It's actually an achievement in its own right, it wasn't a 8 lane road bridge, it was a fucking walkway, maybe 10 meters long. If they laid down a pair of tree trunks and hammered a few planks on it, it would last hundreds of years.
I feel like this is what happens when you want to copy something you don't understand, and thereby only get the trappings of it.
Because it looks like they wanted a "modern" bridge to make them look more advanced and smart, but had no idea how those work. Rather than sticking with what they know, like tree trunks.
In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.
For anyone that sees this, the whole article is an interesting read. This part really stood out to me:
And I thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy it would have been to check on them by noticing that nothing really worked.) So I found things that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of how to educate. There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you’ll see the reading scores keep going down—or hardly going up—in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods. There’s a witch doctor remedy that doesn’t work. It ought to be looked into: how do they know that their method should work? Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress—lots of theory, but no progress—in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.
Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience. A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way—or is even fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one. Or a parent of bad boys, after disciplining them in one way or another, feels guilty for the rest of her life because she didn’t do “the right thing,” according to the experts.
So we really ought to look into theories that don’t work, and science that isn’t science.
Obviously I like this speech since I linked it, but I also can't help but wonder where Feynman would have stood if he were alive 2 years ago. Probably for the best he didn't live that long for us to find out.
Right, that's one of the most extreme versions but you see it everywhere. Most videos of tribal people meeting with whites for the first time you can see this play out in real time, and for years after.
Most of Africa today is built on the idea. Its why there is always just something slightly off about a lot of their "modern" elements.
Read Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman. It's an extremely easy read. A sampling:
• Feynman gives a commencement speech at a SA university where he tells everyone, students and faculty, they're retarded, except the one guy who turns out to be a German exchange student.
• A PUA acquaintance tells him how to get women. He tries it and it works. Feynman concludes the guy is probably right, but it feels unsporting, so Feynman never tries it again.
• He tries to put forth the 'critical thinking' meme, but most of his math stories are about how memorizing way too much ended up saving the day.
• He was such a good lockbreaker at Los Alamos that engineers would ask him to open file cabinets of people who were away rather than wait for the owners to return. He would have to sit in an empty office for 20 minutes with the door closed doing nothing to make sure he didn't accidentally open the locks too quickly.
A PUA acquaintance tells him how to get women. He tries it and it works. Feynman concludes the guy is probably right, but it feels unsporting, so Feynman never tries it again.
Like pushing deer. It works every time, but doesn't seem fair.
Man, I should reread that book, it was great. There's also a really funny story where he's asked to review some plans for a new facility. He has no idea what he's looking at, so he just randomly points at a spot and asks "Why is this here?". The architects take a look, pause for a while, and go "Oh wow, you're right, that makes no sense! You're a genius, Mr. Feynman!"
Well, now you see how many rituals came about. Something worked before (or seemed to work because of coincidence), but for some reason, it doesn't any more, but that doesn't matter, because the people forgot the real reason behind WHY they were doing that ritual many generations ago, anyway.
The nature of rituals is that they're a way for smart people to encode their wisdom in such a way as to be useful for not smart people. But the problem is that the smart people don't themselves always understand why the ritual works.
Or as a former engineer boss told me many years ago when I was describing some problem I was working on where I didn't understand how the solution worked: "you're an engineer: you don't have to understand how it works as long as it does".
You may not like it, but a lot of machines in history were developed by people who didn't work the math out first.
And even if they wanted to, sometimes the vendor doesn't want to give you (or themselves doesn't have) the information you need to do so. "Just use another vendor who will" you say. Well unfortunately they're the only one whose product meets all these other non-negotiable requirements.
It is truly a miracle that civilization doesn't collapse daily.
Imagine your tribe lives in a place where your water is seasonally bad.
Once or few times a year a lot of people get sick and start shiting and puking themselves to death. So you bang some drums and waft some smoke over them to drive the bad spirits out.
Maybe half of them have a good enough immune system to weather it, so they recover. And just like the drum banging and smoke cure dysentery/cholera/typhoid, at least some times.
"This design makes no sense, we can't use it!" "But the Americans designed it, so there must be something awesome about it!" "Okay, but we're gonna un-retard it as much as we can." (years and billions of rubles pass) "Wait, it was just a retarded design?"
"Any idiot can build a bridge that never collapses, it takes an engineer to build one that just barely doesn't collapse" is the common form of that saying.
Though as we're finding out that isn't quite correct: not any idiot can build a bridge that doesn't collapse. For example the HR lady who fires a Civil Engineer for being "culturally insensitive" certainly can't.
In our lifetimes I suspect we'll be learning that lesson the hard way.
That just strikes me as bad engineering frankly. When I build things for others to use, I dont' want them to just barely work, I want them to be robust and durable.
It's about efficiency. You're being Stunning And Brave by spending 10x more to build your overly robust and durable thing. The parade in your honor will be held tomorrow at Noon.
We still revere the structures built thousands of years ago that are still standing because they weren't built with this misguided notion of "efficiency". They are marvels of engineering, construction and craftsmanship.
Efficiency has its place, but blind worship of it is an illness of the modern era.
It's actually an achievement in its own right, it wasn't a 8 lane road bridge, it was a fucking walkway, maybe 10 meters long. If they laid down a pair of tree trunks and hammered a few planks on it, it would last hundreds of years.
I feel like this is what happens when you want to copy something you don't understand, and thereby only get the trappings of it.
Because it looks like they wanted a "modern" bridge to make them look more advanced and smart, but had no idea how those work. Rather than sticking with what they know, like tree trunks.
