if his teachings lead you to ignore the suffering of others and/or leads you to die cold and alone in a gutter somewhere.
@Murphy says
Satisfaction is having nothing you want. This can only come by choosing to have no wants (choosing to be satisfied). One cannot have wants and then become satisfied by fulfilling them. Since Bezos has not quit his day job he appears to be unsatisfied. As for the parents, I know nothing about them. If they choose to have no desires, they will be satisfied.
Have you quit your day job? Are you unsatisfied?
@HowardHolmes
Bezos may consider his job and/or the status & perks that come with it very satisfying. He may not be doing it for the ability to buy more stuff. Note that a high income has status benefits, so one may still want a high income, even if one doesn’t really need more money.
I can believe it as much as I want, but I assume your original set of choices only applies to me and does not affect the poor around me. So from their point of view, I have to choose between a) becoming rich enough to effortlessly pay their rent/student loans/medical bills/gambling debts/etc. or b) insist money isn’t important, all while having turned down option a). Unless option b) can be somehow extended to apply to literally everyone on the planet, option a) is better.
I interpreted “no desires or wants” to be not just material stuff but more abstract things too: reputation, peace, life, salvation (for the religious), friendship, saving the metaphorical drowning toddler. There are plenty of things one can desire even while shunning materialism, plenty of it meaningful. I sincerely would not want a life with my desire for living taken away from me.
@rubberduck
I see your point. It finally got through to me. You are assuming, unlike me, that having more of what one wants leads to a better life. I am coming from the belief that one cannot satisfy wants with getting regardless of whether one believes he can. Let’s say you identify poor person Sam. Sam thinks he wants more of something because he is typical of all humans who think they want more and that more is better. So you give Sam more of X. Will he me MORE satisfied than before? No Will he stop wanting more? No In what way have you changed his life? In no positive way that I can see.
And how does one go about making it meaningful? I say that is through conscious choice. We decide to make things important. We decide that it is important that our team wins or that we have steak on the table occasionally or that we have a bigger house or that we have friends or that we are alive. We can also choose to make these things not important. Which are they in nature? I say they are not important at all in nature and objectively. Choosing to see them as important is merely choosing to see them the way they are.
Without meaning to be presumptious I suspect you have never lived a life without desire so you are speaking with little experience. At least, I have lived both. Buddha said that desire is the source of all suffering. He also lived both lives.
So from their point of view, I have to choose between a) becoming rich enough to effortlessly pay their rent/student loans/medical bills/gambling debts/etc. or b) insist money isn’t important, all while having turned down option a).
But choosing option (a) does not necessarily mean you’re going to pay the bills of random poor people; Jeff Bezos is channelling his excess worth into his own private space programme, not going down to the local soup kitchen and picking out ten people whose bills he pays off completely.
Option (b) affects your own life; if you think money won’t affect your standard of living, then you’ll be temperate in demeanour even if you become poor. Becoming unimaginably rich doesn’t mean anything more than having lots of money to do with as you please – someone might please to pay off the bills of poor people, another person might please to fill a swimming pool with dollar bills and dive in.
It seems pretty arrogant to assume that everyone else would be happier without desire just because you are. From whence comes this incredible ability to see inside the hearts and minds of others? Religious fervor?
For me, getting what I want does make me happier. In periods of my life when I am getting more of what I want, I am happier, and in periods where I am getting less, I am less happy. I never stop wanting things, but wanting things is a part of being human. There’s nothing intrinsically bad about it.
I don’t see why you think that Bezos is not happier than you. He very well might be?
@Cliff says
It seems arrogant of you to assume I think what I never claimed. I never claimed others would be happier without desire nor do I think they would be. In fact, being happy comes from desire.
I agree, and not getting what you want makes you less happy. Just as desire is the cause of all human suffering, it is also the cause of all human happiness.
This addresses my very point. It is not the wanting that you want (wanting causes suffering, not happiness) but rather you seek the object of your desire assuming that will bring happiness. Bottom line is that you seek to “NOT want”. My point is that one can achieve a state of not wanting (which is what you seek) by making a conscious decision to not want. My point is that wanting can never be satisfied because one always wants more unless one decides not to want. My point about Bezos was to assume he still wants which you yourself said is part of being human. I agree it is part of being human but not an inevitable part.
Lets say you identify a lonely child.
James thinks he wants hugs and affection and parents who love him and a warm place to sleep and for the cold empty feeling in his stomach to stop.
He is typical of (almost) all humans.
So James is adopted, his new parents give James love, affection, a warm safe bed to sleep in and good food to eat.
Of course. And if your ideology is somehow telling you that he won’t then something is utterly broken with your ideology and you might want to take a careful look at it.
Eventually. Absolutely. Kids get hugs and affection and eventually they’ve had enough and they squirm away to go sing a song or watch a story or play a game.
And after meals he’ll stop being hungry, won’t desire more food and will go do something else.
After a good sleep in a warm bed he’s not suddenly going to want infinite sleep and infinite warmth. Once he’s had a good sleep in a warm bed he’ll typically want to get up and do something like play with friends.
If you can’t see the difference between the 2 versions of James life and how one is better than the other then you’ve drunk a really toxic glass of coolaid.
This seems simply untrue. Lots of wants can be satisfied.
The friendless can be happy and content when they gain friends.
The lonely can be happy and content when they feel loved.
The hungry stop being hungry when they’re full.
A parent with a lost child, desperately searching for them doesn’t keep searching for more children after they’ve found theirs.
When you’re cold you don’t want infinite warmth. When you’re too hot you don’t want infinite cold.
You fulfill desires and they get fulfilled.
“deciding not to want” is about as helpful as telling a mother searching for her lost child that she should just give up because ultimately her child doesn’t matter.
@HowardHolmes
I think here’s where we come closest to agreement. I concur that if you somehow truly eliminated your desires, you would neither suffer nor be happy (and probably just be a vegetable, but that’s beside the point).
But I like happiness! I want to be happy! Even if it’s at the cost of occasional suffering. There are things in life that bring me joy, and I want to experience them, and I want to continue wanting to experience them. Even if I could eliminate all my desires by hitting a button, I would never choose to, and I would never want to become the kind of person who would choose to.
If you’ve decided to make the opposite trade-off, it’s no skin off my back. Though I’ve critiqued and poked fun at your mindset elsewhere, if this philosophy of removing desire works for you, then you do you. Except to the extent that it leads you to claim that poor people should just stop wanting to not be poor. (But hey, we all have our rationalizations for why we don’t sell everything we own and give it to the poor, you’re not alone in that.)
@Murphy
Individual wants can be satisfied. You want a car. Getting a car satisfies that want, but then you will want something else for the same reason you wanted the car. You will still have wants. The only way to have no wants is to stop having wants.
The suggestion accomplishes nothing if it is not taken.
The second option only seems to edit my beliefs.
Editing my beliefs doesn’t change reality. You could sink wires into my brain and use them to convince me that spiders taste like chocolate, that the world is flat and that a sheep is the most sexually attractive thing in the world… but that doesn’t change the shape of the earth.
Money buys antibiotics to keep people’s kids alive, it buys bed nets to keep your kids from getting malaria. Money buys food so you don’t go to bed hungry and resources to keep people safe.
I’m not terribly interested in getting my brain edited to believe untrue things.
I might as well just go with wireheadding if I did that. Or just take a lot of drugs until I can ignore the world around me.
I get the feeling you’re trying to play games swapping between “more stuff”or “it’s just stuff” and wealth/money in general.
An extra prada bag for someone who’d already tapdancing on the top of maslow’s hierarchy of needs may have very limited utility… but a few bucks worth of plumpynut for a mother who’s child is starving to death can be the most important thing in either of their lives.
Nominally both are “just stuff” but that kinda shows the gaping holes in the anti-“stuff” ideology.
@Murphy
Money can do those things but money does not make those things important. People make them important, and they do so for their own reasons. In and of themselves they are not important. You can protest in whatever bold typeface you wish to use, but you are still providing me with no reason why these things are important other than your own wishes.
If you choose to value a life over a Prada bag this is simply your choice. Nature does not make that choice. Reality does not make that choice. You make it for your own reasons. The person choosing the Prada bag seems clearly to be doing so out of a desire to be important. That is also an arguably possible motive of someone buying mosquito nets.
Provide an example of something that is important.
If you cannot, you are playing games with the word “important”.
@greenwoodjw
There is nothing that is important. However, I not the one’s playing the games. The games are by the bulk of humans who think they themselves are important and make themselves seem important by making other things important. I am not the one who made up the word and am pretending that it attaches to something real. It is pure illusion.
All of the second options sound like obvious traps.
“Money can’t affect your well being” – unless the whole society is being uplifted into some sort of Culture utopia, you’re affected by money unless you’re a hermit, a prisoner, or your life is so miserable that no amount of money can help (terminal disease maybe).
“No wants” – genie kills you or makes you a vegetable.
“No concern about what others think” – you’re a hermit or a sociopath (or both).
@gbdub
We are affected by money but whether it makes life better is a matter of opinion. Bill Gates might think his big house makes him better off than me, but I do not. Given the choice I would take my one-bedroomer if for no other reason it is easier to vacuum. Its already more than enough room since I have a bedroom which is not used by day and a living room not used by night. They could, but for building codes, been one room.
Would you rather have your current arrangement or a cardboard box?
If you say the former, does that not make it “better” than the box in at least a limited sense restricted to your personal preferences?
If you say you are truly indifferent, why aren’t you living in a cardboard box right now?
If you say the latter, well, have I got the new “house” to sell you!
@thevoiceofthevoid
Living things have to make choices. I have to make a choice between my house and a cardboard box simply because both are options. The question then is “Does the fact that I am forced to choose prevent me from being indifferent?”
I make a lot of choices and I also attempt to live with indifference. I think one can succeed at this, and I could give you many examples I have actually faced (never thought seriously about the box). Last year in March I was diagnosed (much to my surprise as I live an very healthy life) with chronic congestive heart failure. While doing the echocardiagram, the lady poked around and found what was described in the doctor’s analysis as a “large mass” on my liver. I went from thinking I had a long time to live to thinking that I might have only a couple of months. I claim to be indifferent as to whether or not I live. This experience confirmed my belief about myself. The diagnosis bothered me none at all. I really do not care whether I live or die. I slept that night just like always and no one but my wife ever knew about it (she was there when I found out).
Now to your point. I have to choose to live or die. You could ask why I don’t die or don’t I think living is better. All I can say is that I know I don’t think living is better and do not care if I die. On the other hand, I am living currently and have to make a choice. Why not? I could flip a coin. I will not, so that means I choose to live. But I still know that I do not consider living better. When I actually think about it, I just think I will let nature take its course.
If circumstances put me in a cardboard box, I would not be distressed. I would probably think, “now I get to learn what Diogenes knew.”
I think you’re kidding yourself. You can’t go through life without preferences.
@Cliff
Whose judging whose private thoughts?
You say you are indifferent, yet you choose the one option over the other, unfailingly. If you’re unwilling to flip the coin—and you admit you won’t even do that—how do you get to say you’re indifferent? You keep claiming you have introspective evidence, but last thread you admitted believing in massive continuous self-deception. I do not trust your introspection, and neither should you.
I think it’s worth pointing out that not preferring either of two options over the other doesn’t require randomly picking either one when the choice arises.
If you allow a friend to always choose for you, and they choose the same option always, it doesn’t show that you were never indifferent in the first place. Even if you randomly choose, we can imagine the coin always landing on heads by pure chance.
A person for which all actions are equal could theoretically act in any arbitrary manner.
Of course in the real world we are still inclined to strongly doubt any person who claims they have no preferences, as I do for HowardHolmes.
@Basscet: There’s either a reason he always chooses one option or there’s not. If there’s not, it’s sheer coincidence, like your example of the coin always landing on heads. But this is definitely not what’s going on. Now if there is a reason, it can be found within Howard or without. But Howard isn’t being forced to do anything, and he’d maintain as he did last thread that the choice always lies with himself. So the reason he always chooses one option, one that remember he maintains he enjoys, must be within. This all men call a preference.
@Nick
Well phrased question. Let’s start with something you might be indifferent about. Let’s say you are fond of strawberry ice cream so you consistently order it. No coin flipping for you. Suppose one day they are out of it. You eat butter pecan instead. IMO whether you desire strawberry depends on how you handle this emotionally. If you find yourself not the least bit bothered by having to eat butter pecan then I would not label this as desire. In my case of choosing life I find myself not the least bit bothered if this choice were not available. If someone told me that I would die in my sleep tonight, I would go to bed at 8 as usual and sleep like a baby. I do not care whether I live or die. I did not choose life; it chose me so here I am living. I’ll go with the flow but am indifferent as to whether I live or die. Sure this is totally introspective, but it is the best I can do. I have experienced caring. I know what it is like to want to live and I have experienced indifference. It looks a good deal different from the inside. That I do not care now seems pretty obvious.
This is a product of being human. My self deception was no greater than yours is. What I am now is not normal, but also it is clear now as to the self deception and its causes.
To not want anything is to be dead. At this point, I do not prefer death to life, so I take the bottle. The other two questions ask about a subset of wants rather than wants as a whole, and indeed there could be an argument that getting rid of some wants would enable one to focus more on other wants, but among the things I want is variety, so making my wants less diverse is also not appealing to me. So, first choice down the line.
You seem to claim that having wants is preferable to not having wants. This seems contradictory since the purpose of a want is to not have it. Bob wants a new car and Jane does not. With respect to a new car Bob has a want and Jane does not (Jane is dead?). Does Bob want the want or the new car? It appears Bob is seeking to rid himself of the want by getting a car. He, ironically, is trying to put himself into the same position as Jane is already who he claims is dead. So neither Bob nor Jane want to want a new car. Jane is in the condition she desires to be in(she has no want), but Bob is not. Please justify how you see Bob as better off.
There’s this famous case in neuroscience about a guy with brain damage in his ‘want center’, for lack of a better word. He didn’t want anything. That included going to the bathroom or putting a spoon in his mouth, even if his previously favorite food was sitting right there.
I’m pretty sure that Bob wasn’t that well off; he’d have starved to death if not for permantent attendance.
@March
We need to restrict the use of the term want. Want implies lack. The man did not lack the meal and was not in want of a meal. The man had the meal. Why he did not eat it goes far beyond wants.
@HowardHolmes
No, he didn’t have the meal. Not quite, not in the sense that’s relevant here. He had what appeared to be ability to obtain the meal, and that ability would be so great and so unrestricted that under ordinary circumstances we’d ignore the difference and just say he had it. But he hadn’t used it yet — and use is the purpose of ownership. And, in fact, he couldn’t use it: its use was prevented by his own apathy.
I suppose this boils down to the fact that ownership is a rather hazily-defined concept. But regardless of how exactly we want to define it, possession is a proxy for use — if you measure how able a person is to use something (under a bunch of parameters that I won’t go into), and that ability-to-use is above a certain threshold, you say the person owns (or “has”) the thing.
But the man in question, in fact, could not use the meal, because his brain was not able to process information in a way that would cause him to do so. So it’s not reasonable to say that he had it.
Loosely, the purpose of a want is to satisfy the want. Satisfying a want only covers a subset of “not having it”. Not having it because of mind alteration isn’t part of that subset.
I am familiar with the Buddhist view of desire. I do not find it plausible, in part because it does seem to have this consequence that it is better to be dead.
@Protagoras
Just repeating the claim that it is like being dead gives me nothing more to go on. I claim to have no desire and want for nothing. I do not feel dead. What am I missing?
@HowardHolmes
As much as I loathe the concept of “revealed preferences”….
You certainly seem to have something motivating you to post in this thread in an attempt to convince us that desires are unnecessary. Would you call that a “preference”? A “motivation”? I’m sure you won’t want to call it a “desire”–but ah, you don’t “want” anything, do you?
Well, you are mistaken (or lying, but I’ll be charitable). I don’t know you well enough to diagnose your errors in detail. But someone who has no desire does not post comments on blogs.
@thevoiceofthevoid
Here is the way I analyse it. I study spanish a little most every evening. I also play a little sudoku. Why? I have to do something. What’s the difference between these activities and sitting in a chair or picking my nose? Nothing. I found that I enjoy these activities. If I found that pottery was more enjoyable than spanish lessons, I would probably do that. Are these things important? Not in the least. Is one thing better than the other, no. Do I desire to do them? No, in the sense that if I were prohibited from doing one, it would cause no concern. I would just find something else to do.
More to your point I consider myself a poor communicator and poor writer. I find it appealing to learn to be better at it. So far I have not had much success at that, but to me I enjoy the effort as much as doing sudoku and hopefully a little more than picking my nose. The real crux is that we must choose. Just because he must choose we are not forced to desire or want. I choose among available alternatives. I don’t always know the reason why and maybe never do.
@Protagoras
What does one who has no desires do? Shoot myself? Before you answer realize that I am forced to choose to do something.
Troll nerd-snipable boards with a bit of the old ultranihilism?
(Obligatory “say what you will about the tenets of national socialism”)
In what sense are you forced to choose to do something? I mean, sure, in the Sartrean sense, doing nothing is something you are still responsible for, and in that sense could be regarded as just a different kind of choosing to do something. But that only matters if you care what you end up being responsible for. I do not see how that point still applies in the absence of desires.
I can only imagine the conversations you have. “I enjoy sudoku. I am going to do some sudoku.” “Oh… do you WANT to do some sudoku, Bob?” “NO!! NOOO!!! I just have to do something so I choose sudoku which I enjoy. I do not WANT to do sudoku, I just am doing it because I enjoy it. I have to choose something!!!!”
@Protagoras says:
In the sense that if one is alive one cannot avoid doing something. If I am sitting in the chair I have to decide whether to continue sitting. If I am alive I have to decide whether to continue living or to die. There is no state of not doing. It is always me the agent that is doing this doing
I don’t want to falsely believe something, even if I’m happier that way, and the fact that utilitarianism considers such things good is a problem with utilitarianism modelling actual human preferences. So I would choose to be rich, unless being rich has other negative consequences (having to work a lot, for instance) that outweigh both the usefulness of money and the badness of believing false things.
Similar answer for the other questions. I’d add that they are similar to asking “would you prefer to be wireheaded?”
@Jiro
How would having more benefit you? Are you dissatisfied in some way with your current life that more money would change?
(a) World’s Richest Person. It’s all very well being emotionally and intellectually convinced that lack of money will not have any effect on one’s life, but that doesn’t last beyond the first time you can’t pay a necessary bill or are held up on something because you don’t have the money for it (that could be as trivial as “can’t go on school tour with the rest of the class because family can’t afford the bus ticket” or as serious as “can’t afford that life-saving operation”). If in the teeth of all evidence you continue to be convinced, intellectually, that “not having the rent money for six months straight will not affect my well-being”, then that leads you into trouble. Mr Pickwick may be the fictional example but there are plenty of real life examples of people who run themselves into trouble over ignoring consequences about being gamblers, alcoholics, junkies or otherwise and using all their money for their desires and not their needs. If you’ve got a billion dollar fortune you can waste a lot of money on trivial nonsense, but if you’re poor you’re going to be even poorer and even worse off if you splurge instead of being practical, and splurging happens when “I don’t feel worried or concerned about the effect of my finances on my well-being, something will turn up”.
As the saying goes, money may not buy you happiness but you can afford a better grade of misery.
(b) Toss the bottle. Not having desires and wants would make things a lot easier. There’s unhappiness produced by the tension between “I wish I could have/do/be” and the realisation that this is not going to happen because you don’t have the capacity for it and never can change your circumstances. Getting rid of “I wish…” would help even a little with “well my life is shit, better accept that and get on with it”.
(c) Live with no care for what others think. Very few people out of the billions on this planet will achieve a global level of recognition like those names. If you’re already not ambitious, then this makes little difference to you, so it’s no lack to lose any desire for fame. People get devoured by a desire for fame, including putting themselves out there on reality TV shows (a formula which seems to be finally, thankfully, running out of steam) and trading humiliation for the very faint prospect of fleeting fame (can anyone name the past winner from five years ago of any TV talent show?) If you can be content that you are doing as well as you are able, then the fame or lack of it has no bearing on your conduct.
@Deiseach
So we cannot have the life saving operation? We cannot have everything. You could just as well fantasized about having a terminal disease for which no operation was available. To live without wanting more means we are willing to live without wanting more. You are claiming that having money will keep you from wanting the operation and that getting what you want makes life better. How can this be if it is true than we can choose to live without wants. If I give away millions of dollars and don’t keep enough for the operation and choose instead to not want, how is my life worse off. You want the money to eliminate wants…which can be eliminated simply by choice.
The saying is not true. Money cannot buy happiness. The only route to satisfaction is deciding to be satisfied. Wanting more and satisfaction are mutually exclusive.
Well said.
don’t keep enough for the operation and choose instead to not want, how is my life worse off. You want the money to eliminate wants…which can be eliminated simply by choice.
My daughter needs knee surgery so that she can continue to run and jump and play. Luckily, I have the money for that.
Optionally, she could use a crutch (although I suppose even crutches cost money – perhaps I could carve her a stick) for the rest of her life. I wouldn’t even make an attempt to prefer that outcome, and I would reject any attempt to turn me into the kind of person who would.
@Matt
Some people in the world do not have the money for that What I am saying is that they are no worse off than you. Their daughter is no worse off than yours. Having a leg or not having a leg is not important. I would choose the leg given the choice, but it is still not important. If I lost my leg, it would cause no distress. This is because I do not choose to make a leg more important than it is. It’s a leg! It’s a life! It’s no big deal!
It seems like in order to make such a decision based on indifference, you also have to be incredibly certain that you are right.
Even a tiny chance that you are wrong means that you should let the daughter’s extreme preference for having a working knee overrule your complete indifference about the matter.
@Kindly
I would fix the knee if possible. Never said I would not. Indifference gives no basis for making decisions, but decisions have to be made. Decisions do not require desire. Animals make decisions, but they do not desire.
What is your basis for saying that animals do not desire? That seems plainly false to me.
To me, it just sounds like you have suppressed most of your emotional responses. Frankly, that sounds terrible. If you have more negative than positive emotions in your life than maybe it would be an improvement, but it doesn’t seem human.
@Cliff
Desire is not choosing to eat a worm in front of me or choosing not to. Desire is wanting that which is not available to me currently. Animals do not know they even exist, much less than that they want something
I find your willingness to judge my life as terrible is ironic given your previous criticisms of me
You are correct. It is not human. Human is to think they are better than others and to always want more. Human is to constantly seek to be distinquished.
You are claiming that having money will keep you from wanting the operation and that getting what you want makes life better.
No, I’m saying “imagine you are very sick, that the medical treatment that can cure you is very expensive, but you don’t have the money to afford that treatment”. Money or the lack of it in that case has a very immediate affect on your life.
@Deiseach
I agree that it has an immediate effect on your life. I am saying, however, that your life is unimportant and the effect is unimportant. We humans make our lives important. We are unique, and we do it for a reason: so that we will be important, so we will be different. We are not different. We are all the same.
HowardHolmes, you argue forcefully for your point of view, but if nothing matters, then why argue?
@Nancy Lebovitz
You seem to ignore that I have to do something. I could say, “I pick my nose, but if nothing matters, why pick my nose?” Today I took a walk, ate, played some sudoku, worked in the yard, checked my email, argued” There might have been other things. One means no more than the other. If tomorrow I can do none of them, I will do nine other things. Just because nothing matters does not mean we die. I could die, but you would ask “if nothing matters, why die?”
He doesn’t WANT to argue Nancy. He just does it because he has to pick something and he likes it, and also he likes convincing people. But he does not WANT to convince them. He just enjoys it. Also he enjoys trolling and annoying people. He does not DESIRE to annoy them but he does like it. And after all, he has to do something, and your life doesn’t matter so what difference does it make? Also, later he may go torture a bunch of people. He doesn’t WANT to torture people, but he does ENJOY it. And after all…
1. Richest person, obviously. I could save/improve so many peoples’ lives with that kind of money! Also, the second option seems like a really creepy and distasteful kind of mind editing – it might keep me from believing true things!
2. Wishes, obviously. For much the same reasons: I could help so many people, and fix so many world problems; and also the alternative is creepy mind editing.
3. This one’s a little less obvious, because I already don’t particularly care what strangers think of me, so the second option involves less creepy mind-editing than the other questions’ second options. I also think being famous would be pretty stressful, and of course at that level of fame I’d be at non-negligible risk of assassination, so the first option here has some real downsides. But I could probably still improve a lot of peoples’ lives by using my reputation to influence countries’ policies? Not that I have any talent for politics, so I’m not entirely sure I could actually do that. But I think the utilitarian calculus still works out to make the first option the best one, even if it’s less certain than with the other questions.
@phi-of-two
What will prevent you from believing true things is the belief that you already know the truth. You seem to believe that having more makes one better off. In what way?
In being happier and more satisfied with life, and experiencing more positive emotions, as research shows is the case for most people.
This needed said.
But now that you’ve said it, you don’t need to say it any more.
Very interesting to see everyone’s answers to #1 here, because to me, the specific wording of “have a life that would make you the world’s richest person” means that you aren’t getting bags of string-free money dropped on you, you are going to have to do the things that make the most money, i.e. do what Jeff Bezos has done, and be beholden to any of the people Jeff Bezos is beholden to (board members, shareholders, competitors, regulators, customers, etc.).
And I could not be paid enough to deal with the stresses of such responsibility.
@AG
Interesting take.
1. Well since the belief is false, I don’t want to believe it. Based on the way you phrased the question I would be unhappy AND wrong.
2. The genie. “I have no desires or wants” seems equivalent to death, literally.
3. I’m a little more on the fence about this one. I do care about my reputation to some degree but something about having it guaranteed by a genie seems wrong.
@
Why?
He enjoys having a good reputation. He doesn’t WANT or DESIRE a good reputation and is totally indifferent to it, BUT he enjoys a good reputation quite a bit, and after all you have to choose whether to maintain a good reputation or not. He could flip a coin, but he chooses not to.
Axiomatically. It is one of my terminal values.
As for why I have that value, probably because I’m a primate and/or I was raised in a society.
Being famous and having a reputation that I didn’t earn sounds like a nightmare. It would make me a complete fraud and I would constantly feel that way.
The last time someone answered a question like this, it started the Trojan War. So I’m going to stay silent.
Whereas most of the SSCommentariat agreed that Paris was thinking with the wrong head and should have gone with Athena.
Good thing we have a genie who can grant us wisdom, eh?
Questions 1 and 2 : we are responsible for one another.
Question 3 : this is a trick question.
First, actual answers to your questions: I think I would choose to have get a life that would make me the world’s richest person (any idea of wellbeing that doesn’t include getting enough food or otherwise having more of my preferences met is alien enough that the other option is too large a change), I would certainly take the bottle, and I would probably take the lack of concern for what others think of me, assuming that leaves me the ability to instrumentally care about others’ opinions of me (stressing about things connected to what others think of me is a large negative part of my life, but I wouldn’t want lose the ability to, say, realize that injuring people who are annoying will lead to being arrested)
Second, I’d like to pose some questions to you:
If given the choice between a guarantee that you will never feel pain or at all be physically injured for the rest of your life, and completely believing that pain or physical injuries do not effect your well-being, which would you choose? How much would either have to change before your answer would change?
