How Being Named the 'Best New Restaurant in America' Hurt My Business - <AUTHOR> https://munchies.vice.com/articles/how-being-named-the-best-new-restaurant-in-america-hurt-my-business <comment><USER3> You know, at the risk of heaping on the negativity, I read their Yelp ratings and while some are excellent, others are genuinely a sign of a restaurant in crisis.

Consider the gentleman from New Zealand who made reservations via an email to the owner five weeks in advance, spent the afternoon walking around downtown LA to avoid rush hour traffic, and then showed up only to be told that they were closed for a wine tasting. Or, there was the reviewer who got the point of the restaurant, but still found the flavours rather difficult. Or heck, consider the endless comments about how poor the service was.

I take a couple of things away from this:

\- No matter how interesting your product is, you still need to please your customers.

\- When you're emotionally invested in something, it is tempting to set aside criticism as being gratuitously negative. But, sometimes your critics are your best advisers.

<comment><USER4> I've generally been growing to the idea that I want to hear all criticism towards my projects, whether it's good or bad, whether it's constructive or not. People suck at communicating, but when they leave criticism, there is always a reason somewhere at the core. It's the old saying that it is apathy, not hate, that is the opposite of love.

So when people are heaping hate on one of my projects, I am now starting to think of it as a failure of messaging on my behalf. If someone says something like "don't reinvent the wheel", it's because I've failed to explain my constraints that prevent me from using existing systems. Maybe one of those constraints is "I don't like that particular system". But whatever it is, it probably needs to be explained if someone is bitching about it.

I might rather people hated my projects than completely ignored them. Getting ignored sucks a lot. Receiving hate tells me people were actually excited by the idea and I was on to something, but that I didn't do something right. I can't figure anything out from getting ignored. It's just blowing in the breeze at that point.

<comment><USER5> I tend to be in the same boat, but I feel there's an important caveat: the person providing the criticism needs to be reachable if the criticism itself lacks substance. A complaint just for the sake of venting does no good.

Take, for example, a recent review on my iPad app:

        As a creative professional I can tell you that this is junk. Today I had an important meeting and this app acted up to the point the client laughed hard for how bad it was. Stay away!

There is nothing specific in there that I can use to improve the experience. Not one user in thousands of daily active users on this version has reported anything I could possibly assume might be what the reviewer is talking about. Further, because it's on the iOS App Store, it's impossible for me to reach the person.

<comment><USER6> That's one of the best parts of the google play store; the developer can directly respond to a review. It's pretty handy, and to me, as a user, it says the app is actively being worked on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> HN is usually pretty good about calling out founders who blame everyone but themselves for failings. This is exactly that, just in a restaurant context.

The problem is that Ari thought that Alma's humble origins mattered to people coming in for a good meal such that they would somehow obscure some pretty big problems with the restaurant. I can't imagine ever excusing a product's flaws simply because the founder had difficulty raising capital, and no other restaurant has these deluded expectations.

In this case, the founder didn't listen to his customers — instead, he chose to rest on his MVP laurels and never move beyond. We appreciate that you were able to open the place on $50k, but now that you're more well known, could you possibly stop ripping people off with Eastern European wine that didn't pair with any of your tasting menu? I understand that your approach required an "us vs the world" mentality, but perhaps you could improve service that was spotty bordering on rude. When your customers dislike the tasting menu because it lacks many standout flavors beyond the snacks that initially made you famous, it's advisable to step up your dishes, not simply change to an ala carte menu and start blaming the Yelpers.

From what I can tell, he raised his own funds to start Alma. Before that, he was fired from an internship at a James Beard award winning restaurant, worked unpaid at a community garden and few other places until he just up and left. The article notes that he's never appeared on any of the cooking shows or anything, and that he was about to have to start working in someone else's place before the permanent real estate "opened up" in Downtown LA (which makes no sense if you've been to the neighborhood).

Point being, it's easy to sound blasé about giving a fuck what other people think of your cooking, but it masks the fact that this guy has never had to answer to anyone about some very obvious flaws in his cooking and business skills. Instead, blame your customers and their "shit talking."

Good riddance.

<comment><USER8> _> could you possibly stop ripping people off with Eastern European wine that didn't pair with any of your tasting menu?.....Good riddance_

Perhaps it's my disdain for wine snobs or anyone else that takes ridiculous things seriously, but I find your comment extremely distasteful - <USER2> the quoted part. Unless he is actively misrepresenting the origin or brand of the wine, he isn't "ripping people off". He simply made a menu choice that you vehemently disagree with. If the negative Yelp reviews are similar to your rant here, he absolutely has a point in blaming the positive articles about the restaurant for bringing in the wrong kind of clientele with outlandish expectations and a penchant for publicly deriding others' lifework.

