wait, can't you just tilt a four-wheeled suitcase and have it become a two-wheeled suitcase? mine seems to work fine for this! but maybe i've been indoctrinated by sleek four-wheeled luggage advertising and no longer remember the comparative robustness of the two-wheel design.
also, strong relate to the feeling of having a flaw in one's approach to life—i feel this with at least eight dozen things that feel MUCH more difficult for me that they seem to be for the average person.
This post has a very Lindyman energy to it (not complaining or condescending! I find his stuff fun).
I think your point on Soylent can best explain this. Humans appear to often struggle with scaling things across thresholds of complexity. We are very good at understanding low-dimension systems, but have been cursed with the knowledge that higher-dimension ones can theoretically be more optimal. Increasing complexity introduces more variables which people either don’t realize exist, or are an unexpected source of fragility.
Not sure if this is a tongue in cheek joke, but you can tilt a 4 wheeled suitcase just like you can a two wheeled suitcase. If it wasn’t a joke, enjoy your newfound luggage experience!
Reality is more complicated. One example: "plump". When you are young your fat is on the hips, buttocks (subcutaneous). When you get older another type of fat (visceral) gets deposited in the belly around your organs. Visceral fat is connected to inflammation and other bad things. That is why you can afford to eat more when you are young (and more active probably) but have to be leaner when you get older. Not to mention the knees, the less weight they have to carry the happier they are.
Another thing: those "classic" NASA rockets were pointy, the ones I saw go up recently with tourists were differently shaped, more like penises. Was there a reason for this change - or is it a message ?
Also, Soylent (Green) is made of people ! But you knew that already I think. If not, watch the movie.
(Humungously colossal comment, sorry! Please do feel free to delete if it's too long!)
Some of your examples are really quite confusing to me!
Cars: Tarmac roads go almost everywhere that almost everybody in the West needs to go to. A run-of-the-mill hatchback or saloon is cheaper to manufacture, cheaper to buy, cheaper to insure, cheaper (here in the UK at least) to tax, *much* cheaper to run, easier to drive, easier to find spare parts for, considerably better for the planet, and mechanically simpler than a big off-road-capable 4-wheel-drive. It looks to me like what you give as an example of the simpler, more ruggesd solution is, for most people, more complicated, more expensive, and more hassle, and your example of the "fancy" solution is in most cases simpler and cheaper for most people?
Sponges: The Roman soldiers presumably got their sponges from the army - yes, they were sponges off the state.. - who presumably had easy access to lots of sponges but lots of difficulty manufacturing and distributing suitable cups. If the Roman army found it easy to manufacture and distribute shatter-proof cups (eg. if they could have made them from plastic) presumably they'd have issued those to their soldiers instead; similarly, modern military-issue plasic cups certainly feel (to the end-user, at least) like the cheapest, no-frills, most efficient possible option. In both cases, then, it feels like maybe each option was the cheapest, more rugged solution for its respective civilisation, rather than one being universally simpler across all civliisations?
(Side-note: to the Romans, "vinegar" had a secondary meaning of "cheap wine", and "cheap wine" had a secondary meaning of "water with juuust enough ethanol in it to stop us all getting cholera". When we translate Roman vinegar as just "vinegar" that's usually a context-dependent translation rather than becasue we know for certain they meant modern-type vinegar and not either cheap wine or ethanol-water. Not super-relevant to the discussion but I hope interesting!)
Food: I feel like we do know enough about nutrition to be able to optimise nutrients *better than the average Westerner optimises when left to their own devices*, and the food industry is incredibly dependent on vast global supply chains and unpredictable weather patterns, and very reliant on just-in-time production. By contrast, if civilisation made a concerted effort to manufacture something like Soylent, it would be easy to feed everybody in the world a meal that's statistically more nutritious than the one they're likely to otherwise get and we'd be much less at the mercy of global trade, the weather, etc. It appears to me that the solution (no pun intended) you present as fancy is actually simpler, cheaper and more reliable, and the one you present as simpler and more reliable is actually just the pointy-end of a vast, brittle system?
(The reason we all, self included, want food rather than Soylent is because we're just not optimising for simplicity, reliability or efficiency here (at least not globally) and we'd get - to quote a very wise man - tired of eating the same goddamn goop every day...)