@liate
I would choose the former. I already have the latter. I choose now to avoid pain when possible. Now if you ask would I give up my belief, for instance, than nothing matters in order to get a pain free promise, no I would not. I will choose to keep my current beliefs that there is no good or bad, that nothing matters, nothing is important, I am not important, that now is as good as it gets, that there is no meaning. I have lived both lives and know the effects of these beliefs.
A question in return:
If you could choose whether to be capable of sincerely feeling the love which you now believe you only imagined you felt, or to relive your life from the beginning with your current attitude of indifference, which would you choose and why?
On the first trip through I sincerely felt what I thought I was feeling. I have chosen my current life now so one would assume, given the option, I would choose it throughout. The life is weirder than you think. My wife and I live in silence and have no friends and typically leave the property once a week for groceries. My life would not appeal to anyone else unless they lived it. It cannot be described favorably.
Then a followup:
Would you, if you could, choose to feel love again (as you once did) before you die?
No. There are a lot of things you could ask about in a similar way. Would I choose to feel happiness. No. All of those highs come with lows. I have no happiness or excitement in my life but also have no sadness or suffering. When someone wishes me a good day, I think about the bad days that are necessary to make good days possible. I would just as soon have none of it. There is no such thing as good without bad, but there is such a thing as neither. I am not claiming by life is better in any way. My guess is that it all averages out. I am 71 years old and have always liked my life and only had my current life for less than 10 years. But still, having experienced it all, I would choose this life.
Why does the balance make it not worth it?
I’m much younger than you; maybe that’s obvious. But I enjoy change. I like to experience the bad times as well as the good. The joy may average out, but I feel richer for the variety.
Do you experience beauty?
@Hoopyfreud
There is a vast difference between a life of meaning and one without. Everything you do is about meaning. Synonym for meaning is important. Everything is about being important.
Take my breakfast. 7 days a week, 365 days a years it is unseasoned and unadorned oatmeal. I know about variety and I know many different breakfasts. I know what you would mean if you told me you like variety. But that is all about meaning. What does it mean to eat a “special” breakfast of eggs benedict or belgian waffles? It is all about ideas and meaning. I look forward to my breakfast and enjoy eating every bite. There is nothing more than that in realty. The rest is just the meaning your give it. And meaning, after you scratch off the bullshit is about what makes me important.
As much as I ever did, but if I see a beautiful sight, I do not point it out to my wife or take a picture or judge it in anyway. I enjoy it like I do a bowl of oatmeal and go on without any drama. That’s the word. You are in it for the drama, and there is drama to be had, but it is all in your head and IMHO an illusion.
That doesn’t satisfy me. In the long run, we’re all dead and very, very unimportant. You’re not lying to yourself any less than I am. The difference is that you don’t (or pretend not to) understand my lies.
Anyway, drama is beautiful too, and no more of an illusion than oatmeal. Not too much, and not all kinds. But some of it is, and I do my best to instigate that sort of it. Same as I do with pancakes. But it sounds like you decided not to lie to yourself about the pancakes, and I don’t understand why.
@Hoopyfreud
I don’t know why either.
HowardHolmes,
What do you and your wife do all day?
@LesHapablap ,
5-6 Walk three miles silently
6-7 Two cups of decaf tea in dark silently
7-8:30 Dicking around on computer, breakfast, chores, getting ready
8:30-11 Work outside silently (5 acres)
11-12 Lunch
12-2:30 Work outside
2:20-3 I shower and do computer things; wife keeps working (she works thru lunch as well)
3-8 chores, dinner, computer
8 go to bed
This is our 365 day schedule except we go to grocery store on Thursdays
When you say computer does that mean reading things on the internet, or work? Do you read books?
What kind of work do you do on the land? Do you grow crops?
@leshapablap
check the news, read this blog, play sudoku, study spanish. Doń’t read books. In yard I clear thickets and vines out of trees Wife has a garden.
HowardHolmes,
What did you do before you retired if you don’t mind my asking?
I find your lifestyle fascinating, particularly the living in silence with the wife. I have parts of my life in which I have small ascetic routines so I wonder what it would be like if I made my whole day like that.
Was it a struggle to adjust to this lifestyle at first?
Did you and your wife talk about it beforehand and make a conscious decision for it, or did it just develop naturally?
Money vs. Belief: I’d go for the cash, obviously. It doesn’t matter whether I believe, intellectually and emotionally, that money doesn’t affect my life, because it demonstrably does. People with mental disorders often believe, intellectually and emotionally, that gravity doesn’t affect their lives; but it demonstrably still does, even if they do jump off of buildings with full sincerity.
Genie vs. Belief: Same thing, except that now it sounds like unlimited cosmic power (itty bitty living space) vs. instant death, so it’s admittedly a less attractive situation.
Reputation vs. Concern: same ting. Once again, feels < reals.
Richest versus belief: this depends on whether the belief would be justified. Most of my goals involve external resources. If the belief came with some kind of magic where I could stay broke and somehow the other resources I needed would materialize anyway, then that’d be better because I’d have less ways of squandering my riches away. I’m guessing not, so, riches.
Unlimited wishes versus lack of desire: I have sufficient hardcoded desires that lack of desire would destroy my identity, unless I could somehow encode my trajectory beforehand so that my current desires will be granted through some other means as a side effect of the version of me lacking desires coming into existence. I’m assuming the genie isn’t evil; if the genie is evil then no option is safe. So probably unlimited wishes, especially since this subsumes the potential to wish for “lack of desire except for a transient desire to throw away the genie” later if it looks clear that it’s become the good option.
First-rate reputation versus no concern: once again, most of my goals involve external resources. It depends on whether the first-rate reputation sticks around; if it’s something that’s easy to lose, I might be tempted to go for the no concern, partly because people who are too concerned about their reputation tend to show it at one point or another and wind up thought of as fakers, so it might be a better option even for my object-level reputation. Assuming the first-rate reputation is guaranteed to stick around and gives me immunity from being outcast and denied resources due to blunders on my part, I would cautiously choose that, since the risk of misusing it and becoming a danger to the world seems manageable versus my desire to achieve my external goals, but they both seem dangerous without more qualifications.
As I’m already fairly free of want for money or material objects in and of themselves, I would choose options A, A, and B.
Life is made of time and living things capable of choices, so why not take the money and wishes? That way I will have more choices available to me in the future. I think I could live in a cardboard box tomorrow, or continue living in my fairly frugal apartment, and remain around the same happiness set point, but I’m not going to move into the cardboard box and take the chance that I’m completely wrong.
Likewise, I think I don’t care whether my dreams and wishes come true, but why not see what it’s like if they did? If it leads to more dreams and wishes, that’s no harm done. I’d be suspect of the person who is so confident in their own belief system that they’d let such potential influence go to waste.
As for the reputational concern of question 3, I don’t see what benefit I or anyone else would gain from being famously dead. If anything it would set up expectations I’d be likely to disappoint. So I’d take not caring, although I’d rather have neither.
I’d describe the philosophy you seem to be advocating as inertial nihilism. You’re at peace with what you’ve got and can’t really imagine having more or less. The reason to doubt this philosophy is that you probably came to it after the inertia had already been acquired. It’s probably a good safety position; since it doesn’t recommend choices, it allows for the selection of additional moral philosophies on top.
I choose the first option for all three. Current me believes it is morally right to help others, and the first option gives me the best chance to help others. Yes, if I chose the second options my beliefs would change, but since I believe objective morality, that would just mean I became wrong and sinful. I also personally enjoy struggling to have my wants met, and never felt that suffering was this horrible thing that should always be avoided. Perhaps I would be happier choosing the second options, but that would be selfish, and adjusting my values to be someone completely different.
Riches, obviously; having money effects my wellbeing for the better, because of all the nice things you can buy. I can eat my favourite foods for every meal, drive nice cars I could never afford, get laid constantly, and buy all the DLC for every videogame I play. The slight dissatisfaction I feel from noticing when I can’t afford something I want to get does not compare to the satisfaction from getting many things that I don’t even consider buying.
Wishes, obviously; “I wish I had no desires or wants” remains a possible wish, so it’s strictly superior. You can indulge in all wants and desires for a thousand millenia, and if you finally give up and decide elimination of wants is the better choice, that can just be the one-billionth wish you make.
If I didn’t care what people thought of me, I’d be much less moral because I’d feel no shame about anything I did no matter how shameful it actually was, so the reputation is better, although it’s less clear-cut than the first two examples.
This has spawned quite a thread, but I haven’t noticed a single mention of Buddhism, and this looks a lot like Buddhism 101 – the root of suffering is desire …
Buddhism was mentioned by Protagoras.
It is likely far too late to get a reply, and it is possible that what I’m about to say has already been said. I’ll post it anyway.
Wealth.
Infinite power.
Not caring. This is conditional on what my reputation is not affecting what I do. If I could pull off something on the order of outlawing slavery in the US or getting the British Empire to leave India, I will put aside my preference for anonymity.
I feel like this whole thing is confusing wants and likes. Desire actually is pretty annoying. But I think I will keep mine, because i’m pretty sure that it makes me happier on net.
The simplest example is Dungeons and Dragons. I want to play dungeons and dragons. I get disappointed if I don’t have a game this week. I call people to schedule it, which I hate. I ask around. I expend mental energy thinking about when I will get to play next. I might mope if a session got cancelled. All of this wanting seems bad.
However, by a happy coincidence, I also like playing dungeons and dragons! I get to see all my friends and hang out for a few hours. I get to experience the thrill of a whole session hanging on a single die roll. The satisfaction of coming up with a plan that is sure to go off without a hitch. The panic as that plan blows up in my face, and everyone has to scramble to fix it. And of course, endless jokes. My friends are all hilarious.
It seems to me that the liking lead to the wanting. And that the wanting leads to more of the thing that I like, because wanting something usually means that you take actions to get it.
Two things:
1. It isn’t at all necessary that you like the things you want, or want the things you like. I like cooking. Its fun to deal with all the ingredients, and watch them become a meal. I have so little want to do it that if I don’t schedule it publicly with my roommate, I will never do it.
On the flip side, I really, really want to browse on the internet all day. Just all day. Nothing else, don’t leave my chair, don’t talk to people. I get annoyed when I have to leave. I find myself longing for it while at work. I browse my phone at the first sign of a gap. I don’t like spending more than an hour or two online at all. I would pay someone a significant amount of money for a switch that would turn all desire to be on the internet off and on.
2. If I could remove desire while keeping the thing that I like constant, I would probably do it. I don’t think that is possible. If I didn’t want to play D&D, would I schedule sessions? Would I call people back after long days at work to give my availability? I don’t think so.
Biweekly Naval Gazing links roundup:
April marked the 50th anniversary of the Royal Navy’s continuous ballistic missile submarine patrols, and I took the opportunity to celebrate the men and machines which have done so much to ensure world peace since the 60s.
So You Want to Build a Battleship continues with a look at the fitting-out process that happened once the ship had been launched, when everything from electrical wiring to turrets was installed.
I’ve been discussing the heavy shells of battleship guns recently, looking at the various interwar innovations in shell design, as well as the saga of the 16″ shells ultimately carried by Iowa.
Lastly, two new museum reviews. First, Megasilverfist contributed a review of Polly Woodside, a sailing barque in Melbourne. Second, I recently visited Fort Sill, near Lawton, Oklahoma. While it may be near the middle of nowhere, there’s a truly fantastic artillery museum.
And as always, I’m hosting a Naval Gazing open thread.
Typo alert: “cassion” for “caisson” in the Fort Sill post.
Fixed. Thanks for spotting that.
I have what I am pretty sure is a million-dollar-plus startup idea/business model. The trouble is that–although a close family member works adjacent to startup world–I don’t have any real experience with startup land (humanities major at a large state school).
I am currently learning to program in Python and enjoying it, but that is a far cry from being able to program a whole startup’s software. I am applying to Lambda School as a backup in case I don’t get into grad school for whatever reason, and we’ll see whether that pans out.
How do I figure out whether I have an idea worth anything? Who do I talk to? Am I completely delusional? (I’m kind of reluctant to post the business model on an open comments section…)
Edit: So as to be a little less obscurantist, the idea is to “disrupt” (god, I hate that word, but that’s what people do) the language-learning market by creating an alternative to Duolingo that uses mechanisms that reward learning rather than merely use of the course, relies at least as much on language acquisition specialists as on marketers and metrics, and has a clearer cash-flow source that obviates the “courses made and maintained by volunteers” problem.
If anybody would like to PM me, my throwaway email address is eateriesofub@gmail.com.
Lambda School’s curriculum will probably not be enough to program a whole startup’s software, but I imagine it might be enough for an interesting proof of concept / mvp.
To find people to talk to, I hear good things about the 80000 hours people, they also offer career mentoring and recommend entrepreneurship as a career path.
A landing page with an email sign up for notifications about your upcoming product is usually a good idea to gauge interest in your idea, depending on the business model you have in mind.
Common wisdom in the startup world is that one should not be too cautious about sharing one’s idea, as success is supposedly about execution, not the idea itself. I disagree with that, as probably the Winkelvoss twins do.
Yes, what I am told by a guy who works at a startup in Switzerland is that the way to get seed money is to create a working proof-of-concept and then pitch it to people. I’m getting in touch with a friend who can code and another who speaks Bengali to see if they’re interested…
It would also be helpful to have an actual user base, even if it’s small, even if it isn’t paying you anything.
This is useful because one of the main failure modes of startups is they building something that seems cool but that no one actually wants to use.
A tip I’ve heard is to coddle the shit out of your initial users. Most startups fail in getting from no users to a small user base.
A common mistake seems to be to think too far ahead, making the business processes scalable for a large user base too soon; as well as ignoring the demands of the actual people who are attracted to your pitch, rather than the theoretical people who should like your product.
Instead, do the opposite at first: optimize the user experience, even if it is very costly & be very responsive to the feedback of early users (and solicit that feedback).
I think your idea is interesting. The current lineup of language learning software is pretty terrible imho.
Think about organizations as customers (e.g. businesses or the military) if you haven’t already.
Note if you can deliver English as a foreign language overseas militaries tend to have budgets for train I g people in this.
Government sales are a real pain to get. But they can work. It helps if you’re in a HUBzone.
I’ve worked in startups and on the VC side. My initial thoughts:
1.) Being overly protective of an idea in a consumer market is a sign of amateurism. Your idea will become obvious to everyone the moment you launch. If a team can outproduce you and gain a dominant position just by knowing your idea then your market is indefensible.
2.) While it’s good you’re learning to code, you will need a head programmer/CTO type. You’re just not going to get good enough fast enough. It also sounds like you’d need someone more experienced in business.
3.) There’s a distinct lack of business concern in this post. This is another sign of amateurism: presuming the quality of the product is the only or main thing that leads to success.
4.) While I don’t care that you’re a humanities major, you don’t seem to have strong technical or business skills which means I can’t trust you to run a technology business.
5.) You don’t know how to validate your idea, which means you lack the ability to get a very basic part of the startup business done.
6.) You also don’t seem to have good connections to people who could nurture/mentor you.
7.) If you’re a language major, that’s actually good for a language based startup.
8.) Language learning is a highly fractured, parochial market with everyone from the government to multi-billion dollar corporations to Chinese neighbors down the street participating. Any idea is unlikely to dominate the market. That means not many VCs will be interested since it probably can’t give good enough returns.
9.) You also haven’t done any market research.
10.) You list goals without saying how you’ll get there. Even presuming you can design a system that rewards learning rather than use, I have serious doubts you would know how to achieve a cheaper marketing strategy or cashflow.
11.) Your disdain for marketers and metrics is a massive, massive red flag. So is your need to signal that you don’t like startup culture.
12.) You have several things that would seem to increase costs without explaining why people would bear those increased costs beyond a vague idea of quality.
Thank you.
(I do mean that sincerely–I knew I had blind spots, but not exactly where they were. Thanks for taking the time to flesh this out.)
You should be trying as hard as possible to tear down your own idea.
I had a start-up idea about a year ago, pursued lawyers and banks about it, and gave up when a) I decided I wasn’t good enough to do it, and b) there were other people in the space sucking up the oxygen. (A third party showed up and implemented it about as well as I could, and had I known that upfront I would have even more reason not to do it.) That should be the modal reaction.
I would spend some time understanding / addressing Erusian’s feedback, then seek out local opportunities for coaching / mentorship / guidance.
This is easier than you think. There are organizations like Venture Cafe that will introduce you to experienced entrepreneurs who can help you develop your idea (and eventually, maybe, your company). Your university probably has similar resources, or google “entrepreneur meetup [yourcity].”
My sense is that you don’t have the experience yet to know whether you would even like building a company. But you’re interested, and the only way to find out is to try! Figure out what you would need in order to be successful (i.e. make money), then start doing those things. Maybe you’ll like it, maybe you’ll hate it, maybe it will work, maybe it won’t, but no matter what you’ll learn a ton, and if you don’t actually take concrete steps you’ll never know.
I endorse this comment, for whatever Erusian Points are worth.
Thanks Erusian for a very thorough reply, I have less experience with startups but many of the same concerns when reading the post
kaakitwitaasota try lurking around fb groups, reddit, startup forums and your local university to start absorbing more of this intuition. Most large metro areas should have some sort of physical institutions that help to encourage business and startup culture, and you should be able to find a good amount of free resources
I’d recommend physical spaces. I’ve found (ironically) there’s a real dearth of good startup material online. What does exist is buried under a lot of bad advice. But there’s less of it in general than I’d expect for such a techy sector.
I wish I had people to give me feedback like this on my life.
It seems like every time I ask for feedback I get people patting me on the back and telling me I’m doing great. I want to vomit on their faces.
Yes. I think it’s useless and a little cowardly to respond to requests for feedback with something like, “Oh, you’re doing great, you’ll be successful soon! Just keep doing the same thing?” Really? You can’t think of one thing I could be doing better or to give me advice on?
Anyway, since I’m in advice mode anyway, go ahead and ask. I promise I won’t give you backpats unless I really have nothing to say.
@Erusian
Many if not most people who actually mean to ask for feedback are already convinced that they are doing quite well and that the advice they solicit is going to be mostly positive, with at most small criticisms. They usually don’t respond well to serious criticism that implies that they’ve been wasting their time and/or made huge mistakes.
Furthermore, quite a few requests for feedback actually have a different purpose than getting feedback. Take the girlfriend who is beaming with joy after buying an expensive dress and asks: “what do you think?” She may want you to appreciate her looks when she makes an effort, the effort she went to to look pretty, wants to feel good about you approving of her taste, etc. Giving negative feedback if her actual reason for asking the question is the above, is not going to be appreciated.
A further complication is that affirmation is only emotionally valuable if it feels meaningful. In other words, there has to be a belief that harsh feedback is possible, for the positive feedback to be affirming. So people often falsely signal that they want honest feedback.
So this in turn means that it is extremely hard to signal that you really do want honest and potentially very negative feedback.
People who get such a request and who do have serious criticism have to choose between actually giving feedback, which very often sours or even destroys friendships; or just giving some vague positive feedback, which takes less effort anyway.
Most people like having friends/partners/etc and don’t feel like making an effort that is not going to be appreciated, so vague supporting feedback seems like a pretty rational strategy.
It’s not really cowardly to not make an effort at your own expense that won’t actually help another person, as they will usually toss the fruits of your effort into the gutter.
Discretion is the better part of valor sometimes, yes. This doesn’t make it a brave action. I fully understand that many people aren’t asking for honest feedback and sometimes I give them a pat on the back. But I don’t consider myself to have given feedback, just performed a social nicety.
Honest feedback is one of the most valuable things there is: both for the recipient, and in terms of cost to the reviewer.
I read an essay by a semi-famous author titled something like “why I won’t read your sample essay.” It was basically about how he had done it a several times for friends in the past, and been burned every time by people that could not handle criticism of their work. A few lost friendships later he made a rule never to critique amateur writing.
In addition to what others have said, here’s some advice:
If you’re based in the US, and especially if your startup is going to have more than one founder, be prepared for a truly overwhelming amount of taxes. Computing your taxes will take a significant amount of time and/or money; and the amount you’ll have to pay will be significantly more than you thought. On the plus side, if you’re clever, you can somewhat mitigate this financial drain by writing off some expenses as business expenses; for example, if you are literally based out of your garage, then you can write off part of your mortgage as a home office expense.
I highly recommend you hire a competent CPA, but, of course, this depends on how much funding you get. If you get millions of dollars, then you can obviously afford any CPA that you want. If you get thousands of dollars from friends and family, then I still recommend hiring a cheap CPA part-time, but be prepared to shoulder a lot of responsibility yourself.
Taxes are rarely an issue for early-stage startups. They are almost always operating at a loss and so have no tax burden. Since the IRS penalty is a percentage of what is owed, there are often few to no penalties so long as the taxes are prepared with even the most basic level of competence.
It’s much more of an issue for growing/late early to early mid-stage startups. That’s where it gets complicated and you need to start paying regularly.
If you have employees, also hire someone (on a contract basis, a few hours a month) to review your books and make sure you are paying your taxes.
>How do I figure out whether I have an idea worth anything?
The received wisdom in startup-land is that startup ideas are worth essentially zero. It’s pretty much 100% in how well you can execute on your ideas and whether you can bring a team and process together for working on things.
Check out Chatterbug as a competitor: https://chatterbug.com/en/
A friend of a friend who is apparently a billionaire from founding a previous start up co-founded this one.
Feldenkrais Method is interesting because it’s the only system I know of for getting improved movement indirectly– instead of setting a goal and trying to make it happen (for example, choosing to relax), you set up conditions which cause relaxation to happen.
These videos promise to be a good sampler.
https://futurelifenow-online.com/feldenkrais-summit-2019/
This is one of those summits where you get free access to the videos for 48 hours after they’re posted, or can pay for indefinite access.
I found out about it a little late, but I’ve just listened to two of them from day 3, and they were excellent.
The first was about Ruthy Alon’s Movement Intelligence programs– she’s started with Feldenkrais and developed methods for improving walking, working with strength, and getting in touch with satiety by using gentle indirect methods. (1 hour)
http://www.movementintelligence.com
The second was 15 minutes of eye relaxation, and my vision is definitely better.
I don’t know whether you’ll be able to get free access to those while they’re still available for free, but I trust that he other material will also be of high quality.
It looks like the Day 3 videos are gone. Do you have the title for the eye relaxation video? I have been straining my eye too much and am definitely in the market for some working exercises.
The video is called Insight and it’s by Dorothy Henning.
If you’re interested in what else there is from the event (there’s a reasonable chance there will be more about vision), I recommend signing up sooner rather than later. It took a day for my registration to go through.
Here‘s a good little essay by Henning about why deliberately correcting one’s posture is a bad idea.
Thanks!
On posture, I remembered a few years ago I tried to correct my sitting posture. All I got was a lot of back pain and thought that my posture/spine was already beyond repair. Definitely should have done more research before I set myself up for that.
You should go to a physio. I had the same problem with standing posture until I finally went to a physio for an unrelated shoulder problem when I was around ~30. It was life changing!
As a general thing, try out the awareness through movement videos– they’re about 15 minutes long and give directions on how to improve ease of movement.
Also, the Larry Wells video (possibly not available for free any more) includes a powerful self-soothing technique for helping sleep.
Fold your hands together so that you can squeeze one hand’s thumb, and that hand can squeeze the other hand’s forefinger. This may take some fiddling around to figure it out.
Do this while sitting with your hands resting on your abdomen, though I find that other positions also work.
Now observe your breathing without changing it, or at least change it as little as possible.
Gently squeeze the thumb on the inhale and the forefinger on the exhale. After you’ve done this for a few minutes, try gently squeezing your thumb on the exhale and forefinger on the inhale. You may find you prefer one pattern over the other.
I find this powerfully soothing, and it helped me get to sleep last night. It’s almost embarrassingly soothing, it’s like a dignified version of thumb-sucking.
Scott, are there any updates on a printed version of Unsong? I really want a printed copy, and I’m seriously considering just printing one myself (and probably matching what I spend on the book in a donation to you), but if an official version is coming I figure I can handle waiting a bit.
Edit for fun, to say thank you for writing Unsong. It’s easily one of my favorite books ever, it’s an absolute masterpiece. The main reason I want to get it printed is that I think that’ll make it easier to get more friends to read it. It’s incredibly rare for me to find I *miss* a book, and that’s definitely the feeling I get when I think about Unsong. So thank you.
Also as a reminder to all, vote for Unsong on top web fiction
http://topwebfiction.com/vote.php?for=unsong
It really does help new people find the story
And for works near Unsong the margin between ranks is small enough that your vote does make a difference in the rankings and in visibility.
I happened to notice when I was voting for Ward last night that Unsong had suddenly gained 73 votes in 24 hours but only 76 in 3 days. I guess this would be why.
I’ve recently been introduced to the wide world of Home Insurance. It seems sufficiently legalistic that it wouldn’t surprise me to find out my plan doesn’t cover anything that I’d actually want it to cover. I’m generally pessimistic about such things. Knowing my own ignorance I had a variety of 3rd parties help compare plans and then just took their word by fiat. It was considerably less expensive than I expected, which is maybe concerning. But that’s been true of everything I’ve encountered in the home buying process, probably from being primed for unexpected expense for so long.
Obviously insurance is a betting game, but for whenever I plan to reassess my insurance situation does anyone have any resources to understand just what I’m getting into?
What I didn’t know about until very recently was water main insurance, which seems like a no-brainer to me. People have been making ominous noises about the wickedness of water mains since I started talking about buying a house. Water main insurance seems pleasingly cheap, straightforward, and unlegalistic and I would be surprised if it didn’t cover what it said.
Basically are there any other easy wins for insuring things? Specifically outside the standard home/health/auto/life.
Flood insurance seems to be the other one people make ominous noises about. The house is not in a flood zone according to FEMA. But it is between two rivers and the East Coast occasionally gets hit by hurricanes which is wild to me but I figure might as well throw a shekel that way? Also it has a basement which seems eminently floodable which is new for me.
FEMA has sometimes been wrong about this (the latest incident I remember was with Hurricane Harvey) so it might be a good idea to do some research for yourself.
Gratuitous anecdote: a high school classmate of mine lives in Houston in a house that was considered pre-Harvey not to be in a flood zone. She got the super cheap flood insurance anyway. It saved their bacon when the house got six inches of water in it (which apparently does MUCH more damage than you would think for that low a water level).
They recently renewed their flood insurance and did not have to pay a higher premium because FEMA still does not consider them to be in a flood zone. Somebody else can probably come up with a snarky quip about this but I, as the kids say, can’t even.
I mean…this makes sense to me on some levels. You don’t have to be in a flood zone to get some flooding in extreme conditions (Harvey qualifies there).
“on some levels”, nice 🙂
The FEMA maps are based on a 1% chance of exceedance*. That is, there is a 1/100 chance in any year that you will see a flood above that contour.
While having a flood occur is certainly evidence that the 1% exceedance interval on the maps is wrong–it’s back-calculated from historical data where possible, and maybe you’re coming out of a dry recording interval. It’s also possible that God was throwing a 100-sided die and your house had a critical failure. You’d need to look over the historical hydrological and projected climate data to know for sure.
* This is also referred to as the “100-year event” but that terminology is disfavored because people think that this means that it should only occur once every 100 years, whereas two 100-yr events in back to back years is unlikely, but not impossible, just like, say, throwing boxcars twice in succession at the craps table. Or, similarly, that if you haven’t had a 100-year storm in a long time, you’re “due” for a flood.
