Why Do American Houses Have So Many Bathrooms? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/why-do-american-houses-have-so-many-bathrooms/605338/ <comment> as-j I've lived in a 1 bathroom house in the US and i said never again. It was one of the first things I looked at when buying a house overseas as well, and it served me well.

Problems with a single bathroom which includes the toilet:

If you have kids, everyone is fighting over a scarce resource in the morning. Showering/shaving/etc all takes time and you're all leaving in a narrow window.

If you don't have kids the people buying the house may, and they will care. It makes selling the house so much harder.

The bathroom _must_ be cleaned to be guest ready, and they get to accidentally snoop through everything. I love my ensuite for this reason. (and if you don't care about it being clean, your partner probably does)

If you have the room, why not have an extra bathroom? So much easier to build in new construction than add later.

When I lived in Australia the toilet was in a separate room, so the 4 bedroom house worked ok with only 2 bathrooms. The toilet wasn't blocked/held hostage by someone taking a shower. (washing your hands on the other hand...) But this also helped sell the place, since with 2 full bathrooms you can have kids/house mates/etc.

My current house has 3 baths with 4 bedrooms. One is in the in-law suite, which I airbnb, so we have 2 on the main floor. It makes 2 baths for 3 bedrooms. This feels like a nice "adult" house. We have a spare rooms for house guests, and they have a full bathroom they can use. This means we can host friends/family for days/weeks and we can be annoyed by their personality, instead of annoyed fighting over a bathroom. ;)

Of all the weird things in the US, a house having "too many" bathrooms really doesn't seem like a problem.

<comment><USER2> I grew up in a 1 bathroom house until I was 14 or so. 1 bathroom for a family of 4 was rough. If anything ever broke (which it did because the house was old), and it's a full on emergency. Having to drive 15 minutes to use bathroom and take a shower at a family members was a common occurrence.

My current house has 3 full bathrooms which is really too many for just my wife and I. But, the extra bathroom has come in handy as we have remodeled over time.

<comment><USER3> Friendly, unnecessary, pedantry: "for just my wife and me".

"I" is used when it is in subject position. Occasionally, the rule is a little bit obscure ("He does it better than I", where the subject position is implicit ("better than I do it")).

This grammar error is becoming very common even among well-educated writers and speakers, in the US at least. It must be stopped!

<comment><USER4> Probably because of the far more atrocious "me and my wife" grammar error.

Edit: Wait, "for my wife and I" was a grammatical error?! The fuck? Fuck the rules! That's a stupid rule.

<comment><USER5> Would you say "for me" or "for I"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > But the U.S. wasn't always so profusely bathroomed. In the past half > century, the number of bathrooms per person in America has _doubled_. "We > went from two people per bathroom to one person per bathroom in the last 50 > years," says Jeff Tucker, an economist at Zillow. "That's amazing, because > postwar America was already rich and booming, and we just, you know, kept > building more bathrooms." Across the country, bathrooms are > multiplying—including in apartments and condos—even as American families and > households are getting smaller.

The article misses a major point here which explains much (though not all) of the trend: household sizes have decreased dramatically in the last 50 years, and the number of single-person households has increased dramatically. Single- person households can generally be expected to have at least one bathroom per person, and small households will generally have higher ratios than large households.

In 1960 single-person households were about 13% of all households; they have more than doubled, to about 28% in 2019 [1]. In 1960 the average household size was about 3.3; in 2019 it was 2.5 [2].

[1] [https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizat...](https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizations/time- series/demo/families-and-households/hh-4.pdf)

[2] [https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizat...](https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizations/time- series/demo/families-and-households/hh-6.pdf)

<comment><USER7> > _postwar America was already rich and booming,_

It was booming, and it was richer than it ever had been, but it was very poor by today's standards.

GDP per person in 1950 was 27% of the 2019 level.

And since this _always_ has to be pointed out: That _is_ adjusted for inflation.

[https://www.multpl.com/us-real-gdp-per-capita/table/by- year](https://www.multpl.com/us-real-gdp-per-capita/table/by-year)

<comment> re-actor There's a LOT more to wealth than GDP/person, saying postwar america wasn't rich is absurd.

<comment><USER8> exactly. The economy didn't need to support so many restaurants and food services when most people cooked at home. People also mostly entertained themselves or spent time with friends/family. Moving all that to a company or service will raise the GDP.

<comment><USER9> Plus childcare and eldercare. Take those and the ones you mention into account, and GDP/person has probably dropped since the 1950s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As for bathrooms in modern US inner city apartments, I believe it's mainly because many bathrooms allow the apartments to be shared by several flatmates. For the developer, it opens the market to more buyers.

American dwellings are larger than European Union ones for several reasons:

\- Most US homes are new: All over Europe, people live in much older housing and apartment stock. Go back to 1940, and the US only had a 130 million population, which typically lived in large families in shared houses. In 1940, the European population (excluding Russia) was already 420 million. Thus, whereas the US population has more than doubled since then, the European population has only increased some 50 percent. This meant construction of far more dwellings in the US in the large 80 years.

\- Eastern Europe: Eastern Europe has been much poorer than the US during the last 80 years with people largely living in apartments.

\- Space: The US simply has more space per capita. We are 500 million in the European Union (for a few days more) in an area half the size of the US.

\- Sprawl: The great US population expansion coincided with the automobile revolution allowing for people to live in suburbs far from city centers, which in turn allowed for larger houses.

\- White flight: Europe never had an exodus from city centers comparable to the US.

\- Materials: Europeans live in brick and mortar houses or concrete buildings. American houses are made of wood and are cheaper to construct allowing for larger homes.

<comment><USER11> > in an area half the size of the US.

Is that so? Europe seems to have slightly more than 10 million square kilometers in area and the US slightly less than that. Europe is certainly more fragmented, but looking at thetruesize.com, one can use a better area preserving map projection and it seems that Europe has more space.

(I still agree with your points in general though.)

<comment><USER10> The EU (with 500 million people) is around half the size of the US. Europe including the land outside of the EU is much larger, as it includes vast areas in the former Soviet Union as well as Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, Serbia and a few other small nations.

<comment><USER11> My bad, I was thinking we talked about Europe (and not only the EU).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "This type of bath went out of style in Europe for almost a millennium after the fall of Rome, thanks in part to Dark Age scientists' developing the very unscientific idea that bathing in water invites a host of awful diseases into the body's pores. For most of the Middle Ages, "most [European] people didn't wash, or even get wet, if they could help it," Bryson writes. When John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, declared that "Cleanliness is next to Godliness" in a 1778 sermon, he was talking about our garments, not our armpits.

This is a minor statement within the article but one which hints at shallow research in some sections. This makes me less confident in the rest of the conclusions.

Bathing was very common and encouraged during the "Dark Ages". A few articles which do a better job than I can covering the hows and whys:

[https://www.medievalists.net/2013/04/did-people-in-the- middl...](https://www.medievalists.net/2013/04/did-people-in-the-middle-ages- take-baths/)

[https://www.medievalists.net/2013/04/did-people-in-the- middl...](https://www.medievalists.net/2013/04/did-people-in-the-middle-ages- take-baths/)

[http://unusualhistoricals.blogspot.com/2013/01/myths- misconc...](http://unusualhistoricals.blogspot.com/2013/01/myths- misconceptions-bathing-in-middle.html?m=1)

<comment><USER13> It seems like people so often underestimate dark age intelligence, as if everyone back then just spent their time groping around in mud pits. I'm curious how extreme you could go (in a Sokal affair kind of sense) and get away with it. Start a rumor that in the dark ages people bathed in giant tubs full of chicken blood because they believed it would ward off witches and prevent their souls from decaying. See how long it takes before columnists are solemnly citing this well-known dark-age fact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> My wife and I recently moved into a 2 bed 2 bath apartment, mainly because we wanted the extra bedroom for an office as she works remotely. I was surprised to discover that it is so nice not having to share a bathroom—no stress about getting in each other's way in the morning, less bathroom clutter—it's really nice. I can see how people would get used to it. And then of course having an extra half bathroom for guests is the obvious next step.

<comment><USER15> Me and my partner just did the same and it was so much better than we thought. Not longer having to time things in the morning, no longer needing to rush the other person because you are going to be late, no need to fight over shelf space.

Downside though is I end up spending more time in the bathroom since no one else is waiting to use it and it's a bit of a quiet space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I just built my house with three bathrooms. ("Two and half," by American standards.) I almost did four, but I just didn't want to have to scrub another toilet.

Why three toilets:

The "half bathroom" is by the kitchen, living room, ect. It's just a sink and toilet. This is the one that, by courtesy, guests use. Because there's no bath, guests don't see our towels, toothbrushes, and other mess that accumulates. (No toothpaste stuck in the sink!) We also put prettier fixtures in there, because it's the one we go in most often.

Then there's a normal bathroom (toilet, sink, and tub) that the kids and overnight guests can use.

Then we have our master bathroom, attached to the master bedroom, which has a toilet, shower, and two sinks. (Useful when my wife and I brush our teeth at the same time.) The point of keeping it attached to the master bedroom is basically so we don't have to walk around the house in "bedclothes" when we have to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

Another thing that this article misses: A lot of people like to loose track of time reading on the toilet. There's nothing wrong with that when you have extra toilets in your house.

<comment><USER17> > A lot of people like to loose track of time reading on the toilet.

"If it's urgent, and all the bathrooms are occupied, turn off the wifi"

<comment><USER18> I firmly believe all workplace bathrooms should be completely Faraday shielded for this reason.