<comment><USER9> Eh, there are wines that go better with certain dishes than others. If you order a wine on your own and it doesn't go with the food, it's your own damn fault, but on a tasting menu with wine pairings it's 100% understood by the customers that the sommelier has spent some time identifying and selecting good matches for each course.

I can't tell from the grandparent comment whether he's grousing about a bad choice he made personally or some botched tasting menu pairings - but if he got the tasting menu with the wine pairings and the wine didn't match, then yeah, he absolutely got ripped off. Expecting two things the restaurant recommends together to actually go well together isn't an 'outlandish expectation' at all.

<comment><USER8> Taste is, by its very definition, subjective. A mismatch between the taste of this commenter's apparently very sensitive palette and that of the menu designer does not qualify as a "rip-off".

<comment><USER10> By that logic, nobody should ever leave a bad review because the food was disgusting.

<comment><USER8> Any statement, taken to its (il)logical extreme, can be made to seem ridiculous. But no one has accused the food here of being "disgusting". In this case, OP said that he didn't like a wine pairing, and ended his comment with "good riddance". In other words, he was happy to see the livelihood of another human being destroyed because he was unhappy with the specific part of Europe that the wine he was served came from. The Internet exacerbates sociopathic tendencies, and there is no finer example of that than this.

<comment><USER11> Can we please have some perspective here? The business owner's livelihood was not "destroyed". His business failed. That is a risk every business owner takes when they start a business, and even that failure generally leaves them more equipped for their next effort. The article even explicitly talks about what he's doing next, which will almost certainly do well by him. He's going to be fine, and the OP of this thread has done and can do nothing to prevent that.

This kind of extreme overreaction to criticisms of people who have incredibly opportunities ahead of them no matter what they did wrong or failed at is just silly.

<comment><USER8> Bad Yelp ratings routinely destroy businesses (which usually function as the livelihood of the owner(s)). When OP said "good riddance," he was saying that he was happy to see the demise of this restaurant because he disliked the part of Europe his wine was from. IMO, _that_ is the kind of "extreme overreaction" you are referring to.

<comment><USER12> I'm gonna go with stormbrew on this one. You say "destroy business" and destroy livelihood as if this guy is going to be kicked out on the streets because his business didn't work out. Give me a break - yeah, it's sad for him that his business failed, but I'm sure he'll find another upper-middle class job soon. Being a special snowflake founder doesn't excuse him from being criticized about running a fine-dining establishment badly.

We would all do better to break out of this 1950s idea that losing a job or closing a business is cataclysmically bad. It's disappointing for the founders, but everyone involved will most likely find something else just as good very soon.

<comment><USER13> Please, restaurant jobs are blue collar, working class jobs. Even operating a restaurant is long, hard labour. Most restaurant owner/operators I know work 12 hour days, 6-7 days per week, and if they were to go bankrupt, certainly wouldn't be able to just jump to the next project...

Capital doesn't simply line up for restaurateurs because there is no big exit. The most you can hope for is to make a profit by the time your lease runs out, and maybe pay yourself a salary.

<comment><USER11> I don't think anyone is arguing it's easy to run a restaurant, or even to start one. That's not the point. The point is that someone having a business that's failing, or losing their job for that matter, has not had their "livelihood destroyed". They have had one tool in maintaining their livelihood removed, it does not mean they have no more.

And while capital does not (and really should not) line up easily for restaurateurs, I would still argue that someone who can raise capital once has a well above average chance of being able to raise it twice, regardless of the risk of the venture. This also assumes the only choice a business owner has when their business fails is to start another.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think a lot of the commentators here are missing his point. Namely, that he started Alma because he loved cooking, and that before being named the "Best New Restaurant in America," he enjoyed cooking for other people, but afterwards all the wannabe critics ruined his experience. So negative Yelp reviews aren't helpful if he didn't plan on becoming a world-famous restauranteur, but just wanted to run a small, local restaurant. In other words, in a world where Alma never won this accolade, he, his early customers, and all the negative Yelp reviewers would all have been happier (because they wouldn't have known or cared about Alma being overrated).

</comment><comment><USER15> Seems like an expensive lawsuit was an issue:

June 2015: "If you add another $18,000 a month in legal fees ... we just can't absorb it on our own."

October 2015: "We're still working with the other party to wrap up the lawsuit. But to maintain the restaurant at this point it would just continue to put us in a substantial amount of debt. [...] as small business owners, we won't be able to afford a trial, and we really can't even afford to go through the proceedings leading up to a trail. The realization was that the only way to bring this all to a close is to dissolve the business and move on"

[http://www.grubstreet.com/2015/10/alma-closing- interview.htm...](http://www.grubstreet.com/2015/10/alma-closing- interview.html), [http://www.grubstreet.com/2015/06/alma-crowd- funding.html](http://www.grubstreet.com/2015/06/alma-crowd-funding.html)

<comment><USER16> Thanks, those articles are helpful in understanding the real issues.

