Tag Archives: lists

Nine fallacies or blurred areas of bicycle advocacy

Posted on by jqr

1. Fundamental attribution error, assuming fallaciously that poor people are not as informed about bicycle transportation as rich people, especially rich people who ride bikes. It is not the case that poor people are unaware that bicycles exist or can be used to go from place to place more cheaply than the bus. It is also not the case that motorists stuck in traffic are unaware that bicycles exist. The flip side of this is the aggressive hunt for people who are absolutely unaware that bicycles exist, who are used as straw men to be set ablaze by the writer’s fiery rhetoric and incendiary logic. See ‘Poor People and Bicycling,’ ‘Despairing Season for Riding a Bicycle.’

2. Subjective worldview, assuming perhaps incorrectly that the advocate’s daily ride is representative of all locals’ daily rides, and therefore that fixing problems along the advocate’s route will make a big difference in ride quality across the city. The other way to conceive of this is to consider the impossibility of ranking poor bicycling conditions across a vast city like New York, especially since truly poor-quality bicycling repels bicyclists, including well-meaning bicycle advocates. See ‘Your Ride is Your Perspective,’ ‘Poor Infrastructure Is Everywhere.’

3. Masochism, or ‘Overcoming Obstacles for Fun.’ Sure, everyone wants to be more virtuous, but bicycling, like most activities, doesn’t make sense for people if it involves too much hassle, discomfort, and frustration. Getting on a bicycle in the wintertime is frustrating and uncomfortable. See ‘Despairing Season for Riding a Bicycle.’ It’s best to recognize this overtly and work on constructive ways to alleviate it, rather than celebrating the suck and hoping that other people are just as masochistic as the advocate. Conversely, masochists fail to celebrate actual joy in the performance of bicycling technique in favor of second-order benefits, like cardiovascular exercise and the ability to perceive the streetscape at pedestrian time-scales. This is tangentially related to Early Adopter Syndrome, in which people who get in on something at the start are consigned to using kludgy, inconvenient equipment to accomplish their goals, while people who start later on benefit from improvements in design. Just think of how much effort and specialized equipment were required in the early 2000s to get one’s bicycle to one’s Manhattan workplace and secure it there; now we have bike share and bikes in buildings!

4. Fighting for inadequate provisions, like these good people complaining that the bike lane on a relatively quiet street hasn’t been repainted, though the street has been marked with a double yellow center line, or this guy suggesting bike paths in highway medians. Oh, the noise! and smell! Let me give you a suggestion. If it would look weird to see a bicycle there, as in “Dad, look! There’s a guy on a bicycle! In the median!” perhaps that’s not the place for a bike lane. Nobody wants to look weird and out of place. Addressing the first issue, is there someone who decided not to bike on Seaman Avenue because the public-works department took away the bicycle lane? Maybe that marginal person on a bike just put the bike back on the balcony and took the bus instead.

5. Focusing on safety promotion instead of bicycle promotion. Assume there is a “safety deficit,” that people feel that bicycling is not safe enough for them to take part. Then, assume that vigorous attention has remedied this safety deficit and it’s not there any more. Bicycling is just as safe as people want it to be. Now, let’s ride! The same marketing campaign to get people into the saddle post-remedy could have been used pre-remedy. How are we in the future going to communicate the safety of bicycling in a way that is not true today? People will get in the bicycle saddle when it makes sense for them to get in the bicycle saddle. Spending time trying to make bicycling safer is a worthwhile way to spend time, but I don’t see how it gets more people into the saddle. See Safety Promotion vs. Bicycle Promotion.

6. Overreliance on imported models. Instead of doing the onerous anthropological work of figuring out who is actually riding a bicycle and how, work that is a natural but perhaps not obvious prerequisite to encouraging more people to ride bicycles, lazy advocates prefer to import models wholesale from the Netherlands and assign them to local populations.  This overlaps somewhat with fundamental attribution bias, especially when zealous Omafiets riders attempt to explain how less doctrinaire bicyclists are doing it wrong by using the bike they had in the garage to commute. Americans are constantly being informed by these kinds of advocates that we are not riding correctly, that all we need is the right kind of neighborhood, the right kind of intersection, the right kind of bike lane, and the right kind of bike and we will be on our bicycles just like the Dutch. Well, yes: if Dutch bicycling is correct then we would do well to build new Hollands everywhere. But if bicycling is so fantastic, why does it have to be done with exactly one kind of bike, and one kind of street? I would prefer to support multiple variations of bicycling technique as I cannot authoritatively pronounce one way better than another.

7. Great expectations from aggregate data. The more people are counted, the more we are supposed to know. But what would we do any differently, knowing 10 times as many people as we thought were using the bike lane? It’s my considered opinion that bicycle infrastructure installation is not particularly dependent on descriptive statistics. The reserve army of bicyclists is not training on rollers, waiting for Mayor De Blasio to build it a bike lane.