<comment><USER19> Except when I'm in the bathroom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> For the actual numbers, go to this site [1] which the article cites. It has XLS files containing stats over time for all kinds of characteristics of American housing.

Eyeballing the "bathrooms" file, the "bedrooms" file, and the "bathrooms by bedrooms" file, it looks to me like most of the growth in bathrooms matches the growth in bedrooms, so maybe the question should be "why do American houses have so many bedrooms?".

One reason number of bathrooms per person may have gone up on average is because people have children later. Over the past 50 years average maternal age at first birth has risen from the low 20s to the high 20s.

So 50 years ago, a young couple would buy a house, and quickly start a family, lowering the bathrooms per person ratio. Now that couple might by a house, sized for the family they plan to start, but not start that family for almost 10 years. So for 10 years they are living with a higher bathroom per person ratio, helping bring up the average.

[1] [https://www.census.gov/construction/chars/](https://www.census.gov/construction/chars/)

</comment><comment><USER21> When buying rental properties, you always want at least 2 bathrooms because otherwise a problem with a toilet is an emergency and will get you out of bed at 2am

<comment><USER22> Do American toilets break that often? I've lived in the same flat for 10 years; one and the same toilet. Never had a problem that made it useless for unacceptable amount of time.

The only thing that took long to fix, was when it loaded the water slowly. But that only meant longer waiting between flushing; merely an inconvenience.

<comment><USER23> North American toilets are bizarrely complex and seemingly designed to clog.

Cross section : [https://www.maven.co/wp- content/uploads/2012/07/toilets-00.j...](https://www.maven.co/wp- content/uploads/2012/07/toilets-00.jpg)

This is because they use a siphon mechanism, which also results in a narrow diameter pipe. Old style ones use an enormous 14L of water per flush and still jam.

Other countries use gravity flush which has lower water usage and less blockages, but forces you to periodically clean the toilet bowl. Personally I would rather clean than plunge.

This article has a rather biased overview: [https://toiletfound.com/siphonic- vs-washdown-toilet-which-is...](https://toiletfound.com/siphonic-vs-washdown- toilet-which-is-better/)

Personally I find US toilets need to be flushed repeatedly because you don't want to risk a blockage.

<comment><USER24> A lot of the complexity you see in that image is the trap. It holds water in it to prevent sewer/septic gasses from entering the home. Sinks also have them.

<comment><USER23> Both types of toilets have a trap. The complexity is due to the siphon mechanism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> What I would like to know is why the America average wash cycle requires around 40 gallons (151L) of water [1], when my machine in Europe uses around 13 gallons (50L) and a 10 year old one uses 22 gallons (84L).

[1] [https://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2018/06/08/new-california- wa...](https://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2018/06/08/new-california-water-law- restrictions-shower-laundry/)

<comment><USER26> The USA is slowly moving to front-loading washers. The top loaders were water hogs.

<comment><USER27> The problem with front loaders are that the rubber gaskets get moldy. You can get lower water use top losers now.

<comment><USER28> If possible, just leave the door and detergent drawer open.

<comment><USER26> +1 for also mentioning the detergent drawer. That thing is a breeding ground, I believe many molds thrive off of detergents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Throughput.

As soon as you have >1 persons, you are going to find the bathroom to be a bottleneck at some point.

<comment><USER30> Agree! But what I don't understand is the 8 bedroom, 14 bathroom type of houses (rich people). I mean what's the point. I agree that you need at least two bathrooms in a home and max one bathroom for each bedroom...but after that, what's the point?

Need in the sense that, it improves the quality of life, and it's a worthy expense.

<comment><USER31> Those houses are designed for entertaining and large parties. Any event hall that you go to will have at minimum 1 bathroom for each gender with multiple stalls, 2-6. This is still a home, so they choose not to have stalls in bathroom setting, hence 6-10 "extra" bathrooms.

Additionally in the very large houses the bed/bath ration doesn't capture the setting of the bathrooms. There is a house not to far from me that has a connected indoor pool and that has 3 bathrooms for changing/shower.

(edited)

<comment><USER30> makes sense. Why not have them, when you can afford them? So your own bathrooms are not used by the guests...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The toilet and shower being in the same room is the biggest issue. If someone is in the shower and someone needs to go to the toilet that's a problem. The worst is in the morning with homes where more than two people are living.

From what I understand many in the UK, European countries have separate rooms for toilet and bath.

</comment><comment><USER33> Due to a water leak and repairs my family of 4 has temporarily gone from 2.5 bathrooms to 1. It's miserable when everyone needs to go at once. Plus guests now have to come upstairs to use a toilet.

Extra bathrooms are absolutely worth the cost.

<comment><USER34> Most people with a family of four or a 3 bedroom place would have 2 baths (or often 1 proper bath and one toilet without shower/bath) in Europe too. What I find a bit strange is the "4 bedroom / 4 bathroom" thing. Bathroom 3/4 seems a bit over the top.

I imagine it's because 1-2 of those would be ensuite to one or more of the bigger bedrooms and/or that one or more aren't full baths.

<comment><USER35> I used to own a three bedroom suburban townhouse that had 3½ baths. Each bedroom had a walk-in closet and en-suite bathroom. It definitely made the properties (this was a 10 unit condominium) attractive for people who wanted roommates

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I have a normal European detatched house with 2 bathrooms. I find that stressful and expensive considering the cost of renovation. Say you do it every 15 years or so. (Yes I realize it would last longer of course, probably want to do it after 15 years or less, especially if you plan on selling). The going rate for bathroom renovation here is $12-15k for small or cheap standard rebuilds, up to $40-50k for large or higher standard jobs. Normal standard and normal size is probably $25-30k. For most people this is a years' pay after taxes. If I had 4 bathrooms I would have just doubled my cost.

<comment><USER36> Why would you renovate your bathroom so often?

<comment><USER34> The design life is probably 20-25 so it's not much different.

Or turn the argument around: would one rather have 2 bathrooms with an average age of 7.5 (15 years interval for renovation) or 4 bathrooms with an average age of 15 (30 years lifespan)?

The house with the 4 bathrooms in worse condition would be a worth a lot less money on the market than one with two bathrooms in better condition.

The cheapest option is of course having 2 bathrooms but staying with long intervals for remodeling. That's where I am now, but as both are pushing 13 yers now it's kind of stressing as they'll both "come up for renewal" at the same time soon.

But yes, living without 80's tiles is something I very much imagine paying a lot of money for.

<comment><USER37> > Or turn the argument around: would one rather have 2 bathrooms with an > average age of 7.5 (15 years interval for renovation) or 4 bathrooms with an > average age of 15 (30 years lifespan)?

A home with 4 bathrooms is going to see half the traffic of a home with 2 bathrooms so they might last 2x. Or is as the case a lot of times, the bathroom in the common areas of the home gets renovated as does the master.

> living without 80's tiles is something I very much imagine paying a lot of > money for.

A lot of European bathrooms I've experienced were very trendy for their time and while that occurs in America I would say it's the exception and not the norm. In general our bathrooms are relatively bland and the materials are "timeless" in the sense that they're not very stylish ever, even new, but also never look that dated either. The last 3 bathroom renovations I did all involved using subway tiles, which while currently trendy, have been used consistently over the last 100 years. The houses I grew up in all used a similarly bland while tile that was 3x3" while squares.

The fixtures and finishes I've seen in European bathrooms also don't tend to stand up either. Pedestal sinks with exposed metal pipes and those detachable shower wands on sliding poles. Apart from the master bathrooms, most American bathrooms are boring with simple sturdy faucets and fixed shower heads. The sinks use vanities which hide/protect the plumbing which is usually plastic and much less vulnerable to corrosion.

<comment><USER38> Timeless!? They are insane. The toilet uncomfortably low to the ground. The sink that splashes, and you have to spend 40 seconds every time to get the water temperature right. The cabinet that's 2 inches deep and things fall out each time its opened. The mirror that fogs up. The slippery tub. The moldy curtain. Noisy flush. Soap gunk by the sink. Plumbing that leaks and clogs under normal use.

Spider Robinson wrote about it. An alien looking at human bathrooms, would have to conclude we are masochistic, stupid, or have some cultural blind spot.

<comment><USER37> > The toilet uncomfortably low to the ground.

In many parts of the world you squat on the ground, which actually better for you than sitting. Most toilets in the last 30 years are taller to accommodate ADA requirements and you can get even taller ones for a slight cost.

> The sink that splashes

I've really only experienced that in those awful flat bottom or angular sinks. The traditional hemisphere or egg shaped sinks don't splash.

> you have to spend 40 seconds every time to get the water temperature right.

I'm assuming you're talking about showering? Most American bathrooms are not located near the hot water heater and the water in the pipes between the spigot and the heater generally cools because it's not well insulated. As such, most Americans don't hop in the shower immediately when they turn it on but instead let it warm up for a minute or two.

> The cabinet that's 2 inches deep and things fall out each time its opened.

Are you talking about medicine cabinets? Sounds like the one you used wasn't pitched properly. There's two screws inside you can remove on the inside walls to loosen it, you can then shim the bottom edge and replace the screws. This will pitch the cabinet back so things fall to the back and not out the front.

Generally medicine cabinets fell out of fashion as the size of bathrooms grew and are usually only found in pre80s homes. Fun fact, most of them have a slot in the back to let you dispose of straight razors and if you remove them from the wall you'll find a stack of rust old razors in the wall cavity.

> The mirror that fogs up.

Hmm... so fancy heated mirror that will fail or a bottle of defogger you apply once or twice a year? * Better yet just turn the ventilation fan on before you start your shower.