This next article gives the other side of the story regarding the lawsuit.

[http://www.buzzfeed.com/arianelange/alma- lawsuit](http://www.buzzfeed.com/arianelange/alma-lawsuit)

[http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/sites/default/files/custom/...](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/sites/default/files/custom/Documents/ESQ/Almacomplaint.pdf)

<comment><USER15> Thanks for these! Very interesting:

"... they offered to set up a payment plan to reimburse _the money he had spent_ on the restaurant."

Which goes to show - it's a bad idea to do anything before terms have been put down on paper! It is quite amazing when you first start doing business by yourself (as a contractor, entrepreneur, or even chef it seems) how often people "go back on their word".

What happens is that both sides have a different idea of the deal, probably picking on whatever hints were in the conversation to interpret them in the most favorable light possible; and in some cases, it's just a case of one side last-minute-changing the deal because they feel the situation has progressed to give them more leverage.

In this case, the disagreement could easily have been avoided if they had typed up a term sheet and preferably some kind of legally enforceable shareholder's agreement BEFORE the payments were made.

Now begins the PR battle as both sides will try and influence public opinion to protect their reputation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I ate there before it was named best restaurant in America. It was ok a bit pretentious with tasting style food and bare interior. I tried to go back months later with a date and the answering machine said they don't take phone calls during dinner service (but they were only opened for dinner) and just hung up. Went to another place downtown instead and drove by Alma, it was empty

</comment><comment><USER18> And they continue to beat up on the guy in the comments: "You represent everything that is wrong with the food industry in Los Angeles."

Can you imagine that? Who is he, Stalin? (I'm giving Hitler the day off.)

<comment><USER19> There's a reason south park riffed on this in the latest season.

Everyone thinks their opinion is important because the internet has made it easy for people to broadcast their complaints to the world (and yes, I realize I'm literally doing this _right now_ ). Review sites like Yelp exacerbate this by making everyone think they're a damn food critic.

Throw in a heavy dose of entitlement and its a recipe for disaster.

<comment><USER20> Well, it's more than that, I think - it's kind of why you never hear comedians lead off with "Here's a really funny joke", and it's because everyone takes stuff like that as a challenge.

I haven't seen the negative reviews, but I read the article declaring Alma best new restaurant, and the article is focused a lot on the humble origins and surprisingly very little on the food. The author talks a bit on how some of the pairings were surprising, but more so because the author wasn't expecting it to be this good.

I'd like to see some of the actual negative reviews, but if that's the article that brought people in, it's not hard to imagine how some might take the declaration of "best new restaurant" as a challenge instead of as a claim.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why not just write that on the menu? One of the best (and highest rated) restaurants near me often features a rant at the bottom of the menu from the owner, either about politics or the economics of the business or just complaining about the customers being douchebags. It's a little quirky, but it doesn't seem to hurt business any, and at least helps the customers understand his perspective on things.

</comment><comment><USER22> I started Matasano with two partners, both from NYC, one of whom had taken a break from software security to go to culinary school.

What I heard from them is that stuff like this is also part of the restaurant culture of different cities. The rap on NYC and LA is that they have competitive, take-down cultures (NYC more so than LA).

<comment><USER23> _" The rap on NYC and LA is that they have competitive, take-down cultures (NYC more so than LA)."_

That's why they're better in the arts. In NYC, they tell you if you suck. In LA, they don't call you back if you suck. In SF nobody says anything and you can suck forever. Go to little theater or art openings and this is quite obvious.

<comment><USER22> Neither Chicago nor San Francisco have takedown restaurant cultures, and both have relatively spectacular restaurant scenes.

Some of this gets to what you're looking for from a restaurant. If you're looking at food as an art form, and only want to spend time getting exposure to the very best of it, NYC may indeed be a better filter for you. If what you want is a Great Neighborhood Restaurant, which is perhaps Great in ways that make it distinctive regionally or even nationally, I think Chicago is a better bet than LA.

<comment><USER24> I think you could almost describe this in the context of only positive- reinforcement cultures vs positive-reinforcement and negative-reinforcement cultures. Both approaches seem to work well in the long-term, but the city which also has negative-reinforcement might have 'failures' more often, which could be seen as a positive from the POV of looking at the health of the whole system, but on the other hand could be seen as needlessly cruel to individuals.

<comment><USER22> But it's also a question of whether you want the culture to optimize for peak artistic quality, or whether you want the median restaurant to be really good. There are some kinds of food for which the NYC median is higher than everyone else's, but for a lot of it, I wonder whether the Chicago median is better even when the NYC maximum is better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Restaurants are hard enough without being compared to restaurants that opened with $10 million and 50+ staff...