And since there are thousands of separate drainage basins in the country, it is quite likely that somewhere will experience 100-year events in back to back years.
The “flood zone” thing isn’t for your benefit. It’s a scarlet letter that gets put on your property that makes it very expensive for you to get certain types of insurance.
You seem a bit in a spending mood. Just take it as an outside data point. Also remember that by definition you’re losing every time you pay for insurance, at least in average. Think more about which kinds of expenses would bankrupt you, not those that would just be a pain in the ass to pay.
This is how I like to think of it as well. The water main insurance is particularly silly in my mind because you should be able to absorb that kind of financial hit. This approach also favors choosing very high deductibles. I have met people with car insurance deductibles so low that they won’t even take the trouble to file a claim.
One other reason to buy insurance is if you have reason to believe your expected claims are much higher than average, for a reason that is not reflected in your insurance premiums. Some of these reasons may be fraud or fraud-adjacent, but ie buying AppleCare because you know you’re 4 sigma clumsier than average is not.
I’m confused. If you don’t file a claim the deductible doesn’t matter. Is it that, say, their deductible is $300 but when they have a $500 cost that would have been covered they don’t bother to file and just pay the $500? That does seem silly.
I’ll bet aashiq meant to say, “people with car insurance deductibles so high”.
I took it to mean like your example, but probably even smaller numbers. Say, a $100 deductible, and for $200 of damage they don’t go through the hassle of filing a claim (perhaps correctly – filing the $200 claim might raise their expected premiums by more than $100).
So, for insurance:
Home/Renters/Auto – the non-obvious thing about this is that this covers a bunch of legal liability that can arise from using these assets, and not just damage or loss to them. It’s a good idea to look up what coverage you need in order to qualify for umbrella insurance, and then get that level.
Umbrella insurance – no, it’s not insuring your umbrellas, it’s something that covers miscellaneous other things that might cause you large amounts of legal liability. It’s generally pretty cheap and can really save your behind.
Life insurance – get term life insurance only, not whole life. Sales will try to talk you into whole life because it extracts more money out of you and earns the insurance company a tidy profit while being too complicated for people to understand how they’re getting fleeced. Stick to term life.
Disability insurance – for gainfully employed professionals early in their career, losing your ability to work is the number 1 risk factor that people don’t mitigate. If you’re a programmer who just started their first six-figure job out of college, and some judgement-proof asshole with a laser accidentally blinds you, you’re suddenly going from a comfortable financial position to relying on whatever your disability contingency plan is. If you have a good own-occupation disability plan, this means roughly “I get 60% of my prior income until age 65, but don’t have to pay taxes on it and don’t have to live near where programming jobs are, so I’m fine”. If you don’t, it means you have to figure out how things will work with whatever social security gives you. Spoilers – it ain’t much, and it doesn’t work great.
Health insurance – the system is completely fucked in a ton of ways in the US. If you don’t need to access health care, it’s going to be pretty expensive anyways and you’ll need to have a bunch of cash on hand to cover your large deductible. If you do need access to health care, you’re going to need to fight insurance companies and health care providers both to get access to care (and in a timely manner), and to avoid getting stuck with bankruptcy-inducing medical bills. IMHO you probably want to think about what happens to your assets in bankruptcy as part of healthcare planning, since it is often highly relevant in the actual processes involved.
If you are a regular middle income person, what about trying to carry as much of your assets in vehicles that are safe in bankruptcy (retirement plans, house) and just being willing to accept that as an outcome?
Homes arent that safe in a bankruptcy. Eg the Calif homestead exemption is only about 100k, last i checked
It is all based on equity though, not total value (so under this strategy I guess you would not want to be paying your mortgage off early). It also depends on whether you are filing chapter 7 (in which case if your equity is more than the exemption they will sell your house and give you the exemption amount in cash) or chapter 13 (in which case you get to keep the house but might have to make larger payments if your equity exceeds the exemption).
Of course IANAL and have not gone through bankruptcy (yet!) but this is my lay understanding.
Don’t let them sell you on things you don’t need. If you’re not in a flood zone, don’t waste money on flood insurance.
This seems like a poor approach.
Insurance works best for unlikely events with high cost when they do happen.
Just deciding that you don’t need flood insurance because it’s less than a 1% chance of happening in any given year (flood zone) is gambling to an extent that many can’t afford to lose the bet.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C6kYoOPWsAAgW37.jpg
If you live in a zone where it floods badly every 5 years…. better to build a house that can withstand a flood without too much damage. If the insurance (likely a little more than the cost of fixing flood damage every 5 years) is too expensive then you can’t afford to live there.
When I bought mine I learned that chancel insurance is a thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chancel_repair_liability
But so cheap that 20 quid covers you for about 50 years: a case almost perfect for insurance.
Plus the weird fact that it’s an insurance policy that technically can be voided if you let anyone know it exists!
I think this is because lay rectors are jointly and severally liable for chancel repair, so the church might be more likely to go after somebody with an insurance policy (as they have deeper pockets).
Thanks all for the input and anecdotes! Onward and upward in the great grift of homeownership.
As a general rule (but of course it’s all in the policy language), most water damage will be covered by home insurance as long as it is not flood damage. Which sounds confusing, and is in fact very contentious in certain disaster circumstances. Rule of thumb is that if the water rises up into your home, that is a “flood” that will not be covered; if the water falls down into your home, that is water damage that will be covered. You can see where this can get complicated in a Hurricane Harvey type situation. The storm broke my windows, damaged my roof, and swelled rivers and caused a storm surge. Was it the rain coming down that caused the water damage, or the river and storm surge? Litigation is still ongoing, I have no doubt.
In everyday life, outside of major disasters, most water damage is actually covered, because most water damage involves pipes breaking and/or roof damage (or house fires, which usually result in major water damage when they are extinguished). You will also get some small level of coverage for sump pump failure in most policies, but usually not more than $5-10,000. That won’t cover a major basement flood cleanup.
I’ve been kind of thinking that the next stage for the Slatestarcodex media empire should be some kind of book that will end up on the airport bookstore shelves. For my money it could be either fiction or non-fiction, but I figure Scott would likely prefer the fiction option – i.e. something like Unsong.
I suggest Unsong (which satisfies ‘something like unsong’), but I may be biased by having a similar comment below in this thread… (though, to be clear, I really hope Scott doesn’t stop with Unsong and publishes loads more long-form fiction)
Can anyone recommend a very good book on the history of siege warfare? Ideally I’d like something that covers at least a time range of Rome to Petersburg, and goes into great detail on both tactics and technology. I expect it to cover actual battles out of necessity, but care less about reading about any particular siege than how each era built, defended, and collapsed or assaulted fortifications.
Very long books are fine.
Engineering in the Ancient World has a section on siege engines, as I recall. Not a one-stop-shop for what you’re looking for, but you would probably find it useful.
Not a book recommendation: the 1929 Encyclopedia Britannica (we had it in the house when I was a child) had an long, memorable article on this topic. It tended to have articles written by subject-matter experts; I would look and see if you can find who the author of that Encyclopedia article was.
OK, had time to look it up: the article is on project Gutenberg, “Fortification and Siegecraft.”link text (Go to the index and click the hyperlink–I can’t get a hard link to work reliably. The author was Louis Charles Jackson, who doesn’t seem to have written a book.
My parents have a 1939 Britannica. The article on Communism is by Trotsky; the article on Psychoanalysis is by Freud.
Yes.
And the article on Guerrilla Warfare is by T. E. Lawrence
Well, there’s certainly problems with that, but the problem certainly isn’t “didn’t choose subject-matter experts”….
(I assume that siege warfare is much less likely to have heavily biased subject-matter experts than communism or psychoanalysis in ’39.)
That’s pretty awesome.
But other times they would commission articles from total amateurs, like having James Clerk Maxwell write on Diagram.
It’s not a book about the entire history of siege warfare, but the Mozi is by far the best contemporary account of siege defence in ancient China, and it is practical enough that reading it gives a very good insight on how people went about the matter back then.
Does anyone know of any books about bounty-hunting? I mean bounty hunting of animals.
It can have large ecological effects and probably economic effects as well, but a little poking around hasn’t turned up any overviews on the subject.
I want to advertise this again since the last time brought in some more people.
To anyone who was interested in a regular Dallas meetup, we are working to put another one together in mid-May. Meeting time will be decided and posted on lesswrong this Wednesday. Please email tayfie@pm.me and I will send the link to a poll to figure out what times work for the most people.
We have a Discord now for more casual chats: https://discord.gg/SSH5PU
The invite expired 🙁
Still open to new-comers?
Has anyone ever used Stitch Fix or anything else that helps clueless people get clothes?
I’ve pretty much given up on having this go well if I do it myself. I saw the Stitch Fix ads plastered along the BART station and thought it looked promising. Now I’m realizing that you send them your measurements and they send you clothes, without any offline interaction. Sounds good if it works, but I’m skeptical. When I look to see if there’s anything more formal where you go in and they help you, it all seems to be really high-end stuff for society belles, as opposed to the “programmer who wants to look 20% less slovenly” demographic.
Any responses along the lines of “fashion is actually really easy, all you have to do is X” will be
deletedbannedmissing the point.Do you wear traditional work shirts? Are they ironed? Are your pants the right size?
There’s a lot of basic stuff at play if you want to look less slovenly. These boxed outfit things seem to be directed at fashionable people.
One workaround if you can’t iron or don’t want to iron is to just wear a t-shirt and then wear a slightly thicker flannel plaid shirt over that. These can be buttoned or partially buttoned, tucked or untucked, and still create a presentable “business casual” appearance. Plus they can be taken off once you get to your car or if you go outside for lunch or whatever.
I have been getting away with khaki cargo pants (way more comfortable — and practical! — than slacks) for the past 2 years but I realize that probably won’t cut it in all workplaces.
Eddie Bauer makes khaki “cargo pants” that will pass as slacks if you get one of the varieties that doesn’t actually have cargo pockets on them. They fit the same way, though.
This defeats the purpose of cargo pants…I want my pockets!
I don’t understand. I wear everything from super dressy button downs to smart casual polo shirts and never even considered ironing them. Maybe because machine driers are not common here and can’t fit in our bathroom anyway so we air dry, and air drying naturally helps with wrinkles? They still have some wrinkles but I find the body heat eases them up to the level they become not too ugly. A friend of us does have a drying machine and boy the clothes look like eaten by the dog.
So my point: wear anything, air dry, don’t iron.
I practically never iron clothing, and we use a machine drier.
Do you just look frumpy and roll with it, or are the clothes not wrinkled?
If the latter, what is your sorcery? (If the answer is, “My wife irons”, that’s cheating and Not OK)
@greenwoodjw:
My wife practically never irons my clothes–pretty much the only thing that ever gets ironed is SCA garb, and that not often.
Once in a while my wife takes something to be dry cleaned, and I think they do ironing or the equivalent (pressing?). My ordinary clothing tends to be permanent press, or soft things that don’t need ironing.
As to how I look, I’m a poor source for that information. You could ask one of the people who come to my meetups. Or you could look at one of the online videos of me giving a talk.
Or, if you are in the SF Bay area, you could come to the meetup this Saturday.
@DavidFriedman looking at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcxGXcmr4ig that’s quite wrinkled IMHO and I am pretty sure air drying would help with e.g. all the wrinkles under your left pocket just don’t happen with my air dried shirts.
@nameless1:
Could be. But I had been wearing that shirt for a good deal of a day by the time I gave the talk and it has spent several earlier in my suitcase.
Probably less wrinkled when it came out of the drier.
1) I am nowhere near SF but if you’re ever in the Baltimore area I’d love to say hello.
2) The posted video is 100% a machine-dried shirt that was not ironed, not something that got wrinkled during the day. (The front panel is a dead giveaway.)
A close relative of mine has been using Stitch Fix to some success. Caveats: this person already had a sizeable and varied wardrobe before starting, and has good fashion sense.
It seems to be better at augmenting an existing style with some novelty, rather than building a whole closet from the ground up.
I’ve been trying out MTailor. They’re… interesting, and pretty good? The deal is, you take a video of yourself (in very specific ways — the app walks you through it), and they use that to make clothes that custom-fit you.
My wife tells me that the shirts I’ve gotten from them look good on me, better than most shirts I buy off the rack. They’ve got a bit of customization you can do, but they don’t really “help you make good choices” about your clothes. The less-slovenly aspect of them would be that they fit better.
I tried them for jeans and didn’t like the results. I think that really the take-a-video-of-yourself thing only gets you about 80% of the way there, and then you really have to go a couple of rounds of, “Could you adjust the sleeves a little” or whatever, but they redo the clothes until you’re satisfied, for free. They do a pretty wide variety of men’s clothing.
I’m charmed by the idea of them, so I’d kind of like them to get big enough to do a v2 that might push a little further in the direction of really getting people clothes that were great looking, so this is a little forward looking. I have no financial interest in them.
Suit Supply might be a good option. I’ve only used them for actual suits, but they have a bunch of bizcas offerings too; it’ll probably end up being slightly more expensive than the range of online MtM-in-Indonesia services out there (my own go-to for stuff that doesn’t fit me off the rack, but I’m picky and too tall for most off-the-rack stuff), but still easily attainable for anyone making a Bay Area doctor or programmer’s salary. Go in to a physical location, tell them you’re looking for an office wardrobe but aren’t very fashion-conscious, and they can probably take it from there. There’s a branch in SF, or was a few years ago.
Alternately, I’m told that high-end department stores (Nordstrom, etc.) sometimes offer services like this. Never used one in that way, though.
It seems like this is one of those services that really needs to be delivered in person. Fitting clothes can be tricky, and even someone who says, “I really don’t know how to dress well. I’ll do whatever you say,” is likely to have some tastes and preferences. And what is straightforward and ordinary in one setting may be too formal or informal for another.
Well, this is why they send multiple options and you send back the ones you don’t want.
As far as fitting, it depends on how far you’re taking that. If you shop by actual fit dimensions, you’re probably not the kind of person that is going to Stitch Fix anyway…the fit you get there probably won’t be any worse than standard Small/Medium/Large/XL sizing with Loose/Relaxed/Slim fit options or whatever.
Fashion might be easier to outsource to a girlfriend.
Yes, I’m aware of how not-easy that is.
How common is this? Are there lots of guys basically letting their S/Os dress them?
If I let my wife dress me — we’ve discussed this — I’d basically walk around looking like a dandy all the time, and I’d be very itchy and uncomfortable. Eventually (like within a few minutes) I’d grow resentful, and worse would follow. I’m curious: what’s up with guys who wouldn’t have this problem?
My girl has better taste in clothes and roughly the same taste in comfort; following her advice means making marginal trades. I don’t do it all the time, but I could without much issue.
Yeah, whenever I have a girlfriend, she gets to dress me.
I have little to no clue what looks good on me, and she does, so it’s an obvious division-of-labor win.
I think it works out fairly well. It’s not even an alignment of style or comfort preferences, but my partner is capable of predicting things that I would would enjoy and look good in, often better at predicting than I am. This has the biggest impact at the margins, in articles of clothing that I would not choose for myself.
My wife has this odd idea that some colors go with other colors and some don’t, and I generally yield to her advice.
Men who don’t have this problem have the trait (IME unusual among straight men) of being willing to occasionally make personal sacrifices– such as wearing clothing that is somewhat uncomfortable or that doesn’t necessarily accord with their self-image– in order to be physically attractive.
No shame in that, of course. I myself chose the strategy of dating someone who thinks I look hot in sweatpants. But it is a trait which people vary on.
Every piece of clothing I own was either picked by my wife or myself, with the other confirming it looks good, with my wife doing most of the picking. Personally, I don’t care about how I look as long as my wife likes it, and my work wardrobe is professional. Almost all my vetoes are on comfort, but gradually I have gotten used to tighter pants, since my wife’s happiness compliments are worth the discomfort trade off. I also find that two people’s opinion on fashion is better than one’s.
I think the idea is more that the SO generates suggestions (the part a lot of people find hard) and you select a subset.
How often do you look in a mirror? How often does your wife look at you? I defer to my wife for both clothes and hair because it impacts her life more than mine.
As rlms says, we go to stores, she picks some stuff out, and I try it on and have veto power. She will often say “this would look good on you but you’d hate it” about, like, green shoes or something, and she’s right.
Find a girlfriend with fashion sense that works for you.
If my wife was dressing me it would be jeans and tees from Esprit, because that is literally what she is wearing all the time, claiming Esprit is the only designer brand who don’t sacrifice comfort for looks.
That gay graphic designer friend you pirated PhotoShop for (everybody has one?), time to return the favor! 🙂
In my observation, Stitch Fix is great for people who want to be more fashionable and have a more varied wardrobe. (I haven’t used it, but colleagues have.) It’s not ideal if what you want is a basic wardrobe of professional clothes; for that, either a department store, or a made-to-measure traveling salesman, is a much better option.
My approach: get someone at a store that sells Land End or the like to help you figure out your size. Order from that maker, in that size, whatever patterns/styles you want. Get someone you trust to look at you and say, NO that looks terrible on you, to about 25% of it; give that away to a place that helps people get professional clothes when trying to enter the job market. And pay to get shirts laundered and ironed.
(don’t waste his time but don’t be rude)
I encourage you to spend a bit of time online and to experiment with your wardrobe. Clothing is a major part of making a good impression. It’s important.
Whatever you get, getting a good fit is the most important thing. I am skeptical of an online store to provide high quality basics as you are buying without trying it on. Good fitting jeans, button ups and a jacket shoudl go far here.
A mindset that may help you is to consider clothing like you would any other tool. Getting the right tool, and knowing how to wield it, is enjoyable.
Clothing is important – but it could actually send the wrong signal if you are too well dressed in my opinion. A slickly dressed guy trying to sell you something raises suspicions along the lines of “and where are the customers yachts?”. In addition, in law firms it my experience that the more junior the associate the better dressed they are. So you quickly realise there is a negative correlation between smartness and competency.
If you are trying to look smart but not too slick – a good plain jacket can add formality to just about any shirt/pants combo. Even jeans.
I use StitchFix. I have had friends compliment me on how well I dress and ask me to take them clothes shopping, at which point I’ve had to shamefully tell them that in fact it’s just StitchFix and I have no idea what clothes look good on anyone. My husband liked the clothes well enough that he also became a regular StitchFix customer.
They work well with vague instructions; I asked them to get me clothes that would signal that I’m gay and wound up with buttondowns with pink roses all over it which, naturally, I am delighted by.
My one caveat is that they’re pretty expensive.
My wife used them for a while. She would typically keep a couple of pieces per month. After a while, she’d gotten enough new stuff and put the subscription on hold. She enjoyed the service, but already had a good sense of style. For her the value was in getting someone else to do the shopping part of getting clothes while we had two young kids and she lacked the time. I’d go ahead and try it. Returns are easy, so if you don’t like it you can just stop.
I have used Trunk Club which I think is similar. It’s good but the stuff was kinda expensive and sometimes almost a bit too fashionable, but I think you can talk to someone to calibrate your tastes. I only did it once or twice, though.
When I decided five years ago that I wanted to stop being a schlub, I went to my local library, read a lot of recent issues of magazines like GQ/Esquire/Men’s Health until I felt kinda fluent in them, bought clothes that looked like what they wore and weren’t baggy (lotta gingham back then), and then I started tucking in my shirt (now I think the “french tuck” is very popular, according to Queer Eye). Worked pretty well, although the girlfriend I soon met told me that my clothes were STILL not tight enough.
Define ‘clueless’, because the problem basically ranges all over the place.
I work with a guy who has n identical matching gray t-shirts that he rotates through daily and wears literally nothing else to work.
I work with another guy who always has stylish/fashionable shoes, but never makes any effort to have his clothes match each other. I thought he was gay and just a little flamboyant, but he’s married to a woman, so I guess not.
Another guy wears worn-out cloths (holes in sweaters, pants frayed at the end of the legs). We all make enough money here that this should not be an issue. His wife apparently doesn’t mind.
I myself used to not know that I was supposed to match my belt to my shoes.
My wife tells me that gray and khaki clash and can’t be warn together – to her it is obvious that they look bad together but I can’t see it at all. Also she’s always trying to get me to wear certain types of shoes without socks, despite that my coworkers (whose fashion sense I do not trust, generally) have commented negatively on them. I regularly wear thin fleece vests in the office because they keep it freezing in here, and she objects that I do that anytime after Easter. I just tell her it’s not summer in the office, and move my vests there until fall returns.
Before I was married I actually attempted to hire one of my dance instructors as a personal shopper, but it didn’t work out.
If I had my 20s to do over again, I would query my female friends more often about my dress and appearance, which would probably have gotten me 90% of the way to ‘nicely dressed’ in a year or so, and would definitely have removed ‘slovenliness’. I strongly suspect you have friends or coworkers who would help you for free.
I know next to nothing about fashion, but my impression is that these sorts of rules change [slowly?] over time, they’re not always intrinsic to our perception of the colors. I think brown and black used to be considered clashing that way but are okay now?
So someday orange and green may not be seen as clashing, and there will be permanent peace and harmony in Ireland (since the color clash is obviously the reason the conflict has been so intractable)?
For a basic upgrade, wool trousers instead of cotton khakis. Have your shirts laundered/pressed/starched. The pants are dry-clean only so this works together. Just having everything crisp and sharp all the time makes a big difference even with off-the-rack stuff.
I’m a man in roughly the same age range and economic situation as Scott; I use Stitch Fix and I’m very happy with it. I’ve received multiple compliments about the stuff I’ve gotten from them, including from female friends of mine. If you have some extra cash to spend on clothes, I’d recommend it.
Male fashion can be easy to overthink especially because what looks good on models/mannequins rarely looks good on real bodies that can vary dramatically. I have not used stitch fix but I know people who have, and it does what they want it to; specifically it communicates positive things to other people in ways that they could not before. I do think that if you’re willing to do the work yourself you can do it cheaper.
If money is not a concern, then I have found that finding a smaller brand that works for you and staying within that brand can often make you look far more put together. For example. if money was not an issue for me I would wear entirely Best Made clothes . That fits my aesthetic. Things like color palettes and the like are easy to figure out based on what is at hand.
I’ve used StichFix for a couple years and have been happy with it. They’ve done a pretty good job of knowing what styles I like and giving me things that fit well. There’s almost always at least a couple things per box that I like. There have been 1 or 2 occasions where I’ve bought something I ended up not liking much, but that happens with traditional shopping, too. Also, it’s more expensive than I’m used to paying for clothes, but not unreasonable (and much less expensive than the other one I tried.. Trunk Club, maybe?).
In general, I think StitchFix will work well if you (or a friend/partner) can tell reasonably well if something looks good on you and fits right. If that doesn’t describe your situation, you probably need something with 1-on-1 advice. The main advantage for me is having some confidence that I’m not way out of style and not having to shop.
You probably want Indochino or a tailor. There, the process is that you go in and let them take your measurements. Once your measurements are on file, they can make casual button-down shirts, for your exact measurements, for about $70/shirt.
At that point, you have a “uniform” of correctly-fitting pants, and a correctly-fitting button-down shirt. Those can be mixed, basically at random, to produce acceptable outfits.
This won’t create any kind of stand-out style. But it will mean that you never have to try on clothes again. When the current shirts wear out, you can just order another pack.
Many major department stores (Macy’s, Nordstroms, etc.) have a free personal shopper service at the larger flagship locations. They will recommend clothing that they sell but a department store should have a variety of styles at many different price points that should suit most professional budgets.
If you just need a few suits and some dressier business casual options Mens Wearhouse will get you out the door with minimal effort and at a moderate price point. Just call up to book an appointment instead of dropping in. That way they will have a stylist ready to spend the necessary time with you. This option isn’t going to style you with the trendiest clothes, but will get you by for most office or semi-formal social situations.
If you need trendier options check out periodicals such as GQ and Enquirer. I used to think GQ was more classically styled up until a few years ago, but it along with other similar publications, will give you good direction if you already have some style sense.
If you are short on time, have the cash, and live in a metropolitan area then you might just want to spring for a personal style assistant. Most charge a day rate that is somewhat reasonable.
I would recommend you stay away from allowing the woman in your life to dictate your clothing style. Women tend to dress men as they would like them to appear and not necessarily how you might like to appear. Develop your own independent sense of fashion and style.
Finally, don’t overlook the importance of a good hair cut. I’ve seen a lot of guys invest heavily in a wardrobe but still get the same cheap haircut from a barber down the street that looks hideous. You can be dressed to the nines in expensive clothing but it won’t matter if your hair looks horrible.
This is CW
You know how in depictions of Mars and Moon colonies, they always have glass domes? Apparently that’s not too likely – I found out the other day that domes are actually really bad in terms of keeping pressure in, and a dome on an area on Mars would leak like crazy and have a gigantic force along the rim trying to rip the dome off the ground (such that you would need to bury the anchors for the rim under tens of meters of rock and soil).
So what would be the proper colony structure? Squares, everything underground?
I think underground is the standard answer. Surely a square would be weaker than a circle.
Pressure vessel shapes. Spheres, cylinders, ovoid shapes, and so forth.
Everything underground would help as well, since that would add compression to help reinforce the pressure vessel habitats, reduce exposure to radiation, and also greatly reduce the effects of the day-night temperature swings on Mars.
What would rip it up? Wind? That doesn’t really make sense. Even if were all glass and there were no anchors for some reason, glass is heavy.
Anyway, you need to be underground to protect from radiation anyway. At least until we invent some kind of magnetic field generator.
Radiation shielding glass is a thing that exists. It tends to be most effective when thick and heavy (as with radiation shielding in general), but thick and heavy would also be what you’d want to be able to stand up to small meteor impacts and similar dangers. At that point, as you say, thick and sturdy enough to stand up to radiation and meteor impacts is probably thick and sturdy enough to stand up to the internal air pressure; indeed, a habitation sphere seems likely to be heavy enough that supporting its own weight would be much more of a structural concern than dealing with air pressure (and of course a dome is an excellent shape for supporting a lot of ceiling weight).
When you get that think, is it still transparent?
Might still let enough light in to save energy, though.
For a Martian habitation dome or sphere made of mild steel, “supporting its own weight” only becomes the dominant structural concern when the diameter of the sphere reaches 15-20 kilometers. On the Moon, that’s closer to 40 kilometers.
To a first approximation, gravity is somewhat useful for holding your space habitat and its contents in place but the only structural load that matters is air pressure. Which is at least an order of magnitude larger than any load terrestrial architects have to deal with save under extremely unusual circumstances (“OK, the nuclear reactor goes in that corner…”), so pretty much throw your intuition out the window.
All true but I don’t understand why it is not obvious that underground is the best way, why are people considering all kinds of overground installations. The constant -21C temperature underground at the Moon worths it alone, as you have a simple heating job instead of a complicated heating and cooling one, and can even leave large swaths of it unheated and yet walk around and work in it in the same kinds of clothes Russians wear for the winter, nothing too extreme for Earthlings of the colder climates. Oh and not having to ship building materials other than isolation but simply excavating living space is another huge bonus.
Perhaps the problem is that in reality excavating rock may be harder than in the sci fi novels where you just evaporate it easily with a laser drill. I would use autonomous, spider-shaped, dog-sized digging robots that periodically go up and connect their chargers to solar charging stations on the surface. We already have lamps that look like natural sunlight, it was discussed here years ago. That should help with claustrophobia. That, and video screen “windows” with fake vistas.