Cargo Cult Science, from 1974:
For anyone that sees this, the whole article is an interesting read. This part really stood out to me:
Obviously I like this speech since I linked it, but I also can't help but wonder where Feynman would have stood if he were alive 2 years ago. Probably for the best he didn't live that long for us to find out.
Given how he handled the Challenger report, I think he would've done us proud.
First paragraph: Arm the people.
Second: Spank the children.
Done.
Right, that's one of the most extreme versions but you see it everywhere. Most videos of tribal people meeting with whites for the first time you can see this play out in real time, and for years after.
Most of Africa today is built on the idea. Its why there is always just something slightly off about a lot of their "modern" elements.
Read Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman. It's an extremely easy read. A sampling:
• Feynman gives a commencement speech at a SA university where he tells everyone, students and faculty, they're retarded, except the one guy who turns out to be a German exchange student.
• A PUA acquaintance tells him how to get women. He tries it and it works. Feynman concludes the guy is probably right, but it feels unsporting, so Feynman never tries it again.
• He tries to put forth the 'critical thinking' meme, but most of his math stories are about how memorizing way too much ended up saving the day.
• He was such a good lockbreaker at Los Alamos that engineers would ask him to open file cabinets of people who were away rather than wait for the owners to return. He would have to sit in an empty office for 20 minutes with the door closed doing nothing to make sure he didn't accidentally open the locks too quickly.
Like pushing deer. It works every time, but doesn't seem fair.
Man, I should reread that book, it was great. There's also a really funny story where he's asked to review some plans for a new facility. He has no idea what he's looking at, so he just randomly points at a spot and asks "Why is this here?". The architects take a look, pause for a while, and go "Oh wow, you're right, that makes no sense! You're a genius, Mr. Feynman!"
Well, now you see how many rituals came about. Something worked before (or seemed to work because of coincidence), but for some reason, it doesn't any more, but that doesn't matter, because the people forgot the real reason behind WHY they were doing that ritual many generations ago, anyway.
The nature of rituals is that they're a way for smart people to encode their wisdom in such a way as to be useful for not smart people. But the problem is that the smart people don't themselves always understand why the ritual works.
Or as a former engineer boss told me many years ago when I was describing some problem I was working on where I didn't understand how the solution worked: "you're an engineer: you don't have to understand how it works as long as it does".
Holy fuck, that sounds like a really dangerous attitude for engineers.
That just further degraded my trust in .. a lot of things.
You may not like it, but a lot of machines in history were developed by people who didn't work the math out first.
And even if they wanted to, sometimes the vendor doesn't want to give you (or themselves doesn't have) the information you need to do so. "Just use another vendor who will" you say. Well unfortunately they're the only one whose product meets all these other non-negotiable requirements.
It is truly a miracle that civilization doesn't collapse daily.
Life's a Skinner Box, and we all bob our heads and press button when the lights flicker.
Imagine your tribe lives in a place where your water is seasonally bad.
Once or few times a year a lot of people get sick and start shiting and puking themselves to death. So you bang some drums and waft some smoke over them to drive the bad spirits out.
Maybe half of them have a good enough immune system to weather it, so they recover. And just like the drum banging and smoke cure dysentery/cholera/typhoid, at least some times.
Saw a YouTube video on it a while back. The wooden facsimiles are surprisingly well done.
Ah so the Soviet space program in the 80s.
"This design makes no sense, we can't use it!" "But the Americans designed it, so there must be something awesome about it!" "Okay, but we're gonna un-retard it as much as we can." (years and billions of rubles pass) "Wait, it was just a retarded design?"
sad Buran noises
In engineering, they say the trick is not building a bridge that stays up, but one that barely avoids collapsing.
"Any idiot can build a bridge that never collapses, it takes an engineer to build one that just barely doesn't collapse" is the common form of that saying.
Though as we're finding out that isn't quite correct: not any idiot can build a bridge that doesn't collapse. For example the HR lady who fires a Civil Engineer for being "culturally insensitive" certainly can't.
In our lifetimes I suspect we'll be learning that lesson the hard way.
That just strikes me as bad engineering frankly. When I build things for others to use, I dont' want them to just barely work, I want them to be robust and durable.
It's about efficiency. You're being Stunning And Brave by spending 10x more to build your overly robust and durable thing. The parade in your honor will be held tomorrow at Noon.
We still revere the structures built thousands of years ago that are still standing because they weren't built with this misguided notion of "efficiency". They are marvels of engineering, construction and craftsmanship.
Efficiency has its place, but blind worship of it is an illness of the modern era.
It's all about efficiency.
At least it was a tiny tragedy.
The ribbon was a structural element
LOL LOAD-BEARING RED RIBBON-CUTTING
It's a load bearing ribbon
Why are they having a ribbon cutting for a literal ditch bridge? Is this that much of an achievement in their country?
Also huge lol at the army guys standing around not knowing what to do.
Diversity hires?
So the next job they get at a london or toronto based engineering firm will likely be a diversity hire, right?
That's generous. It went down literally the instant it opened.
Bridge has no pile or column to support and distribute the load.
Geez.
i wonder how humanity would be if only africa and sub-saharan africans exists.what kinda advancements we would have.
Kinshasa or Marseille, or is it Detroit? Maby it's London bridge is falling down, 2030 edition remix.
Did you hear the narrator comment about "sharply suited dignitaries"? And he's serious.///
Also I want to know many $millions in foreign aid this project cost.
Are these the engineers and doctors feminists keep telling us we're getting with illegal migrants from these places?
The ribbon must have been an integral part of the structure
How the hell can you not build a foot bridge
Oops.
The ceremonial ribbon was the only thing holding it together.