$50k means you're a neighborhood restaurant, most dive bars and sandwich shops cost more to open...

<comment><USER25> This is one of the most important points in the comments here.

In LA opening a restaurant with only 50k is irresponsible mathematically. I say this having taken restaurant management courses with the goal of one day opening one myself.

It is true that restaurants are one of the most difficult businesses to start. It takes time to find your groove, and 50k no matter what neighborhood your in is not a lot of time. Most people in this situation would start with a food truck or save more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> People go to restaurants for lots of different reasons. That's what a 5-star rating system doesn't capture. I think simply rating "I am/not likely to eat there again" would be more appropriate. A site could aggregate enough of that data to find users with similar tastes to you. I.e., Yelp should be more like Pandora and less like Rolling Stone.

I don't know anything about this particular restaurant but it seems like he's accidentally targeting the wrong audience. Wine pairing menus, fancy plating, an article in Vice, Kickstarter... none of these things strike me as targeting his desired customer, which is someone with modest expectations and expecting just dinner, not an event to review.

<comment><USER27> This actually is a huge pet peeve of mine. It's most obvious with extendingl extremely specific needs like vegetarians for example. It drives me nuts when I read yelp reviews that rate a restaurant low because they don't offer good vegetarian alternatives. It is obviously an issue, but it should be trivial for yelp to exclude that recite from the rating that they show to non- vegetarians. Less obvious examples that are a related but different issues are reviews by people who clearly don't know what they are talking about. Looking at reviews of high end Spanish restaurants in the Basque country, I really don't care about reviews that start out with "This was my first visit to a restaurant with a Michelin star...". I'm not trying to be snobby, but I'd much rather have the review by someone who had been to a ton of then in the same area weighed much higher.

Edit: I wonder if there is a great opportunity for some disruption here. Well be tough do to overcome yelps moat. I would love to work on this!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> People assume that you pulled some sort of strings or gamed the "system" to be named "best new restaurant"; they don't know you're an accidental victim of overrating.

(If that _were_ the case, some of the negativity would be justified.)

</comment><comment><USER29> Starting a business is really hard, these people experienced just one of a near-infinite and surprising way that new companies fail. The good news is that should they try a new concept that is more community-oriented they'll have more leverage with investors and potential partners since they can clearly show they have potential.

</comment><comment><USER30> Interesting that they were remarkable when they opened, but when the mainstream media made it remarkable, it was no longer remarkable to a different set of people who were looking for more than what the space was.

This reminds me a little of Clay Shirky's article A Group is it's own worst enemy.

Not faulting in the restaurant owners (all businesses have growing pains), it raises thoughts about branding and how much "this is how we do it here" is as much about the holes in the walls at the restaurant as it is the food, and how that story was known and told.

Was the restaurant's message about who it was clearly known, before outside reviewers came in and interpreted their story and told their story for them? For me, a restaurant bootstrapped on so little money is remarkable and worthy of support, but it might not be for everyone.

Some things aren't meant to appeal to everyone and still be successful.

Link to essay: [http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enem...](http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enemy.html)

</comment><comment><USER31> Restuarants are a very risky business. I'd lump them in with other entertainment ventures like quitting your job to go write a novel or whatnot. You get to follow your dream but are not likely to be financially secure. Its a pity society works like that, rewarding pointless work (like corporate lawyers, middle manager and HR people (no offence intended)), and seemingly punishing people who pursue their calling. I'm planning to do that myself (to make computer games) but I will arrange it so I dont have to make any money doing it and can still survive (I have almost saved enough money to buy a two bed apartment, I'll rent the 2nd room and live off that + my expenses will be extremely low as I wont have to pay any rent myself as I'll own the place)

</comment><comment><USER32> Another possible explanation, as an alternative for all the "failing to scale" scorn shovelers who rushed to post: he started this restaurant, and then had it blow up in popularity before he had the chance to shake out all the bugs.

<comment><USER13> Not to mention, you can't 'scale' a small restaurant. You have a limited amount of space, and sometimes it's just not possible to progress beyond a certain point. Sometimes a neighborhood restaurant just needs to stay that way, it can't become a 'destination' restaurant because it simply doesn't have the logistics to manage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Public restaurant reviews are simply not helpful. There are better ways to solve discovery for consumers, and it's uniformly terrible for venues. Enabling private feedback to the GM/owner would be better.

</comment><comment><USER34> From a recent article in Vanity Fair about how some chefs are surrendering their Michelin stars, as they pigeonhole the chefs.

[http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/09/top-chefs- michelin...](http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/09/top-chefs-michelin- stars)

I do feel bad that they had to shutdown, but I suspect the same thing that hurt them (the accolades) also helped them to land a gig in The Standard. I consider this a success for a young chef, even if it arrived via a perceived failure.