> The slippery tub.

The only time I've ever fallen in a shower was in Italy in one of those shower coffins. So... yeah that's not a problem unique to America.

> The moldy curtain.

You know you can change those right? And if you spend more than $2 you can buy one that's mold resistant?

> Noisy flush.

That sounds like those jet flush toilets used in commercial property, most residential toilets are gravity flush tanks like their European counterparts.

> Soap gunk by the sink.

I'm guessing by this and your mold curtain comment that you're not one to clean your bathroom?

> Plumbing that leaks and clogs under normal use.

That's not normal.

<comment><USER38> In denial.

Remember those two faucets that used to be on sinks, one hot and one cold? Got replaced by the lever-valve that you push right or left to adjust temp? Took a generation to switch, though the benefits were obvious the first day.

Well, those two faucets go back even further. Watch any old cowboy movies? In the rooming house, the wash stand with the enamel basin and two pitchers? One pitcher hot water; one cold. Mix in the basin, then wash and shave.

When plumbing happened, the basin got set into the wash stand, a drain put in the bottom, the two pitchers replaced by two faucets.

Then, for about 100 years, nothing. No progress. Just that old familiar setup without modification.

Finally the kids were like "hey! I'm not filling that dirty old basin with water and washing in there! I'm just washing under the running water." The basin became simply a drain. So thus the impetus to combine hot and cold. So you didn't alternately scald and freeze your hands.

The 'modern' bathroom sink took 100 years to come about. Not because to took that long to invent. It took only a moment to see the advantages. What it took was, 100 years for the old, hidebound folks to pass away and let the kids take over.

I'm convinced our bathrooms are the way they are (weak explanations notwithstanding), because people are slow to change.

<comment><USER37> You responded to my comment about the timelessness of an aesthetic as somehow wrong because the underlying technology is not to your liking?

No one is agreeing or disagreeing with what you're saying because no one understands where you're coming from. You've basically said "Green is stupid because we're still using cars!"

<comment><USER38> Hey, I can speak for myself. No need to put words in my mouth. Thanks!

Design aesthetic is different from 'stuff that doesn't work'. I'm reminded of design students that create something that looks like a bicycle out of cardboard layers, and say "See! I've improved the bicycle! It'll change the world!" And what they have is a useless sculpture of a bicycle.

It's plain to most folks, using ordinary bathrooms in ordinary houses that the stuff is laughably awkward, dangerous and hard to clean. Try to explain it away all you like.

<comment><USER37> > Design aesthetic is different from 'stuff that doesn't work'

Again, we were speaking about durability and aesthetics, not functionality.

Since you want to discuss functionality...

> laughably awkward

For example? Do you have any better real world alternatives.

> dangerous

What and how?

> hard to clean

Compared to?

> Try to explain it away all you like.

No one is trying to explain away anything. We're not talking about the same thing. You're interjecting your thoughts on functionality as if they're in opposition to our discussion about reliability and design.

To put it another way, we're talking about reality and you're arguing hypothetical. It's like showing us how your air guitar is better than our actual guitars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Al-Khwarizmi And why do Americans keep using that kind of toilets with high water level and soft flushing that tend to get clogged?

I mean, in my 37 years of life in Europe I haven't ever clogged a toilet, I don't think it's even a thing, at least if you don't throw anything that doesn't belong in there. But in my trips to America... I'm not going to be specific, but let's just say that some experiences have made me very cautious when I use the toilet there.

<comment><USER39> Yeah, I totally get what you're hinting at ;-) I stopped counting the number of times that I clogged American toilets with...let's say "substances that clearly belong in there". Seriously, am I supposed to hold it in the middle of the action and flush?

Another really, really backwards thing seems to be shower fixtures. If you aren't lucky and find a modern mixing valve, you are likely doomed to experiment with various push, pull, turn-while-pull, push-while-turn-then- pull, turn-until-searing-hot-then-go-on-because-warm-comes-after-hot-on-the- scale moves to get a decent water temperature. And not only is this totally unintuitive, it also differs between every single shower in every single hotel or motel room (especially motels seem to have these weird fixtures).

<comment><USER40> It took me a long time to discover how some fixtures in hotels work in the US, because the idea that to get hot water you have to open up full-throttle (passing through cold) and there is no way to control the amount of water was totally alien to me. I never expected such a wasteful design.

<comment><USER15> Worst ones are (although not limited to America) ones where you have to reach under the water flow to get to the control.

Eg the knobs are on the inside wall of the shower facing the entrance. So to turn on the water you have to reach your arm and sometimes half the body across the shower. Then you have to turn the bloody thing past cold full blast, with the cold water coming down on you. And to add to it, you can't really tell where you set the temperature to unless you feel the water. If the temperature is wrong you have to reach through the water stream again to change it. Annoying if you set it too cold, good luck if you set it too hot.

Who designs these things?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I don't think this requires that much analysis. As the article acknowledges, American houses are on average double the size of ones in the EU. That leaves plenty of space to place bathrooms to maximize convenience (as opposed to just handling maximum expected occupancy). For example, our 1950s house growing up had three bedrooms and two bathrooms, one upstairs shared by the bedrooms, and one downstairs for the family room. My parents' current house has one more bedroom, but two more bathrooms. Two of the bedrooms get a private attached bath, and the other two share a Jack and Jill bathroom. The main level gets a powder room. If we finish the basement, that'll be another bathroom, because people don't want to have to go to another floor to access the bathroom.

</comment><comment><USER42> There's an historical error in this article; public baths were very common in Europe up until the Black Death. Actually people became really dirty from the late 15th Century onwards, and yet with stark differences between countries.

<comment><USER43> See e.g., [https://www.medievalists.net/2013/04/did-people-in-the- middl...](https://www.medievalists.net/2013/04/did-people-in-the-middle-ages- take-baths/), which describes the many bathing habits of the Middle Ages that contradicts the original article's claims, including this anecdote:

> The Dutch philosopher Erasmus, writing in 1526, notes the fall of the public > bathhouse. "Twenty-five years ago, nothing was more fashionable in Brabant > than the public baths," he remarked. "Today there are none, the new plague > has taught us to avoid them."

That is, water does spread disease, and public baths went out of fashion _during the Renaissance_ , not the Middle Ages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> > In the mid-19th century, American sanitarians came to believe that disease > stemmed from "sewer gas" emitted by toilets, which encouraged home builders > to cram tub, sink, and toilet into one well-ventilated room with exposed > pipes, in order to limit the spread of disease.

To be fair, sewer gas is indeed gross and can be toxic. So modern plumbing carefully vents the sewer gas out the roof and has traps that prevent sewer gas from entering the room.

(The P trap under your sink isn't to catch valuables that go down the drain. It's there to hold water so that gasses and critters can't come through.)

<comment><USER45> > The P trap under your sink isn't to catch valuables that go down the drain. > It's there to hold water so that gasses and critters can't come through

Yeah, I have a P-trap in the kitchen space of my single-room flat, in theory for the dishwater; but since I don't have a dishwasher, there's no water and I got sewer smells until it was plugged by rags.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Meanwhile, American showers still have a fixed showerhead mounted on the wall and a single control that doesn't let you adjust pressure, only temperature.

<comment><USER47> Hold on, am I missing out on some shower innovations?

I've never heard of this pressure control

<comment><USER48> What we get here in the rest of the world, is something that allows for control of both temperature & water flow. Usually (but I can't really speak generally) with a freely-moving showerhead connected by a metal-jacketed rubber hose (which can be placed on a fixed position to the wall for overhead showering)

<comment><USER14> We have those too. In particular, I have one of those. You can buy them at Wal-Mart. I rent and I take it with me when I move (re-installing the original hardware).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> A lot of people get more utility from an extra half bath than an extra closet

Bathrooms make entertaining people easier, both by having them conveniently located and by reducing the privacy infringement of making your master bath available (everyone's an asshole and goes through everyone else's medicine cabinet)

It's not wasteful since having more bathrooms doesn't mean you go to the bathroom more.

<comment><USER50> There is also an emergency health issue. I had c.difficile and was instructed by the nurse to use a separate bathroom from my spouse to avoid cross- contamination. We only had one bathroom so this meant I had to bleach the toilet whenever I "took the boys to the pool".

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I can't say I've done a full study on this, but at least anecdotally, the claim of this article seems over-blown. I'm a software engineer for a large tech company (i.e., I make pretty good money), and I live in a relatively well off part of the US (New Jersey, in the New York suburbs). When I was looking for a house, most houses in our price range had either 1 full bathroom or 1 full bathroom and 1 half bathroom. So even in a pretty well-off situation, it's not automatically the case that you live in a huge house with lots of bath rooms.

To the extent that the claim that American houses have so many bathrooms is true, I'm not sure you can think about American real estate in such a homogenized fashion to assume it is universally true. I think it applies in certain particular circumstances, but is not universal.

<comment><USER51> NJ is the most population-dense state in the U.S., so that (and its being really old, and comparatively expensive) might have something to do with your experience.

<comment><USER52> > NJ is the most population-dense state in the U.S., so that (and its being > really old, and comparatively expensive) might have something to do with > your experience.

Yeah, a house built in the eighties or the nineties is pretty new in Journal Square of Jersey City. However, the city (Manhattan mostly) has it worse. I saw an ad for a tiny room that explicitly said no access to kitchen or the bathroom. I don't think it is even lawful to say that.

Imagine someone living in that room comes across this article...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Could it be as simple as poor design?

Another trend that I think is poor design is the "open-floor" trend for newer homes.