I would think the challenge of massive extra-terrestrial excavation, plus the destruction of things we might want to study would be the main issues with doing everything underground.
Also, what are we doing with all the excavated material?
It’s the difference in air pressure between the inside of the dome and the much thinner Martian atmosphere (or lack of atmosphere altogether on the Moon). If you have a dome anchored to the surface, that creates tremendous pressure on the edge of the dome trying to rip it away from the surface.
Seems like the solution is that rather than having a dome that truncates at the ground, to dig into the ground until you complete the sphere. It’s not like current building don’t already set the foundation into the ground and anchor the struts to it with overlapping pieces like rebar.
Even if they don’t go the “full sphere” route, it seems that they just need to ensure that the primary seam doesn’t occur at the ground. (That is, that the foundation becomes the first segment of wall in one unbroken piece.
Building a sphere underground seems like relatively more of an engineering challenge than laying a foundation and anchoring to it. Probably to an extent that this challenge exceeds the challenge of handling air pressure forces in restricting your potential dome size.
Also, my intuition tells me that having everything including the ground encased in the sphere could be some kind of problematic but maybe not.
1. Dig a big hemispherical hole. Making holes is easy, particularly if we don’t mind being a bit messy. But you can do it with old-fashion bulldozers and excavators if you like.
2. Build a big steel spherical pressure vessel.
3. If you’re so unimaginative that you can’t think of anything better to do with the bottom half of a big spherical pressure vessel on Mars than to fill it with dirt, OK, fill the bottom half with dirt.
4. Are you sure you couldn’t figure out anything better to do with the bottom half of that pressure vessel than fill it with dirt?
Re: 3 and 4
That part came from what may have been a misreading on my part. I wasn’t suggesting to build a sphere and fill the bottom half of the sphere with dirt, that is the suggestion I [thought I] was responding to.
Even the first Case For Mars from 1996 addressed a bunch of issues with domes and other ways to build them.
https://i.imgur.com/fbxIEnL.jpg
(I quickly checked the updated version and it doesn’t look much different.)
Not sure what “domes are actually really bad in terms of keeping pressure in”; they show up in pressure vessels designed to do nothing but keep pressure in all the time. Spheres are the most efficient shape for keeping pressure in; cylinders come in second but are easier to build and work with, most of the other good shapes are variations on the sphere or cylinder (e.g. ellipsoids and truncated cones), and I believe the most common pressure vessel geometry bar none is a cylinder with flattened-hemisphere domes at each end.
Possibly your source means that compression domes, the most common sort in terrestrial architecture, made from solid chunks of masonry and held up by those chunks not being crushed to dust under their own weight, are bad at keeping in pressure. That’s true, but that’s rarely the sort of dome you see in science fiction. Tension domes, made of sheets or membranes of some strong and somewhat flexible material like e.g. steel, are the kind that keep in pressure.
You only need to bury the anchors tens of meters deep if you insist on building just half of the sphere/cylinder/ellipsoid/whatever, otherwise the skin of the structure carries the pressure load as well as anything can. If you’re looking at the illustration on the cover of an SF novel, there’s no way to know whether the imaginary structure is a hemispherical dome anchored to keep it from blowing off the foundation, or a sphere half-buried to keep it from rolling away. And if you’re an engineer trying to build something that works, it’s not clear which is better – there’s no magic formula that stops you from having to do something to deal with about ten tons per square meter of pressure force.
What sucks for keeping in pressure, unfortunately, is glass. Or any other transparent construction material we know of. Either too weak or too brittle, or both, and critically vulnerable to crack propagation especially if there is any sort of pressure cycling (which there will be). So the ethereal transparent dome that holds in the air over some more conventional bit of architecture (or park or farmland) is not going to be the preferred solution.
Instead, you’ll get domes and cylinders and the like made of steel (if manufactured on-site) or titanium or Kevlar (if shipped from Earth), with a minimum of windows and tightly filled with useful space and stuff. And mostly buried for radiation protection. But even buried, it will be the metal shell that holds the pressure; you can’t really trust caves or tunnels for that.
Greenhouses will probably use mirrors to concentrate sunlight on relatively small windows, to be diffused on the inside, because windows in pressure vessels are expensive. And there will probably be observation domes for psychological reasons, but having one around e.g. your living quarters is going to count as a fairly extravagant luxury good.
What would be the optimal pressure in a pressure dome? I know spacecraft and space stations use one atmosphere for logistical reasons, but couldn’t a moon or mars base save quite a bit on structure by using a lower pressure, or are those logistical reasons still more important?
Humans can survive down to ~4 psia in an oxygen-enriched environment for short periods with no ill effect, and that’s a good pressure to use for spacesuits. Maybe short-duration spacecraft as well, but for anything more than a few days you start to get problems with e.g. lung irritation due to dehydration. This hasn’t been extensively explored, but it is unlikely you are going to get huge gains over just using standard air at 14.7 psia. That’s what ISS uses, and maybe we’ll wind up standardizing on something like 10 psia at 30% oxygen or the like, saving a little bit on structure.
There are also fire-safety concerns with low-pressure oxygen-enriched atmospheres, which again drive standard 14.7 psia air in the near term because it is so well understood, I haven’t seen the fire hazards of alternate atmospheres properly quantified and that may be an overrated concerns
Would there be a gain from somewhat lower air pressure, even though you’re not going for the lowest survivable air pressure?
Denver apparently has 12 psia, presumably without oxygen enrichment, and people seem to do okay there, so it feels like we could make modest gains by lowering air pressure without enhancing fire hazard.
There are a lot of design constraints. Another one is that it’s advantageous to have all your structures at the same pressure, including your suits and your vehicles, because you don’t need any acclimation when switching environments. That makes your suits and vehicles lighter and easier.
Wouldn’t the fire problem depend on the partial pressure of oxygen rather than its percentage in the atmosphere?
People traveling to Denver, Boulder, etc, frequently experience mild or sometimes acute altitude sickness at an altitude of around 5000 feet.
Aircraft are generally limited to a cabin altitude of around 8000 feet, when acute altitude sickness starts to become a problem, although they generally operate with a margin below this limit. My understanding is that the majority of discomfort attributed to jet lag is the result of the cabin pressure experienced during the flight rather than the circadian disregulation from being in a different time zone. This is why aircraft manufacturers are making a big deal about bringing the cabin altitude down in their aircraft (to closer to 5000 feet, or even less) in order to improve passenger comfort.
For reference, 5000 feet is a little over 12 PSI, and 8000 is a little under 11.
So unless you want your crew to experience acute flu like symptoms for the first several days (probably not a good idea), this is probably when you need to start thinking about oxygen enrichment. And, honestly, saving 2.5 PSI doesn’t seem like a big enough deal to worry about. And aircraft manufactures investing in the extra weight to support higher cabin pressures instead of taking the opportunity to drive down the cost per passenger mile in the insanely cut throat airline industry hellbent on turning air travel into unrelenting torture is… telling.
@Another Throw:
Have them spend however many days is appropriate to acclimate before getting on the transport from Earth to Mars. Keep the transport at the same reduced pressure. They should be perfectly adjusted by the time they get to the colony/outpost on Mars.
The inert gasses still serve to both absorb heat and transfer it away from the combustion zone, reducing peak temperature and reaction rate. So 3 psia of pure oxygen is worse than 15 psia of 20% oxygen / 80% nitrogen. Quantifying that beyond “worse” is a tricky problem because we don’t have established metrics for that.
So as a fun exercise I found a random pressure vessel calculator online. The difference in thickness for a pressure vessel with an operating temperature of 100F and a 10 foot diameter for 14.7 PSI and 12.2 PSI (5000 feet) is… nothing.
Now, admittedly I don’t know anything about the underlying code their referencing (or have any idea whatsoever what material “CS SA-285 GR.C” is), and we are ignoring the fact that you’re going to design in considerable safety margins, but it kind of illustrates the point that saving 2.5 PSI probably isn’t worth the hassle.
There’s a lot of square inches in your average spacecraft or habitat to have 2.5 pounds on.
And while acclimating to Denver may give some people problems, it seems broadly clear that, acclimation done, people can live there long term without problems.
This seems pretty different from a few-hours-aircraft ride from people who prioritize short-term comfort.
I get that.
But:
A. As I said, a quick check with a random calculator (and some default values that weren’t particularly aligned with conditions on a space station but I was pressed for time) didn’t actually show a difference in wall thickness for those 2.5 psi.
B. As I alluded to, working pressure and design pressure are two different things. Reducing your working pressure by a few psi doesn’t automatically mean that you can reduce your design pressure. The kinds of pressure/temperature excursions you would like to not blow up during are not, necessarily, a function of working pressure. And unintuitive results are… likely. For example, as you reduce your working pressure, you reduce the effectiveness of your best heat transport method. This would make any temperature excursions more localized and hotter. And since basically anything you are going to build out of does not like being heated you do not get to automatically assume you can reduce your scantlings without doing a lot of research.
C. I thought it was self evident that spending a couple weeks in a hypobaric chamber before visiting the grandkids at Muskapolis Prime on the moon for Christmas (or being sick the whole time) is not a compelling multimillion dollar vacation pitch. But maybe you’re thinking about different use cases.
D. It is suggestive that nobody has actually found it worthwhile to study (B) enough to try doing it. And airplane manufacturers making a big deal about increasing their working pressure is also suggestive.
E. The last time someone tried building a spacecraft with an oxygen enriched atmosphere (admittedly at above atmospheric pressure during the fateful test), it did not go well and I get the impression that basically nobody is keen on the words “oxygen enriched” anymore. Like, at all. You are going to need a really good sales pitch to overcome the PR nightmare of being branded the Apollo 1.2 or the Space Hindenburg. And no, “it means you don’t have to spend a week or two in a hypobaric chamber!” is not compelling.
@Another Throw
I think the concerns about pressure are overblown. Personally, when I flew a 787, I didn’t see a difference, although I might be a bit on the insensitive end when it comes to altitude. (I’ve driven from a couple hundred to ~6,000 ft overnight, then had to walk a lot the next day, and not felt sick. Just out of breath.) As for why it was feasible to go to a lower altitude, there are a lot of different drivers of aircraft wall thickness, and if it turns out that something else is your driver, then it’s essentially free from a structural perspective to raise the pressure. I suspect that the relative fatigue strength of composites and aluminum played a major part in this.
@Another Throw
I think that saying, “Oh, the calculator I found for pressure chambers says that 2.5 PSI is no big deal” is another way of saying, “Oh, it turns out that atmosphere won’t leak at all,” and we know that that’s not true. Given the existence of leaks — but not actual blowout — a lower air pressure will reduce leaks.
I think you’re also drastically overestimating the need for pressure acclimation to Denver-like altitudes. It’s not like Denver is Everest. People visit it all the time, sans hyperbaric chambers. When I got skiing at much higher altitudes than Denver has, I don’t get altitude sick, and neither do most people. Yes, a few do. That doesn’t sound like an insurmountable challenge.
If we do build a long-term habitation on the Moon, Mars, or in space, it will be a serious undertaking, not a “hey, let’s have Club Med on the Moon,” and no, I’m not super concerned about principally serving grandparents on vacation.
Nobody is suggesting oxygen enrichment.
The problem with a lower pressure is you then need to have a higher percentage of it be oxygen, and flammability is much more about the percentage of oxygen in air rather than the pressure (IE it doesn’t drop much with a major reduction in air pressure, unless you have really low pressure).
That can work, but it imposes some big design constraints – you can’t risk having anything that might catch a spark indoors. For a long term mission, that strikes me as a big inconvenience compared to bringing nitrogen (or in the case of Mars, siphoning some of it off when you’re sucking in air for producing methane fuel – Mars’ atmosphere is 1.9% nitrogen).
I asked about that earlier and don’t think I got a response. I would have expected flammability to depend on the partial pressure of oxygen, not the percentage.
What am I missing?
Answered here, but it got buried in a string of responses to a different question I think.
To elaborate a bit, even with the simplest of hydrocarbons in an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere you’re going to see a whole mess of interconnected reactions whose rates (and therefore products) vary extremely nonlinearly with temperature. We’re pretty good at controlling the variables enough to avoid the most unpleasant outcomes under an expected range of conditions, but tweaking ambient O2 changes a lot of inputs to exponential processes.
You could certainly bury part of a spherical habitat in the ground, but I was thinking more of the stereotypical dome-tent or glass-shell on the Martian surface, like the tent-cities of Kim Stanley Robinson’ Red Mars.
You’d probably just use artificial lighting for it.
You can collect sunlight with polished metal and run it through window glass, using ~80% of it in the end, or you can collect sunlight with carefully doped refined silicon and send it to other carefully doped refined silicon and use ~20% of it in the end. Why is Plan B the winner here?
Well, you’re going to need to have Plan B in place anyway to power other things, so one reason might be consolidation of infrastructure (your options here are solar panels and mirrors or just solar panels, there is no “just mirrors” option.
A cursory search (I’m sure this will be enthusiastically refuted by someone shortly) indicates that Mars gets 50% or so less sunlight than Earth. This means you will need a lot of mirrors reflecting to a semi-focused area to get adequate light for most greenhouses. The placement and orientation of those mirrors is further constrained by the placement, orientation, and size of the windows. Your greenhouses won’t be very big, unless your windows are very big, but it has been suggested elsewhere that the windows need to be as small as possible. These arrays will also need to adjust to track with the sun or you will only be getting a handful of hours of daylight.
By contrast, you can arrange your solar panels in whatever optimal orientation for collecting sunlight and put them anywhere without concern for directing light through specific windows. You will need more of them than you would mirrors, but you would be less constrained in where you could put them. This also allows you to control the lighting, rather than being forced to use actual daylight hours.
“Solar panels” has about 50% more syllables than either “windows” or “mirrors”, but about 500% more cost. And you’d need an order of magnitude more of them to provide illumination for agricultural greenhouses than you would for everything else on a Mars habitat combined. So “just use solar panels for everything” is easier to describe, but much more expensive to actually do.
I’m not saying “mirrors are at terrible idea, it should definitely be all solar panels”. Just pointing out that the mirror solution isn’t actually as simple as “point some mirrors through some windows” and does come with some trade-offs/constraints. I certainly didn’t suggest that solar panels would be cheaper (of course they wouldn’t). A car isn’t cheaper than a bike, but…
Is solar the best power option on Mars?
If the people colonizing Mars have a domestic economy that includes lots of small, cheap commodity nuclear power plants that just need to be modified for Martian conditions, nuclear power would probably be the way to go. Otherwise it’s almost certainly solar.
I don’t follow this. It seems to read “If nuclear is best they should use nuclear”. I’m sure you mean more than that.
“Nuclear is best” and “your economy actually has a robust nuclear power industry” are two entirely different things. Also, “nuclear is best” can have different answers for Mars and for wherever it is Mars’s hypothetical settlers are coming from.
Boutique artisanal nuclear reactors are impractically expensive for most purposes. If the place we are imagining Mars’s settlers will come from does not have a robust nuclear power industry, for whatever reason, then they should stick with mass-produced solar cells for power on Mars.
Boutique artisanal anything is impractically expensive.
So… nuclear is best if you start with economies of scale but before then you should stick to solar and not build up scale for nuclear?
I swear I’m not trying to be difficult, but I’m having trouble wrapping my head around this.
That’s about right. When Mars is a big enough economy that you can mass-produce nuclear reactors for sale only to Martians, and assuming nobody will throw you in jail for doing that, then you start building nuclear reactors for Martians.
Or if something changes so that Earthlings start mass-producing nuclear reactors for use on Earth and you just need to buy a few of the smaller models and tweak the design, but that doesn’t seem likely any time soon.
Oooh, I get it now. I thought you meant economies of scale for nuclear reactors, not just in general.
Postscript: dammit, now I want boutique artisanal nuclear reactors in my luxury gay space communism.
@Nick
…Do I have to be gay to join?
Boutique artisanal reactors are all fun and games unless you’re the one who has to empty all those little bottles of heavy artichoke water into the coolant loop.
For downward pressure, one could make the top of the dome heavy enough to offset the pressure underneath. Of course, you then run into a problem getting the dome up before you pressurize it.
A more interesting challenge is the lateral forces. The bigger the circle the flatter the curve. The tensile strength needs to go up linearly with the radius. This is why balloons catastrophically pop. Notice the thickness of the aluminum walls in a commercial jet. About a quarter inch as I recall. I’m not sure how much of this thickness is needed for holding the air in vs. how much for keeping the plane rigid. Assuming the former, multiply this thickness by the same factor that your dome diameter is vs the diameter of the plane fuselage. Yikes!
After running this exercise in my head, I have become very skeptical of large ring or cylinder space stations. And a Ringworld is definitely out.
I suggest diverting enough comets to give Mars a proper atmosphere and oceans before trying to colonize.
From the start, they knew that Ringworld required some kind of magical substance with a tensile strength on the order of like the nuclear strong force.
For a dome holding a standard atmosphere on Mars, that means making the dome out of steel roughly three and a half meters thick, or volcanic rock roughly nine meters thick. Atmospheric pressure is vastly stronger than you imagine, and gravity is the puniest force in the universe.
You’re probably better off using the strength of steel, rather than the weight of steel or stone, to hold in your air.
Note the basic stress in the dome (assuming a perfect hemisphere, something flatter and the stress gets worse) is going to be sized by the P*r/t (that is to say Pressure * Radius of the dome / thickness of the dome) (Also, this assumes 10*t<r, also known as the thin wall assumption). For a 737 (~12" diameter pressure cylinder, assuming your 1/4" wall number is right, an Aluminum 2024 T0 condition e.g. welded, and a 10 psig design condition), your looking at about 1/4 of the tube tensile capability being used up for the design pressure. That's not accounting for a factor of safety (probably in the 1.5-2 range), material thickness tolerances (probably +/- 10% on thickness), damage tolerance (probably -10% on thickness), assembly tolerance (probably ~1% out of roundness on the cylinder), local stress concentrates, or critically for an aircraft fatigue life concerns. As a result, you're probably actually using closer to 90-95% of the design capability of the aircraft for pressure. Meanwhile your vehicle bending stresses are carried through the skin orthogonal to the primary (hoop) pressure stresses, and you're basically getting that capability for free.
Note, using aluminum for design of a cyclically loaded pressure vessel that isn't weight critical is generally a bad idea, mostly because of fatigue concerns. From a practical engineering standpoint, if you can keep the stress in a steel part below a certain limit, then it's fatigue life is considered infinite. This is not the case with aluminums, which is one of the reasons why aircraft have to be inspected very regularly (the other being that we don't have the luxury of keeping stresses that low in aircraft anyways).
In this case, not being concerned for the weight of our pressure vessel allows us to use steel, which is great for a lot of reasons (depending on the grade, can be up to 3x stronger, particularly for welded assemblies which will be critical for this large scale construction)
The comment about radial forces being the killer is spot on, though a bit of misnomer for a dome. The loads discussed above carried through the skin of the pressure vessel, and rely on the fact that the pressure vessel skin is expanding and growing under the load. However, when you then tie this thing into the ground, which is effectively rigid you end up with nasty kink in your wall, which puts a very large bending stress into things. This is always a problem in designing pressure vessels (and one of the good guidelines to follow is always made your cylinder wall thickness match your cylinder head thickness) and has some solutions for optimizing thickness, but it effectively means that your walls at ground level are going to be very thick (probably at least twice that of main pressure dome).
This fact also drives us to the use of free standing dome, because any internal stiffening of the pressure vessel (in this case think a roof truss) tends to create more stress concentration problems than it will relieve by providing alternative load paths.
As for the feasibility of large spherical space stations, assume a 60 ksi strength steel, a 15 psig pressure, and 2x factor of safety, which says that you wall thickness needs to be about 0.05% of your radius (with a station mass of ~0.0018*r^3 lbs, assuming r is in inches), and will be about the same for cylinder (though the cylinder will be heavier for a given enclosed volume)
Maybe I am missing something, but the dome design appears to me to be fairly trivial. All you need is a hoop at the bottom of the half dome that is pretty strong. This hoop will be in tension, but pretensioned reinforced concrete steel is pretty good at handling tension, we can add some cable to it if we want. The hoop can be made by digging a deep circular trench using normal construction techniques like bucket evacuators. If you are really concerned about the hoop lifting because it is not heavy enough, then install piling into the bottom of the trench for the hoop to be anchored to. Pile driving is pretty simple tech to get right and well proven. If we can hold up a 1km skyscraper against cyclones loading on earth with piles, we can surely hold a dome down. The material of the dome would be some kind of clear fabric if it were my decision, held perhaps in tension with cabling. Glass is heavy and not ideal for this service as it tends to creep. Small punctures would not be too much of a problem, plenty of time to patch them.
The depth of the hoop will depend on how you finish the floor of the inside of the dome. Dirt is not particularly good at holding pressure so a deeper trench will provide you with more pressure sealing. If you did a concrete floor over some kind of sealing geotextile probably the hoop could be pretty shallow.
Personally I think the need though for domes like this on Mars will be limited. It would be a pretty boring view in my opinion after just a short while. Probably only the tourists would bother. As others have said, going underground would be the way to go for living. I can imagine a giant cavern, with the ceiling lit by LEDs to simulate blue sky and earthlike sunshine as being the most tolerable environment. If the cavern dome is about the size of a normal sport stadium on earth this will appear pretty realistic. Having worked in a lot of remote places with very harsh environments (desert, tundra) I believe people underestimate how pleasant a nice natural looking day in the warm sunshine can be.
Being underground has all sorts of natural advantages on Mars, the ground temperature is warmer, protection from radiation, air leaks not an issue and so on.
The majority of the caverns could be simple tunnels drilled using TBMs shipped in from earth, then sprayed concrete on the walls for stability. A 7 diameter tunnel (same as channel tunnel) is very stable at earth gravities in good rock and would give ample sense of headroom without feeling too cramped. With a few hundred miles of tunnels snaking back and forth should be plenty of living space for a very large population. Probably you could drill tunnels in parallel, then connect up with side tunnels. These tunnels would be used for growing stuff, as well as living space. For growing you would need to string up a bunch of full spectrum lights along the length of the tunnel – probably you could simulate day and night by lighting different parts of the tunnel at different times. Heating is going to be needed, you would need to be at least 10Km below ground to get normal earth temperatures (at a 6k/Km) temperature gradient as surface temps of Mars are so low (-55DegC), which may be too deep at least initially (current record deepest mine on earth is 4 km). But with the lighter Mars gravity maybe this would work.
Energy will come from a nuclear reactor – not solar. These can be shipped in from earth quite profitably as the lifetime energy density of reactors is huge. Solar panels wouldn’t have enough lifetime energy density to be worth shipping, especially in the weak sunshine of Mars. The mars colony would have to get really big before it would make sense to start making either reactors or panels on Mars, probably millions of people if not hundreds of millions. The initial Mars economy I think would mostly be agricultural and services. Maybe this would finally be the killer app for 3D printing for any manufacturing since order runs would be too low for any kind of regular manufacturing at scale.
The tunnels have to be really deep if you want the weight of the dirt on top to balance the air pressure. Zubrin proposed underground brick vaults covered with dirt in _The Case for Mars_, but I think they’d have to be quite deep–John said 10m above, and that fits with my back-of-the-envelope calculations[1]. (You should listen to John, though, because I’m a not-very-informed amateur here.) And I’d expect to lose a lot of air over time, given the pressure and materials involved. But in principle, I think you could make a Mars colony mostly out of brick vaults built at the bottom of deep holes and then covered over with something like 10-15m of packed-down Martian dirt. That’s a deep hole to dig for a habitat, and it sure seems intuitively like it would be easier to make some kind of containment vessel out of iron or steel or re-enforced concrete or something, and then bury it as deep as needed for radiation shielding and insulation.
[1] Mars has about 1/3 Earth gravity, and the pressure we need is about the same as the weight of 10m of water on Earth, so you’d need 30m of water on Mars to hold down your atmosphere. Since rock/dirt is more dense than water, you can probably cut that back to something more like 15m.
I checked the second edition of The Case For Mars,[2] and Zubrin’s math is that if we have 5 psi (3.5 psi oxygen, 1.5 psi nitrogen)[1], the upward pressure is 3.5 tonnes per square meter. Assuming the soil is 4x dense as water, we then need 2.5 meters of soil to countermand that.
I think, after living in tin cans on the surface, digging underground will be the next step because it’s simpler to understand and implement and bootstrap.
[1] Zubrin says this was good enough for Skylab. But see the other conversations about “oxygen” on this page about why we might want much more psi.
[2] I’m pretty sure this wasn’t changed at all from the first edition.
Martian soil isn’t 4x as dense as water, but 1-1.5x. Also, you don’t want to trust a cut-and-cover trench in the local landscape (or a cave for that matter), because pressure loads are absolutely isotropic, bedrock and loose soil aren’t necessarily so, and that mismatch could result in many, many tons of unbalanced force blowing out one of the sidewalls.
Digging out a substantial excess volume and using concrete to fully encase your pressurized tunnel, gives you more control and alleviates much of that risk. Martian concrete would have a density of ~2 g/cc, so we’re back to 5-10 meters of overburden depending on your taste in atmospheres. Probably at least that thickness on the sides as well.
Reinforced concrete would be better, and of course we’ve already discussed metal-walled pressure vessels. So this comes to the relative cost of steel vs. concrete on Mars, which is not something I am confident I could forecast at this point.
Yes I would not expect an unlined tunnel to be able to hold pressure, there could be cracks or similar which could leak pressure at too fast a rate – maybe if you were just using it for growing food you could manage to have a low air pressure farming perhaps with high CO2 partial pressures. But then you would need space suits to access the area. If the rock was stable enough you could get the pressure seal just by spraying on concrete to an inch or so thick – that is going to enough to fix any cracks in the rock and keep any leaks low. Mars air is primarily CO2 so you can just keep a compressor sucking in air to keep the pressure up in your growing tunnels – the plants should be making oxygen of course to replace the oxygen lost in the leaks.
In terms of cut and cover vs TBM tunnels – I would tend to go for the latter just because it makes the problem a lot more automated. I suspect this is part of Musk’s reasons for creating the Boring Company. If the rock is fairly heterogeneous then your process can be fairly automated with TBMs (or even fully autonomous) in a way that surface digging and brick building just could not be. I don’t know how deep you would want to go – it would depend on the rock mechanics to some extent. Most earth mining is constrained by temperatures, on Mars it is an actual benefit for any conceivable depth. Hauling the spoil out of the hole could be an issue, but with fairly cheap energy and low gravity I don’t think it would be too much trouble, perhaps it could be blasted out using compressed Mars air. One benefit of Mars, at least initially, is there is no pesky environmental rules to be followed so if you created a local dust cloud no-one would care. I am of course thinking about the time when millions of people are living there – not the first thousand or so. Probably in the early days it is also about quickest way to get large amounts of cheap shelter – so cut and cover may well be that.
Like John I am not sure of the relative benefits of concrete vs steel as a lining technology. But limestone and gypsum appears to be fairly common on Mars and making cement is just a matter of heating the two compounds together in a fairly simple retort that would work fine in low pressure environment. Iron of course is also extensive on Mars but the process for refining ore and creating a good quality steel requires quite a bit of carbon which may not be as available. Plus the process is more complicated than the cement one.
Sunset Boulevard holds up pretty well.
I saw Hail, Caesar pretty recently; I remember it getting panned by critics but I don’t know why — it wasn’t perfect, but it was very good.
