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The age of average

alexmurrell.co.uk

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Re: The age of average

#421

Post by bobthepanda »

nine_k wrote: post #400
bobthepanda wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird and interesting are a part of individual behavior, and unfortunately our economy is trending towards more consolidation. The urban streetscapes of older cities are dominated by very similar buildings, but often the differentiation is not just a result of the architecture but of the tenants. You have multiple buildings, multiple landlords, and multiple tenants, and the combinatoric permutations of all of them pr…

Isn't this one of the points that the article is making?

No, the five over one section mostly talks about architectural choices, which is important to a degree.

This is more of an elaboration; people don’t see architectural renders when they walk down the street, they see the combination of building and tenant.

The most obvious manifestation of this is storefront areas; in old shopping districts in New York you’ll see a variety of awning shapes and colors, whereas in newer developments if you are even allowed to have one they must match every other one on the building.

Re: The age of average

#422

Post by eimrine »

pixl97 wrote: post #392
eimrine wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would dare say that 99.99999% of keyboard users expect a similar layout. Why don't they expect the best one? Seems like the 99.99999% of users are fooled by monkeys and bananas on ceiling experiment. I can not name that amount of people just idiots but if your upper-home row consist a word "typewriter" I consider your choice as definitely not wise.

>Why don't they expect the best one? Best is multi-dimensional, so please tell me 'best what'. Is 'best' affordable? Is 'best' compatible with what I learned without invested more time in learning something new? Is 'best' something that's going to live far beyond it's usefulness based on it's cost? Is 'best' something you can't hand to someone else and have them use it?

> Is 'best' affordable?

Yes. Exactly as what we are having, no extra keys or extra something, we are talking about different placing of same keys so I surprised to see this question.

> Is 'best' compatible with what I learned without invested more time in learning something new?

Well, why (in ideal world) the kbd supplier has to consider the needs of not wise people? If you really have learned Qwerty you will not even noticed a different paint on the keys.

> Is 'best' something that's going to live far beyond it's usefulness based on it's cost?

It is best in the sense that the best side of knife for cutting bread is the sharp one but it is one of the worst ones for holding the knife.

> Is 'best' something you can't hand to someone else and have them use it?

Any idea may be shared among minds.

Re: The age of average

#424

Post by [deleted] »

citizenpaul wrote: post #387
groby_b wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a core point. It most stuck out to me when the article talked about car colors - most cars are black or white because car makers mostly make black or white . Buying a car with a splash of color is hard. Red is your best chance. Followed by butt-ugly blues. You cannot meaningfully choose according to your taste because choice is restricted. (Related, try to buy furniture that isn't a fucking cheap imitation of…

Safety is an under appreciated function of car color. I've had a number of same looking cars of different color. I noticed that driving a white version results in substantially less near miss/near accidents while driving. I will only buy white cars now because of this. I'm tired of dodging inattentive drivers that are sleepdriving through their commute or whatever they are doing besides driving.

[deleted]

Re: The age of average

#425

Post by brnaftr361 »

naijaboiler wrote: post #259
titzer wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even if those things have converged aesthetically? But they haven't converged aesthetically any more than preferences have been absolutely overwritten , overridden , and overprinted by whatever is most easy to produce today. Your comment somewhat assumes that where we are is the ultimate endpoint of some long process, when in reality fads come and go. Tastes change. What is out there now is no more inevitable than…

the push towards homogenous zeitgest has always existed. I think what's more accentuated in the modern times, is the world-wide convergence because we have made communication across vast geographical areas instantenous. with modern phones, and internet, everyone everywhere pretty much has visual access to the same things. Now convergence is not just local, it's global in scope.

This is an interesting point, but I disagree that it has been around forever. I'd posit this is elementary of the state. But the state emerged not so long ago in an otherwise massive tract of history. And as to globalism, that's only somewhat correct. There are pieces of antiquity found all throughout the world, indicative of huge trade networks. Feathers from South America found on the East Coast of North America and artifacts of the Indus Valley people found in Western Europe. The speed at which that happens is, I don't think, particularly relevant. Even once in possession of such information the consequences are seldom manifest immediately. It's as much about maintaining the status quo and hierarchical stability as it is the process of civil evolution.

And it's easy to explain why: the more similar people are the more predictable and thus more controllable they become. Anyone in a position of power would love it if every word spoken was agreed upon and acted out as if their imagination was manifest. If every element of a given state was mechanistic rather than organic. Of course businesses are little states in their own way.

An interesting [unsourced] aside: I remember some comedian talking about their comeup, and that once they had what they wanted they became depressed. Telling the same jokes to different crowds and getting the same laughs over and over again. Peering into how easily people can be won, manipulated... I think it was Birbiglia. Be careful what you wish for, I guess.