</comment><comment><USER35> I have a tough time ginning up a whole to of sympathy here. Most people in business would kill for such attention. Not being able to figure out what to do with it seems like a comparatively small problem.

</comment><comment><USER36> "A year ago, a former friend and advisor who sought to partner with our business sued us. The charges alleged in the suit are serious, including fraud and unjust enrichment. For the past year, Alma has been hit hard with legal fees required to manage and defend the business against this suit." [https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/save-alma- restaurant#/](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/save-alma-restaurant#/)

</comment><comment><USER37> Honestly, it just seems like they were a mediocre restaurant.

Whether or not Yelp and publicity helped or harmed them is debatable, but that doesn't change the fact that their restaurant wasn't anything spectacular to write home about.

There are many instances where a genuinely good product or service receives negative publicity (remember the original iPad anyone?), but is still a genuinely innovative product or service.

It just seems like they weren't able to deliver an exceptional restaurant experience.

</comment><comment><USER38> When you get that much media attention and you still fail, there are no excuses. It means mistakes were made and expectations were not met. I don't think it's the media attention which killed the restaurant. Getting people's attention requires luck, keeping people's attention requires skill.

</comment><comment><USER39> fair enough. good points are made, people are brutally indifferent and you just wanted a kind of "secret" identity for your restaurant. yelp reviews didn't treat you the right way.

yet, most of what i read irks me because of its raging, venting way. oh well, its not like i haven't written similar things because of bad experiences.

best of luck to this guy.

</comment><comment><USER40> This is why, despite loving all kinds of different foods, I hesitate to call myself a 'foodie.'

</comment><comment><USER41> Here's a great rule of thumb: don't write bad reviews. If a place sucked, oh well. People have bad days. Stop acting like a wannabe gourmet and shitting all over people.

I'll only consider a bad review if you give me food poisoning. Cooking your food thoroughly isn't hard.

... Or if your service personally lost me real money. Then it's a legit "beware."

</comment><comment><USER42> > Who is he, Stalin? (I'm giving Hitler the day off.)

On a completely unrelated note, I'm so glad that western public opinion views this guys on the same level of evil.

If only russian public opinion was like that.

<comment><USER43> We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10767524](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10767524) and marked it off-topic.

<comment><USER42> It certainly is off-topic. But I didn't know that off-topic discussion, that goes as off-topic as a polite conversation between real people often can, is discouraged by HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> "Exposure killed my restaurant so I'm writing about it to get exposure for my new restaurant."

</comment><comment><USER45> It is so easy to criticize food. This is not different than writing or cinematography. This is the same attack against George Lucas. The Phantom Menance wasn't written for 34 year olds who act like children playing pretend in costumes, its target audience is 7 year olds. And, the movie is about growing up, leaving the protection of the protective mother (although gender roles have changed so now this includes the protective father) and join the adults.

There are probably a lot of people on HN in academia who after publishing popular papers or gained some fame find themselves with targets on their back for criticism.

Anyone dealing with the pressure of criticism should read a very small book that contains 10 letters written by Rainer Maria Rilke to an aspiring poet who went to the same German military school he went to called Letters to a Young Poet. [1]

It starts with:

"I cannot discuss your verses; for any attempt at criticism would be foreign to me. Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings."

I did cook professionally for 17 years. I understand what this chef feels. However, I have learned to not care about what anybody feels or says about my dishes. I do not cook for other people. I cook for myself, because I enjoy the process, intensity, and experience of cooking and the food I make is what I would want to eat. Most of the time I find what I want to eat is also what other people want to eat and in the cases it is not they can move along to next restaurant because I don't care what they think.

[1] [http://www.carrothers.com/rilke1.htm](http://www.carrothers.com/rilke1.htm)

<comment><USER46> The Phantom Menace is objectively a bad film. You want a good film that teaches this to seven year olds? Try Finding Nemo.

The Phantom Menace features offensive racial stereotypes, terrible dialog, A poorly-executed subplot about a trade dispute, and characters that I personally could not and cannot identify with.

Is it fair to speculate that you were born in 1992, making you the 7 year old you refer to above? Search your feelings, zappo2938, you know this is a bad movie!

<comment><USER47> It's also a historic piece of cinematography with a world that feels vast and immersive to its fans.

(I'm not one, but I am empathetic enough to imagine how they feel.)

Objectively it's not perfect, but every movie means something different to everyone and registers on a different level with each person.

So you're free to criticize it and rate it based on how well or poorly it portrays the things you think it stands for.

But other people have opinions too. And unless you're a filmmaker worth a damn yourself, your opinion doesn't count for anything.

<comment><USER45> Star Wars is for children and always have been. If a bunch of adults complain that the films don't speak to them, there is something very wrong with their state of maturity.

