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The age of average

alexmurrell.co.uk

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Re: The age of average

#111

Post by gizmo686 »

mmkhd wrote: post #97
Ekaros wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would probably look at listings of new apartments in various parts of the world to get picture what is common and what is not. And this should be matched to similar segments(low, mid and high income) in each location.

> look at listings of new apartments And even that is fraught with problems, because in my neck of the woods (Germany) we generally do not buy houses/appartments furnished (and renting appartments furnished is also an exception and not the norm. Even kitchens are empty rooms without cabinets and appliances.). Edit: Even though the AirB'n'B methodology is not perfect, I agree with some of the conclusions. Just like ra…

That is bassically the same here (usa), although we typically include major appliances and cabinets.

However, when houses are put up for sale, they are typically "staged", where the seller will rent furnishings to make it look more homely.

Apartments are more hit and miss. The bigger complexes will often have a show apartment they keep furnished for toors, and may often used a furnished one for their pictures.

Obviously the way you furnish a house for show is not the same way you would to live in it. But it seems like a reasonable approximation of the 'average' sensabilities of the market.

Re: The age of average

#112

Post by masswerk »

SteveDR wrote: post #91
KaiserPro wrote: post #14

Congratulations, you've found fashion. The reason why things were more varied in previous generations is the speed of communications. it took much longer for fashions to permeate through society, this mean that more local variations happened. Now, fashions are almost always global, but they still change at the same rate. The difference being is that they change much more in unison across the globe.

Agreed. Reading this I thought "all of these things are superficial, who cares?" Who cares if movie posters and book titles are converging towards something that markets well? The parts that matter (the content, themes, style, etc) are probably very different among all those books/movies. IMO Fashion like this exists just so that salesmen can convince consumers that they can buy The Current Thing and earn respect fro…

Fashion used to have an important social and cultural function as it provided signals and markers for group alignment in society. As these kept changing periodically, this also gave a chance for realignment and reconsideration. (Compare this to the increasingly-caught-in-the-bubble phenomenon that we experience nowadays.)

E.g., just compare major fashion trends in the 1970s (from mini to maxi, to bell-bottoms, to pants and tube socks & disco attire, to clogs and para jackets, to college look vs. punk) to the major fashion trends of the last decade (slim fit). This variation from season to season, while, of course, invented as a vehicle for marketing, actually provided a vehicle for repositioning in a varying landscape of tribal subcultures that was typical, then.

Re: The age of average

#113

Post by sidewndr46 »

anthomtb wrote: post #70
sidewndr46 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5 over 1 is the result of regulations of various kinds converging resulting in economic pressures dictating that building format. Also unless land is just atrociously expensive, the marginal cost of adding floors doesn't go down. In fact it really goes up at some point. I've still never actually worked out how sewage works in supertall buildings.

I'm no expert but sewage seems rather simple in a tall building. You have gravity on your side so you "just" need longer pipes. Its getting the fresh water up that should get exponentially more difficult as building height increases.

Try dropping a baseball from the 75th floor of a building and watch how hard it hits the ground. You can't just have a sewage vertical going up that high.

Re: The age of average

#114

Post by omginternets »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #101
qwertfisch wrote: post #76

Most comments lean onto the unscientific results about fashion and design, which follows fashion. But the article also displays one categorie that should be independent of fashion and solely rely on creativity: media. This chapter proves the premise with statistics about film grossing and the increasing unoriginality that influences movie plots. When I was a teenager or years 20 to 30, I went to the cinema up to a do…

Film is much less creative. But look at television and you see a different story. We have far more creativity and variety than ever before.

Is it? What do you have in mind?

There’s certainly more television than ever before, but I haven’t seen anything truly novel in a while.

Re: The age of average

#116

Post by quadcore »

Distinctiveness has died

Always was like that and I'll tell you why to the core.

We often speak about how our behaviours are shaped so we could initially survive the saber-toothed tiger - or wild animals. But it's a huge misconception when it comes to the human race. We, human, never feared much the saber-toothed tiger simply because our brain is especially good for planning. So we always planned and hunted the saber-tooth tiger. We dont really fear wild animals that much, there is no need for confirming that simple fact.

So the question is: what does human trully fear? What, would easily kill you? Like really really easily?

We fear being rejected by the group because nothing kills you faster than being rejected by the group. Once you're rejected by the group there is two outcome 1) you're dead already because the group proceeded to beat you to death or 2) you are banned - and now, not only will you face the saber-toothed tiger alone but you will meet other groups that will get socially stronger hunting you.

Get rejected by the group and just like that, you're chance of survival has drop to zero. Or close to it. In the snap of a finger.

And that's what shape our behaviours the most. People fear nothing - nothing - like being rejected. They will lie to not be. They will deny truth, they will mate with anything as long as it's socially strong.

It's not like "we are social", no, it's you die if the group doesnt accept you. Still true today.

Re: The age of average

#117

Post by dragonwriter »

drewcon wrote: post #106

Isn’t this just…Darwinism? We could say the same thing about biological convergence in animals. The average vertebrate animal… Two eyes, two ears, one mouth, one brain, two sexes, five digits, moving around on appendages. It converges because it works.

Your vertebrate example is not convergence, it is non-divergence plus common origin. There are biological examples of convergence (e.g., everything is crab [0]), but that's not one of them.

[0] https://www.popsci.com/story/animals/why-everything-becomes-...

Re: The age of average

#118

Post by fullshark »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #101
qwertfisch wrote: post #76

Most comments lean onto the unscientific results about fashion and design, which follows fashion. But the article also displays one categorie that should be independent of fashion and solely rely on creativity: media. This chapter proves the premise with statistics about film grossing and the increasing unoriginality that influences movie plots. When I was a teenager or years 20 to 30, I went to the cinema up to a do…

Film is much less creative. But look at television and you see a different story. We have far more creativity and variety than ever before.

I don't see any novel TV. The last truly novel TV format was probably the different reality TV formats which exploded 20 years ago and kind of took over everything. Netflix which has dropped billions of dollars on TV basically decided to just copy every format which was successful on cable TV, and has invented nothing novel as far as I can tell except for the interactive TV specials (https://help.netflix.com/en/node/62526) which didn't really seem to take off.

Re: The age of average

#119

Post by jonnycat »

A tangent from the point of the post, but Komar & Melamid did a similar "experiment" with music to produce both the most wanted and most unwanted songs, and the results are amazing/hilarious.

The most unwanted song, for example, features all the thing people dislike in music (according to their surveys): opera singers rapping about cowboys, bagpipes, uncomfortably slow tempos, and choirs of children singing ad jingles among other things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gPuH1yeZ08

Re: The age of average

#120

Post by tsunamifury »

pier25 wrote: post #98
uhtred wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is still not wrong though, despite how you try to science it. Everywhere I look it's too much of the same shit: the instagram clone army of injected lips and fake eyelashes, the same craft ipa on every shelf, the same song released by someone with $$$ lil and x in their name, the same superhero movie with people being thrown through buildings, the same "our food is natural" burger chain.

It's the same that has always happened. Human groups tend to become homogeneous because this helps survival. The difference is now the cultural bubble is global and of course it's completely irrelevant for survival.

No it’s not and stop trying to be smarter by saying it’s always been this way.

Go look at art of different societies from as near as 150 years ago. Spanish, French, English, and American fashion, architecture, and style are wildly different compared to the sea of homeginity of today.

I am tired of hacker news for always having these shallow “smarter than you” sage comments that completely miss the point. It’s just like the article pointed out. At scale here everyone’s comment is “no you’re wrong because [some mundane detail observation that misses the point].” It’s like engineer cognitive scale Markov chain.

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