Suitcases: For most people, your suitcase only ever makes four journeys under its own steam: from your house to your car boot, from your car boot to the baggage check-in desk, from the baggage carousel to the nearest taxi, and from the taxi to your hotel room. All these journeys are 95% perfectly smooth and level and 5% covered by lifts or access ramps. (Personally I agree with you; I need the flexibility to go hors-piste with my suitcase and I resent that part of my limited baggage allowance by both weight and volume, which could be gainfully spent on another four bowties or a lovely cummerbund, is instead taken up with a mechanism that I don't want or need - but I do recognise that 4-wheelers are a better solution for the average suitcase consumer's use-case)
(Re. using a four-wheeler like a two-wheeler: never tried (I mean, why on Earth would I ever have a four-wheeled suitcase...) but it's quite surprising to me that it doesn't work. In vehicle kinematics the trail angle allows casters - "castors"? - to track in a straight line; its part of how eg. motorcycles remain stable at high speeds, and why operating a shopping trolley isn't like participating in a demolition derby...)
General point: I feel like almost all the points of confusion disappear if we recognise that simplicity/reliability vs. fanciness is just one design axis in a multiaxial space, that any given design's position on other axes can be as, if not more, important, and that altering a design's position along one of those other axes can as a secondary effect make it more or less simple/fancy than we'd otherwise prefer?
Bonus example: My own personal example of simplicity/ruggedness counterintuitively losing out is my vacuum cleaner. When I needed to buy a vacuum cleaner I just bought the same vacuum cleaner as they had on the last ship I'd sailed on (I hear on Roman triremes they used sponges rather than vacuum cleaners...) which is an industrial model and which has turned out to more reliable and more capable (eg. able to vacuum up liquids, having a much more powerful suction, being able to run in reverse to function as a blower, etc. etc.), and made of much tougher plastic (near-identical metal models are also available) than a domestic model whilst also being actually cheaper to buy. If one can live with the downside of it's being twice the weight* and sounding like an aeroplane taking off, it does seem a good example of simplicity/ruggedness actually being optimal but occupying a much smaller market share?
I MAY HATE THE 4-WHEELER MORE THAN YOU. My wife insists on using one and it is fine on completely flat surfaces, which don't exist on earth, unfortunately. Left unattended, it stealthily drifts away, typically bumping into some stranger down the street. The wheels are too small and improperly positioned to climb curbs. The best thing they do is allow you to spin the bag in circles. But why would you do that more than twice?
Targeted optimizations increase the number of unacceptable tradeoffs in ways that limit future development.
Swivel casters improve mobility in hotels and airports (sort of), implicitly blocking any change that might sacrifice this - development stops. I mean, G-RO exists, but c'mon.
The shuttle program seeks to eliminate waste, so we can't do anything during development that has a quantifiable, high risk of failure since that would defeat the purpose.
Capital punishment could serve a community's desire for revenge or crime prevention, but reducing the moral hazard through life imprisonment has always felt like paying in torturous installments. Exoneration might let us make things right, but who really gets made whole? 'Better that ten guilty men go free than one have forty-five years of life sucked away, hour by hour'?
For most of these problems, I think we can do better (or I don't believe we know we can't), but we're waiting for the next philosopher or entrepreneur with just enough hubris to challenge 'good enough'. We may mock their half-steps or be awed by the next step forward, but until then, we're nothing if not adaptable - even to the presently unacceptable.
Hybrid vehicles have some nice feature over Battery only Electric Vehicles (BEVs) - specifically, consumers are fine with a much smaller battery in a Hybrid; a smaller battery means lower purchase price and less wear and tear on roads.
Hybrid vehicles are more complicated than BEVs, so BEVs will probably be cheaper than Hybrids at some point in the future, and could be right now if they used a smaller battery pack. (See the Wuling Hongguang Mini EV)
---
There's a much dumber solution that I happen to love: Put a generator on a trailer. Rent it to people going on road trips.
This allows for cheaper EVs with smaller batteries, which is better for just about everyone. It also alleviates range anxiety.
The generator does not have to be especially big - 30 HP would be plenty, especially for a small, light BEV.
It's dumb but it's brilliant. It allows you to decouple the problems from choosing either BEV or Hybrid (literally!!)
Why a generator and not just use the engine to power the trailer wheels? Having a trailer in a "pusher" configuration would severely alter the dynamics and would be prone to loss of control.