I wasn't passing judgement on the films whether they were good or bad. I was pointing out like the chef, after Lucas gained popularity, people started to attack him and his films with harsh criticism. Maybe the criticism of the chef is legitimate, maybe is earlier stuff was better than his latter stuff -- I don't know. My point is that criticism is an inevitable part of creativity and people can't make works of art to satisfy criticism because they will crush under the pressure. If the motivation for this chef is the applause, feeling accepted, and getting accolades, he is going to have a nervous breakdown.

This chef, George Lucas, Mark Zuckerberg, and before him Bill Gates can't catch a break from the shit talkers. I'm not passing judgement. But if you base your self esteem on prestige be prepared to have people tear that prestige and your self esteem away with it.

<comment><USER48> > _Star Wars is for children and always have been._

That's objectively false, though. Star Wars marketing quite clearly targets both children and adults; much more so than, say, Pixar films, which are marketed solely at children despite arguably being more mature (in the "thoughtful and intelligent" sense, not the "sex and violence" sense) than Star Wars.

You're actually trying to say that adults who like Star Wars are childish, and you're welcome to your opinion. But if you choose to back up your opinion with facts, you need to pick facts that are true. There are many exclusively kid- targeted properties that attract sneering attention from adult fans (mostly TV cartoons, in my experience), but Star Wars doesn't fit.

<comment><USER45> I absolutely enjoy Pixar and Star Wars films, along with many Dr. Seuss books which have messages not only directed towards children but also their parents reading it to their children on subjects like nuclear nonproliferation, anti- Semitism, dictatorial leadership, environmentalism, and in the case of Horton Hatches and Egg, not being a dead beat parent. I considered Star Wars just entertainment until my early 20s when I read Joseph Campbell which made me very conscious of what George Lucas and Disney were doing including the message of self sacrifice for a person's community, family, and friends. This means that George Lucas and everything from Disney [1] thoroughly rejects the libertarian philosophy of Ayn Rand using a language of myth and symbolism which according to Campbell connects deeply with children. That is Han Solo's character arc; he didn't care about anyone but himself when we first met him, maybe a little for Chewbacca, until he met the princess. She was the first person he put above his own self interests and the investment paid off when she put herself in harms way to rescue him. It's for children, the toys which children use to foster their imaginations are for children, the dress up customs for Halloween are for children, and Campbell explains that the particular myth of Star Wars is the coming of age story of a boy who leaves the safety of his mother to join the men.[2] Most people are heavily influenced by these stories. It's pseudo science but we understand what is going on with children who have nightmares of the Beast from Beauty and the Beast or Darth Vader. As for adults who play pretend and dress up in customs for play, they really miss the point of coming of age in the stories.

[1] [http://www.thewritersjourney.com/hero's_journey.htm#Memo](http://www.thewritersjourney.com/hero's_journey.htm#Memo)

[2] [http://billmoyers.com/content/ep-3-joseph-campbell-and- the-p...](http://billmoyers.com/content/ep-3-joseph-campbell-and-the-power-of- myth-the-first-storytellers-audio/)

<comment><USER49> I think the problem is that you're talking past the critics you claim are missing the point. The usual criticism of SW isn't about the main storyline (particularly of the first trilogy, which you summarized here), as the people who find that plot thin and uninteresting were never SW fans in the first place.

By the way, I was 10 when the Phatom Menace came out, and I can tell you that I found it very disappointing. For a film supposedly targeted at children, it has a lot of scenes involving politics, both at the Senate and at the Jedi Council. And no, Jar Jar wasn't funny, not even then.

<comment><USER45> Too bad you felt that way. All the little kids in my life at the time it was released completely loved it and were obsessed with it the way I was with the first three.

At no point did I say the movie was good or bad, only that it was for children and most of the children I know loved it. So I think it was on target.

My original comment was about handling criticism. I think that George Lucas will continue to make movies not caring about what people think about them. I'll let him speak for himself on the subject. [1]

[1] [https://thescene.com/watch/vanityfair/george-lucas-on-why- he...](https://thescene.com/watch/vanityfair/george-lucas-on-why-he-s-done- directing-star-wars-movies)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


An Update to End-To-End - <AUTHOR> http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2014/12/an-update-to-end-to-end.html <comment><USER2> Given that they've already decided to include support in Chrome itself for accessing USB hardware security tokens for U2F, I see no reason why they couldn't do the same with End to End + OpenPGPCards like the Yubikey NEO, which happens to also be a U2F device.

It would provide a solution to some of the issues they document on their own Wiki regarding secret keys being stolen by an attacker through another Chrome extension, another application on the system, etc.

EDIT: YES! I missed this part[1] in the Wiki earlier:

"Additionally, we plan to add remote private key support in the future. When support for that is ready, high-risk users could protect their secret keys (stored, e.g., in a hardware USB device) from compromise even when an adversary introduces a backdoor in the source code."