</comment><comment><USER54> It's not US specific I live in Ireland houses are way smaller here yet most(all?) new construction have large number of bathrooms.

</comment><comment><USER55> I spent a lot of dough on a master bathroom renovation (large steam shower with elevated seat, THREE showerheads and 3/4-inch pipe direct from the boiler), double sinks, all-LED lighting, WC room with this Toto: [https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B009IJ2JQW/ref=ppx_yo_dt...](https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B009IJ2JQW/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1) and a jacuzzi tub)

... and it's just been a fantastic place to start and end the day in. The universal response people have when they walk into it is "wow". It's a significant quality-of-life improvement IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER56> American houses have too many square feet, and about enough bathrooms. I don't see how a three-bedroom 1-bathroom house is compatible with two people getting to work on time, especially with kids around throwing things off-schedule.

</comment><comment><USER57> The delta between one and two bathrooms is huge. When someone is showing and someone else really needs to go to the bathroom, that's a mess.

The delta between two and three and higher is quite small.

I don't get these houses with like six bathrooms. What's going on there?

</comment><comment> kube-system Because it is a nice luxury to never have to wait on someone else to be done in the bathroom. This is further amplified because our bathrooms customarily have more functions that tie them up, as we don't use separate water closets.

<comment> blaser-waffle Yeah after travel in Europe that's one that irks me being back in the US. Why does my toothbrush need to be in the same room that everyone is dropping deuces?

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I can't help but think of the sprawling McMansion my extended family vrbo-ed in Houston during a wedding. The home comfortably housed 14 people across 7 bedrooms and I counted 6 bathrooms. While the rest of the house was thoroughly maintained (and a little gaudy), one bathroom tucked in the corner of the house had an awful mildew smell, white duct tape covering a crack on the toilet, and a bunch of stains on the wall and tile that I could only assume were a rush job to remove mold.

Just a little anecdote that fits my worldly philosophy of the more things you own, the more things that can break.

</comment><comment><USER59> I thought it was status signalling: a house with more toilets implies higher social status. Especially holds in one state (Arizona?) where Healy costs for local water connection were much higher for more toilets.

</comment><comment><USER60> Another strange thing to me is the ridiculous number of bedrooms in new single family homes, and the assumption that more is better.

Sites like Zillow don't even let you put an upper limit when searching. Agents can't believe you don't want a bigger place. I don't mean cheaper, I mean I don't want all those rooms and stairs. In my area, you perversely have to go to the ultra-luxe range of the market to get a high quality 2-3 bedroom single family home, while 5 bedroom new constructions are a dime a dozen. That makes no sense.

<comment><USER61> "In my area, you perversely have to go to the ultra-luxe range of the market to get a high quality 2-3 bedroom single family home, while 5 bedroom new constructions are a dime a dozen."

Same in the Boston area...you're either getting an older, reasonably sized home, a new-build condo/apartment, or a new-build McMansion / cookie-cutter development. These new-builds are often much larger than millenials want, bigger than boomers need, and too expensive for their blandness.

My guess is homebuilders simply make a better profit on these huge homes...for now...while the market is upheld...

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Maybe houses have many bathrooms, but my experience from the US was that it is incredible hard to find public toilets which is very annoying when you're a tourist.

When we found one, they were pretty disgusting. Even places like Starbucks didn't even have a toilet. I mean what the hell? How can you serve people coffee which makes stomachs rumble without having a single customer toilet?

From a European perspective, this was very uncomfortable and I also have a condition which makes my stomach untrustworthy.

<comment><USER54> Hmm lived in/visted many places in US honestly never had this issue.

<comment><USER63> I understand SF has this issue, for various reasons; the outcome is not pleasant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> And no bidet to use after the paper.

</comment><comment><USER65> The overloaded term "bathroom" is not very helpful. What do these bathrooms have in them? Do they have a bath, or a toilet, or both, or what? I think we should be told!

More toilets than bedrooms - e.g., the 20:8 ratio mentioned in the article - makes perfect sense for a house that might see large numbers of guests at once.

One bath per person surely can't hurt, if you can afford it, though averaged out this is probably going to mean a bath:bedroom ratio of around 1:1.

</comment><comment><USER66> I grew up in a Brady Bunch house: nine people and 1 1/2 bath. The father had priority, then high school kids, then grade school. The bedroom config was more interesting than bathroom. Always a minimum of two, sometimes up to four. A rearrangement every couple years.

Perhaps that is why I sought mainly single bedrooms in college and grad school.

I think all of the next generation were nver more than six in house and every child with personal bedroom.

</comment><comment><USER67> 2-per-person (round down) sounds about right. We have 2.5 and the 2nd full- bath (in the basement) is rarely used. I'm flabbergasted to know that, as an upper-middle-class Canadian in a 5-person family, my home would be _below average_ compared to a new American development. One-person-per-bathroom is madness.

Stephen Colbert said it best: "One for dinner-guests and one you poop in".

</comment><comment><USER68> A bathroom is one of the few places you can have total privacy. A second place is the car when you are driving alone.

</comment><comment><USER69> Isn't it obvious? Have you seen what we eat?

<comment><USER70> Yeah those quora comments really made me think that Americans have diarrhoea way too often since it is mentioned numerous times as a reason for the high number of bathrooms.

The same way I've often read silly threads on reddit mentioning those fecal problems (like after mexican food, it seems like a ritual for us folks to crush the toilet bowl) which don't seem as common or popular in europe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> It's not the number of American bathrooms that's fucked up, it's their size. I've seen bathrooms big enough to host a dinner party. It's insane. In student housing I had a perfectly usable bathroom that was very cramped and I'd love to have two of those in a house and a normal sized one.

</comment><comment><USER72> The article is overthinking it

The question is: what happens when you have few bathrooms (maybe only one). It's a constrained resource that is usually used by people at around the same time frames.

Sharing one bathroom across a family of 4 is not easy. Two or three make more sense.

This gets worse if it's 4 unrelated people

</comment><comment><USER73> Having at least two bathrooms is an absolute life saver - if you only have one and something goes wrong you pretty much have to stay in a hotel. Not to mention having some privacy from guests is great. So that doesn't seem like an excess to me.

</comment><comment><USER74> > In the past half century, the number of bathrooms per person in America has > doubled.

Most people who grew up in the past half-century grew up in a household with several siblings and appreciate the luxury of not waiting in line to use the toilet ^_^

</comment><comment><USER75> Is the ubiquity of "master bathrooms" peculiar to the U.S.?

I don't mean this lewdly, but: I would imagine parents everywhere appreciate the ability to clean up after sex without having to first walk though the house's public areas.

</comment><comment><USER76> I've shared an apartment with 3 other people (single bathroom) and it can be either utter chaos or totally fine depending on schedules. Staggered morning work times are the best, everyone gets their time without feeling rushed.

</comment><comment><USER77> Having visited my brother for Christmas... I came to appreciate the large number of bathrooms. (It was originally a farmhouse, so many were added over time.) It makes having a bunch of visitors a LOT easier to accommodate.

</comment><comment><USER78> Is it exclusively an American thing, or is it simply that newer houses have a lot of bathrooms? I was recently in a tiny two bedroom house in England (built in the 90s, I believe) that had three toilets (two full baths).

<comment><USER79> Some of it is age. I only have one bathroom in about an 1800 sq ft house. Presumably the indoor plumbing was added at some point. But, while a house that size would have 2 brs today, there's just no easy way to add one and I don't need it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> Because "everybody poops". If I gotta go, I want to be able to without waiting on someone else. I spent the first 12 years of my life in a single bathroom house, not doing that again.

</comment><comment><USER81> We have one bathroom for the four of us, and I've never had a particular desire for more. That's just extra toilets and showers to clean and extra pipes to leak. No thanks.

</comment><comment><USER82> I like to be able to have multiple options to do my things comfortably, at some point when trying to come up with a house design i liked it ended up with _6_!

</comment><comment><USER83> I mean, you could certainly describe it as frivolous, but I like being able to shower or use the toilet without worrying about my wife doing the same thing.

</comment><comment><USER84> Also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22137008](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22137008)

</comment><comment><USER85> I believe 99% of the problem is marketing. Adding an additional bathroom can add $5000 USD (or more) onto the asking price of a home in the US.

</comment><comment><USER86> If you've every dealt with a stomach virus going through a family at the same time you'd never question the number of bathrooms in a home.

</comment><comment><USER87> European in the thread: would a bathroom and a seprate toilet count as 2? In this instance? Or are we talking about two full bathrooms?

</comment><comment><USER88> Utah houses traditionally do not have many bathrooms, in fact most made before 1980's only have one. It's quite odd actually

</comment><comment><USER89> A thing from which, if you have no kids, you are spared: the three-year old sitting on the toilet holding open an upside-down New Yorker Magazine.

...

</comment><comment><USER90> Also, why do american houses have so much damn pavement? i mean every single house i go to there's these massive driveways sometimes even wider than the garage itself! with even more pavement on the side for god knows what and behind that some more pavement along the side of the house.

and it's not even nice pavement, it's just concrete, like a big airport.

it's especially bad in CA because the lots are so small making the pavement look even bigger proportionaly.

</comment><comment><USER91> One word, basic convenience, is like phone chargers, you have one in office, and prob one in bedroom or living room

</comment><comment><USER92> we have come a long way from the days when we asked ourselves why we have so many chamber pots

</comment><comment><USER93> "Bathrooms sell houses, period". Which came first, the supply or the demand?

</comment><comment><USER94> Alternatively in LA houses less than $1.5 million seem to only have one bathroom.