Bonus: If you are concerned about grid stability, you can use the generator as a generator at your home. 30 HP is well beyond the needs of most homes.
I was ready to be up in arms about inflatable sleeping pads for cold weather camping, but you refused to blindly insist on your original thesis (rude! What will I complain about now?).
I still want to defend inflatable pads, though. The biggest difference to me is that they take up so much less room. Space is at an incredible premium when camping. As you noted, they also tend to insulate better, feel more comfortable, etc. If it’s really cold, what’s actually recommended is that you use both! The foam pad protects the inflatable from sharp rocks, and you need the stacked insulation anyway. I’ve also been rescued by my inflatable’s extra height when 35f (1 or 2c) water got into my tent overnight and soaked everything but me.
So yeah, I’d add inflatable pads to the “fancy, delicate solution is actually much better than the rough and rugged one” column.
One of the key differences between some of the examples where our intuitions seem to side with the rough and rugged examples vs the fancy and delicate are where the preferences being specialized into by the latter are primarily aesthetic. There could be a bit of a maslow’s hierarchy of needs thing going on here, where distance from the brute realities of a problem enables us to satisfy lower-priority preferences, which we genuinely care about, but abandon when confronted with harsh realities on the ground. Most of the examples in this post, however, have no aesthetic component whatsoever, in which cases I would expect the differences to be either more straightforward trade offs, or to favor the more developed solution.
The simplicity/generality/convenience tradeoff space is fun. I thought about multitools when reading: a friend used to say the Leatherman was the wrong tool for every job. I've gone back and forth on having a separate knife and multi-bit screw driver, but then occasionally you do need some pliers and so on, and multiple items require some kind of further solution to keep together.
There was an intermediate solution for a while in the 1970s and 1980s. People used to use a bungie and a schlepper to haul their suitcases around. The schlepper was a collapsible aluminum frame with two wheels and a little ledge to hold the suitcase. It was like a miniature handtruck with a long handle so you pull it along when walking. The bungie was an elastic cord to hold the suitcase to the schlepper.
They were polarizing. Some people thought they were absolutely great. Others thought they were a nightmare. They were all over the place for a while, but now people just buy a wheeled suitcase.
wait, can't you just tilt a four-wheeled suitcase and have it become a two-wheeled suitcase? mine seems to work fine for this! but maybe i've been indoctrinated by sleek four-wheeled luggage advertising and no longer remember the comparative robustness of the two-wheel design.
also, strong relate to the feeling of having a flaw in one's approach to life—i feel this with at least eight dozen things that feel MUCH more difficult for me that they seem to be for the average person.
This post has a very Lindyman energy to it (not complaining or condescending! I find his stuff fun).
I think your point on Soylent can best explain this. Humans appear to often struggle with scaling things across thresholds of complexity. We are very good at understanding low-dimension systems, but have been cursed with the knowledge that higher-dimension ones can theoretically be more optimal. Increasing complexity introduces more variables which people either don’t realize exist, or are an unexpected source of fragility.
Not sure if this is a tongue in cheek joke, but you can tilt a 4 wheeled suitcase just like you can a two wheeled suitcase. If it wasn’t a joke, enjoy your newfound luggage experience!
Reality is more complicated. One example: "plump". When you are young your fat is on the hips, buttocks (subcutaneous). When you get older another type of fat (visceral) gets deposited in the belly around your organs. Visceral fat is connected to inflammation and other bad things. That is why you can afford to eat more when you are young (and more active probably) but have to be leaner when you get older. Not to mention the knees, the less weight they have to carry the happier they are.
Another thing: those "classic" NASA rockets were pointy, the ones I saw go up recently with tourists were differently shaped, more like penises. Was there a reason for this change - or is it a message ?
Also, Soylent (Green) is made of people ! But you knew that already I think. If not, watch the movie.
(Humungously colossal comment, sorry! Please do feel free to delete if it's too long!)
Some of your examples are really quite confusing to me!
Cars: Tarmac roads go almost everywhere that almost everybody in the West needs to go to. A run-of-the-mill hatchback or saloon is cheaper to manufacture, cheaper to buy, cheaper to insure, cheaper (here in the UK at least) to tax, *much* cheaper to run, easier to drive, easier to find spare parts for, considerably better for the planet, and mechanically simpler than a big off-road-capable 4-wheel-drive. It looks to me like what you give as an example of the simpler, more ruggesd solution is, for most people, more complicated, more expensive, and more hassle, and your example of the "fancy" solution is in most cases simpler and cheaper for most people?