Re: The age of average

#426

Post by fomine3 »

efsavage wrote: post #383
ryandrake wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if they had to ultra-optimize the aerodynamics so all the cars look like the same bar of soap (they don't have to), they could still at least paint the damn soap a different color. But, no. All you see coming out of the factory are white, silver, gray, black, the occasional red and the occasional blue. What's driving this? That's what the article is about. Is it actually pull from customers, or is it push from t…

> What's driving this? That's what the article is about. Is it actually pull from customers, or is it push from the manufacturers? It's both. Most people don't want a gray car as their first choice, but it's probably more people's second choice than a real color. So red cars sit on the lot for 15.3 days, blue ones for 14.2, and gray for 11.6. Obviously (in MBA terms) the dealer, should order more gray cars. So they s…

It should be true for the US that customer can't order a specific car. But other markets also like boring colors.

Interesting to see worldwide research (PDF) https://www.axalta.com/content/dam/New%20Axalta%20Corporate%...

Re: The age of average

#427

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

titzer wrote: post #367
epups wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure, maybe its just nostalgia, but there were plenty of trends and aesthetics from my younger years that are just nowhere to be found. Why? Because when people renovate, they go with the aesthetic de jure, what's available and what the social pressures are. Hardly anyone is going to renovate a 1980s basement and put in...1980s carpet. And were people in the 1980s using furniture from the 1940s when they renovated?…

> embrace the fact that things change and will always change. Living in a European city for a few years got me thinking about what the sources of changes are. Everything, and I mean everything requires maintenance, or it will crumble into dust. That maintenance is like a running cost. For (what we consider today to be) high-value jewels of the past, we pay this cost, because we like having these amazing things--like…

Just to be a devil's advocate: yes, construction in the US generally doesn't last as long as in the "old world". But on the other hand, look at how hard it is to take a beautiful 17th century stone building and make it as energy efficient as modern construction. Same with just about every other internal quality-of-life feature - the old building wins on feng shui and other ineffable valuations, but fails in terms of every day to day and efficiency/cost metric. Yes, it can seem stupid to be tearing down and rebuilding a 50-100 old house when you compare it to old-world behavior, but building technology has moved along at a pace almost as rapid as computational tech, and there's an argument to be made for benefitting from that rather than being hamstrung by "old beauty".

Re: The age of average

#428

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

trgn wrote: post #355
GauntletWizard wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like weird shit a lot more than the next guy, and I think you're being pointlessly melodramatic about it. Convergent evolution of tastes is not the same as fascism.

It's much worse. It's global submission to the machine, which is not even a political project. What is easy, convenient, efficient, from a machine perspective, therefore is aspirational, desirable, wholesome from a human perspective. This is what's happening. We are all becoming widgets, that is to say, mere participants in bureaucracies, cogs in mechanized processes. Compare the existential dread people experienced…

To repeat the question a couple of levels up: how would you differentiate convergence on the best (so far) solutions from "submission to the machine" ?

The outdoor gear (hiking, camping, cycling) that I use today is an order of magnitude better than the stuff I used in the 1970s. And even though the brands vary (to some degree) worldwide, the designs, features, and materials have pretty much converged everywhere. Goretex (or something like it) is better than PU-coated nylon. Angle-cut wrists with velcro closures just do work better than loose or elastic wrists. Internal frame backpacks are lighter, more comfortable and in just about every way superior to the old external frame designs. A tent that weighs 2/3 or even 1/2 of a tent from 1980 is a better tent for everything except car camping, and contemporary tents are much better at dealing with wind loads.

I could go on for a long time. How do we differentiate improvements like this, spread across the globe to the point of uniformity, from your "submission to the machine" ?

Re: The age of average

#430

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

eestrada wrote: post #413
majormajor wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at etsy or the long list of artists on Spotify putting out music without hitting the mainstream radio, I'm not convinced the world has converged everywhere. I have far more variety that appeals to me available to me than ever before - and so does a person with opposite tastes. Expensive to build or change things have - houses or cars - but art or more commodity products have fractured. The people/media one is…

To bolster this point, the bestselling album of all time is still Michael Jackson's Thriller, released in 1982. So it has been literally over 40 years and nothing else has topped that for mainstream popularity, musically speaking. It has sold over 70 million copies. The next nearest album is AC/DC's Back in Black, released in 1980, at 50 million copies, a 20 million copy difference. A present day musician would be ov…

Even better, not only has nothing "topped" Thriller for mainstream popularity, it was also never really "copied" in any meaningful sense. The same is true of many of the most popular works of ... popular ... art. Yes, Thriller had quite an influence on pop-dance music when it came out, but who can name a single song about which the first thing anyone says is "oh, that's just like from Thriller"
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