BBC Archive
Published 17 Jun 2023Russian moon landings, week long traffic jams, a workforce replaced by automation and above all, too much leisure time!
These are just some of the bold predictions made in Don Haworth’s 1963 BBC “mockumentary” Time on Our Hands – a remarkable film which projects the viewer a quarter of a century into the future.
Imagine how the futuristic inhabitants of 1988 — a society freed from the shackles of endless hard work — might reflect on the way people live and work in 1963. Its aim is to look back at the extraordinary, almost unbelievable, events of the intervening 25 years — referred to as “the years of the transformation”.
“This Buoyant programme could be repeated a dozen times and still intrigue, delight and disturb me”
Dennis Potter, Daily Herald TV critic, 1963This footage is compiled of excerpts from Time On Our Hands, a faux-documentary film by Don Haworth.
Originally broadcast 19 March, 1963.
June 19, 2023
1963: Mockumentary Predicts The Future of 1988 | Time On Our Hands | Past Predictions | BBC
Patterns of incompetence
In Palladium, Harold Robertson says that complex systems that we all depend on will not have the resilience to survive our society-wide failure of competence:
Graphic for Rhode Island College’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
At a casual glance, the recent cascades of American disasters might seem unrelated. In a span of fewer than six months in 2017, three U.S. Naval warships experienced three separate collisions resulting in 17 deaths. A year later, powerlines owned by PG&E started a wildfire that killed 85 people. The pipeline carrying almost half of the East Coast’s gasoline shut down due to a ransomware attack. Almost half a million intermodal containers sat on cargo ships unable to dock at Los Angeles ports. A train carrying thousands of tons of hazardous and flammable chemicals derailed near East Palestine, Ohio. Air Traffic Control cleared a FedEx plane to land on a runway occupied by a Southwest plane preparing to take off. Eye drops contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria killed four and blinded fourteen.
While disasters like these are often front-page news, the broader connection between the disasters barely elicits any mention. America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a credit card issued by the banking system. All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.
The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems. At its inception, it represented a break from the trend of the 1920s to the 1960s, when the direct meritocratic evaluation of competence became the norm across vast swaths of American society.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, the idea that individuals should be systematically evaluated and selected based on their ability rather than wealth, class, or political connections, led to significant changes in selection techniques at all levels of American society. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) revolutionized college admissions by allowing elite universities to find and recruit talented students from beyond the boarding schools of New England. Following the adoption of the SAT, aptitude tests such as Wonderlic (1936), Graduate Record Examination (1936), Army General Classification Test (1941), and Law School Admission Test (1948) swept the United States. Spurred on by the demands of two world wars, this system of institutional management electrified the Tennessee Valley, created the first atom bomb, invented the transistor, and put a man on the moon.
By the 1960s, the systematic selection for competence came into direct conflict with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement. During the period from 1961 to 1972, a series of Supreme Court rulings, executive orders, and laws — most critically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — put meritocracy and the new political imperative of protected-group diversity on a collision course. Administrative law judges have accepted statistically observable disparities in outcomes between groups as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination. The result has been clear: any time meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority.
The resulting norms have steadily eroded institutional competency, causing America’s complex systems to fail with increasing regularity. In the language of a systems theorist, by decreasing the competency of the actors within the system, formerly stable systems have begun to experience normal accidents at a rate that is faster than the system can adapt. The prognosis is harsh but clear: either selection for competence will return or America will experience devolution to more primitive forms of civilization and loss of geopolitical power.
H/T to Theophilus Chilton for the link.
Why Rivers Move
Practical Engineering
Published 7 Mar 2023The basics of fluvial geomorphology (the science behind the shape of rivers)
Errata: At 11:54, the slope equation is inverted.
We’ve teamed up with @emriver, a company that makes physical river models called stream tables, to create a two-part series on the science and engineering behind why river channels shift and meander and what tools engineers use to manage the process.
(more…)
QotD: Nietzsche’s view of women
… women, as a sex, are shrewd, resourceful, and acute; but the very fact that they are always concerned with imminent problems and that, in consequence, they are unaccustomed to dealing with the larger riddles of life, makes their mental attitude essentially petty. […] Women’s constant thought is, not to lay down broad principles of right and wrong; not to place the whole world in harmony with some great scheme of justice; […] but to deceive, influence, sway and please men. Normally, their weakness makes masculine protection necessary to their existence and to the exercise of their overpowering maternal instinct, and so their whole effort is to obtain this protection in the easiest way possible. The net result is that feminine morality is a morality of opportunism and imminent expediency, and that the normal woman has no respect for, and scarcely a conception of abstract truth. Thus is proved a fact noted by Schopenhauer and many other observers: that a woman seldom manifests any true sense of justice or of honor.
H.L. Mencken, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, 1913.