Sponges: The Roman soldiers presumably got their sponges from the army - yes, they were sponges off the state.. - who presumably had easy access to lots of sponges but lots of difficulty manufacturing and distributing suitable cups. If the Roman army found it easy to manufacture and distribute shatter-proof cups (eg. if they could have made them from plastic) presumably they'd have issued those to their soldiers instead; similarly, modern military-issue plasic cups certainly feel (to the end-user, at least) like the cheapest, no-frills, most efficient possible option. In both cases, then, it feels like maybe each option was the cheapest, more rugged solution for its respective civilisation, rather than one being universally simpler across all civliisations?
(Side-note: to the Romans, "vinegar" had a secondary meaning of "cheap wine", and "cheap wine" had a secondary meaning of "water with juuust enough ethanol in it to stop us all getting cholera". When we translate Roman vinegar as just "vinegar" that's usually a context-dependent translation rather than becasue we know for certain they meant modern-type vinegar and not either cheap wine or ethanol-water. Not super-relevant to the discussion but I hope interesting!)
Food: I feel like we do know enough about nutrition to be able to optimise nutrients *better than the average Westerner optimises when left to their own devices*, and the food industry is incredibly dependent on vast global supply chains and unpredictable weather patterns, and very reliant on just-in-time production. By contrast, if civilisation made a concerted effort to manufacture something like Soylent, it would be easy to feed everybody in the world a meal that's statistically more nutritious than the one they're likely to otherwise get and we'd be much less at the mercy of global trade, the weather, etc. It appears to me that the solution (no pun intended) you present as fancy is actually simpler, cheaper and more reliable, and the one you present as simpler and more reliable is actually just the pointy-end of a vast, brittle system?
(The reason we all, self included, want food rather than Soylent is because we're just not optimising for simplicity, reliability or efficiency here (at least not globally) and we'd get - to quote a very wise man - tired of eating the same goddamn goop every day...)
Suitcases: For most people, your suitcase only ever makes four journeys under its own steam: from your house to your car boot, from your car boot to the baggage check-in desk, from the baggage carousel to the nearest taxi, and from the taxi to your hotel room. All these journeys are 95% perfectly smooth and level and 5% covered by lifts or access ramps. (Personally I agree with you; I need the flexibility to go hors-piste with my suitcase and I resent that part of my limited baggage allowance by both weight and volume, which could be gainfully spent on another four bowties or a lovely cummerbund, is instead taken up with a mechanism that I don't want or need - but I do recognise that 4-wheelers are a better solution for the average suitcase consumer's use-case)
(Re. using a four-wheeler like a two-wheeler: never tried (I mean, why on Earth would I ever have a four-wheeled suitcase...) but it's quite surprising to me that it doesn't work. In vehicle kinematics the trail angle allows casters - "castors"? - to track in a straight line; its part of how eg. motorcycles remain stable at high speeds, and why operating a shopping trolley isn't like participating in a demolition derby...)
General point: I feel like almost all the points of confusion disappear if we recognise that simplicity/reliability vs. fanciness is just one design axis in a multiaxial space, that any given design's position on other axes can be as, if not more, important, and that altering a design's position along one of those other axes can as a secondary effect make it more or less simple/fancy than we'd otherwise prefer?
Bonus example: My own personal example of simplicity/ruggedness counterintuitively losing out is my vacuum cleaner. When I needed to buy a vacuum cleaner I just bought the same vacuum cleaner as they had on the last ship I'd sailed on (I hear on Roman triremes they used sponges rather than vacuum cleaners...) which is an industrial model and which has turned out to more reliable and more capable (eg. able to vacuum up liquids, having a much more powerful suction, being able to run in reverse to function as a blower, etc. etc.), and made of much tougher plastic (near-identical metal models are also available) than a domestic model whilst also being actually cheaper to buy. If one can live with the downside of it's being twice the weight* and sounding like an aeroplane taking off, it does seem a good example of simplicity/ruggedness actually being optimal but occupying a much smaller market share?
*Luckily it has four wheels rather than two....