[1] [https://github.com/google/end-to-end/wiki/Threat- model#backd...](https://github.com/google/end-to-end/wiki/Threat- model#backdoor-in-end-to-end-source-code)

</comment><comment><USER3> I mean, this seems just straight amazing, right? Am I missing something?

Obviously Google is pivoting on a number of fronts; if this enjoys wide adoption (unlikely as that may seem at the moment), they'll have to basically retreat from email content analytics, right?

<comment><USER4> Perhaps the additional user trust is worth it?

But the other cost is searchability, which is a pain for a search-based email system. I don't think many people use labels very much.

<comment><USER5> Considerable value of the search functionality can be retained by restricting it to metadata like originator which needs to be accessible for delivery to work anyway.

<comment><USER6> For me at least, this would be completely unacceptable as a search replacement, as I frequently search old message bodies. Not to mention that there's no reason originator can't be encrypted at rest, at least in theory..

However, based on the experience of desktop search, I think pure client side search would probably have reasonable initialization time and space overhead, and would certainly make searches faster, at least compared to my current Gmail experience.

<comment><USER7> _For me at least, this would be completely unacceptable as a search replacement, as I frequently search old message bodies. ... However, based on the experience of desktop search, I think pure client side search would probably have reasonable initialization time and space overhead, and would certainly make searches faster, at least compared to my current Gmail experience._

Just install Mozilla Thunderbird and use IMAP. Client side search, all your devices sync via IMAP, no ads, and free software.

<comment><USER6> FWIW, I've evaluated email clients from time to time, but haven't found anything I like enough to replace Gmail. I haven't tried Thunderbird for years because I don't want to use a client without conversation view, and Thunderbird doesn't seem to offer it as a core feature; I could try one of the extensions for it, but I'm suspicious it won't work well. Also, I'm not sure I want to start using a product that's been on life support for two years. However, I admit these are relatively small turnoffs, so perhaps I should give Thunderbird a spin some time...

Anyway, it's off topic.

<comment><USER8> > I don't want to use a client without conversation view, and Thunderbird > doesn't seem to offer it as a core feature

Actually it does, sort of: Right click on email@example.com, choose Search Messages, then Save as Search Folder, then "Match all Messages" and, in "Select the folders to search", Inbox and Sent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > _We're migrating End-To-End to GitHub_

A bit off-topic but it seems to me that Github is fast becoming a "too big to fail" actor.

<comment><USER10> The switching costs away from Github is trivially low actually. You may lose out on some of the niceness related to github - but there are plenty of good git based source code hosting software out there.

<comment> k-mcgrady The only pain point in switching I can think of is issues/wiki. Are they exportable from GitHub and importable into something like BitBucket?

<comment><USER11> The wiki is just a Git repository so you could just clone that and then do what you need to with it. Once it's cloned locally I'd imagine it's fairly straight forward to either manually copy it to something else or use an API to copy the files up to a wiki somewhere.

For issues GitHub has great API coverage for fetching them [0] so I'd imagine it's not terribly difficult to write a migration script. There are already ones out there for going from BitBucket to GitHub [1] so the reverse should be possible.

[0] [https://developer.github.com/v3/issues/](https://developer.github.com/v3/issues/)

[1] [https://github.com/vbabiy/bitbucket_issue_migration](https://github.com/vbabiy/bitbucket_issue_migration)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can anyone who has been using End to End provide some feedback and additional info about it? The docs (and blog posts) don't really say much other than it encrypts text.

</comment><comment><USER13> How could a regular user start using this (unless it is not ready at all for the "fearless ones")?

</comment><comment><USER14> I wish they would stop calling it End-to-End, it's misleading, they don't talk about DNS at all. One weak link in the chain means the entire chain is weak.

<comment><USER15> DNS is not relevant at all here. Your email is encrypted client-side at one end, and decrypted client-side at the other end. At no point in between does it exist in cleartext. If there is some DNS vulnerability that causes your email to get intercepted, that in no way compromises the encryption.

<comment><USER14> Here? Where is here? The blog mentions nothing about email specifically.

<comment><USER15> Whatever. "here" is any text encrypted by this module, whether it is the body of an email or something else. The data isn't getting decrypted mid-stream, it goes from one client (or "end") to another. It is end to end encryption, and DNS has nothing to do with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I hope they don't work too hard to making it compatible with PGP (and probably shouldn't at all). Just through Gmail and Yahoo alone adopting it, the end-to- end encrypted e-mail user base could increase by 100x. So it makes little sense to make it backwards compatible, especially if that creates potential security issues.

<comment><USER4> One of the benefits of PGP is that it's stood up pretty well to the test of time. Incompatible changes would be a little suspect, from a security perspective.