</comment><comment><USER95> "... foreigners when we first arrive here, and the sheer number of bathrooms in suburban houses is very high on the list" and article still contains square foot without any conversion to metric

</comment><comment><USER96> Do middle class Americans clean their own homes?

<comment> kube-system Most do. Some upper-middle do not.

<comment><USER96> Why would someone want to clean so many bathrooms?

<comment><USER97> In the US most people clean their own bathrooms.

I.E in a 4 bedroom, 4 bath home, there are likely 4 people living there, each person cleans their own bathroom,

<comment><USER28> Except in the very common case when 2 of those people are children.

<comment><USER14> Depends on the age and maturity of the children.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER98> "Fine, take away my bathrooms, but don't you dare touching my guns. I shit you not - I will be pissed."

every Midwestern American

</comment><comment><USER92> oprah: the key to a happy marriage is everyone having their own bathroom.

</comment><comment><USER92> there is a puritanical thread in american life that is so fundamental we don't notice it.

the puritan does not hate pooing because it is stinky, but because it gives pleasure to the pooer.

</comment><comment><USER99> I grew up in a house with 1 bathroom for 7 people. It was a living hell. I think that issue alone caused massive strife in my family.

My current house has 4 people and 4 bathrooms.

</comment><comment> o-__-o a house i am looking at has a bathroom for every bedroom. it makes no sense and i am contemplating removing 1.5 of them for more storage if i buy the house (it's not looking likely).

<comment><USER100> It adds significant value to the home, every room is basically a potential high-value rental unit, especially if they're full baths.

Oftentimes homes with many small rooms each having private bathrooms were actually designed specifically for the purpose of room rentals, think elderly shared housing type places.

<comment> o-__-o No offense, but you have no clue what you're talking about. It's new construction and going for $1m. I need storage, not a bathroom for a nonexistent elderly rentals.

<comment><USER100> I never asserted the home you were buying was an example of such a home, no need for the personal attack.

Such homes are actually fairly common in California, I've rented such a room on two occasions.

My understanding is there are quotas requiring housing be built for low income tenants in a regulated proportion to other residential developments. The way classy SF bay area neighborhoods prefer to fulfill this requirement is to build shared housing units for the elderly, for obvious reasons.

The two I personally experienced were indistinguishable from regular residential homes from the outside, but once inside there were some telltales like exceptionally robust fire suppression/alarm systems, and a high density of small bedrooms each having a full bath.

It was actually illegal to rent the rooms to people like me, but enforcement is lax and with CA rents so high, apparently worth the risk for the owner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER101> I want my bathroom to have two commode fixtures then my wife and I can bond over poop. You have your phone when eating but nothing when pooping.

</comment><comment><USER102> Well, Americans do eat quite a lot more food than most people in the world, and thus they need to relieve bowl movements often. This can be a problem if this causes a queue in your house due to a shortage of toilets. There are a few ways to address this bottleneck. One is to apply scheduling to when individuals eat and carefully study the bowl patterns of each person to adequately predict when a toilet is available, say, in a house of two or more inhabitants. Another method is to increase the available resources and add more toilets.

<comment><USER103> Something unintentionally amusing about your comment. Sounds like the opinion of an alien playing SimToilet :)</comment></comment>


CIA Manual from 1944 on how to troll (Page 28) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2012-featured-story-archive/CleanedUOSSSimpleSabotage_sm.pdf

<comment><USER2> The last three pages read like what not to do if you work in a modern office. The first few pages are interesting, but sabotaging telegraphs? This has been declassified because it's antiquated. Most of this is more terrorism than trolling, anyway. This is like the anarchists cookbook of trolling. I learned very little and am not enthused with even the cleverness of the methods described herein. Much worse can be done with modern technology, after only 15ish minutes of my own brainstorming. Please upload the latest version, thanks.</comment>


Showing a Craigslist scammer who's boss using Python [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtNYzv8gLbs&feature=youtu.be <comment><AUTHOR> I agree that in all likelyhood, a technically clever scammer can trivially exclude the ~500 entries this guy put in, but it _does_ create some extra work for them, and we have no idea how skilled the person harvesting these things are. (Plus, a committed troublemaker could likely make these things much harder to detect, and much more work for the scammer.)

<comment><USER2> Definitely not skilled enough to install a TLS certificate :)

<comment><USER3> These guys clearly aren't very good, but there's a chance they might be deliberately not getting a TLS cert to avoid getting flagged by safebrowsing via CT logs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It makes me a little sad to see him write Python 2 code. There's only 18 month of Python 2 left.

<comment><USER2> That's what all of us oldies do. We can't get used to the hip new stuff so quickly ;)

<comment><USER5> Most of the time you're writing Python3 code and you don't even know it... try changing #!/usr/bin/env python to

#!/usr/bin/env python3

I bet your Python2 script will run on Python3.

<comment><USER6> It might be interesting as a learning exercise but there's a lot of gotchas in running 2 as 3.

Besides the obvious things like print, which will just cause an error, there's behavioral changes, like with division and range, that may introduce more insideous bugs.

Better to read up on the difference first and use a tool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If I were that scammer I'd quickly see I can likley filter out all accounts added within such a short burst of time following convention of <name><number>@yahoo.com

Also, my guess is most users don't have that pattern of password...

<comment><USER8> I thought the form fields were suspicious. The scammer may already have something in place that generates random user/pass form fields, and even random endpoints by the look of the url.

The "engineer" didn't check this, which he could have easily done by simply refreshing the page. But if the scammer did have any sort of protection, the engineer would have had a lot more work in it for him, having to scrape the page.. so maybe he purposely ignored this red flag.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's no need to put engineer in quotes. This video wasn't an in-depth how- to; it was just a quick proof-of-concept.

<comment><USER8> It wasn't meant as an attack. I don't know his name, but his channel is called engineer-something, so I meant it as "engineer-something".

Although I do think, for a learning video, that he missed out on a lot of opportunity to explain such things as I mentioned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The terrible thing here is that:

'very common name' \+ 1 digit @yahoo.com generates a list almost completely of real email addresses...

Spammers don't care about cleaning their lists... So he just helped the spammer do his job, involving a few hundred unrelated victims.

<comment><USER10> If all the scammer wanted was email addresses, they could have written a random yahoo email address generator on their own. They want legitimate email + password combos.

<comment><USER11> Given that world + dog has the entire Yahoo DB by now, I wonder if a list of yahoo username + password still has any value on the market... Well, I can only hope so, or else the scammer will just drop all the yahoo addresses from his take rather than try to clean up the data.

<comment><USER3> If you can somehow find the yahoo DB, I will pay you $5000 in bitcoin for it :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Seems a little dodgy to redirect output from an apparent scammers website to an apparent root shell.

</comment><comment><USER13> What's the scam here? The scammer gets access to someone's Craigslist account... and then what? They take down or change their posts?

<comment><USER14> They try the username + password on other sites.

<comment><USER15> Relevant XKCD: [https://xkcd.com/792/](https://xkcd.com/792/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What if the URL and the form fields are randomly generated? I would just use the Chrome console to keep submitting the form or something low-effort like that.

</comment><comment><USER17> Put a time delay in there and let it run over a couple days. Otherwise it's too easy to just delete all the names from that 5 minute window of entries.

</comment><comment><USER18> Usually entering credentials causes an email to be sent containing at least user IP address and a User-Agent string. In this case, the UA string reveals it all

</comment><comment><USER19> For educational purposes only. <wink>

#2600

<comment><USER20> Yeah. Let's not the cover-all disclaimer

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> My hero!

</comment><comment><USER22> this dude should do this on multi thread and distributed in cloud. this is so vanilla, also the hacker can just just filter with a easy regex. lame</comment>


The FCC's OCBO has not heard from many small businesses about Net Neutrality. - <AUTHOR>

I just called the FCC hotline and mentioned that I'm a small business owner. They immediately redirected my call to the Office of Communications Business Opportunities[1] (202-418-0990) where I spoke with the Director Thomas Reed.
After I raised my concerns, he took down my name, business name, phone number, and email, and said he would get back to me. I asked if many small businesses had called, and he said not many.
I'm worried that entrepreneurs and small business owners on HN don't know there is a special FCC office just for small businesses. If you have a startup or small business and want to raise concerns about the pending Net Neutrality policy, please use this office to get through.
(202) 418-0990
[1] - https://www.fcc.gov/office-communications-business-opportunities <comment><AUTHOR> Here's the comments I left:

* "Hello, I'm <name> and I'm a small business owner. Could I please speak with Director Reed regarding the pending FCC Net Neutrality policy?"

If he's unavailable, suggested message to leave:

* "I'm a small business owner in <state> and the success of my business depends on the internet. Why is the FCC working with ISPs to make running my business harder? This will kill small business jobs like the ones I am creating. Please raise the small business job consequences of this pending policy with Chairman Wheeler, and please give me a call back. My business is <business_name>, and you can call me at <phone_number> or email me at <business_email>. Thank you."

As always, the more times you mention "jobs", the better.</comment>


Computer Programming Is a Dying Art  - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsweek.com/2014/06/06/computer-programming-dying-art-252618.html <comment><USER2> Even back in the 1980s everyone knew that "fifth-generation" programming languages will make programming obsolote. This article seems to take a bunch of press releases and use them to claim that programming is obsolete in a few years.

The problem with these articles is that programming is AI-complete. Therefore, once we've solved programming, we will also have a general AI, which is 100x more interesting than talking about programming computers. Yes, it'll happen, maybe even in a few decades, but that discussion is very fuzzy.