Would that it were so simple
Dear boy, why are you saying “t’were”?
Logged in just to say that Hail, Caesar! was one of the favorite movies my wife and I watched in the last couple years. Thought it was well done.
I think the critics were rating Hail, Caesar! on something it wasn’t trying to do. They were expecting another Coen comedy-thriller, and instead they got a pastiche of old Hollywood with a thin plot to tie it together.
At least, I was. Halfway through something clicked for me and I started liking it a whole lot more.
The plot is subservient to the film as a theme piece, which was that old time Hollywood was cogs in a machine all the way down (with the Marxists merely having found a new machine to slot into, rather than having found a non-cog existence), with the question of if the product (people’s dreams through stories) was worth it.
The marketing was also unfortunate, because it make the film seem like some kind of Ocean’s or Avengers team-up film, instead of the “here’s how this life is, there will be no change to the status quo” exploration piece the film actually is.
Escape From LA /s
Ed Wood, for a serious answer.
In “Skin in the Game” Nassim Taleb brings up the problem of industries judging themselves versus industries being judged by their customers. He suggests that there is variability (I forget now whether he suggests what causes variability) among industries and fields in terms of how inward-facing they can afford to be (though there are individual exceptions I think part of the premise is that industries will be as insular as they can afford to be, with participants preferring to seek the accolades of their peers, rather than “pandering” to customers or “going commercial”; this might also be framed as the extent to which e.g. the auto industry or the fashion industry or the restaurant industry can mold consumer preferences as compared to the extent to which they must conform to consumer preferences).
I am wondering if this isn’t a partial answer to the “why can’t we build beautiful architecture anymore” problem that has long bugged me. That is, maybe architects are primarily designing to impress other architects rather than please the people who will actually use the building.
Alternative/supplementary explanations include “people’s stated preferences aren’t their revealed preferences” (they’d rather drive to their spacious McMansion in the suburbs than live in a characterful but dense street corner apartment) and “architecture isn’t primarily about what you think it’s about” (we assume architecture is first-and-foremost about having a nice place to live but maybe it’s actually about having a roof over your head and then, beyond that, impressing your neighbors/being comfortable; I wonder if this isn’t also why people dress in what seems so sloppy a manner compared to 100 years ago).
Architecture is one that clearly would not fit into the skin in the game model. A beautiful building is viewed from the outside, whereas the people that pay for it are on the inside, deprived of its beauty/lack thereof. I want to be adjacent to the best view, and want my view of that view to be very nice (big windows preferably). But my 100% window building is boring, it maximizes my utility inside, but the people on the street get no benefit.
I think this also gets to your other examples. People leave “characterful” places because those characters aren’t all that nice. They build suburban McMansions because property per square foot is cheaper out there, so why not.
Well I agree with both clothing and architecture there’s a certain trade-off between comfortable/convenient for wearer/inhabitant and visually and otherwise pleasing for onlookers. Maybe due to society becoming more liberal and individualistic or simply due to innovations in making houses and clothing comfortable, we seem more willing now than before to e.g. live in an ugly but functional house or wear unattractive but comfortable clothing.
However, I don’t think that’s the entirety of it as I don’t think there’s a pure trade-off relationship between beauty and comfort/utility in architecture or clothing. Making the outside of a house ugly doesn’t make the inside any more comfortable, for example. Of course, one could prioritize interior over exterior because you don’t care what the neighbors think, but I don’t think that’s what people are complaining about when they complain about “ugly modern architecture.” I think the “ugly modern architecture” is often not inherently cheaper or more functional than a similar, more traditional/aesthetically pleasing structure.
Why you hate contemporary architecture
Really interesting article on trends in postwar architecture and some possible explanations for why buildings got ugly.
Good article. Seems very much to support the theory of “an architect’s architect” etc. as being a big part of the problem (that is, success in the field of architecture being primarily a function of garnering the admiration of other architects).
I wonder if it has something to do with the very big conceptual space possible within a category like “library” or “museum.” For example, if you are a university building a new library your priorities, in order, may be something like: 1. some sort of structure that holds books 2. built by a famous architect 3. a pleasant place to read, work, etc.
The number of structures that can conceivably fulfill 1 is vast, so not very limiting. Barring extremes, 3 is hard to determine until after the thing is built and one doesn’t want to be the first person to tell famous architect the emperor has no clothes when it comes to building beautiful, comfortable libraries (plus, any rube can make something “beautiful”; we’re interested in challenging).
So as to the question of why “famous architect” is a category determined by other architects more than clients, it may be because regular people are bad at judging 1 and 3 and so defer to “experts” on those questions with the result that the architects admired by other architects get the lucrative jobs and a self-perpetuating cycle results?
I guess the question is why monumental architects can afford to scoff at the general public’s preference for beautiful structures while even top restauranteurs mostly can’t afford to scoff at customers’ demand that the food tastes good, though they may allow taste to take a backseat, to some degree, to experimentation with presentation and technique, etc.
The odder thing is that there have been famous architects before the twentieth century. So what changed that they have so much freedom today? I was reading a few books on Gothic architecture a few weeks back, and more than one noted that it was the first period in which architects were known by name and sought by cities or monasteries on account of prior work. Some Gothic cathedrals still have a monument to, for instance, the bishop who commissioned it and the initial architect. (Can quote sources when I get home.) These architects were innovators, and stars of their time for it, but they seemed to have a lot more respect for the traditions they were working in than our contemporaries.
Great article. Makes modern architects sound like Steinmann from Bioshock.
I… can’t really agree with the other commenters on this article. The way it is written is basically a 2000 word opinion piece that says “only intricate ornamentation looks good, and if you disagree you’re wrong” over and over, with a handful of architects’ quotes added in (who, it turns out, can be pretentious pricks, too).
I also found it interesting that the authors apparently didn’t actually talk to anyone in architecture, since my younger sibling recently graduated with an architectural degree, and several blanket assertions made are entirely false.
The “why” of the entire article can just be boiled down to “because I (and many other people) like detailed ornamentation, which is out of style, at least partially due to cost.” And then 15 tons of judgmental garbage piled on top of that.
I won’t disagree with you that the article is quite polemical; which blanket assertions, based on your sibling’s experience, are entirely false?
I don’t think cost has much to do with it, given that modernist eyesores tend to be especially prevalent with lavishly-funded public architecture and the like. Residential housing, where cost is more of an issue, tends to be, if not beautiful, at least not actively ugly.
Well, yeah, when you impose your eyesores on other people, you deserve to get judged good and hard.
Cost issues could perhaps explain the purely functional concrete boxes, but not things like this or this.
This part, specifically, was what I was thinking of when making that comment:
The number of discussions that I’ve had with my brother about things that he’s been learning, around ideas such as evaluating what emotions design can evoke in people, how people interact with objects and structures, and the like, were wildly far-ranging and too numerous to count. I know there were also multiple courses that he took specifically devoted to studying building and architecture throughout history, and guarantee that it was not “a discussion of buildings since WW2”. I don’t know as much what was covered in those courses because I was less interested, but having heard him talk about the styles of a wide variety of buildings and structures, I know that it didn’t boil down to “Greco-roman and french styles are garbage and super-modern formless structures are the best things ever”.
These are topics that are taught, discussed, and have entire classes on in architectural school. Whether or not the authors would agree with the students’ and teachers’ preferences and evaluations, it’s factually untrue to claim that they only teach raw engineering concepts and nothing to do with the practice as a form of art.
I agree, and that’s where I took other issue with the authors’ assertions. It actually felt a bit motte and bailey-ish; they point to brutalist architecture and say “this is inhumane and emotionally numbing” and then point to what I now have learned is apparently called ‘blobitecture’, which explicitly is a style that draws inspiration from organic structures in an effort to enable structures to resonate with people on a more emotional level, and first claim that it’s the same, and if not, retreat back to “even if you feel emotions, it should only be anger because it’s ugly, and if you disagree you’re dumb and wrong”.
Which, I guess, sure, is their opinion. But also doesn’t really contribute anything.
(I’m unsure how much of my motivation to respond on this topic is because I strongly disagree with their aesthetic preferences, but you can safely assume it to definitely be a nonzero amount.)
Lest you think McMansions deserve a pass, though….
That author emphasizes throughout the creeping wrongness of the McMansion. Most people don’t have the vocabulary to say why the houses are wrong, or the expertise to fix it, but they can feel it.
I suspect the McMansion hell blog is mostly documenting Sturgeon’s law.
Given the sources the author works from, it doesn’t seem so. He (?) quotes from a compendium of American building styles’ description of the “Millennium Mansion”*:
Haphazard dormers and inconsistent window shapes are not good things! The “Millennium Mansion” is a recognizable style with common features—features that are just bad.
He has a theory about why the McMansion is so bad, too—they’re a product of living above one’s means by building the biggest damned thing in the middle of nowhere where no one can bother you, and making that (barely) affordable means skimping on a lot of things. Hence incompetent design, tons of construction mistakes, cheap material that needs replacing a few years down the line…. I’m sure these were problems in other places and at other times, but McMansions seem to be uniquely bad, on account of the conditions that gave rise to them.
*Hey, at least it’s not millennial mansion, amirite?
@Nick
Millennials can’t afford them 😉
@Nick
She’s a grad student studying (I think) acoustics. That site is a little hard to navigate, but the 50 States of McMansion Hell entries are a blast to read.
@Nick
The author of McMansion Hell is Kate Wagner. One of the things that she points out about McMansions is that they are not designed by architects but rather by builders/clients. The architects are left out of the equation and so you get things that are mostly functional but are odd looking and off putting.
She has also posted a rebuttal to the article about how bad modern architecture is. I forget where I read it, it might have been twitter. I don’t mind most modern architecture and I thought that there were some genuinely beautiful buildings used as negative examples in the article.
What are you defining as “modern” architecture? Most of it is extremely hit-or-miss, with a lot of stuff that looks absolutely ridiculous, and a lot of it is quite polarizing. Which is the point, architects like a lot of stupid stuff that other people don’t like.
McMansion is not a well-defined term. However, people like modern homes that are “meh” on some quality standards and aesthetics because having 3000 square feet is really nice. Post-war ranches and split-levels and pre-war bungalows and four squares are quite frankly claustrophobic for modern families, who have a lot more stuff and live differently than families of past generations.
Also, split-levels and ranches are hardly the picturesque communities we think of when we think high-density living, and high-density living is more likely to be slum or slum-adjacent than these picturesque Instagram towns.
When people talk about McMansion, is 3000 square feet about what they are thinking of? I would consider that a comfortable size for a family house—ours is a little less, but not a lot—but not anything extraordinary.
I think 3,000 would be the absolute lowest that could be considered a McMansion, probably depending a bit on context (location, surroundings, etc). I’m fairly certain that the original usage was expanded downward to that number, I think it originally referred to larger houses.
The image it conjures in my mind is probably more like 4,000-5,000 square feet. If you Google image search the word, the top results are all much more than 3,000 square feet.
@DavidFriedman
Interestingly, in my country only a third of families with children have over 1600 square feet.
Might your ‘comfortable’ not be more a case of peer pressure than of actually being uncomfortable with less space?
@Aapje
I would say 2,500-3,000 square feet is a large family home, but not obscenely or inappropriately large (unless it is surrounded by blocks and blocks of 900-1,500 square foot homes in which case it is probably an eyesore that doesn’t match the surrounding aesthetics, which is why I suggested location is an important factor here).
I can’t find any numbers on size of homes with children in the US (admittedly I didn’t try very hard) but single family home size in general (which may be occupied by an actual family, individual occupant, or other despite the name) grew from ~1,600 square feet in the 70s to ~2,300-2,600 square feet now depending on your source and whether you want mean or median (median is slightly lower, unsurprisingly).
I know my mom grew up in a family of 8 kids in a house that I would estimate at no more than 1,200 square feet…maybe less.
“McMansion” isn’t a term with defined meaning. For instance, this house is listed as a “McMansion” on the Wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMansion#/media/File:McMansion,_Munster,_Indiana.JPG
You can find somewhat similar homes on Zillow, like this one:
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/10115-Somerset-Dr-Munster-IN-46321/73399594_zpid/
These are relatively large homes, between 3k and 4k, and they are pretty “meh,” but it’s not like the split-levels and ranches they are in competition with are national gems. They have lots and lots of space. Also, contrary to their reputation of complete garbage builds, most of the ones I have been in have been perfectly acceptable homes, with no major problems beyond the usual problems with all homes.
Wealth Envy at play.
@A Definite Beta Guy
That is what I was trying to get at about the definition shifting over time. Originally I’m pretty sure it was used for very large houses with cheap and/or incredibly ugly design (I’m sure they were nice to live in). I don’t know that it was wrong to criticize this, because people complain about all types of eyesores and these certainly qualified as such.
Now a lot of people do seem to use it basically as a pejorative for “any suburban house that isn’t a bungalow” which is stupid.
This would be more persuasive if you weren’t in a subthread where I quoted a definition by an architectural historian. And where I started by linking to a blog which explains and defends its definition at great length. That a words has been abused or overextended is not sufficient reason to abandon the word, much less the concept it points to; if it were, we could no longer talk about gaslighting.
The big offense of the McMansion Definite Beta Guy cites is its big front garage. Both the wikipedia article and Kate Wagner seem to find big garages particularly problematic. I’ll freely admit that lots of the true mansions Wagner likes are very attractive and would be spoiled by a big garage. But I sort of feel like a lot of what’s going on is just a city-dweller’s contempt for suburbia.
I sort of agree; I think one of the biggest issues with the McMansion is adding secondary masses that imbalance the house, and garages (especially 3, 4, 5, 6 (!!!) car) are probably the single worst offender there. There’s no reason they can’t be disconnected, though, and even put behind the house. A few of the proper mansions she’s shown do that. I did the same when I built a (not very good, but not Mc) mansion in The Sims.
I define McMansion broadly as “a > 3000 square foot tract house”. That is, if it’s a custom build, it’s not a McMansion no matter how ugly it is, and if someone makes a decent large tract house (there are a few around me; the builders seem to have patterned them after actual local mansions), it’s still a McMansion.
IMO the major sin in most of those isn’t the garage but the rooflines. Second major sin is the mish-mash of styles, like a round Victorian turret on a house that’s otherwise neo-Colonial. And third is the haphazard cladding materials
Construction varies a lot between builders. As for new building techniques, EIFS (fake stucco) is easy to do wrong and early versions were just no good. OSB already has some issues. On the other hand, engineered beams and trusses work really well.
Putting garages behind the house doesn’t make practical sense when they’re your primary entryway, but the “N-car garages” that are done by taking a design for an “N-1 car garage” and glomming an extra bay on the side are just ridiculous.
I don’t think so.
It’s desirable, although not essential, for each child to have its own bedroom. For parents with two children that requires three bedrooms. It’s convenient to have at least two bathrooms, and for a two story house where the bedrooms are on the upper story, it’s nice to have a third bathroom on the lower story. Add in kitchen, living room or equivalent, dining room, and perhaps an office, assume the average room is 14×14, and you are getting past 2000 square feet once you allow for hallways and such.
More space is still useful. We have one room that doubles as a guest room when we have a visitor staying over, and a play room for kids of our guests–usually my granddaughter when that family comes over for dinner, as they do most weeks.
We could certainly survive with a substantially smaller house, but the space in the existing one is all useful.
Let me put the question back to you. An ordinary medieval villager had his whole family in one room. The same seems to have been true for residents of Moscow in the mid-20th century. Is your preference for more space than that due to peer pressure more than to being uncomfortable with less space than you are used to?
I think the main cause of difference in house size between the US and Europe is room size rather than number. Bedrooms in the UK are more like 12 x 12. Number of bathrooms is probably the secondary factor (en suites are fairly rare in the UK at least).
Right, that’s how most people think of most McMansions.
1. It’s really big
2. It’s tract housing
3. It really doesn’t look like a nice mansion
The one that I posted has an unbalanced visual mass because of the huge garage, but that’s quite frankly NOT a McMansion problem. That’s a huge problem in my parents split-level/ranch neighborhood constructed in the 1960s. Other than that, the one I posted is just a normal house, but it’s basically a McMansion build: it’s big, it’s vinyl siding, it’s tract housing.
However, these houses have a LOT of room, and lots of room is very nice. You can host, you can have lots of kids, you can have spare rooms for offices or work rooms, you can have lots of storage space…extra room is very nice. I wouldn’t mind doubling the size of my house. I could have:
1. Separate workout-room
2. Separate craft-room
3. Master Bath
4. Full sized third bath
5. Separate laundry room
6. Big-ass kitchen
7. Dining room big enough to have 30 people over
8. Indoor garden
9. Guest bedroom
10. Full basement bar
11. Separate area for teenagers to hang out
Would be so, so nice. Right now, I have a combined laundry room/office, that sits next to the sub-basement, which is the main living area, that also includes all work-out equipment, that’s right next to the utility room, so you hear the sump-pump and the heater go off non-stop. Plus no easy way to install surround-sound.
Also, there are a LOT of custom-build McMansions in my neighborhoods. They have their stupid McMansion nub and their non-matching windows, and a bunch of random features thrown in from various schools of architecture. We also have a random-ass Southern plantation house in my neighborhood. That’s because I live in a UMC-pretending-to-be-rich neighborhood, and that’s what those kinds of people do. Who the hell cares? It’s a really nice neighborhood. The lot sizes are generally small, the set-backs are small, and the streets are small, so it creates a rather intimate feel.
I have a much bigger problem with the idiots who can’t take care of their lawn and let it get overrun with weeds. THOSE houses are disgusting. McMansions are not. However, I suspect most of the anti-McMansion people are also of the “lawns are evil, replace it all with weeds!” variety.
@DavidFriedman
But also more effort to clean and maintain. Presumably, there is a preferred size for an optimal balance between upsides and downsides, where both larger and smaller houses are considered sub-optimal.
Then people are driven to smaller housing by the cost of buying/building a larger house, but to bigger housing by peer pressure*.
* Aside from some weirdo communities where smaller housing has higher status.
I wrote:
Aapje replied:
And more expensive to buy and heat.
Obviously there will be some size that maximizes the net benefit for a particular family under particular circumstances.
I thought your suggestion was not merely that more size may not be worth its cost, which is obviously true, but that it was worthless for practical purposes, hence done only in response to peer pressure. My point was that it was not, at least for sizes well above the average size you quoted, and probably for sizes as large as 3000 square feet for a family with children.
‘Comfortable’ can be interpreted in both ways: either a holistic general comfort level that includes both costs and benefits; or more specifically whether one can make use of the space.
I think that the former makes more sense for this discussion and most practical discussions, because without considering costs, extreme outcomes are typically logical, while they rarely are in practice.
My claim is that people generally increase their housing demands in response to peer pressure, so their costs/benefit analysis without peer pressure effects is going to result in a smaller housing preference than one with peer pressure effects.
Of course, it is plausible that the effect of high housing prices is so large that the peer pressure effects are relatively small in comparison, for most people.
Does that apply to increasing housing demand to be more than one room per family?
Perhaps I’m misreading you, but it sounds to me as though you have some idea of a size of house such that additional size is of very little value, hence is acquired only due to peer pressure—possibly the size you are used to living in.
You now seem to be only claiming that peer pressure has some effect, which is probably true. I thought your earlier suggestion was that it was the main reason for people preferring larger houses.
A lot of the things in the first article on that page look like they might fit the pattern of “looks nice to live in, just doesn’t look good from the outside.” For instance, one house has a giant row of windows along the top that the author criticizes for being “too many voids.” But I bet there’s a pretty good view from inside the building.
A lot of other issues in that page strike me as “Built something that was supposed to look nice, but didn’t consult an architect to tell them about things like “proportions” or “balance,”” which runs contrary to the thesis I’m hearing everywhere about how modern things look ugly because of architects run amuck. On the contrary, the problem is not enough architects!
On the other hand, if you pay too much attention to architects, you get something that looks like this. There is clearly a middle ground here.
@Nornagest
It is an art gallery, though. They often want the building to be art too.
I know, art museums are easy prey, but I just couldn’t pass up a building that looks like a liver fluke for Godzilla.
The worst thing about that building is the wonderful looking neighborhood it’s ruining.
Liver fluke? Clearly in the end times Giant Link will pick it up to play the Song of Time.
Assuming you’re talking about residential architecture, I think your second explanation (architects are actually designing to revealed preferences among consumers) is more likely.
First, I find it unlikely that an environment where architects are competing with other architects to impress a class of architects would converge on the standard suburban two-story cube with vinyl siding and tiny windows. Or even your upper-class McMansion for that matter.
Second, I suspect that for most people the greatest factors for their home (that have anything to do with its architecture) are:
-Cost
-Cost per square foot
-Low/easy maintenance
-Convenience of use
All of these things contribute to features of residential architecture: vinyl siding, standardized construction methods and materials, low cost materials, large interior spaces, attached garages and driveways (implying setback), etc.
Brick is expensive for new construction. Alternative materials are likely to either be more expensive or more difficult to maintain (not least of which is because most contractors and fellow homeowners are familiar with the “standard” materials and techniques). Most homeowners probably also either have a family or aspire to have one, so having more large bedrooms, a lawn, and “protected” suburban neighborhoods are also desirable.
Edit: In terms of commercial architecture I suspect that “cost is king” and this informs all architectural decisions. Brutalism is ugly but its also cheap.
I think with residential architecture a lot of it can’t be blamed on the architects but on the tendency, in places like the US with a lot of space and good highways for people to keep spreading out, taking away the human, pedestrian scale.
I think generic residential housing is a good example of industries judging themselves and consumers having to accept what’s on the market. But it’s not really so bad. Most people like their suburban houses.
I think the bad modern architecture, which inspires the question “why can’t we build beautiful architecture anymore”, mostly appears in monumental and public architecture, which is built bespoke, and the clients have many opportunities to meddle (as anyone who builds websites for clients would be familiar with). So in fact, self-judging seems to be inversely related with bad architecture.
I would rather answer “why can’t we build beautiful architecture anymore” by pointing to how we dress. In an age where people dressed formally, buildings were also dressed formally. Nowadays when people go out in T-shirts with obscenities printed on them, buildings are similarly designed to shock.
Errrrr, there’s no possibility that architects would converge on most of the stuff that we dislike in architecture. I mean, some things, yes: Brutalism is an abhorrent crime against humanity. But stuff like McMansions and suburban sprawl are anti-architecture. Those things are almost 100% driven by consumer preference, and it’s because consumers want lots and lots of floor-space, lots of breathing room, space to park their cars, and big arterial roads and expressways to get where they need to go.
That’s not to say that no one likes the neighborhoods, because there is a lot of demand for those kinds of spaces (otherwise they wouldn’t be so expensive), but this isn’t where most people want to live. I follow createstreets and all that jazz on Twitter because they show pictures of nice, pretty neighborhoods, but none of the places they post are car-friendly. So….no, I wouldn’t ever live in one of those areas.
And that’s even though I choose to vacation pretty much exclusively in those areas.
Architecture can certainly fail due to consumer preference, but it can fail in different ways, too. Here are some examples of what architects build for themselves (i.e., when they’re not trying to satisfy a client). Maybe not the same brand of ugly as, say, a McMansion, but definitely not either practical or beautiful designs, especially as houses–they look more like sculptures than something designed to be easy to live in.
I am aesthetically pleased by (and would happily live in) about half of these – which isn’t a bad rate for what is essentially liveable art.
I think most of them are reasonably good-looking except for the pile of rocks, but what’s with the no-privacy glass wall in front?
1 would only be livable for an exhibitionist. 3 is too experimental to be practical. 4 would give me too many university flashbacks. 5 looks like a police station in a cyberpunk thriller. 7 is just boring. 6 is boring too, and the lights would keep me up at night.
I’d be okay with living in the second one, even if it looks like a museum gift shop. 8 and 9 are tolerable too, but probably cost four times what an equally attractive conventional house would.
Mostly what I’m getting out of this is that architecture schools teach a fetish for cubes and bare concrete.
8 actually looks decent, probably because of the nature and the nice interiors.
What’s the robot version of number 5 look like?
Same geometry, but steel rather than concrete.
Oh, sorry, I mistook it as a Transformer.
I personally think most of these look cool. I’d qualify that by saying “I’m not an architect,” but I suppose this discussion started with an insistence that architects should be trying to impress the non-expert j1000000s of the world, not other architects.
For reference, what do you mean by beautiful architecture? Are you talking about residential houses, or iconic skyscrapers like the Chrysler Building, or something more like Notre Dame?
What counts as beautiful architecture? I suspect cost and requirements like “can fit a certain number of people in this small space of expensive CBD land” are relevant; Christopher Wren didn’t have the option of building St Paul’s with girders and concrete. Plus, two selection effects: you don’t remember non-ugly modern buildings, and presumably ugly old ones were more likely to be demolished.
One possible explanation is the rising marginal cost of originality.
Suppose you are the first city planner in the history of the world and are very smart. You come up with a cartesian city, where it’s easy for people to find their way around.
The second city planner can’t do a cartesian city because it has already been done. Perhaps he comes up with a functional polar design.
Now you are the two hundred and seventieth city planner in the history of the world. All the good designs have been done, all the not so good designs have been done.
You design Canberra.
I expect that, to some degree, it applies to architecture too.
Yes, I think the problem is that architects and city planners see themselves as “artists” and artists, like academics, are expected to be original, at least if they want to achieve high status within the profession (seems quite analogous, really: if you’re happy to teach high school you can just be someone who’s really good at teaching the standard interpretations; if you want a high-prestige tenured job at an Ivy League school you need to produce original research, which in a field like e.g. English literature is often quite hard just because so much has already been written about e.g. Shakespeare, thus incentivizing people to come up with some really weird ideas in the name of originality).
But I think academic success, maybe especially academic humanities, also suffers from the problem (or enjoys the benefit, depending on one’s perspective) of depending primarily on the assessments of one’s peers, not the judgment of the general public. But this leaves the question of what makes some fields more like this than others? I think Taleb’s idea, as I recall it, is that one needs some outside, objective measures of success. For example, there may be such a thing as a “doctor’s doctor,” but no one is going to praise a surgeon’s innovative new technique if the survival rate for his patients is poor.
fields where there’s no objective measure of success besides impressing your peers strikes me as likely candidates to be more like this.
I remember reading a book by an English author, possibly Norman Barry, in which he discussed post WWII architecture in England. By his account, the architects thought they knew what sort of lives people ought to live and tried to design buildings that would fit those lives, perhaps push people into them. Very much an architect based rather than customer based approach and, by his account, working very badly.
I think half the problem is that architecture has the mindset of an art (and a modern art at that, where pieces are optimized for a compelling explanatory plaque) rather than a craft — industrial design post WWII is quite capable of achieving beauty (though it did have a bad decade in the Eighties), and so are things like furniture, but both are made to be looked at and used, rather than Appreciated.
The other half is that materials science is advancing rapidly and aesthetics haven’t fully caught up. This is most significant at large scale — skyscrapers and airport terminals and such — but even things like engineered trusses for houses fit kind of awkwardly into vernacular architecture.
I think it definitely applies for publicly funded architecture in particular.
But also, is it a thing that architects often don’t kow the principles of engineering, electricall wiring, plumbing, etc. And have to hire engineering consultants to work those into their “artistic vision”?
Well, lack of engineering knowledge is not a thing in Spain, and they still build the same butt-ugly buildings the rest of the world does.