8. Measurement bias. Rides that can be measured become the yardstick, and the data that can be conveniently gathered from open data repositories somehow becomes the entire story. I would like to know what the spread and success of local bike shops says for the technique, as local bike shops actually turn bicyclists per se into consumers and job creators, but that data is a lot harder to find. Easier to see how many people are using the local bike share kiosk. This goes along with subjective worldview, as the people who are doing the measuring are the ones providing the worldview.

9. Historical bias, e.g. “Bicycling: Now Safer Than Ever.” Bias toward the past, and what happened in the past, and away from the future, and what we plan to happen. We overvalue the incidents that happened in the past, and neglect to take into account recent interventions to address those incidents, and undervalue what will happen in the future. It took me a while to see this one as its own fallacy. It can be viewed, however, in the inability of safety interventions to change people’s attitudes about the safety of bicycling. Folks will always remember how unsafe it felt the last time they got on a bicycle… in 1999.

Lee Semel’s answer to What are some stupid things that smart people do? – Quora

Posted on by jqr

Engaging in zero sum competitions with other smart people .

There are whole industries – semiconductors, computers, most software, mobile phones – with too many smart people and not enough dumb ones. (Although, we should note that RIM tried to get less smart by having two presidents, and HP has done their part at least twice.)

27 Feb

via quora.com

This part about the zero-sum competitions is pure genius. Link to the Semel post is here: http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-stupid-things-that-smart-people-do/answer/Lee-Semel-10289

‘I noted it down,’ discerning substance in a concrete-free phrase

Posted on by jqr

This week, things have returned to a prior, less solipsistic order, but last week, searching for the words “I noted it down” on one of the larger search engines brought up in the number one spot my post on Casa Azul and its cats, and the role their existence had played in the life of my mind so far.

I spent more than a decade pondering the loss of the list of the names of the cats of the Casa Azul, but now, thanks to the near relatives who went to Mexico City and compiled the list again on my behalf, I am made whole. It’s not the same list of course, but it serves the same purpose, just as the consideration of later front-lines of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers (Terence Blanchard and Donald Harrison, for instance) summons to mind their predecessors in the band (Freddie Hubbard and Jackie McLean, let’s say). Reading the names of the contemporary troop of cats brings generous details of my visit from the nineties to mind, but even in those days when list-less, I survived without being able to recall the little beasts’ names, recalling the memory of having made the list would, like a relay, sharply evoke that visit to Coyoacan.

Some googlenaut had actually searched for “I noted it down,” and found my Casa Azul post. I know this because it popped up in the analytics one day last week, and bewildered me to no end. There’s no concrete noun in the phrase: the association that “I noted it down” would entail in someone’s head was opaque to me, in the way that search-engine fodder like “tub girls” is all too transparent.

And when I looked it up myself, it seemed to me that my original post had relatively quite a lot to say about “I noted it down.” There wasn’t, for instance, a great famous quote that had escaped the mind of the search-engine user.

The clip that has replaced mine at the top of the list is this: “He gave me the date and I noted it down. And EXACTLY five years later, it happened.” Here it is the prescience of having noted the date that is being remarked upon (I guess; I haven’t read through the linked page; I prefer not to disturb the perfect opacity of this particular text by reading it).

Here’s the second link:

Then i walked in a shop and bought a diary and two black sketchpens to note the things down that i will do on the day. I was actually not trying to welcome 2009 but i was a little sad for 2008, and i think that is why i was perplexed.…I noted it down in the diary.

—from the first post on http://abhinavyadav.com/blog/

This “I noted it down” quote includes the context of the noting: it’s done in a special diary, with a special pen. I particularly like the idea of perplexity (a word that I will always associate with Professor Cuthbert Calculus) coming on the heels of auld-lang-syne–style sadness. In this case, and strictly for myself, “I noted it down” is a kind of four-word emotion organ emulator, an ALT-text version of some strange invention out of a Jack Vance book, that creates perplexing sense-harmonies from the sequential interplay of different emotions.

So, “I noted it down.” Whatever the object it is, it has somehow returned to mind in the mind of the writer: the phrase laces an episode from the past tightly to the present: “I noted it down then and have returned to it now.” It’s making a list, paying attention, keeping tabs on something.

In the Casa Azul post, I saw “I noted it down” as an identity-building trope: this was something that I did, and that on some perplexing level was a form of identification: I make lists of things that uniquely interest Jonathan, therefore I am Jonathan. Now, I see the phrase as a way to connect the often mystifying present with a clearer, better defined past. I don’t know what’s going on right now, but my clear description of this one certain event in the past can be used as a lens to focus that busy present.

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‘She bought screwdrivers, iron files, hacksaw blades and hammers; baling wire, nylon twine and bungee cords.’ –M. Connelly

Posted on by jqr

The pleasures of reading mass-market literature extend to the
simplicity with which you can excerpt your favorite parts for later
commentary. As you can see from the first attached picture, forty-nine
out of the 50 chapters of Michael Connelly’s Void Moon remained
in the airplane where I read them. I saved chapter 5, which has the
best writing in the entire book.
 