The article also seems to imply that programming using higher-level tools (e.g. visual programming) is not "true" programming, but I disagree with that definition. I also think that teaching programming is a decent way to teach this "higher level abstraction and design". It's just taught along with learning a particular programming language.

<comment><USER3> Teaching programming is like teaching constructivism in logic. It teaches rigour and produces working things, and a focus on algorithms, even if most people don't see what they're doing as having anything to do with algorithms. Very valuable that. There's the issue that some things are fundamentally out of reach of constructivist thought, but it certainly is an easy way to get pretty knowledgeable.

In my opinion the easiest thing to automate are the higher up jobs in companies. A top executive essentially has to make 2 judgements. First, tell if someone's lying or wrong or otherwise doesn't know what (s)he's talking about without having any first-hand knowledge of the subject. Second, basic (and only very very basic) NPV calculations.

The second problem is so extremely easy my 5 year old daughter is probably pretty close to being able to automate it.

The first problem is the perfect computer science problem. The key is here : "without any first-hand knowledge of the subject". The decisions higher ups in companies make, they have to make without having real knowledge of what they're deciding. So there is no advantage is having knowledge about first- principles, simulation, ... they're generally not going to be beat by any engineer, because an engineer will want exact answers, and they don't exist. So their decision process HAS to be based on statistics, numerical analysis and nothing more. They will obviously disagree, but everyone does (I remember very strong discussions about robots not being able to make and/or combine "non-trivial" auto parts during my vacation jobs long ago).

I did a startup, and we eventually hired an older CEO, mostly because he could get us more funding than we ever could. Now, the guy was everything I expected: zero knowledge about what the company was doing, and not interested in learning more about it (beyond polite interest I mean, he was very professional). Surprisingly, his sales knowledge also was tangential at best. Now I wanted to know what this guy knew that I didn't that made him successful ? But I just couldn't find anything where his knowledge didn't seem trivial at best (outside of physics, which he doctored in an eon ago, but I'm pretty sure he wasn't using 50-year-old high energy physics knowledge to lead the company). Eventually I found it. For a specific funding we had to get a "model" of the business going. And we worked on it together ... so I worked with the guy for a few weeks.

What. The. Fuck.

The guy built a model, in excel, that was just far beyond anything I even thought possible in excel. In fact, it was significantly beyond what I could get done in real programming languages, especially given the time available. He had all components of the business in there, and how they evolved. Employees, equipment, rent, lines of credit, ... and all sorts of things. Assuming we use the most efficient credit line to pay for things, employee onboarding means 2 months of half productivity, X new features per month, X sales calls per month, X% of them successfull, when we get a customer, X days to install, X days to first payment, X months the customer stays, then leaves, slowly ramping up to bigger and bigger customers, ... And what came out is what happened to the company's bank balance. My mind was blown in a pretty big way.

Now it wasn't perfect. Far from it. He got the gist right though, and looking about a year later, he wasn't that horribly far off, close to 100k euro. And more importantly, it got investors on board. I didn't believe the model he made, to be honest, but I was wrong.

But going to work on that data, using AI methods I could (after the fact) build a much better model predicting the business. Of course it isn't an excel file that could be passed to investors, but ...

But here's what I eventually found out his job was : to go out, negotiate. Takes a bit of flair, but everyone can do it provided you do the next thing right : Take the terms on offer, translate them into this excel model of the business and see how they affect it. If they make the business succeed or just barely fail, accept them after a bit of haggling. If they don't, don't bother with the haggling, just politely and professionally tell the guys to get stuffed.

Now of course, this can be automated. I believe this is much easier to automate than programming the company's products themselves, which requires domain knowledge no-one has when the company starts. It is generally a bloody hard problem for any new kind of product.

And middle management, even of programmers, would be a lot easier to automate than even this.

I think that's what's going to happen. Some people, probably financial companies first, since they're really only numbers, will put AI algorithms in charge of departments, which will include programmers. And then the owner will die, simply of natural causes, but the company just stays running. And 200 years later we will be wondering. Hell, I'm betting several such companies already exist, as it's certainly been possible for 10-20 years now to do this.

Because one thing I'm very very sure of. No matter how good you think you can model stuff as a human, you will get your ass handed to you by relatively basic predictive algorithms. Of course, those algorithms, they don't know what they're talking about, beyond the numbers. But neither does management, so it can't be critical for the function.

<comment><USER4> RE: <The guy built a model, in excel>

Do you have a template of that model?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _MUSE will assemble a massive collection of chunks of code that can perform almost any task anybody could ever think of and tag all the code so it can automatically be found and assembled._

Good luck with that.

But seriously, "Art" is the worst term the author could have chosen for anything that is in danger of automation. To the extent that computer programming is an art, how could it be in any more danger than music, painting, or literature?

</comment><comment><USER6> If you showed a 1970's person in my field what can be knocked together in R or in python today then they would be blown away. In that sense as more and more code reuse through libraries happens the role of programming for the majority changes from low level difficult stuff to simply strapping bits together. I can see this trend continuing until we have a convergence of e.g. ipython and spreedsheets. In that sense everyone will become a programmer of sorts. But hardly anyone will be a 'real programmer'...

<comment><USER7> No, that 1970's person in your field would have likely shown you what they knocked together with APL and would blow _you_ away. Not all of what we're doing can be termed progress, we're inventing a lot of stuff all over.

Python is essentially a much better basic, there isn't much that I can do today in Python that I would not have been able to do in let's say Gfa Basic more than 2 decades ago.

Our machines have gotten faster, our memories are much larger, and so are our drives. We take networking for granted.

But our programming languages are only a very small step up from what we had back then and our ability to solve harder problems comes mostly from the faster hardware and the bigger ram, the drives and the network.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here's the thing, if this thing actually works not only are all programmers going to be out of a job but everyone else will too.

I really wish these articles would stop talking about how IBM made a computer than can beat a grand master at chess, how about talk about how computers can't beat my 9 year old at Go. There are lot of problems which computers currently excel at, creative thinking isn't one of them.

<comment><USER9> You know...that's really one of the best analogies to the NP-complete problem in computer science...if ever a solution is found to them, then all NP- complete problems are solved.

To use your excellent example...computers can't do _everything_...such as construct a program that fixes all bugs...Not that humans can do any better, but the humans who can control the computers can at least step in and instruct the computer how to fix itself or at least mitigate the damage. Once a computer can be programmed to program and fix all of its own bugs...well, then we won't need programmers, nor will we need humans, either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow,

I'm upvoting this only to encourage someone to write a good article with a similar title.

gavinpc writes: _" 'Art' is the worst term the author could have chosen for anything that is in danger of automation."_

Indeed, The only logical argument for computer programming as dying art is that the art aspect is being drown by armies of low-paid contractors and start-up worker. But I'm not saying that's true. I'm just point the way in case someone wants to write the good "Computer Programming Is a Dying Art". I'll wait tell then to comment.

<comment><USER11> Yep ! Exactly ! I clicked the article expecting to read a reasonably written lament about the fact that programmers are lesser artists and more artisans these days in the way they approach the act of programming. Amusing thought tho': I wish someone writes an article in Newsweek with the headline "Journalism is a dying art" and then go on to describe news aggregation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wow, this is a disturbingly naive article. Who writes and maintains MUSE? How do you express to it what you want done? Who writes the code that feeds into it?

As for computers that behave like human brains, who writes that code? On what planet is teaching a human a task more efficient than writing computer code? How is it an advance in any sense to turn computers into human brains? We have already have billions of human brains in the world and they cost nothing to produce. Let's not waste our time trying to build electronic versions of them.

<comment><USER13> > Of course, someone has to write the raw code, just as some farmer has to > grow the wheat that winds up in the box of rigatoni at Safeway. But, as > happened with farmers, far fewer coders will be needed as existing code gets > repurposed. Theoretically, just one person on the planet will have to write > the raw code that makes a computer perform a certain task.

Just that one person. Sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I love how this article tries to equivocate with statements like this one:

 _In the end, far more people will be able to program without knowing code. They'll just need good higher-level design thinking so they can clearly, logically explain the computer's task._

Apparently these folks haven't figured out that the language humans use to "clearly, logically explain the computer's task" is called _code_.

I don't imagine that programming as we know it will remain unchanged forever, but one of the greatest accomplishments of this era of computing is that we _did_ create _any_ system for clearly, logically explaining the computer's task. I find it annoying that this article downplays that achievement, going so far as to suggest that we shouldn't teach kids to code. Y'know, because the last 60 years of prognostications of "we'll have thinking machines in 5 years!"[1] have worked out so well.

[1] As-near as I can accurately recall quote from a 50's news reel segment filmed with an MIT professor.

</comment><comment><USER15> Even by the "standards" of Newsweek, this article is supremely stupid.

Current high level languages make so few concessions to the underlying execution engine, that all they really are, are convenient notation for clear and logical thought. The only reason they seem needlessly hard to your average Newsweek hack, is because of his/her own shortcomings in the clear and logical arena.

English, as well as other "human" languages, are (perhaps)good for making highly concrete grunts to ones hunting party, and for making jokes to impress chicks. They were never well suited for describing complex processes and procedures. And complex processes and procedures is what defines an advanced economy. Every area of advanced economy endeavor suffers from having too much of it's workings half assedly and imprecisely "described" in a "human" language. And honestly, for no other reason than that too many "stakeholders" are too bloody dense and lazy to learn anything better suited.

But I guess there are those who think mathematics would be better off without all that weird, difficult notation as well. With mathematicians instead hand waving and counting on fingers, in front of calculators "smart" enough to learn from humans......