I MAY HATE THE 4-WHEELER MORE THAN YOU. My wife insists on using one and it is fine on completely flat surfaces, which don't exist on earth, unfortunately. Left unattended, it stealthily drifts away, typically bumping into some stranger down the street. The wheels are too small and improperly positioned to climb curbs. The best thing they do is allow you to spin the bag in circles. But why would you do that more than twice?
Targeted optimizations increase the number of unacceptable tradeoffs in ways that limit future development.
Swivel casters improve mobility in hotels and airports (sort of), implicitly blocking any change that might sacrifice this - development stops. I mean, G-RO exists, but c'mon.
The shuttle program seeks to eliminate waste, so we can't do anything during development that has a quantifiable, high risk of failure since that would defeat the purpose.
Capital punishment could serve a community's desire for revenge or crime prevention, but reducing the moral hazard through life imprisonment has always felt like paying in torturous installments. Exoneration might let us make things right, but who really gets made whole? 'Better that ten guilty men go free than one have forty-five years of life sucked away, hour by hour'?
For most of these problems, I think we can do better (or I don't believe we know we can't), but we're waiting for the next philosopher or entrepreneur with just enough hubris to challenge 'good enough'. We may mock their half-steps or be awed by the next step forward, but until then, we're nothing if not adaptable - even to the presently unacceptable.
Hybrid vehicles have some nice feature over Battery only Electric Vehicles (BEVs) - specifically, consumers are fine with a much smaller battery in a Hybrid; a smaller battery means lower purchase price and less wear and tear on roads.
Hybrid vehicles are more complicated than BEVs, so BEVs will probably be cheaper than Hybrids at some point in the future, and could be right now if they used a smaller battery pack. (See the Wuling Hongguang Mini EV)
---
There's a much dumber solution that I happen to love: Put a generator on a trailer. Rent it to people going on road trips.
This allows for cheaper EVs with smaller batteries, which is better for just about everyone. It also alleviates range anxiety.
The generator does not have to be especially big - 30 HP would be plenty, especially for a small, light BEV.
It's dumb but it's brilliant. It allows you to decouple the problems from choosing either BEV or Hybrid (literally!!)
Why a generator and not just use the engine to power the trailer wheels? Having a trailer in a "pusher" configuration would severely alter the dynamics and would be prone to loss of control.
Bonus: If you are concerned about grid stability, you can use the generator as a generator at your home. 30 HP is well beyond the needs of most homes.
I was ready to be up in arms about inflatable sleeping pads for cold weather camping, but you refused to blindly insist on your original thesis (rude! What will I complain about now?).
I still want to defend inflatable pads, though. The biggest difference to me is that they take up so much less room. Space is at an incredible premium when camping. As you noted, they also tend to insulate better, feel more comfortable, etc. If it’s really cold, what’s actually recommended is that you use both! The foam pad protects the inflatable from sharp rocks, and you need the stacked insulation anyway. I’ve also been rescued by my inflatable’s extra height when 35f (1 or 2c) water got into my tent overnight and soaked everything but me.
So yeah, I’d add inflatable pads to the “fancy, delicate solution is actually much better than the rough and rugged one” column.
One of the key differences between some of the examples where our intuitions seem to side with the rough and rugged examples vs the fancy and delicate are where the preferences being specialized into by the latter are primarily aesthetic. There could be a bit of a maslow’s hierarchy of needs thing going on here, where distance from the brute realities of a problem enables us to satisfy lower-priority preferences, which we genuinely care about, but abandon when confronted with harsh realities on the ground. Most of the examples in this post, however, have no aesthetic component whatsoever, in which cases I would expect the differences to be either more straightforward trade offs, or to favor the more developed solution.
The simplicity/generality/convenience tradeoff space is fun. I thought about multitools when reading: a friend used to say the Leatherman was the wrong tool for every job. I've gone back and forth on having a separate knife and multi-bit screw driver, but then occasionally you do need some pliers and so on, and multiple items require some kind of further solution to keep together.
There was an intermediate solution for a while in the 1970s and 1980s. People used to use a bungie and a schlepper to haul their suitcases around. The schlepper was a collapsible aluminum frame with two wheels and a little ledge to hold the suitcase. It was like a miniature handtruck with a long handle so you pull it along when walking. The bungie was an elastic cord to hold the suitcase to the schlepper.
They were polarizing. Some people thought they were absolutely great. Others thought they were a nightmare. They were all over the place for a while, but now people just buy a wheeled suitcase.