Here is the syllabus of a Spanish architecture degree (in Spanish). It includes a lot of subjects like: Construction systems, materials, solids and structure mechanics, building physics, and many other engineering courses.
Etoile,
Architects generally need to have some understanding of those subjects, enough to talk intelligently, but aren’t expected to be experts. On anything other than a really simple structure, the design will be a group effort by a team of consultants with the architect usually taking the lead and coordinating everyone. (Personal experience; may vary by location)
Your problem “why can’t we build beautiful architecture anymore” reminds me a lot of a problem some people have, when they compare abstract or suprematist art to something more traditional (say renaissance painting or some mass produced nondescript landscape type of thing).
It seems to me, that some people think there’s an obvious objective standard of beauty, and anything that doesn’t conform to it, must be produced with some different goal than that of making something beautiful (as an aside, the goal of artist getting money for their work was as relevant back in the day as it is today).
Taking examples from the article (the one linked by rubberduck), I personally like those “bad” modern buildings way more than the old-timey stuff. As I see it, most of modern architecture presented have an interesting silhouette, beautiful clear lines, it dominates and bends the space around it, some of it conveys motion while being static, it plays with stark contrast and weird angles, it’s powerful stuff!
On the other hand, most of the examples of “good” architecture look overly busy, smothered in unnecessary details, driven by boring repetition of the same element. Some things that come to mind when I look at them are “someone really spent a lot of time on these” and “they really did use all the colors available to them at the time”.
What I’m trying to say is that there’s not necessarily some deep underlying reason for “people not building beautiful architecture anymore”, besides your personal tastes not aligning with those of the modern day architects, which is totally fine of course. It just irks me, when people criticise modern art (for a given value of “modern”, seeing as a lot of it is built (no pun intended) on a hundred years old ideas) for being “ugly” and assume some nefarious motive behind it’s creation.
Also, I would assume, that a 100 years ago overwhelming majority of people were actually dressed much more sloppily than majority of people today. It’s just that, when you think of old times fashion, some random farmer or city urchin is not the first thing that comes into your mind.
While there is modern art that does convey something, some modern art is lazy nothing that gets sold because of the name attached to it.
I think Pollock is a CIA stooge with no aesthetic value whatsoever.
Modern art can be beautiful, even when it’s just lines on a canvas.
And yes, people like to look at stuff and say: “oh, I see a cat; or is that a fox” even when presented with a child’s drawing. Art that says nothing and communicates nothing without an explanation is not worth the same as art that doesn’t need an explanation.
My going theory for modern art is, if you need to explain it to get something from it, then the theory/process should be the art, not the final result (like the deconstructed cow; I think the final result is fairly boring, while the stages make it interesting).
And yes, I’m convinced that Miro could not paint a classic painting. Nothing in his art shows any awareness of technique (unlike Picasso, who made beautiful realistic sketches).
Same can be said about lots of classical art, some throwaway sketch will be sold for unreasonable amounts of money, if it got a famous name attached to it. It’s a problem with the market, not with art itself as such.
As for your examples of Pollock and Miro, I genuinely find a lot of their works aesthetically pleasing (neither is particularly modern as well, seeing as they died 30-ish years ago). What I mean by “pleasing” doesn’t include the way they were made or ideas they were supposed to convey, just the visuals, color combinations, composition etc., and not in a math-y way, but in general feel-y way.
For me personally, meta stuff carries almost no weigh at all. If I like some piece of art, the name of the artist only becomes important, because there’s a good chance, that their other stuff will also be to my liking. Details of their personal life, their ideology, politics, feelings they wanted to convey and such are of pretty much no importance to me (though biographies can still be interesting to read, regardless of whether I like the art of the person in question).
Also I don’t see what the ability to paint a classic painting has to do with worth of non-classical piece of art. It seems like you saying (sorry if I misinterpret), that since Picasso could paint a sick realistic painting, we can sorta forgive him his silly abstract stuff. Which sounds very wrong to me, cause a lot of people just like the abstract stuff by itself without all the bells and whistles and explanations of the process.
I mean, naive art is a thing and some people really do like it. So you can either uncharitably assume that they all are pretentious pricks, who actually secretly in love with realistic art, and just force feed themselves things they know are garbage, or admit that there might be a difference in tastes to account for.
Regarding child’s drawing: if you like the drawing, what difference does it make, that it was done by a child? Some of the children’s drawings, that I saw, are amazing and can absolutely stand on their own. I don’t like quotes in general, but I think Picasso has a fitting one: “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” (gotta admit, sounds quite cheesy)
Basically, evaluating art’s worth is super subjective, so be charitable to other people’s opinions. As I see it, those opinions carry more information about the observer, than about the piece of art in question, anyway.
Part of the reason why art got abstract is that photography made realistic painting a waste of effort. I think it’s a mixed bag – some of it looks nice on the wall, some of it doesn’t, there’s usually no deeper meaning in it.
But to ride on the distinction between modern and contemporary: abstraction is modern. A lot of contemporary art is about displaying your political radicalism in the most obnoxious way possible. (Also, ugly naked people.) And, look, I get that if you were gay during the AIDS crisis, you’d want to scream from the rooftops about how fucked up it all is… but the crisis is over, and there has to be more to life than being angry all the time.
I don’t get how abstraction is “modern”, it’s at least a hundred years old tradition at this point.
Modern architecture is a thing, but it wasn’t among the examples of “bad contemporary architecture”, it also doesn’t specifically relate to abstract art any more than other types of architecture, I don’t think.
What bugs me is that often when people use the words “modern art”, they actually mean “contemporary art”, while pointing a finger at something that’s been part of artistic tradition for a hundred years plus.
You’re falling victim to the foundational blunder of modernism.
“Modern” is a period, like “classical” or “baroque” or “medieval,” firmly rooted in the past, and pretty well on its way to being over at this point. Hell, postmodernism is (hopefully) damn well on its way towards being over now. Some moron a hundred years ago thought it would be a great joke to start using synonyms for “right now” to name things, because it would make things incredibly confusing for the people in the future.
Which is where we are at right now. All the words meaning “right now,” or even “in the future” all refer to periods in the past. (And exactly which periods is wildly inconsistent between fields.)
It wasn’t a very funny joke.
@Another Throw
Oh, I definitely agree, naming conventions of art movements and periods are often a confusing mess.
I thought “modernism” was a movement in architecture only, while “modern art” is just another name for “art nouveau”, neither has much to do with abstract art specifically. So to me calling abstract art “modern”, didn’t sound right. I might be mistaken though.
No, I’m pretty sure that, 100 years ago, even paper boys and street urchins too poor to afford shoes wore nicer clothes than most people today. (Note, I didn’t say they were cleaner, healthier, or happier, only that, if the clothes they were wearing were clean and they were otherwise happy and healthy looking (and if we put some shoes on them) we’d say they were remarkably well-dressed compared to most children today). I understand there is an extent to which “old-fashioned” codes as “formal,” codes as “nice clothing,” but I also think there’s an extent to which people objectively dressed nicer in public 100 years ago than today (and also nicer than they did in Ancient Greece, most likely).
I also think that beauty is not entirely subjective. As with taste in food, music, etc. there’s a wide range of what people can find enjoyable, but it’s not limitless and is rooted, at least to some context, in neurobiology. Consider: in the polemical article linked above the quoted architects don’t claim to be exploring a different kind of beauty or to have different ideas about what is beautiful; rather, they are explicitly pushing back against the notion that architecture should be beautiful, comfortable, etc. This implies they actually know what is beautiful and comfortable but eschew it because it’s pedestrian and uncreative, not because there are no objective standards.
Hmm, I suppose, it varies from country to country (btw second link seems to be broken), also I was thinking more about rural population and specifically the word “sloppily”. Nicer is such a relative term, but I’ll agree with you, that early 20th century clothing are very visually appealing indeed.
I won’t agree though, that beauty is not entirely subjective, I think, it’s one of the most subjective things in life. Something being rooted in neurobiology doesn’t make it non-subjective, it just means it’s governed by brain, like pretty much all other aspects of human behavior.
I haven’t read the article yet (I will later, really got to go to sleep now), but I will say that the opinion of the architects doesn’t matter much to me, I find their creations beautiful regardless, also I seriously doubt they don’t find their creations beautiful to look at, see the list of architect homes (from CatCube) as well.
@onyomi
Your second link is broken, it should be this.
I disagree that those street urchins are wearing nice clothes.
That link throws a 403 for me.
ETA: Weirdly, though, onyomi’s link worked fine for me earlier. And it throws a 403 now too. Maybe it was taken down?
It showed a 403 when I clicked on it just now. Then I reloaded it and it worked.
The server seems to be haunted. Apply garlic to your mouse before clicking on the link.
I’ve read the article, here’s some thoughts in no particular order:
1. There are some interesting patterns and kinks in provided examples of “good/bad” architecture (I’ll drop the quotes over “good” and “bad” for the rest of the post for the sake of readability, as it stands: good = classical; bad = contemporary):
– Overwhelming majority of good architecture examples are places of worship, even more curious than that – most examples are interiors. On the other hand bad architecture is mostly represented by places of work and is mostly shown from the outside. Part of the reason for such a peculiar choice is probably due to cathedrals often looking grim as all hell from the outside, and contemporary architecture looking nice and livable on the inside.
– Almost all not-churches in the good pile are small scale projects, which lend itself naturally to more warm, cute, classical style. Pretty much all bad apples are large scale projects, that IMO favor more monumental, abstract shapes kind of approach.
– Example of Moscow subway is in the wrong group time-wise and ideology-wise, the subway was opened in 1935 and vast majority of stations were completed after the WWII, almost all of them under rigid totalitarian regime (though there’s been semi regular openings of new stations recently, some quite well designed, I think). As an example of soviet subway architecture I recommend googling for images of Novoslobodskaya station (opened 1952). In general it’s well worth checking out Moscow subway pictures, if you have even a passing interest in architecture.
– Quality and resolution of some contemporary architecture pictures leave a lot to be desired, to the point where it’s hard to make out details. I don’t want to assume bad faith on the authors’ part, but it rubs me the wrong way. Also most bad examples were filmed during overcast skies, while steel, glass and concrete actually look quite great and uplifting in the sun, in the sort of futuristic “triumph of humanity over nature” kinda way.
2. The article cherry picks it’s architects a lot to suit the agenda. Especially focusing on one eccentric provocateur type person (Eisenman), seems like choosing too easy a target (I still think a lot of his works are beautiful).
The quote of Frank Ghery at the end of the article, that’s presented as mad ramblings, actually looked fairly straightforward to me. He describes his mental process when coming up with a particular shape. Like quite a few mental processes this one worked by the way of association and comparison, in this particular case – comparison with a fish anatomy. Lots of stuff in art is based on similarities of one thing to another, or using certain specific characteristics of a thing in unlikely or unfamiliar context.
3. There was a notable lack of your everyday apartment buildings in both good and bad categories. Probably because contemporary apartments don’t look sufficiently odious on average, while old-time apartments on average are demolished, cause they were a hellish poorly optimized places to live in. Which rather undermines the whole “old vs. new” point of the article.
My guess, is that for an average citizen contemporary architecture, as place to live in, wins hands down, over what was available for said average citizen in the past.
In the article there’s even a quote about how nice it would be if no building was allowed to be taller than four floors, completely disregarding how such arrangement would impact commuting, price of construction and destruction of wild nature due to massively increased city area. Maybe it’s a US thing (personal house cult or something), that I don’t get, but large apartment complexes are not actually the devil, when it comes to providing massive amounts of people with a place to live.
Similar thing about article’s point, that lots of people like to visit historic cities, with all the old-time charm preserved etc. This point seem to miss completely that this situation makes a lot of those places quite a bit worse places to actually live in, higher costs of everything, poor infrastructure due to obsolete planning, crowds, deficit of living space.
4. Finally, the one point in the article, that resonated with me, was, that architecture as an art (or trade, or what have you) is in a unique place, where the simple fact of it’s existence will impact people lives in no subtle way, with not much choice in the matter on their part. So if the polling data in question is solid, then I completely agree, that it’s a problem, but considering that tastes of majority are unlikely to align in any meaningful way with tastes of artists/architects, I don’t quite see an elegant solution.
Not that the authors of the article propose anything much, besides poorly defined “make a better thing please”, and some incredibly inefficient sounding strategies, like total gardens (would be quite nice actually, except for people with pollen allergies), mass of artisan stonework/woodwork (done by artisans, same cost as reinforced concrete somehow), or four floor limit mentioned above, this last one frankly sounds as insane as anything Eisenman has said.
The solution, in which tastes of majority dictate the visual appearance of cities (if even possible to implement), seems nightmarish to me, but then again, I would say that, wouldn’t I.
This is false. I went through the article and counted 7 examples of religious architecture and 12 non-religious that were being touted as good architecture. (13 if you count Alexander’s garden thing, which got a middling reception.) 9 are exterior shots, while 10 are interiors; it’s a tie if you count Alexander’s garden.
This is also false. I counted again, and 5 are commercial buildings, while 7 are not. Some of them, indeed, are specifically residential buildings. One was formerly a factory and is now a community center, but I counted it as commercial anyway.
I’d also dispute whether cathedrals look “grim as all hell” on the outside—there’s nothing hellish about a cathedral except the gargoyles, and those are damned delightful—but I think you should reevaluate your argument in light of the math first.
Yeah, 12 (didn’t get 13, sorry, probably my bad), including a drawing, three non-descript street views, a part of a barely legible garden shot and a Moscow subway shot that doesn’t suit the point being made. Admittedly I’ve mistaken three of the shots for religious buildings, which they might not be (in my defense those examples aren’t subtitled for some weird reason). So I still think that good examples are dominated by religious architecture.
“Exterior shots” was a bad wording on my part, should’ve wrote something like – “only shows part of the building”, in contrast all “bad” examples show full building where possible. (I don’t actually rate random street views at all, as they are not a concrete piece of architecture, but rather a mood setter thingy for article more or less).
With regards to “places of work” point, I specifically didn’t call them “commercial” for obvious reason, that some of them weren’t. That was intended as a contrast to “places of worship”. Museums, hospitals and subway are still places where people work. I feel that, english not being my first language, I failed to communicate my thoughts clearly enough in this instance.
To me a lot of cathedrals look grim, I also feel part of it is by design – to accentuate insignificance/subservience of individual before god. I think, that it’s a significant part of traditional catholic church philosophy. Other than that, I don’t know what disputing my personal opinion on the matter does, you have different taste, I’m fine with that. It’s still a thing, that there’s not a single full exterior shot of a religious building in the article, that extensively talks about mosques, churches and cathedrals, which was my point (not sure about the japanese-looking thing, might be a shrine, again lack of subtitles).
There’s a NY Times article about the restoration of Chartres Cathedral, which wiped away a thousand year of grime to reveal bright white underneath (before and after pics at the link).
Cathedrals may look grim to us simply because they are old and very very dirty, but they weren’t built that way.
Not just dirty–the paint has worn off.
My favorite medieval church is probably Sainte Chapelle in Paris. They have maintained/restored the interior painting and it’s gorgeous.
I wonder why the “grim look of cathedrals” is something that seems to rub people the wrong way, probably a cultural thing, that I’m not really getting.
They look grim to me mostly because of seemingly large amount of very sharp angles, lots of crisscrossing elements, the overall vibe of the castle of some sort of ice sorceress. Grim isn’t even the negative term here, I like grim, it centers me well. Visually I like orthodox churches way less, for example.
But I don’t see what that has to do with anything? People used to make nice-looking museums (2, 3), hospitals, and even office buildings, so there’s no reason why their modern equivalents have to look ugly.
WRT offices, it used to be that a business office was where a few dozen clerks and managers hung out while all the actual work was done in mines, factories, etc. (which were not always very attractive). They were a relatively small and high-profile part of the business, so the company could afford to lavish craft on them. But modern businesses have far more office workers than pre-WWII ones did, which means more floor space, which costs more money.
I think rounding off hospitals, community centers, museums, and so on to “places of work” is a little ridiculous. Sure, people work at these, but people also work at home, to say nothing of maids, apartment building foremen, etc. I don’t see any reason why a residential skyscraper should be ugly because it has a janitor or porter. And I think it’s fair to say that, just as we recognize a difference between a home and an office, we recognize a difference between a public place and an office. Given that—given buildings that don’t just exist for office workers to sit in—how tolerant should we be of horrendously ugly public buildings?
Even big offices can be done well, though.
@Jaskologist and David Friedman
Japan has a similar thing (analogous, I believe to ancient Greek statues and temples as well, I believe) where really old structures have had the color gradually washed away with the result that they have a very austere look which later structures sometimes imitate. Yet structures from the same time and place that have been restored to something more how they looked at the time are generally brightly colored.
@The original Mr. X
It has to do with the way the authors of the article present their arguments. If you would compare things, ideally you would compare like with like (they did in one case, comparing hospitals, with badly chosen shots though).
When it comes to comparing shots of architecture, they should preferably be in similar scale, light conditions and made from similar angle, if you are serious about presenting your argument fairly.
In the article visuals boil down to “parts of church ornamentation are not like office blocks at all, what a shame”. Well, you don’t say.
You can call contemporary variants “ugly” all you want, it’s still a matter of opinion and aesthetic preferences. I happen to like ’em.
I certainly think there’s beautiful modern architecture and ugly traditional architecture. I think a big reason modern architecture gets so much hate is survival bias: most of the ugly (or just blah) traditional buildings got torn down, so we only see the really nice ones standing today and think everything must have looked like that back then. Meanwhile the ugly modern buildings haven’t been around long enough to tear down, with some exceptions.
(Side note: “Modern” doesn’t mean “contemporary.” The Seagram Building is modern, but it’s not contemporary, it’s 60 years old. I’ll defer to the crowd and lump in all the styles that arose after WW1 as “modern”, but often it’s only used to mean simplified designs like the Seagram, as opposed to whatever the hell Frank Gehry does.)
I’d also like to say that the Centre Pompidou is ugly to look at, but it’s totally awesome and futuristic to actually ride the escalators and walk down the hallways in those tubes, if my memory of visiting Paris at age 10 is at all accurate.
I don’t think so: lots of cities have old quarters where nothing’s really changed in centuries, and we have plenty of depictions of old cities, and none of them have monstrosities like this or this.
Places where nothing has changed in centuries are called “ruins.”
In particular, last year I visited Munich, a city full of charming old buildings that were nearly destroyed during World War II. Most of what I saw was deliberately reconstructed to look the way it did before the war. That which wasn’t worth rebuilding, wasn’t rebuilt. It’s the same in many other cities ravaged by wars or natural disasters or plain old neglect.
Letting things fall to ruin is change. I don’t think that maintenance is ‘change.’
Eisenman said it clearly: because the world is so tormented, he wants to express torment. In other words, he is thinking like a sculptor, not an architect, he is not designing for people to live in and around, but simply a work of art to express a view of the world, like a sculpture or a painting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scream
I perfectly understand why modern art isn’t so happy-go-lucky, why artists want to express Guernica type sentiments.
The mistake and it is really grievous and unexplainable is thinking architecture is like sculpture or painting, an art, instead of making things to live in and around. Someone convinced architects they are artists. No. They are not. They are designers. Artisans. Not artists. Put the expression of the tormentedness of the world into the form of a sculpture, not a building. And put the sculpture into an art gallery, not on a public square, so we can go and feel that despair if we want to, but are not forced to do so every day. Clearly if every tenth house had a huge Guernica mural painted on it that would not help our mental health either.
It’s exactly like the crazy clothes at fashion shows no one would want to wear in real life. It’s an art. But that is not causing much damage because the shops are still carrying clothes people actually want to wear. But why do fashion designers think they are artists?
Slightly tangential but, I think, related to the question of clothing and architecture, as well as the survivorship bias some have mentioned (homes and neighborhoods of the rich and powerful are more likely to survive into posterity) is the large number of options between “do it yourself” and “hand-crafted in a labor-intensive process” mass production makes possible.
For example, it frustrates me that, today, we are theoretically much richer than peoples of times past (and with much better technology for e.g. building things cheaply), yet I always find myself so much more charmed by “authentic medieval city center” than I am by a city center of more recent construction (when the builders presumably had access to more resources than the medieval craftsmen).
So, nowadays everyone knows that hand-made, bespoke clothing is nice but expensive, hand-made furniture is nice but expensive, etc. Now if we imagine a world in which those are the only options and they are still just as expensive in relative terms, then that is, in a way, equivalent to everyone just being poorer (because money doesn’t go as far), though the items one can afford, if one can afford them may often be more “characterful” because people like handmade and personalized touches.
I always find myself so much more charmed by “authentic medieval city center”
Despite the smell of feces and the public executions?
And public floggings, I suppose.
I think authentic medieval city centres are often nicer to visit/look at than to live in.
Cologne is pretty ugly these days but virtually every apartment I’ve been into in the city has been impressively nice. Barcelona old town is charming as heck but when I stayed in an Airbnb there rather than a hotel I was…not impressed.
ETA: While there are some obvious counterexamples, I think more modern buildings are often more comfortable to live in, even if they’re not necessarily better to look at. But I value power outlets, easiness-to-clean and double glazing more than very high ceilings, characterful-but-awful-to-clean plank floors, or little plaster embellishments on the ceiling.
I don’t think that’s the reason — yes, people like personalised touches, but you can buy mass-produced home ornaments etc. which are nice to look at, so there’s no inherent reason why mass-produced things have to look soulless and ugly. Clothing was one of the first items to be mass-produced, and people still continued to dress nicely until well into the twentieth century; moreover, whilst people will usually look better in bespoke clothes, it’s possible to dress perfectly well in things you buy off the shelf. As for architecture, buildings like the Graz Art Museum have plenty of character, and are still extremely ugly.
Also, I suspect that the reason bespoke clothing, handmade furniture, etc., are so expensive is because making such things by hand is no longer profitable due to mass production. If we had a world where mass production was no longer possible for some reason, I expect you’d end up with a range of qualities and prices, from high-class stuff for the rich to relatively cheap stuff for those lower down on the social pyramid.
I think there may be two separate, albeit potentially related, questions: one being why famous architects commissioned to build monumental works like that museum now often produce works most people find ugly (may be because they’re designing to impress other architects) and the second being why many more “pedestrian” structures like footbridges, subway platforms, and regular city sidewalks and streets are now seemingly much uglier and blander than before or than is necessary.
I was thinking about the second question while walking through a very bland train station in my (currently Asian) city. It doesn’t look like it was designed by a brutalist architect aiming to “challenge” his audience’s bourgeois attachment to comfort and beauty, it just looks very boring and bland, like it was the minimum structure that could meet the requirements when the city contracted out the building of a train station and no more. While ornament, I guess, may not be inherently expensive (since at least some kinds may also be mass produced), it is, by definition, superfluous.
I wonder if part of it doesn’t come from e.g. rules governing government subcontracting? For example, when you build something new, including a new public work, in an “designated historical district” or some such, one is often required to give some consideration to aesthetics and therefore, presumably, also allowed to include some aesthetics in the budget. But most public works aren’t built in such areas, so maybe even if a contractor might like to build a characterful train station they will lose out to the contractors willing to do the bare minimum?
That would make sense, if actual stations (as opposed to stops) weren’t small cathedrals.
Movies about movies is a serious, not to say overdone, genre. I have a weakness for these things: I sort of think that a movie about the movie business is generally a bit of an incestuous affair, but the good ones are very good.
Here’s a by no means complete start on some of the great Movies About Movies:
8-1/2 (not Hollywood, but)
The Player (maybe not the greatest of all industry movies, but very good)
Get Shorty (very funny, pretty dark)
Sunset Boulevard (already mentioned)
Bowfinger (almost defies description)
Singing In the Rain (all about the transition to talkies, and interesting for it)
Hail, Caesar! (already mentioned)
Hollywood Confidential (really a police procedural, but definitely interacts with the film biz)
Wizard of Speed and Time (I nerd-flex by citing Mike Jittlov’s obscure film about the special effects business, which is more or less a factionalized memoir of his experiences, including bringing the titular short animated film to the screen).
The Pickle (can’t remember much about this one, it was about making a sci-fi movie)
The Shadow of the Vampire (again, not Hollywood, this is an English-language film about the European film biz, but with a great horror twist).
And many more. I think two of the “A Star is Born” films were about the movies, not music.
Of these, “Get Shorty” is approachable, fun, and very rewatchable. “The Player” is maybe the king of the movies-about-Hollywood genre, and if you watch only one, it might be the right choice. The rest are all to your tastes, but I would recommend any of them.
The Player, by Robert Altman.
Seconding The Player
Not IMHO as good, but still good, and leaving out some of the ones already suggested.
Barton Fink
Get Shorty
Hollywood Shuffle
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
The Muppet Movie
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
The Three Amigos
Not sure if that’s the correct place, But I’ll give it a try:
1. I’m looking for a therapist for online therapy (Video chat) that is Rational-Adjacent, If anyone here is a therapist or knows someone good I would love to get a recommendation (I prefer male therapist).
2. I’m also interested in finding a mentor to help me think about how should I develop my career. I’m generally reasonably successful – So I’m looking for someone who is at least 40, and have a strong understanding of the business world. I know it’s pretty challenging to find a mentor, Would anyone have good advice on how to approach this?
Thanks!
Definitely the right place:
https://slatestarcodex.com/psychiat-list/
On a mentor–send me an email at my username at gmail. I may meet your criteria, or know someone who does.
LA Confidential?
<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/06/heres-why-moderate-drinking-is-probably-not-good-for-you?CMP=fb_gu#Echobox=1557128407"? Lack of evidence that moderate drinking is good for people
Article:
Study conclusion:
I was tempted to say “I’m done here”, but out of curiosity I checked another claim:
Article:
Study conclusion:
The second study also left out “current nondrinkers” from the analysis, and “lifetime abstainers” was a fairly small percentage of the sample, especially for men, so when you slice and dice by SES there may not have been enough to find a real effect.
Is there any way to fix this software so either
1) it doesn’t randomly log me out(*)
2) when I log back in, it takes me back to the same place, so I can finish the comment it rejected due to me being “not logged in” when I tried to post it.
(*) probably not random – probably some expiry time that’s a lot shorter than the up time on my browser window 🙁
Could be something else but it sounds like you’re blocking cookies.
Singin’ in the Rain
(even if they take a big detour to valorize Broadway, hah)
Another baffling example of a US and European regulators treating products differently – toothpaste. https://elemental.medium.com/why-is-the-internet-obsessed-with-this-cult-toothpaste-963dda060501
why would you expect to separate, very complicated regulatory bodies to reach the same conclusion on a new and different product?
Because one has been burned more often than the other? It seems that the US body has strict regulations on marketing– the use of the word “repair,” probably stemming from some case where products that were falsely marketed as having repairing functionality and someone sued. If there hasn’t been a similar case in the EU, then presumably there maybe a different approach to lawsuits/the courts/consumer protection regulations there.
I think you’re mistaking me. I expect that the two regulatory bodies to reach different conclusions, for the reasons you mention and others.
Nickelodeon (1976) is great. Bogdanovich wanted to film in black and white, but his studio wanted color, so he sabotaged the film by lighting for black and white. So the released film looks awful and destroyed his career. Make sure you watch the black and white “director’s cut,” although it ruins some of the jokes (like the colorful suit).
I liked In a World… (2013).