</comment><comment><USER9> > _" Writing code is a terrible way for humans to instruct computers. Lucky > for us, new technology is about to render programming languages about as > useful as Latin"_

Jesus. Well, this coming from the same publication that thought the founder of Bitcoin was as simple to find and verify as looking in the phone book and conducting an ambush interview...I can see why they don't sweat the details of accuracy and nuance.

</comment><comment><USER7> When I was 20 (and still overly ambitious) one fine evening I started a program optimistically called 'the last one'. It was meant to replace me. I figured that I knew enough programming by then to write a program that would take a spec and spit out another program.

Why it failed I'll leave as an exercise to the reader (go build it!) but let's say that 30 years later I'm not at all worried that programming will be dying as an art form any day soon. Because for that to happen we'd have to elevate computers to the levels of creative thinking normally reserved for us humans.

We can make tools to make it easier, ways that will afford us higher levels of abstraction using better programming languages. But those are mostly incremental steps, a better drill versus the previous generation drills.

And those tools will allow us to do more with less input from the programmers. But for now I don't see any revolutionary development on the horizon other than quantum computing and practical implementation of those for general problems seems to be at least several decades out.

</comment><comment><USER11> Whether programming is dying or not, Mr. Kevin (the author) seems to have figured out how to write articles that generate traffic for Newsweek -- take something popular and predict its demise or that of something which is related: [http://www.newsweek.com/authors/kevin- maney-0](http://www.newsweek.com/authors/kevin-maney-0)

</comment><comment><USER16> Just think of the legal licensing concerns this database would entail. GNU/BSD/ASPL/MPL/whatever else code all living together, and trying to assemble it into a reasonable harmony would be almost as complex as actually compiling viable software.

Then we get into architectural details, like 32/64 bit, endianness, unicode flavor of the decade/ascii/ebcdic strings. Not to mention call by value, call by reference, calling across cross languages, reference counting, value boxing, garbage collection, thread-safety, pointer data alignment, struct packing, dynamic linking dependencies and symbol versioning.

I'm sure someone long ago wrote that we'd have replaceable car parts by now, so that one spark plug works in every car. And we'd just pick out an axel, suspension, steering wheel, paint color, transmission, starter motor, and wind shield wipers from a catalog and be able to build the car of our dreams just by pointing to its parts.

</comment><comment><USER17> > The thinking is that of the 20 billion lines of code written each year, most > of it repeats something that lots of programmers all over the globe have > already done. MUSE will assemble a massive collection of chunks of code that > can perform almost any task anybody could ever think of and tag all the code > so it can automatically be found and assembled.

Excess hyperbole aside, this really is an interesting project. This seems like a logical extension of the existing practice of creating libraries, except that the effort of gluing code together would be automated.

That being said, it's hard not to point out the invariable difficulties:

* A large proportion of the 20 billion lines is probably fixing bugs or working around design decisions.

* Using pre-written code in a new context will unearth a few unaccounted-for edge cases

* Getting code from multiple languages to interoperate without human intervention would be a coup in and of itself.

</comment><comment><USER18> I was going to address the problems of the article but it seems like other people have already addressed these points.

However I will mention that it seems no one on Newsweek's staff must have an iPhone or browse via mobile because their site experience was terrible.

Page loads and I try to scroll past the image. Can't. Wait a while and finally I can start to scroll. Then the site does a huge redraw and once again I am stuck on the top of the page unable to load. Finally an advert (which I guess is the reason for all the lagginess) takes over the entire screen. It is animating, has an optional video to load, and refuses to acknowledge my touch on the close button.

Is this what the web has come to?

</comment><comment><USER19> HAHA. Nice going newsweek, this idea, it's been around for over 50 years, and it's always just around the corner according to rags like you, and like practical nuclear fusion, it's always 50 years in the future for anybody who's got a clue.

But just in case we actually can teach computers to understand us, "solving programming" will be one of the least exciting things that'll happen at that time. Other things may include, but may also not be limited to: extinction of the human species, technological singularities, deconstruction of earth and moon to build a matrichoka brain, and so forth.

</comment><comment><USER20> Click-bait.

For the foreseeable future, computer programming will be a flourishing art and non-natural languages will be the primary way of interacting with computers for non-trivial tasks, if only due to the ambiguities of natural language. There's a reason mathematics still uses specialized notation after all these years.

I do think we can say with relative certainty that Newsweek is a dying company, however.

</comment><comment><USER21> I am getting tired of these ridiculous articles.

It's like a dream for people who really want to believe that the people off programming computers are wasting their time because they will never have the drive to learn how to do it themselves.

I know that there are a lot of projects to make software development obsolete, but I can't see it happening, not on the timeline of 20 years they're predicting.

</comment><comment><USER22> Sounds unlikely. I would like to not have to tell the computer exactly how to do stuff. We will see if that will be possible in the future.

</comment><comment><USER23> Funny. Who do they think will be teaching computers how to understand humans?

</comment><comment><USER24> Paywalled.

</comment><comment><USER25> The 1970s called. It wants its uninformed futuristic bullshit back.

"Everyone should learn to code" is a bit ridiculous, given that technology's biggest problem right now isn't a lack of capable coders, but that of the competent people who are out there, few are rarely trusted to tackle real work. (See today's blog post: [http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/05/30/technologys-l...](http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/05/30/technologys- loser-problem/)).

The _theory_ might be that AI will render programmers obsolete. The reality is that we've been commoditized and humiliated by process and business nonsense, even though we're nowhere close to achieving AI. What has actually rendered our prospects poor in comparison to what they should be isn't AI but the diametric opposite: Human Stupidity.</comment>


Chinese students claim they worked illegal overtime making the iPhone X - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/11/foxconn-and-apple-face-controversy-over-student-worker-overtime-claims/ <comment><USER2> 450,000 people make the iPhone in Shenzhen, China. This does not include the parts that Foxconn itself can't make. Although the 450k number is from a couple of years ago, it could conceivably be less now due to robotics and automation.

Then you have everything else made in Shenzhen, so we are talking millions more jobs.

The US imports 86% of its goods, or about $2 trillion every year. We're the LARGEST IMPORTER in the world.

The fact that companies in other countries can treat their workers terribly is the real reason jobs won't comeback (along with the fact that we're missing about 30 years worth of manufacturing know-how and capabilities). Joseph Stiglitz, economic advisor to Hillary Clinton, made a great sort of anti-free trade proposal in his book "Rewriting the Rules". His plan was to block or highly tariff imports for every country that won't adhere to strict worker safety and benefits reforms. That is a great solution which offers rewards to the left and right and should be looked more into.</comment>


Platform specific PHP bug - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jerrywong.net/2008/07/back-from-dead.html

<comment><USER2> How the hell does this get upvoted to the #2 spot on hacker news?

This is both dumb and not news. Ranting on magic_quotes_gpc has been done to death already.

Now for some code:

        if (get_magic_quotes_gpc()) {
            array_stripslashes($_GET);
            array_stripslashes($_POST);
            array_stripslashes($_REQUEST);
            array_stripslashes($_COOKIE);
        }

        function array_stripslashes(array &$array)
        {
            foreach ($array as $key => &$value) {
                if (is_string($value)) $value = stripslashes($value);
                elseif (is_array($value)) array_stripslashes($value);
            }
        }

</comment><comment><USER3> "Platform specific bug" is only mentioned in the HN post title: it isn't the article's title, nor does he mention a "platform specific bug" in the article. Magic quotes is a side issue: his expected output has no quotes in it in the first place! "Where are his random quotes coming from?" was his question, not "Where are these random slashes coming from?" - he answered that question by himself.

But yea, $_COOKIE is the way to go.

</comment><comment><USER4> I hate PHP as much as anyone, but I have a feeling this is programmer error. Of course, PHP makes programmer error really easy, but...

</comment><comment><USER5> magic_quotes_gpc should almost never be turned on. a lot of linux distro has it off by default. it's the programmer's job to escape the db inputs. this blog article is too contentless to make it to #2.

</comment><comment><USER6> He shouldn't be using not sanitize and not parse_str. He should be using $_COOKIE[]

</comment><comment><USER7> Magic quotes.. _sigh_

I think this feature is going to be removed in PHP6.

<comment><USER8> I hope so. Magic quotes are evil.</comment></comment>


Idea for Security Bounty Program - <AUTHOR>

Simple way to have people test security of your server file system.
1. BTC address has 100BTC. (or whatever is appropriate / to however your stuff is)
2. Private key is put in a plain text file on the server.
3. Have people go at it!
Hi everybody, our server address is 10.x.x.x. There is a BTC private key with 100BTC in a text file called private.txt in the /root directory. <comment><USER2> Also known as a bitcoin piñata: [http://ownme.ipredator.se/](http://ownme.ipredator.se/)</comment>


Ever tried learning programming and failed? Here's how I started without failing - <AUTHOR> http://amazedprogrammer.blogspot.com/2017/08/ever-tried-to-start-learning.html <comment><USER2> Didnt read it but you should fail a few times, failing is learning!</comment>


Test drive a Chrome notebook. – Google - <AUTHOR> https://services.google.com/fb/forms/cr48advanced/ <comment><USER2> I would, but Chrome still hasn't fixed the bug where radio buttons and checkboxes mysteriously disappear at random points throughout the day.

</comment><comment><USER3> US only, a pity.

<comment><USER4> is it ? you can choose any country while applying

<comment><USER5> _So if you live in the United States..._

It is.