The list can function as a shortcut to good writing. It’s all nouns,
and no prescriptivist, not even Elmore Leonard, would suggest that you could improve your
writing by leaving the nouns out. A good list creates a minimal,
dynamic, ready-for-action mood, quite like the mood of Void
Moon that this chapter introduces. Cassie Black has decided to
rededicate her life to crime. Connelly provides one last simile
(though he confuses the role of arteries and veins) before crossing
the Rubicon into list territory:

The charge of outlaw juice was boiling in her blood now, banging through her veins like hot water through frozen winter pipes.

 She began by changing her body clock, dramatically shortening her sleeping hours and pushing them well into the morning. She offset the sleep deprivation with a regimen of energy-enhancing vitamins…Within a week she had dropped from seven to four hours of sleep per night.…

 After carefully making a list of every conceivable thing that would help her overcome any obstacle on a job, she memorized its contents and destroyed it…

 She bought screwdrivers, iron files, hacksaw blades and hammers; baling wire, nylon twine and bungee cords. She bought a box of latex gloves, a small tub of earthquake wax, a Swiss Army knife and a painter’s putty knife with a three-inch-wide blade. She bought a small acetylene torch and went to three hardware stores before finding a small enough battery-powered and rechargeable drill. She bought rubber-tipped pliers, wire cutters and aluminum shears. She added a Polaroid camera and a man’s long-sleeved wetsuit top to her purchases. She bought big and small flashlights, a pair of tile worker’s knee pads and an electric stun gun. She bought a black leather backpack, a black fanny pack and belt, and several black zipper bags of varying sizes that could be folded and carried inside one of the backpack’s pockets. Lastly, in every store she went to she bought a keyed padlock, amassing a collection of seven locks made by seven different manufacturers and thereby containing seven slightly different interior locking mechanisms.

 You couldn’t write an entire book like this, but it makes a nice
change from the following paragraph, which in its subjunctive mood is
echt Connolly. His characters are always introspectively
calculating the angles and predicting their lots thereby:

If the tool satchel were ever discovered by Thelma Kibble or any other law enforcement officer, Cassie would have a degree of deniability that might keep her out of lockdown. The car was not hers. Without prints on the tools or evidence of her having purchased and made them, it ultimately could not be proved that they belonged to her. They could hold her and sweat her but they would eventually have to let her go.

One of these days I am going to crack open Jacques Ellul’s The
Technological Society again and drawing on his distinctions between
craft and technique, write a big academic treatise on the false
techno-realism of thriller novels. If I knew so much about what it
took to break into a Las Vegas hotel room, I would be doing it myself
and not writing novels about it. Luckily the march of progress makes
books like Void Moon, from the late 90s, seem as hopelessly
anchored in the past as Sherlock Holmes’s exploits in Arthur Conan
Doyle’s The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans

Identity and lost lists

Posted on by jqr

via flickr.com

Bombon, Murros, Silvestre, Chupa Chupa, Tita, and Monica

These are the names of the six cats at Casa Azul. There’s a story here.

When I went to Mexico City the first time, in 1995, I stopped by Casa Azul, Frida Kahlo’s house in the Coyoacan neighborhood. It’s a pleasant dwelling, with a copy of Inside Europe by John Gunther on the bookshelf (same as in my house!), and a pre-Columbian pyramid, scaled down and painted blue (not the same as in my house).

There were also several cats prowling around. I asked one of the groundskeepers what their names were, and I assiduously copied them down in my little pocket notebook. In the fourteen intervening years, the notebook has been lost, and with it this important historical record.

The fact of losing the list placed it front and center in one of my better literary efforts, “La liste de listes perdues.” I wrote this up as the last entry to date in La fièvre Madiaba, my French-language blog from earlier in the decade. For those of you who can’t read French, in 2006, while in Paris, I struck up an acquaintance with this French author who was putting together a book about lists. I thought for a couple of days on the subject, and then came up with my idea: a list of lost lists. There are 10 of them, some of which have since been found and others which remain in a state of latency.

So when the folks went to Mexico City and asked me for suggestions, I thought for a minute and said, “Hey! Here’s something that you can really help me out with. I lost my list of names of cats at the Casa Azul. Can you visit and get me the current list?”

Et voilà! Bombon, Murros, Silvestre, Chupa Chupa, Tita, and Monica.

But now, three years since “Liste de listes perdues” and 14 years since the visit to Casa Azul, I am reconsidering the whole list-making enterprise as something very dear to me and my identity. I was there, at the Casa Azul. I made an observation (cats!) and noted it down.

This is the same thing I’ve been doing with my cycling: I was there, out back of the airfield, riding fast (how fast?), and I noted it down.

But what is the identity-building part? Is it the object (the thing listed), the subject (my list-making habits), or the verb (the act of making the list) that makes me feel more thoroughly myself?

picture via flickr.com from Sophie Cunningham