S.O.B. (1981) is probably not the best Blake Edwards / Julie Andrews sex comedy, but I love it just for the self-referential synopsis: Edwards directs his wife Andrews playing an actress with a squeaky clean reputation convinced by her director (producer?) husband to add nudes scenes to their movie.
Wikipedia claims that The Long Goodbye (1973) is set in Hollywood, but that’s probably not what you meant. The Aviator (2004). Adaptation. (2002); but the more famous Jonze/Kaufman film, the one with an actor in the title, is set in New York.
I have often complained that entertainers write too much about their business. Writers about writers, musicians about the stage, filmmakers about Hollywood. But looking through my list of movies I find a lot more about the New York stage than about Hollywood (eg, All About Eve (1950)).
You don’t get a lot of movies about the film industry, but you do get a lot of films with struggling writers as protagonists. Which were, of course, written by struggling writers.
There’s also a fair amount of film-industry subtext floating around Hollywood. Take for example Avatar (2009), which stars a person who projects himself into an idealized body and has crazy sci-fi adventures in a colorful alien world: now, am I describing the protagonist, or his actor?
Yeah, all of my first instinct suggestions were theater based classic films (The Stage Door, The Great Ziegfeld, your Gold Diggers of 19XX and Broadway Melody of 19XX, your Mickey and Judy Put On a Shows), which makes sense, given that early productions would involve a lot of people who came up from theater writing about their business. Stars who originated in theater were still starring in films as late as the 60s. But that might also be an artifact of the studio system, wherein the studios continued to peddle theater-based nostalgia as the safe bet. Once they were broken up, you had an influx of new filmmakers treating cinema as more than a means of adaptation, as well as filming technology advancing to make less stagey photography more viable.
Isn’t this kind of like comedians starting to make airplane jokes?
I was commenting below on music theory and it seems that there are a few people who are familiar with its principles. I thought I might pose a little theory riddle which I stumbled upon; it doesn’t have an extremely neat and satisfying solution, and it helps to be comfortable in the mathier side of music in order to ponder it, but I think it is easily enough explained and shocking enough initially to be worth considering.
So, for a tiny bit of background, the two most commonly used scales in music are the heptatonic and pentatonic scales (figuring out the actual riddle might take you on a digression into WHY this is the case). Heptatonic scales have seven notes, and we are most familiar with them as the normal major and minor modes. The pentatonic scales also have major and minor modes which mirror the relation between major and minor heptatonic scales. They are simply constructed by removing two notes from the heptatonic scale. If this is news to you, here’s an example. C major/A minor has the notes C D E F G A B, then comes back to C; or use the same notes starting on A to play A minor. The pentatonic version removes the notes F and B, and this works for both C major and A minor modes.
So, here’s the riddle. If you come to a piano you will clearly see that to play your C major scale you simply use all of the white keys, making it very easy. What if you were to use all of the black keys? Well, once you orient yourself in the less common and distant key, you might notice that these are the notes in the F# (or Gb) major pentatonic scale. What that means stated generally is that in our system of twelve notes, the complement of a major scale is the pentatonic major scale rooted a tritone away. So, with that observation, the only questions is: why on earth does such a strange relationship arise, and does it have a deeper significance to the construction of said scales?
Because tritones are the Devil’s plaything?
Kidding. This might be over my head but I’m going to try to come up with a real answer later.
I had known everything in your setup, including that the white notes were C major and the black ones are F# major pentatonic, without ever really noticing that the two scales were each other’s complement. Contemplating it, I think I can come up with a reason, but I have no idea whether it will be the one you have in mind.
Is it to do with the fact that fpnyrf ner (be pna or) pbafgehpgrq ol fgrccvat nebhaq gur pvepyr bs svsguf? Gur znwbe fpnyr vf pbafgehpgrq ol gnxvat frira* fgrcf bs n svsgu sebz gur fpnyr’f sbhegu (S, va gur pnfr bs P). Gur cragngbavp znwbe vf, V frrz gb erpnyy, pbafgehpgrq ol fgrccvat svir* svsguf sebz gur fpnyr’f ebbg. Fb vs lbh fxrgpu obgu bs gubfr bhg ba n pvepyr bs svsguf, fgnegvat ng bccbfvgr raqf (n gevgbar ncneg) naq pbybhevat nf lbh tb, lbh jvyy svaq gung gurl svyy gur pvepyr jvgubhg bireynccvat. Nz V jnez?
*Ironically in light of my screed below, I think ‘seven’ and ‘five’ in that answer are—dare I say it!—fencepost errors. But rather than correct them I’m leaving them in because it’s funnier that way.
And since I don’t recognize your name, I’ll explain that, according to our custom, that passage has been encoded with rot13 and can be decoded the same way.
Lrf, irel jnez! Nf V fnvq gurer vfa’g arprffnevyl n gvql ‘fbyhgvba’ gb guvf bar, ohg lbh zvtug nyfb guvax nobhg gur snpg gung gjb cragngbavp fpnyrf bs svir abgrf nqqf hc gb gra abgrf; jung’f tbvat ba jvgu gur bgure gjb bhg bs gjryir? Naq jung vf fcrpvny nobhg gur zbqhyngvba bs xrlf ol n gevgbar?
I had imagined that thinking about this with a simple base-12 modular arithmetic approach would uncover the relevant relations faster, but I think that if you convert that back into the world where seven semitones is a perfect fifth and the pentatonic scale is a thing you use to play over some changes, it maybe has some implications for how you think of the pentatonic scale being pruned down from heptatonic, and how modulation works. In any case, thinking about this sent me down a rabbit hole of playing with alternate heptatonic scale sets to figure out what was special about the common one.
Because 12 – 7 = 5? Why do you consider the black keys to be the most natural F# major pentatonic scale? Some cultures omit the third instead of the fourth.
Because that’s not actually a different pentatonic scale. Take what is termed the major pentatonic in C, C D E G A. Now, just start it in a different place, on G: G A C D E. Exactly the same as if you had removed the seventh and the third from a G major scale, which if I understand correctly is the construction method you were suggesting. It’s just the same as the fact that this F#/Gb major pentatonic scale on the piano could also be a D#/Eb minor pentatonic. And the construction still works if you think of the mode of pentatonic you suggest as the mixolydian mode (based solely on how we name modes relative to major in the heptatonic scale, you shouldn’t make more significance of it being mixolydian than that); on the black keys it would be C# mixolydian pentatonic, a tritone away from the G mixolydian scale which is played on all white keys.
Anwyay, obviously it’s not strange that the complement is ‘a pentatonic scale’, that’s just how the math works out. I think this observation is largely in the eye of the beholder, and should it not compel you, then it is not compelling.
Just in case the modal equivalency in this case is new to you, one other interesting observation. You can take the modes of the normal heptatonic scale (major scale) and divide them into major and minor according to this rule: if it has a major third and a perfect fifth, it is major, if it has a minor third and a perfect fifth, it is minor. The locrian has a minor third, but a diminished fifth so we’ll simply put it aside. This divides the remaining six modes evenly between major and minor. If you then take a major mode and construct a major pentatonic scale on the root of this mode, it will be a subset of any of the three modes you could try this with. The same holds for the minor modes and minor pentatonic scales. In case you want to try this, an example: G mixolydian scale is GABCDEFG, G major pentatonic is GABDE. The major modes are ionian (major), lydian, mixolydian; minor are aolian (minor), dorian, phrygian.
The twelve semitones in the octave are on the circle of fifths. Seven of them form a heptatonic scale. The other five will form a pentatonic scale if they’re contiguous on the circle of fiths, since that scale is formed by forming fifths. So if we choose the notes of our heptatonic scale in such a way that they can be reached from the root by going up or down fifths, without hitting notes outside the scale on the way – clearly a useful property – then both the 7 of our scale and the other 5 will be contiguous on the circle. The question then becomes, why is the pentatonic scale rooted a tritone away from the root of the pentatonic scale? Because as we search around for the notes to form our pentatonic scale, going fifths up and fifths down from the root of C, it’s clearly desirable to avoid adding a very dissonant interval – tritone – to our scale, so we stop just before F# on the circle, and F# then starts the contiguous part of the circle that forms a pentatonic scale and ends up as black keys on the keyboard.
(well, we do have a tritone anyhow, between B and F, but both these notes are clearly useful, as a fourth from the root and a leading tone for the root, and at least the tritone doesn’t involve the root, so it’s an acceptable compromise)
(this explanation is probably atrociously ahistorical)
Sullivan’s Travels (1941) is good if you like old comedies.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Albion’s Seed lately: particularly the Borderers, and especially on whether the social ills traditionally associated with Appalachia (alcoholism, drug addiction, violence, disregard for the law, etc) are primarily culturally transmitted or genetically transmitted. Take addiction in particular: in school I was taught that a history of alcoholism in your family means you are more likely to be an alcoholic, but how strong is that correlation exactly? Can alcoholism be bred out of a family line, and if so how easily? What about addiction in general? I have heard about “addictive personalities” and how they can run in families as well, but how solid is the evidence for that?
I have been wondering this in particular because of my own family history. My mom’s side of the family is mostly Scandinavian with some Puritan English mixed in (my maternal grandfather is half Norwegian and half Swedish, while my maternal grandmother can trace her English lineage within striking distance of the Mayflower, but I don’t know how much other bloodlines have been intermixed over the years). My mom grew up in a stable and successful family, teetotalers who worked hard, went to church, sent their kids to college, and invested their money prudently. My grandpa was an aerospace engineer, his father was a farmer, and his grandfather came over to america and got some land in the homestead act. On that side of the family I know of no alcoholics, no drug addicts, and nobody has been arrested, much less gone to jail.
On my dad’s side of the family I don’t have much idea of the history other than that I have a Scots-Irish surname and somebody in the family says we are descended from a Scottish farmer who came over a long time ago. My great grandparents were Oakies who became migrant workers in California during the dustbowl and never left. I don’t know for sure where they came from before Oklahoma, but Albion’s seed makes me think that Appalachia is likely. On that side of the family we have several alcoholics, at least one gambling addict, and a mixed bag when it comes to lawlessness (family lore also states that there is an old west highwayman in our line, but I don’t have names or dates so I take that with a grain of salt). My paternal grandfather was always traveling from place to place starting different businesses, and after losing most of his money in a risky investment he abandoned his family and disappeared: from what I’ve been told he spent a long time drinking and doing drugs. Because of this family history my father warned me that an “addictive personality” runs in the family, and that I should be very careful.
So it seems like my family story fits Albion’s Seed exactly: addictive, shifty Borderer side of the family and a hardworking Scandinavian/Puritan side (Scandinavian ancestry in America is also strongly correlated with success if I remember right). But is that really the case, or am I just pattern matching my life to a book with a neat idea? And if it is true, which side of my family line wins out in a fight? I grew up in my mom’s culture: I hardly knew my relatives on my dads side, we only rarely visited while we lived very close to all of my mom’s relations. My dad was also teetotal, as he hated seeing what alcohol did to the people in his life growing up. So does nature or nurture win in this case?
You’re pattern matching your life to a book. Which is fine, and perhaps even informative, but not necessarily serious. If anything, to play your game, it sounds like your Puritan side is well buttressed against Borderer instincts since you’re going about remaking yourself in the image of a book. That seems very Puritan to me. (Why everyone here seems so pro Puritan is a mystery to me. Quakers any day)
I suspect you’re well equipped to judge for yourself whether you have dark impulses and an addictive personality. The way to address these things is not to be found in Albion’s Seed, but the usual litany of resources for impulsive and addicts. You can mythicize it along a Lovecraftian sense of dread at your borderer blood quantum, or maybe go for a Jungian styling of shadow-anima-something-or-other. If you’re looking for a horoscope, you won’t find more than this-group-collectively-tends-towards-this-range on various unfeeling charts. And you could fall anywhere on it.
You can always try and cultivate the broad, good natured qualities of the Borderers, if you must have Albion’s seed to work from. Talking about these broad sociological movements as an individual though sounds to me like “the blood of Númenor is spent” frankly.
If you’re afraid for your children, remember that you’re only half of the mess you’ll make of them, genetically, and take some solace in that bad cycles have been broken in the past. Or, take solace in our old evolutionary friend random mutation. It could always make it better or worse! How much a mess you make of them after they’re born is of course at your discretion.
Basically, the fact you care to worry about this puts you ahead of the game.
I don’t have detailed information on the matter, but A molecular mechanism for choosing alcohol over an alternative reward (Augier et al., Science 2018) could be a good lead for digging into genetic alcoholism. Here’s a rough summary, but keep in mind that my experience in the field is limited:
1. If trained to press a lever for 20% alcohol, and then given a choice between alcohol and another lever for saccharin solution, rats start switching to the latter, especially if you use a higher-strength saccharin solution. Rats don’t stop alcohol intake altogether, but decide on a roughly 75%/25% S/A split for 0.2% saccharin.
2. Rats vary in individual preference. Most of the population prefers saccharin over alcohol (n = 465, SP rats), but one group has an even split (n = 60), and another prefers alcohol (n = 95, AP rats). The AP-to-SP ratio very roughly matches the prevalence of alcoholism in humans. There’s no change if you let the rats binge on saccharin before training (test for “sugary rewards early in life increases risk for alcoholism later” idea).
3. AP rats are exceptionally determined to get their fix. If you set up a reward system where you must press a lever an increasing number of times to get each reward (so the first is one push, the second is two, third is four, eventually you have to become a tiny Star Platinum), AP rats try extra hard for alcohol (about as hard as both AP/SP rats try for saccharin). If you spike the alcohol with quinine, AP rats still drink while SP rats are deterred (especially by higher concentrations). If you give rats strong enough electric shocks while drinking alcohol, AP rats still drink while SP rats are deterred.
4. The amygdala of AP rats shows the strongest changes in gene profiles compared to SP rats, with downregulations all across the board in a big GABA transmission pathway (not familiar with this but I’m seeing GABA transporters, receptor components, and associates of that complex). The idea is that GABA transport is impaired in the amygdala, resulting in excess GABA presence in the extracellular space (GABA transporters are responsible for clearing this up), with receptor downregulation representing a coping mechanism.
5. Neurons in the central amygdala of AP rats give stronger responses to stimulation compared to SP rats (which is kind of strange, shouldn’t GABA-suffused neurons if anything be less responsive?) But if you take out the GABA receptors with a competitive antagonist, the AP neurons become even more responsive but SP neurons don’t, so the too-much-GABA-in-ECM idea is panning out. You can replicate AP-like responses if you knockout the GABA transporter GAT-3, so the too-much-GABA-in-ECM idea is panning out even more. Also, it turns out that GABA-mediated inhibition in the central amygdala was implicated in aversion/anxiety responses, and AP rats show reluctance to enter/lower tendency to hang out in open spaces.
6. And for the here’s-why-this-is-in-Science-rather-than-Neuron kicker, they knocked out GAT-3 in SP rats and turned them AP, and found that human alcoholics have GAT-3 downregulated in the central amygdala but not other places.
I might’ve missed things, but this seems like a solid case for at least some genetic component to alcohol dependence, provided that you’re regularly exposed to alcohol.
Genes and culture interact, and the this makes culture, which is more malleable, critical.
I had a somewhat unique front-row seat to this. I had a childhood friend whose ancestry was classic Borderer, but who was adopted by a Mennonite couple around the time my parents joined the same Mennonite church.
Think of the Borderer genes as risk-seeking, and Borderer culture as optimized against a particular risk. Changing cultures won’t change the risk-seeking piece of your personality; what it can do is focus that risk-seeking on beneficial things, rather than mind-altering substances and violence.
I’m out of date but 40 years ago there was evidence that alcoholism in particular was somewhat heritable, and followed the blood line – adopted children resembled their birth parents. I know of no research available at that time that attempted to control for the fetal environment. Some other syndromes were also correlated with alcoholism; they were what I was actually interested in.
“Somewhat heritable” does not mean “if your parents have it, so do you”. It means you may be more likely than average to try to solve your problems with a bottle. I don’t have numbers, but what I remember suggests they were fairly low.
Anecdotally, I’ve seen cases where people raised by alcoholics grow up to be teetotallers – but some of the grandchildren become alcoholics. I.e. viewing the disadvantages of drinking at close hand possibly provides partial immunization. Given that your father was such a teetotaller, you should probably be a bit more careful than average.
You ask things like
The real answer is “that’s not how these things work”. Which do you want to win out in your case? I suggest acting that way, and making it a habit. Hang out with other people who act that way. It’s probably easier to stay with the way you were raised, than if you’d e.g. been raised by the neer-do-well paternal grandfather. But the part you can influence is what you do. And if you want to take after the neer-do-well paternal grandfather, you can probably manage that, perhaps more easily than average.
So I’m looking for information about trains – preferably book recommendations – and was wondering if anyone here could help me out.
Explanation: I’m writing an SF adventure novel. My protagonist needs to get about a thousand people and some heavy and illegal equipment halfway across a continent; air and sea don’t work for Plot Reasons, and it looks as though she needs to hijack a train, probably some kind of long-distance cargo train, to get where she wants to go. The relevant technology is near-future, and I’d like to know about the crewing and technology and organization of modern trains, along with useful things adjacent to that, so I can use it as a base to build my story on.
Ordinarily I’d just search Amazon, but I have no idea what the relevant searches are for ‘how modern trains work’, so I thought that given the staggering amount of knowledge that SSC people seem to have, someone might be able to help me with this.
Thanks in advance!
Not to poke holes, but will they be able to somehow avoid detection while doing this for plot reasons (or will fending off the “authorities” during transit be part of the story)?
You will definitely find people here who can give you more than you ever wanted to know about trains though, that I can assure you.
The latter. The challenge of the episode is how they can evade the authorities, via some combination of cleverness, planning, and surprise.
Trains go along straight lines with predictable routes. Are communications not a thing?
Indeed, communications are a thing, and these facts you mention are central to my protagonist’s scheme. 🙂 I just haven’t gone into detail on the scheme, since what I’m trying for is ‘what do I need to make it possible for me to do the research,’ rather than ‘help with my story’.
Long-distance movement of trains is typically handled by Centralized Traffic Control, where a dispatcher authorizes movement using wayside signals. It’s hard to see how they could avoid authorities without having a cornfield meet with another train.
Plus, there really are only a couple of routes. IIRC, you’ve got the Southern Transcon and Northern Transcon, operated by BNSF, and the Overland Route (following the First Transcontinental Railroad) and the Sunset Route operated by Union Pacific. It’s going to be hard to move a train long distance without going over one of these, and I think all of them have several trains per hour. I *do* think they’re all double-tracked, but it’s not like a highway where you’re guaranteed that traffic in one direction always, say, keeps to the right; the dispatcher can authorize movement in any direction on any track using CTC.
Aevylmar is writing SF. It isn’t set on Earth, let alone in the U.S.
What David Friedman said. Also, do you have an example of the Centralized Traffic Control page that is written in ‘readable English’ instead of ‘wikipedia english’? Maybe a book?
I’m mostly trying to do research, rather than solve my plot problems right now.
I certainly didn’t assume the story was set on Earth when I read the post, but being SF certainly doesn’t exclude being set on Earth and/or in the US…
As @acymetric pointed out, there is, in fact, SF set on Earth. I dunno, Dark Angel, for example. I grant the US assumption was totally unwarranted.
This sentence…doesn’t really mean anything to me, so you’re going to have to clarify further what you mean. It’s going to be harder to simplify further than that page if you want enough detail on how things are handled to use for similitude. As far as books, I’m not aware of anything beyond textbooks for designing signaling systems. Most people who do this as a hobby learn from a combination of sources and observation.
As the author building your own world, you can certainly construct it to make whatever you want work, but it’s hard to see how it’s going to be much more plausible to subvert whatever security you’ve got in place to get people on a train vs. trucks, since trains are easier to keep track of.
As an example, consider the railfan video here. I’ve linked to the point where the guy is discussing some odd types of cars that he hasn’t seen in a while and wouldn’t normally see travelling in this direction, and in the comments somebody else discussing pulling a report about where those cars ended up (here). Of course, you may not have concerns about slightly off-kilter people sitting by the tracks and watching trains in your world (e.g., the security forces shoot them), so this specific concern may not apply, but what I’m pointing at is that it’s very, very easy for people who’s job it is to track railcars that something has changed; people do it as a hobby.
Similarly, there are wayside detectors that look for defects in trains. One of the pieces of information they give via computerized voice is the number of axles, whether or not there are defects. For example, one that I used to tune up because it was near my house said “Paducah and Lousiville Detector, milepost 141.2. No defects, repeat, no defects. Number of axles [xxx]. Detector out.”
The reason for this is that if there are detectors near each other the train crew can be confident that the detector is talking about their train, because they just passed that milepost and the number of axles matches the number of axles on their train. If you change the number of axles, people are going to notice–I believe defect reports are also sent to the dispatcher electronically as part of their tracking the train. So slapping cars on the end is going to be a problem, in addition to the one @The Nybbler mentions below where you may no longer fit into sidings. There are also Automatic Equipment Identification detectors, which track individual railcars with RFID tags
–actually one of the first uses for that technology, IIRC.This is how that commenter I discussed a few paragraphs ago was able to figure out where those railcars went. So even switching them out is going to be relatively easy to track.It’s hard to see how whatever you’re doing to subvert all this tracking necessary for safe and efficient operation won’t be easier to use with trucks that can move individually where they’re much less likely to be noticed among other truck traffic. As I said, though, it’s your world.
Edit: I crossed up the history a bit; there was an older barcode system that was abandoned, with the modern RFID system dating from the ’80s, not old enough to be “near first use”.
@CatCube
In light of all that, this seems like an opportunity to write the greatest heist of all time.
@Hooppyfreud
I mean, it’d kind of be like the opposite of what they did for the Star Wars “Solo” movie, right?
“This sentence…doesn’t really mean anything to me, so you’re going to have to clarify further what you mean.”
Ouch.
“CTC consolidates train routing decisions that were previously carried out by local signal operators or the train crews themselves. The system consists of a centralized train dispatcher’s office that controls railroad interlockings and traffic flows in portions of the rail system designated as CTC territory. One hallmark of CTC is a control panel with a graphical depiction of the railroad.”
None of this tells me what the routing decisions are, what a ‘railroad interlocking’ is, and the third statement is… really not useful. I think I have some vague idea of what they mean, but I don’t have an intuitive understanding of how it works and how all the various bits fit together.
I mean, I appreciate your telling me that there isn’t an easy way to get the knowledge I need. That’s useful! Thank you! I just think I need to know more than I do.
And… clarification, this was totally my bad communication: the protagonists don’t want to make the train go somewhere it isn’t going. They just want to hitch a ride. (With a thousand people.) They and their guys and their stuff are at one end of the continent; they want to be several thousand miles towards the *other* end of the continent with their guys and their stuff.
@Aevylmar:
Ultimately your best resource is going to be to find someone experienced in the transportation industry (specifically rail) and pepper them with questions.
You may need to do this in verbally in person though, as someone who works or worked in the industry may not be comfortable putting a “how to smuggle people and things illegally via rail” in writing.
You might also want to be prepared for any such person to tell you “this is basically impossible,” which you’ll need to handle via some plot contrivance (which isn’t necessarily a problem, most plots have some kind of contrivance to help move them forward).
It sounds as though, at least in our world, the control of trains is more centralized than the control of trucks. That’s an advantage if you have a way of subverting the central control mechanism. It’s easier to hack into one computer and make it tell lies on your behalf than a thousand computers.
@Aevylmar
I will note that I’ve never looked terribly hard for an overall book, because a lot of what I know comes from reading forums, Wikipedia pages, and putting it together with what you see actually watching trains. It’s possible that there’s some sort of lay text that I don’t know about, but mostly I think publications are going to either be for experts concerned with this as part of their job, or stuff for hobbyists who are interested in watching trains. Neither is all that amenable to a simple “ELI5” book that covers everything without having to dig into details from other things.
As far as the page is concerned, a couple of the terms in question are blue hyperlinks to their own explanation, “routing decisions” is what it means in regular English–the decisions necessary to get from point A to point B, just like driving down the Interstate–and the “graphical depiction” appears in every photo on the page, as the linework showing cities and schematics of the track layout.
I don’t even know of any webpages that would have everything you need to understand modern rail operations on a single page where you can start reading at the top and understand everything when you get to the bottom without clicking through to fill in details on things that are of interest.
Given what you’ve posted elsewhere, though, even this isn’t pointing at what you need, unless you’re interested in learning for its own sake. Since you’re not contemplating a hijacking–just finding some way of using an existing train–it doesn’t seem like it’d much matter how the train gets routed, just that the protagonists know the destination of the train. Then it becomes a matter of getting their stuff on board it.
As others have pointed out, you can’t add cars without the knowledge of the train crew. They’ll know from both wayside detectors that they’ve got more cars than they expect, they may not fit in sidings anymore, and 10-15 additional cars will probably change the handling characteristics of the train. That last one will be less important if you’re traveling over flat ground vs. in mountainous terrain, where the engineer will absolutely notice that something has changed.
So now you’re talking about getting your cars added to the manifest so the railroad comes and picks them up. The typical procedure* for routing a car in the US is as follows: the customer orders a railcar, and the railroad spots it on the customer’s siding (or they have an empty from their last delivery). After it’s loaded, the railroad sends a train that picks up and drops off cars from their customers, called a local train. This will deliver the cars to a rail yard where they’ll be sorted into trains going to a particular destination yard. That train is then sent to the destination yard–or there might be intermediate destinations where the train is broken up again and resorted–where it is sorted into a local, then the local drops it at the destination.
The train crew doesn’t, per se, need to know even what the cars on the train are (so long as they don’t change). They typically have a manifest so they know what they’re hauling–especially HAZMAT–but it’s not like they routinely check the interior of the cars themselves. They’re just picking up the train that’s been made up by the personnel in the yard and delivering it to it’s destination yard. Similarly, the yard personnel are just moving, say, Car #123456 into a track so it can be made up into a train going to the destination yard. They don’t actually usually open it barring extenuating circumstances like a damaged car (or noise inside calling the honesty of the manifest into question).
So for your protagonists, it’s a matter of 1) getting a bunch of railcars ordered at a place under their control with a siding, 2) getting their stuff and pax on the railcars without being detected, 3) getting an order put in to move those cars to a destination under their control, and 4) getting off the cars without being detected. (And, of course, not getting detected along the way).
Doable, but from a Doylist perspective it’s hard to see how it’s easier than getting trucks rented, which gives you more flexibility. It’s not going to be a huge plot hole to do it, though.
* This is for a mixed freight, where the cars are all from and to different customers. A unit train is a train made up of cars carrying one type of freight from a single source to a single destination, for example, a coal train carries an entire trainload of cars from a mine in the Powder River Basin to a powerplant in Utah, then shuttles the empties back.
@Catcube
The unit train is probably the best concept as 1000 people plus their gear is going to weigh a lot less than a fully loaded train, but ideally not enough to noticeably affect the handling, as the train is spec’d for hauling unobtanium from the mines.
Plus you get to deal with having to get on and off the train while it is moving because the security is too tight at the mine and the spaceport?
@Catcube: Nice. Thanks.
I’m going to want to do a plot-summary post for my current sketch, but I think (?) that will be top-level (er, one-level from top – direct reply to my initial post) rather than in-response to this.
But I wanted to say that your posts are definitely helpful.