<comment><USER6> Sad. I hope they will do something serious to properly handle internationalisation. They seem to want to modify the keyboard for example, i hope they will consider internationalisation when doing that.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Brexit-1 Fiber Cable – NYC to Marseilles - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/announcing-brexit-1-cable-sunil-tagare <comment><USER2> With one AWS and 2 Azure data-centers coming to France (one of the Azure one is supposed to be in the "south of France"), this would probably help reducing the latency and increasing bandwidth between those data-centers and the US ones.

Apart from the name which I have a hard time to believe, (is it just a joke attempt from the post author?), the part I find interesting is, according to [1], this would be the first cable between France and the USA. I can see "FLAG Atlantic-1" and "Apollo", but those seem to have endpoints in both France and the UK. There is however already cables between the USA and European union countries, such as MAREA

[1] [http://www.submarinecablemap.com/#/country/france](http://www.submarinecablemap.com/#/country/france)

</comment><comment><USER3> > Fourthly, this will be a truly diverse path and one that is just perfect.

Surely this article is some kind of satire that's over my head...

<comment><USER4> > Sunil Tagare

> Thought leader in the global telecommunications industry

I honestly can't tell either.

<comment><USER5> Although describing yourself as a " thought leader" seems popular these days, I don't think I've ever come across anybody using that term about themselves accurately.

<comment><USER6> "thought leader" is the point I quit taking people serious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why do I have to log in to linkedin for this??

</comment><comment><USER8> Why is this BS on HN?</comment>


The Mythos of Model Interpretability - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.03490 <comment><USER2> When educated people like doctors, lawyers, managers, etc., ask for "interpretability," what they mean is, "what are the 'key variables' we can control that will help produce the outcomes we want?"

Simpler statistical models, and particularly linear models, provide easy-to- grasp "answers" to that question -- for example, "to get more of y, we need more of x1 and x2, and less of x3."

An entire generation of leaders and professionals has been trained to think this way by statistics professors and teachers who have been rigorously trained to think that way too. (For background, I highly recommend Leo Breiman's now-classic paper, "Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures:" [https://projecteuclid.org/download/pdf_1/euclid.ss/100921372...](https://projecteuclid.org/download/pdf_1/euclid.ss/1009213726) )

Alas, there's no going back. Simpler models _do not work_ for complicated tasks like, say, predicting the next best move in a game of Go, for which there are no 'key variables' in the traditional sense.

<comment><USER3> It goes further. Folks who care strongly about the interpretability factor generally only care because it gives them authority and political control -- they definitely don't actually believe it's a superior, nor even cost- effective, way of obtaining prediction accuracy.

Robin Hanson summarized this well in his article "Who about forecast accuracy?" [0]. Here's a nice quote:

> The benefits of creating and monitoring forecast accuracy might be lower > than we expect if the function and role of forecasting is less important > than we think, relative to the many functions and roles served by our > pundits, academics, and managers.

> Consider first the many possible functions and roles of media pundits. Media > consumers can be educated and entertained by clever, witty, but accessible > commentary, and can coordinate to signal that they are smart and well-read > by quoting and discussing the words of the same few focal pundits. Also, > impressive pundits with prestigious credentials and clear "philosophical" > positions can let readers and viewers gain by affiliation with such > impressiveness, credentials, and positions. Being easier to understand and > classify helps "hedgehogs" to serve many of these functions.

> Second, consider the many functions and roles of academics. Academics are > primarily selected and rewarded for their impressive mastery and application > of difficult academic tools and methods. Students, patrons, and media > contacts can gain by affiliation with credentialed academic impressiveness. > In forecasts, academic are rewarded much more for showing mastery of > impressive tools than for accuracy.

> Finally, consider next the many functions and roles of managers, both public > and private. By being personally impressive, and by being identified with > attractive philosophical positions, leaders can inspire people to work for > and affiliate with their organizations. Such support can be threatened by > clear tracking of leader forecasts, if that questions leader impressiveness.

FWIW, having worked for a while in quant finance, I can testify that this precisely nails it. Even when it would be cheap, easy, obviously worthwhile, and likely impactful, projects to switch from politically-controlled, simplistic regressions couched in the buzzwords of academic finance and instead embrace principled statistical computing, proper model fitting hygiene, machine learning, etc., such improvements will _never_ be considered. There's too much political gatekeeper rent-seeking at the higher levels of the management who oversee the investment process. Sure, they'll claim plausible deniability by saying something is "a black box" or making a fallacious comparison with an algorithmic trading firm that lost money, but the real reason is to protect their fiefdom, over which they are the lord and master because of their credentialed authority in some "interpretable" buzzword.

[0] < [http://www.cato-unbound.org/2011/07/13/robin-hanson/who- care...](http://www.cato-unbound.org/2011/07/13/robin-hanson/who-cares-about- forecast-accuracy) >

<comment><USER4> > they definitely don't actually believe it's a superior, nor even cost- > effective, way of obtaining prediction accuracy.

Prediction accuracy is not the only goal. There are only a handful of times in my life where I've seen a machine learning task where the training data was a perfect match for the business objective. The training objective is a proxy for the actual objective, where the gap between the two includes a lot of systematic bias. Interpretability is necessary to make sure the model isn't merely exploiting that gap. (And also to motivate further improvements.)

<comment><USER3> I don't think what you are saying is incompatible with my comment. Asking a question such as, "what is it about the data that is causing the model to be fitted like this?" is very healthy and important, but is rarely what anyone means by 'interpretability.'

Instead, 'interpretability' is usually taken to mean something more akin to: which readily human-understandable cognitive structures (out of the set of such structures that I am the authortity on) is the model directly (and easily) mappable to? By mapping onto those structures, I can now weave a story about the model within the domain in which I am the established authority. If such mappings don't exist, or are very difficult to compute, then my authority is threatened.

Having said all of this, the most egregious abuses of the nefarious side of 'interpretability' that I have seen have all come in quant finance, which is a situation in which the optimization criteria are _literally_ the identically same thing as the actual objective.

Given that when prediction accuracy is paramount to the definition of success you still see politics trumping science, I have very little confidence that when you move to domains where the objective criteria of the models differs from the real-life objective in non-trivial ways, then somehow 'interpretability' will be used appropriately rather than overwhelmingly just as a political tool.

<comment><USER5> With respect, I think there's a fundamental error in this reply. You're making a dogmatic statement about what interpretability is taken to mean, which assumes of course that the vast body of work, both in academia, journalism, and business meetings, holds a consistent view. The point of this paper, however, in part, is to point out that this view is mistaken.

<comment><USER3> You are incorrect in your claim. The paper does make a good point that under the umbrella term "interpretability" there are varied and conflicting understandings of what, specifically, is meant.

That fact has nearly zero relevance to what I'm saying.

When I say that people look for mappings from the model to a space of cognitive structures over which they have authority, it could be (and observed in practice always is) a smattering of all the different things talked about in the paper -- authority over which diagnostics represent 'trust,' authority over which visualizations are adequately informative, authority over explaining 'how' an algorithm works, and so on.

Though all of these are discordant takes on the specifics of interpretability, as discussed in the paper, they still are unified in the sense that the _true_ intention in appealing to any of them is to map things into a domain where someone wields the authority. It's not about actually caring about trusted diagnostics, or caring about quality visualizations, or caring about communicating the intuition behind a model. Those are just the plausible deniability excuses proffered to try to win the battle over which faction's authority gets center stage.

I don't require that anyone have a cross-domain consistent view of the specific definition of interpretability in order for my claims to be a viable explanation, and so it is perfectly compatible with the paper. The paper looks at the on-the-ground specifics used in the arguments over interpretability, meanwhile politics explains the behind-the-scenes motivations of _any_ of those specific choices.

The _Moral Mazes_ chapter _Dexterity with Symbols_ is a good place if you want to read on the evidence about how this is carried out in management bureaucracy. It has actually been formally studied in some interesting ways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe the prevalent mental model regarding models is wrong? The real elephant in the room is the idea that "all models" are similar, and therefore occupy the same space regarding interpretability, forecasting, and other uses. Models are designed to solve specific problems, usually within specific scopes. Confusion, misinterpretation, and error occur when consumers of models don't understand (or simply ignore) the limitations of these models.

Whenever I sit down to build a new model, or work with a new-to-me model, I start with questions like:

\- What questions was this model built to answer? Be careful when asking other questions, and know the limitations of those answers.

\- If it's been in use for a while, how effective has it been? How is that efficacy measured? A highly accurate decomposition of historical behavior may involve a lot of post-fact knowledge that has no predictive power, so be careful interpreting cross-use results.

\- What are the ranges and distributions of the input variables? What are their boundary conditions? This is not always applicable to all variables, especially unstructured data, but when it is applicable, it is usually straightforward.

\- What are the ranges of the model outputs? Do they have any boundary conditions? Do boundary effects impact the situations in which the model can be applied? For example, when working with a binned variable, often bins 0 and n include less homogenous data than the rest of the bins.

\- How is model accuracy calculated? This is usually far less objective than model constructors are willing to admit to. How does your error vary along different dimensions? Which dimensional error do you look at more closely, and why?

In my experience, the best way to reason about models is to work with a lot of different models, and to be honest about their flaws. That learning generally happens more efficiently, and more broadly, in the real world than in the classroom. With the recent rise in popularity of applied models, we have lots of inexperience modelers out there, so these growing pains are to be expected.

<comment><USER7> It seems like you're talking about human-created models (e.g. a manually- constructed decision tree), whereas the paper's primary concern is machine- created models (e.g. the weights derived mechanically by a neural network).

So the problem would be: how do you get the "modelers" (i.e. the machines) to be "honest about the flaws" of the models that they generated?</comment></comment>