Standard ISO shipping containers are 8′ wide, 8.5′ high, and either 20 or 40′ long. Trains are built to accommodate cars with a double-stack of containers. Whatever you’re transporting will need to fit inside those dimensions. Go any higher, and you’ll smack into the top of a tunnel. Go any wider, and you’ll hit passing trains.
And, once you’ve packed your stuff in a shipping container, why bother hijacking the train? People send shipping containers across the US all the time, and the train company won’t bother inspecting yours. You’d be looking at a cost of around $2k/container.
But if you really wanted to take over a train, the actual hijacking would be the easy part. Trains run on tracks, and only go like 40MPH. So, pick a flat spot, drive a truck next to the train, and hop on. Since you’ve got unlimited people, it should be easy enough to overcome the couple crew-members on the locomotive.
The problem is everything that happens next. So you’ve got control of a train. You don’t have control of the switching system. And, in all likelihood, your train is expected to make a bunch of stops as it travels across the country so that freight can be added or removed.
There’s no reason to expect that the tracks in front of you are clear, or that you’ve got a bunch of extra fuel on-board, so you can’t really blow through these stops without hitting something immobile / running out of gas.
So, if you’re doing trains, just stick stuff in shipping containers, and pay $$$. The real challenge is fending off the guys with McGuffin detectors, without alerting the rail yard that something weird is going on.
Thank you for what you’re saying! But, I’m sorry, but… most of this isn’t actually helpful. This is an SF story, not set on earth, with technology that is not identical to our trains but serves roughly the same function – some kind of fancy SF high-speed rail. It works roughly as a train in that it travels along a set track at a fast speed carrying lots of stuff, which is why I’m trying to study trains so I know what the constraints are.
So… are there any books you could name for me? Webpages? What I really want to know is stuff like ‘how many people are on the train? What do they do? What will explode if nobody pokes it? How does it slow down? What’s controlled on the train versus off of it?’ All that sort of questions. Because I want to know the real-world answers to help me in designing my setting.
American freight trains typically have a conductor and engineer, where the latter drives the train and the former handles communication, planning, safety regulations and such. The conductor is formally in charge. There is debate whether a two-man crew should be mandatory. Note that the conductor is often in the back of the freight train.
Your SF scenario could very easily accommodate a single crew member, if the tasks of the conductor are split between the rail traffic controller outside the train, and the engineer.
Trains normally just drive themselves once you set it to a certain speed, so there is no gas pedal that needs constant pressure to keep going, like in a car. However, there is a dead man’s switch to prevent runaway trains. Old fashioned trains have a pedal that needs to be permanently pressed, but this is now consider too unsafe, as a disabled driver may press it down. Modern systems require a regular push of a pedal or button, where permanently pressing it doesn’t work. When a dead man’s switch is triggered, the train will do emergency braking. Depending on the system/setup, the rail traffic controller may or may not be notified.
Railways have systems to prevent trains from plowing into stopped trains. Railways are separated into blocks, where a single train may occupy a block. The blocks in front and behind have to be empty too, as a buffer.
In the most common way to detect whether a block is occupied, the rails of each block are isolated from the next block and a small current is placed on the rails. Then the train closes the circuit. The simplest systems then operate signals to notify drivers to stop as the track ahead is occupied. More advanced systems (also) automatically stop the train.
You seem to want a hijacking scenario, but loading 1000 people and equipment on a train is going to take time. Unless the rail is very sparsely used, you will block trains that will notify the rail traffic controller. You might get away with faking a mechanical problem, but you will draw attention and you may get ordered off the rails. Furthermore, trains will still be going in the other direction and the engineer on those trains will notice you loading 1000 people and equipment on the train.
As Nybbler argues below, you may be able to (at night) steal and switch out rail cars for a relatively quick switch, but it’s still sounds like one of these movie scenario’s where you have to get quite lucky a dozen times, which is very unlikely.
This is incredibly useful detail. Thank you. Are you willing to go into more detail, or can you recommend a book that includes this information?
I just picked up some knowledge along the way. If you want more detail, you might want to check out: Railway Operation and Control by Pachl. I haven’t read it, but it’s by a very knowledgeable German engineer and the table of contents & description look to be very suitable to your needs.
It’s not just a description of one local system, but describes general principles and differences by country, which is good for you, so you can pick the features that work best for your scenario. It may be a challenging read.
Another book that may be suitable is Principles of Railway Operation by Glover. It’s probably more accessible and easy to understand, but is so by eliminating detail. It also focuses on the British railways. It seems out of print, with only Waterstones still selling it.
I would also suggest you look into getting into contact with a local organization of railroad enthusiasts or an organization like this. I’m sure that you’ll be able to find a railroad geek that is willing to tell you what you want to know…and much, much more.
Is there a reason they don’t use trucks? Standard ISO shipping containers are put on trucks all the time; they can go cross-country faster than trains since they go at Interstate speeds without stopping. This costs more, but I assume cost isn’t an issue with your protagonists.
Or if cost is an issue and your protagonists can’t buy or hire trucks, they can at least hijack trucks instead of trains. Trains have all the infrastructure dependencies @Drew describes; trucks are at least physically able to blow past weigh stations well over the speed limit even if their license plates have been reported stolen.
Why don’t truck thieves take different license plates to swap on?
Yes, there is a reason! Due to details of the SF setting, cars, trucks, and planes are sharply regulated and observed by the (villainous) government, and not used for transport by non-government people. If a train goes its normal route at the normal times and happens to have a thousand people and some equipment get on near the start and off near the end, it may be possible to disguise this fact, with access to the resources my protagonists do. If they steal a fleet of trucks and take off with them, there is no way they can hide that from the authorities.
Freight trains generally have no more than two people on board. In a near-future setting, they might have none, but of course it’s your story. Slipping 1000 people and a bunch of equipment onto a train without the engineer and freight conductor noticing is not possible. If it were just the equipment, you’d have a spy story; fake bills of lading, suborned employees, etc.
People, though… they’re going to have to build a whole infrastructure for supporting 1000 people on a cross-country journey (freight trains aren’t fast), and pack it in rail cars. And unlike trains, railyards and intermodal transportation facilities have a fair number of people in them; 1000 people are going to be noticed, you’re going to have to load up somewhere other than a railyard.
So, problem 1: Steal a bunch of railcars and fit them with food, water, and sanitation for 1000 people on a cross-country journey.
Problem 2: Get these railcars and the people to somewhere you can hook them up; a blind siding. Railcars are big and heavy; you’re going to need at least local trucks, unless you’ve managed to take over a whole railyard.
Problem 3: Actually hook them up. You’ll need to suborn the train crew at a minimum, and an excuse for them to stop — one which won’t get anyone called out to investigate or repair.
Problem 4: Do the reverse at the other end.
If your characters can do that, a few extra railcars for the equipment should be no problem.
Of course, adding extra railcars is going to be noticed (and may make the train too long), so you’ll need to have legitimate railcars on the train that you can remove when you add your own. A fake order for a few carloads of goods would be easiest, but make sure you choose goods that would be transported in the same type of car as you’ve refit.
I know the OP isn’t asking for this kind of detail, but this question was a bit of a nerd snipe so I’m going to dive in anyway.
How many rail cars do we estimate would be needed for our 1,000 people? We should probably assume that they won’t be packed in like sardines, but they don’t necessarily need individual seats and such either. Probably something like 10 cars minimum to get some base level of comfort, right?
Just to point out that we’re not talking about sneaking a couple cars onto a train, we’re probably looking at 15+ minimum with whatever heavy equipment factored in.
Rail cars don’t have standard lengths, so your question seems impossible to answer. It depends on what type of rail car you use and even then, it may vary.
A common size of the cattle cars used in the past to transfer people against their will was 27 by 7 feet (8 by 2 meters). The official regulations were that 50 Jews could fit in that space, but actual occupancy seems to have gone up to 150.
Assuming that one wants to be no less kind to the passengers than the Nazi regulations were to Jews, that means 50 people per car and thus 20 cars, without equipment.
If you put the people in standard 40 foot containers (with air holes), for which plenty of rail cars are available, there will be a bit more length and width, so you may fit 66 to 70 people based on the same density. So that would be 14-15 cars.
I was basing my estimate off of using 40′ containers, because in this scenario it needs to be as non-obvious as possible that there are people inside and containers seems like the best or at least one of the best camouflage options there. So I was pretty close, especially since I was being intentionally being generous with how many people we could put in each to get the lower bound on number of cars.
“Freight trains generally have no more than two people on board. In a near-future setting, they might have none, but of course it’s your story.”
Two is way fewer than I expected! I’m going to stick with two for my story, I think.
“Slipping 1000 people and a bunch of equipment onto a train without the engineer and freight conductor noticing is not possible.”
That’s what I assumed. 🙂 Thank you.
In general, all your comments are interesting and useful, and I appreciate your listing of all the impossible problems my protagonists have. I’m sorry to sound like a broken record, but is there any chance you can recommend a book or something? Even a really realistic thriller in which the protagonists have to do something like this would be useful.
“Assuming that one wants to be no less kind to the passengers than the Nazi regulations were to Jews, that means 50 people per car and thus 20 cars, without equipment.”
This is more useful detail. I don’t suppose you can just randomly give me more detail like this that I can use for my story? I know it’s not clear what is useful for my story, but any detail like this could *potentially* be really helpful.
Is it possible to slip the people onto the cars before they’re added to the train? If you know (somehow) that empty (empty enough?) cars are waiting near your origin to be dropped off for filling at your destination, then you get your men and equipment on the cars before the train gets there, the train hooks up to your cars and hauls you away.
On the other hand, it might be possible to suborn, kill, or otherwise disable them.
@Aevylmar
A relatively common occurrence in drug smuggling to the port of Rotterdam is that they get help from people who work at the port, in one capacity or the other. This greatly increases the odds of getting the drugs where they want it, without being intercepted.
This is probably required to make your scenario work in a plausible way, even just for knowing which trains go where. The most useful might be to have a railway traffic controller cooperate, since they can direct one train to leave empty railway cars on a siding where it is relatively easy to load a lot of people and equipment at night without being noticed and then later to direct another train to pick these up and deliver them to where you want them to go.
Not much hijacking or other ‘heroics,’ but quite plausible.
@Aapje
I used to ship a bunch of stuff through Rotterdam (no drugs, though, just big machines).
Then your stuff was probably handled by software that I’ve worked on (although most of the development I’ve done was for container handling, not breakbulk, which is presumably the category for your shipments).
It’s possible for most of the potential problems to be overcome with creative worldbuilding or storytelling. In some cases, this may suggest story events, while in others, you can bypass it entirely with a few sentences of worldbuilding. Putting my GM hat on, some things to consider:
If the general public doesn’t have ready access to transportation, there’s going to be some incentive to improvise routes, especially by people on the marginal end of society (who are also the most likely to be rebels against the government). One of the classic ways to do this is to hop a train. How does the authoritarian government try to prevent this (because they will), and how well does it work? It could be that the train crew includes a member of your evil state security apparatus who periodically checks for stowaways. It could be that there are automated sensors (that need to be subverted) to detect hobo wannabes, either on the train or in the yards.
What sort of traveling conditions do your thousand people require, and for how long? If your thousand passengers are desperate refugees, they might be more than willing to be crammed into box cars in standing room only for the trip with no food (google “Bangladesh overcrowded trains” for some images of how many people you can pack into a train if you throw safety out the window). On the other hand, if you’re transporting soldiers who need to be ready to fight at the other end, you want more space and for them to have enough food and water to keep in good condition.
Another thing to consider is that railways are common sabotage targets, especially in war. If there’s an active rebellion / resistance, take any real-world security measures and ramp them up significantly. There will be security measures in place to defend the rail yards, easy to damage and difficult to repair track sections (like bridges), and any place there’s a significant amount of rolling stock.
None of this should make your story impossible; in fact, it might make it easier. The train could be hijacked while stopped without being detected because someone else in the resistance attacked a bridge further up the line, and the trains are stopped while new routes are arranged. Rebel soldiers moving from train car to train car while the train is in motion could wear state security uniforms so observers think they are the train’s security detail checking for stowaways.
“If the general public doesn’t have ready access to transportation, there’s going to be some incentive to improvise routes, especially by people on the marginal end of society (who are also the most likely to be rebels against the government). One of the classic ways to do this is to hop a train.”
Yes, and what my protagonists are trying to do is hop a train with a thousand people and some illegal equipment. 😀 Which I assume would mean taking it over, given the impossibility of getting all that on without the conductor and engineer noticing, but I take your point.
“How does the authoritarian government try to prevent this (because they will), and how well does it work?”
Interesting thing to think about! Thank you!
“What sort of traveling conditions do your thousand people require, and for how long? If your thousand passengers are desperate refugees, they might be more than willing to be crammed into box cars in standing room only for the trip with no food (google “Bangladesh overcrowded trains” for some images of how many people you can pack into a train if you throw safety out the window). On the other hand, if you’re transporting soldiers who need to be ready to fight at the other end, you want more space and for them to have enough food and water to keep in good condition.”
Interesting point. Hmm…
… Basically everything you say is interesting and useful. Thank you! Can you say more things?
I would not do this as a high jack – a train is much too easy to stop in transit if you make that much noise at the outset, and trains practically require faster-than-trains communications to exist.
So, do it as a plot. The trick is to make a train load of troops look like a train load of grain, coal, or something else, and to get that train load shipped to where it needs to go with the papers all in order.
1918 is in the opposite direction technologically, but might provide useful inspiration for dialog/operations/things-that-can-go-wrong: Look up the history of the Czechoslovak Legion and how they commandeered a bunch of trains to cross the entirety of Russia as it was disintegrating.
Those last 4 words seem incredibly important.
Be fair. They only crossed most of Russia. Sibera, and the bits of European Russia southeast of Moscow.
Of course, they had to conquer most of Russia(*) to do it, that being the only way to make the trains run on time during the Russian Civil War. Then they were stuck holding it for a year or so because the western powers that were going to arrange ships from Vladivostok took another look and said “Wait, a bunch of people who aren’t Communists have conquered most of Russia? How long can we stall them and keep it so?”
* By provincial area, not population, so not as impressive as it first sounds.
I can’t believe I didn’t think of this. Thank you!
So, thinking about what @Aapje, @Catcube, @Acymetric, @The Nybbler and probably loads of people I’m missing have said, let me try to sketch the new plan (as my phone downloads the recommended books):
• Protagonist has about a thousand people, plus equipment. (“Stuff.”) Protagonist’s resources boil down to brains, money, computer skills, social skills, and anything these four can get her.
Step One: Arrange for the purchase/construction of cars containing ISO standard shipping containers designed to carry people, supply these cars with food/water/sanitation, etc. (“Carriers”.)
Step Two: Arrange for the Carrier to be taken from the manufacturer/refitter to the rail yard where you’re going to start the plan without anyone inspecting it, via some combination of bribes, computer skills, and social skills.
Step Three: Physically move Stuff to rail yard without authorities noticing. (P1). This is in or on the outskirts of a major city (Q1).
Step Four: Sneak Stuff from the place just outside the rail yard into the rail yard without anyone being suspicious, via a combination of bribes to look the other way, electronically messing with surveillance cameras, or possibly something audacious and clever, and load it into the Carriers. (P2).
Step Five: Watch as the railway staff connects the Carriers to the locomotive or locomotive-equivalent without inspecting them and the train takes off.
Step Six: Stuff gets transported several thousand miles without starving, running out of water, drowning in its own sewage, being noticed by anyone my Protagonist hasn’t bribed or suborned, or any other horrible problem I’m not thinking of. (Q2, P3).
Step Seven: Somehow get off the train without anyone noticing. (P4.)
Qs are things that I’m still trying to get more information about, Ps are Problems that my protagonist has to solve that will be difficult, where I may need to know relevant information that I don’t know. If anyone who knows anything about trains thinks there are more significant Ps, please let me know.
Steps one and two can probably be taken care of offscreen.
Problem P1 can probably be ignored/handwaved as long as I don’t put too much emphasis on it. P2 requires that I/my protagonist be Clever. This can probably be managed given that this is the fourth chapter of a serial and my beta readers think I’ve been Clever thus far. P3 depends on how long the journey is, how fast the train-that-isn’t-actually-a-train is going, how many cars my protagonist can add loaded purely with food/water, and and how fancy arrangements can be made for sanitation without anyone noticing, and whether my protagonist can just bribe/suborn the two (!) people on the train other than her private army.
And P4 is, I think, just the inverse of P2, requiring roughly the same solution.
What am I missing? What do I need to know about these problems? What problems are there that I’m missing? And where are rail yards usually physically located?
(And, again, immense thanks to everyone who’s helped thus far.)
One thing that I’ll note is that it’s probably not necessary or advisable for your protagonists to buy or build their own railcars, if the rail system is reasonably close to what you see in the real world. Providing this kind of stuff is why railroads exist.
Very large shippers will own their own cars, or people with very specialized equipment (say, a chemical that needs extremely specialized lining inside a tank) but the vast majority of customers just rent the cars as part of the shipping service. There are large pools of railcars jointly owned by major railroads to provide this. TTX and its subsidiary RBOX have some 200,000 cars for this. The railroad will spot the cars for their customers to load.
Depending on what your protagonists do or what connections they have, they also don’t necessarily need to find a railyard. They just need to suborn a company with its own rail service. For example, I used to railfan in Lebanon Junction, KY. The CSX mainline from Lousiville to Nashville runs through there, with a spur (originally to Lebanon, KY) that now has just a few customers. I’d occasionally catch them tying down their train, pulling the locomotives off (usually with a few cars) and they’d go to the publishing plant here and drop of a few carloads of paper and pick up the cars that the plant had emptied since their last run. They’d sometimes do this on the weekend so the employees of the plant had new paper waiting for them when they got in on Monday.
That plant’s spur is of course way too small for what you’re proposing, but a larger factory (like a car plant or mine) will have a huge number of tracks for loading their product for shipment. The problem here is that if the railroad spots a much larger number of cars than the plant would conceivably need to load, you might have the plant personnel asking questions–they get charged demurrage for holding cars for too long and don’t want to risk that, and the extra cars are taking up space on their property.
If you’re loading intermodal containers, you can also have the railroad come pick them up, or have them delivered by a trucking company to an intermodal yard. If your protagonists can do that, though, that begs the question as to why they couldn’t have the trucks to do this just take them all the way. The additional handling (transshipment) is why railroads started getting their lunch eaten by trucks in the mid to late 20th century–once you’ve got your product on a truck, it often pencils out to just have it hauled all the way by truck once interstates were a thing. This isn’t always true, of course, but it still mostly is.
There’s also a real time penalty for rail vs. truck, due to all the handling steps required; trains are only efficient if there are large numbers of cars going from one city to another, so the cars might sit in a yard a few days waiting for enough of them to make a train.
For your questions:
1) As noted above w/ Lebanon Junction, if your setting allows for plants in out-of-the-way towns, they can use those and not a major city. Of course, a town of that size is likely to notice an additional 1,000 people, especially if you’re there long enough to require purchasing supplies. You’re basically doubling the population of the town.
2) The problem is that if you want to really be “realistic” with this, the plan as you’ve stated it will be either boring or tragic without excellent writing. I mean, you’re basically putting these people in a box and FedEx’ing them to the destination. Either your protagonists get on the train, be quiet for a few days to a week and a half, then they get delivered at the destination, all without being detected. Or, they *do* get noticed, the train gets stopped by the authorities, and all your people get led out to a drainage ditch near the tracks and shot (depending on how repressive your setting’s authorities are). It’s going to be hard to have a standard dramatic situation where it kind of fails and they do something to rescue it. Not impossible, but difficult.
3) This is going to depend on what kind of things your protagonists are willing to tolerate. Bathing is going to be right out. They’ll have to have enough water, but that’s pretty simple. Chicago to Miami is about 5 days, 8 hours per CSX, here.
I’ve got to run, but hopefully that at least gives you something.
The point of ISO containers is that they can be quickly moved onto and off ships, trains, trucks, etc. So you never commission the containers with the car itself. Empty containers are kept in container depots in many locations. If your scenario has capitalism and no government controls on containers, you can just call one of the companies that run a depot and buy some second-hand containers. Alternatively, you can steal them or bribe the person running the place.
One of the places where depots are pretty much always located is a port. That is a good start point for your journey.
A rail car suitable for containers would be a flat car or a well car. A flat car supports two 40 feet containers placed end-to-end, while a well car supports a stack of two 40 feet containers (and thus makes for a shorter train for the same cargo). However, the latter is too high for electrified track, so can only be used when the entire track is non-electrified.
One type of flat car used for containers is the spine car. As you can see in the picture, not the entire container is fully supported. This allows you to make a hole in the bottom of the container that is then not blocked by the rail car, which is useful for:
Drop chute toilets. Traditional sanitation for trains is simply a hole in the floor with a seat on top of it. Nicer variants have flushing, but still just eject onto or just next to the tracks. The most environmentally friendly version has a septic tank. The obvious solution for your situation would be the simplest variant. Note that properly designed drop chute toilets work like a chimney, so they don’t cause bad smells in the train.
—
The easiest may be to bribe the people working at a container depot. Then you take a few blue collar guys to drill holes in the containers with a hole saw & you add some food and drink. If the containers will be stacked on a well car, you need two holes in the bottom container. After the containers are loaded on a train, the people inside can then put a pipe though both holes, for the human waste.
All the people and equipment can be loaded into the containers at the depot, during the day or night. The depot will have a crane to put containers on and take them off a stack. If this crane is the right type, this should be usable to load the containers on a flat car and perhaps well car. However, this requires the rails (and rail cars) to be very close to the depot.
The absolute easiest would be to bribe/extort all or some workers at a rail container terminal like this. You’d have the empty containers, a railway yard and a way to get the containers on a train; all in one place.
If the terminal normally has some trains going to the right destination, with the right number of containers, you could simply load your containers on that train instead of the intended ones. Then near your destination, you’d have to find a way to intercept the containers, perhaps with the same scheme.
PS. You’d probably want to have at least one truck to bring the people and equipment to the container depot. It’s going to be completely normal for trucks to go there, so it’s not going to be suspicious, as long as you unload the people and equipment (and load them into your containers) out of sight.
Lads, result of second leg Liverpool vs Barcelona Champions League semi-final right this minute – AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Don’t ask me how we did it, I have no freakin’ idea, I love you Gini and Divock!!
WE’RE GOING TO THE FINAL!!!!! YEAH SO CITY ARE GONNA WIN THE LEAGUE BUT WE’RE GOING TO THE FINAL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
One of those mornings (it was morning here in Australia) that make a Rationalist wonder if they should start believing in miracles.
If Ajax makes it to the finals too, it would be two miracles in a row (given that the budget of the the entire Dutch Premier League equals the budget of Liverpool alone).
COYS!!!!!
Is there any way to find all the fiction on this site? I’m (slowly) trying to work through everything on here but Scott’s short fiction is so excellent I’d rather not just wait until I found it all.
https://slatestarcodex.com/tag/fiction/
That might miss some stuff that Scott didn’t tag, though.
Don’t forget the fiction on his old blog!
I am sure this has been discussed many times before (and resolved against?), but I wish there was a way to ‘like’ (or something similar) comments. So many interesting comments in these threads it would be nice to be able to tell the person posting a comment that their post was enjoyable, and replying is not always the right option
I often feel the same way, but I also think that adding the ability to like or upvote would hurt the discussion. A lot of the functionality could be improved here but I think the lack of functionality is a big part of what keeps it the way it is.
My ideal would be:
– likes but no dislikes/downvotes
– not used for sorting or visibility, just displayed
Under those circumstances, I don’t think they’d disrupt the current discussion style.
I, too, often feel like it would be nice to be able to show appreciation for a comment without polluting the place with ‘thanks’ and ‘good post’.
Publicly visible likes from lurkers (who always greatly outnumber posters on any site) would still end up looking like votes, which would likely change the way people post. Maybe if you could only see the likes on your own comments?
Probably all moot anyway since I get the impression the WordPress code for this place is annoying to work with and it’d be a big hassle to add a major feature like that, even if Scott wanted it.
Yeah, I guess it would mean creating a whole new database table, so it’s not like it could be implemented with just a skimpy layer of client-side javascript over the top, like most of our current mods.
On the other hand, it seems like a common enough desire that probably there’s some wordpress module/library/whatever for it.
One thing I’ve wanted to test is hidden upvotes, where only the author can see their score. I wonder how much undesired behavior from upvote systems are from publicity, where people compare relative vote tallies and feel there’s consensus in some direction, and so want to maximize the upvote count on their own posts etc. etc.
What about upvotes only the admin (Scott or whoever) can see, for picking out “comment of the week” highlights?
I get that some comments are so nice, or so effort-driven, that I want to recognize that. But I don’t want the people here who take unpopular opinions (sometimes I am on their side, although more often not) to feel pushed against.
So exciting!
The Big Picture
We’re looking for a third roommate in a rational-ish house in Mountain View, near downtown. Starting date around June 1st, rent 1400$/month. Is nice house. reply/email me (rot13 of funxrq.xbcyrjvgm@tznvy.pbz )if interested. Hope this is allowed outside of classifieds posts.
Found on the net: this table of draft statistics documenting the number of US men drafted by year from 1940 to 1973 (and 1917-18.)
http://michiganintheworld.history.lsa.umich.edu/antivietnamwar/exhibits/show/exhibit/item/73
The draft lasted a solid generation, from 1940 to 1973. There was one year, 1947, where no men were drafted at all.
With some of the discussion of modern architecture below, I think I should find an example of a piece of modern architecture that I think looks very good.
When vacating in Sedona, Arizona, I took a chance to visit the Chapel of the Holy Cross. The Chapel was designed by architect Marguerite Brunswig Staude; and was built in 1957.
The design looks like it is an extension of the landscape. It also has little in the way of ornamentation. The chapel has an appearance that is simple-but-breathtaking in person.
I think this is a good example of modern architecture done well.
I’ll throw in my vote for Thorncrown Chapel
From the pictures, it is indeed good architecture.
My half-formed thought was that the Chapel of the Holy Cross is an example of modern, low-ornamentation architecture which is not bad architecture, per the article cited below.
I think what sets it (and the Thorncrown Chapel) apart is the use of architecture to fit the structure into the surroundings.
I’m generally not a fan of modern churches (okay, that is putting it extremely diplomatically), but there are a number of skyscrapers I like. I think the Burj Khalifa looks okay. I really like the Shanghai World Financial Center. I always thought the Bank of China Tower had a neat design. And of course, I like lots of older skyscrapers—think the Empire State Building, or Sullivan’s stuff, or the Flatiron building.
Always a fan of charts like these, even when I think some of the buildings look dumb or ugly.
#3 is real surprise! Looks two hundred years old.
Tropic Thunder. I’m surprised no one mentioned it yet.
Also, The Truman Show.
Does Truman Show really count? The prompt is about Hollywood specifically, not the film industry in general.
The Player https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Player_(film)
I’ve just made a twitter account for thoughts, ideas and practical advice. Some topics I talk about include:
Adventures with my friend GPT-2
Novel immigration policies
If you like SSC, I think it’ll be up your alley. (Long time reader by the way, just never commented)
Last chance to participate in the GoT ending prediction competition our watching group is organizing (we will close the form a few hours before the next episode airs). There’s a 10 question version and a 60 question version.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1fbUCkzq9hHDcQSMuwukcylfGNo7DoR08etihqQxNQUo/edit
(Please no GoT spoilers in this subthread)