<comment><USER16> PGP's lack of forward secrecy seems like a _major_ flaw, unless they can somehow make it easier to have the benefits of PFS while keeping the current design. But didn't they already say they intend to use elliptic curve keys instead of RSA for much better performance? Wouldn't that already break compatibility with PGP?

The only real downside I see from breaking PGP compatibility is that then the new system will need a few years before it can really be "trusted".

However:

1) it already won't be very trusted since it happens in the browser, and it will be quite hard for Google to _absolutely guarantee without a shadow of a doubt_ that they can't change any settings themselves (even though they own the Chrome browser and the Chrome store, on which the extension will live).

2) being new doesn't mean it can't be better. We already have better secure messaging crypto protocols such as Axolotl, so it is possible to make one that's both new and better. (I actually wonder why we can't just use Axolotl for an email interface, and call it a day?!).

<comment><USER17> Forward secrecy on PGP? So I can't go read my old love letters?

<comment><USER18> Forward security typically means you make it possible, after the session is complete, for anyone to have said anything during the session. Thus making it possible for any potential log of said session to be forged and presented as 'evidence'; therefore implying that even a log which happens to exist on someone's computer is in fact forged (or more to the point, that any potentially recovered log or monitored log is forged; even if an identity has signed off on the session key).

So if 'PFS' was used with a sent message then anyone/everyone would be able to read or forge the message. This is not the problem that PGP/OpenPGP was designed to solve.

<comment><USER19> No, that's deniability (OTR has that property), something very different from PFS.

PFS just means you've got session keys that can't be derived from the long lived authentication key.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


I have an idea for an app, now what? - <AUTHOR>

I have an idea for an app/site and want to find the right developer.  What is the best venue for sharing an idea for an app? <comment><USER2> [http://appmuse.com/appmusing/finding-a-developer-for-your- ap...](http://appmuse.com/appmusing/finding-a-developer-for-your-app-idea/)

<comment><USER2> And, as someone mentioned in the comments, make sure you document functionality it should have. If you blindly say "I want an app that tracks your workouts" it leaves much ambiguity. You must say "I want an app that tracks runs, pushups and situps (times and amount), ability to sync between devices, graphs progress and lets you share it on Facebook" otherwise you'll end up with a screen with a text box.

Remember that in the future you will have to pay someone (same person or different) to revise code, add functionality, etc so having someone less experienced/cheaper WILL cost you more in the long run.</comment></comment>


Medieval people bathed regularly - <AUTHOR> https://going-medieval.com/2019/08/02/i-assure-you-medieval-people-bathed/ <comment><USER2> "Regularly", but not as frequently as we do now, and to whatever extent this was true, it certainly didn't extend to conquistadors in the early modern period because American Indians all considered white people intolerably dirty by their standards.

The Internet seems to have amplified a certain contrarian tendency that goes too far. While it's true that the people of medieval Europe were not just a bunch of ignorant, filthy peasants, they were still more ignorant and probably more dirty than you and I are at the moment. While the early middle ages in western Europe were not "dark ages" completely bereft of human accomplishment, they were by many measures crappier than either the heyday of the Roman empire or the early modern era that would follow (or indeed even the late Middle Ages).

<comment><USER3> I've always found the chart of Rome's population [1] very thought-provoking. That's unimaginable collapse of cities, trade, arts...

[1] [https://i.imgur.com/bVjPVPK.png](https://i.imgur.com/bVjPVPK.png)

<comment><USER4> You're certainly misrepresenting something here.

The population of the world doesn't follow this chart which simply implies Rome became irrelevant in history and people moved elsewhere.

<comment><USER5> I think that was their point

<comment><USER4> Their point was more akin to "all cities have been abandoned as civilisation ceased to exist".

If that was the case we would observe a definite decline in population numbers across the world.

We don't see that which either implies that the existence of civilisation wasn't the prerequisite for our survival or that civilisation went elsewhere.

I am betting on the second one. By the time Rome become irrelevant we observe the raise of Paris and London.

<comment><USER2> Or the population dispersed into rural areas and returned to lives of subsistence farming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The myths we tell about history always tend to be so self-serving and belittling of the people who came before us. I'm not sure I want to know what people will think about us 500 years from now

<comment><USER7> What on earth makes you think anybody 500 years in the future will give a shit about any of us?

<comment><USER8> A person 500 years in the future is more likely to give a shit about you than a person 5 minutes from now.

Consider your comment, a throwaway one liner of no significance. Most people just read it and move on. But what if, your comment and our comments were all preserved through a series of backups and database migrations over time until eventually they were 500 years old! Imagine some future archaeologist coming across our threads and seeing what people of this day were thinking and saying to each other. Sometimes I stumble across old posts from 2001 or so and read with fascination about what the world used to be like back then. It'd be pretty meta if that future archaeologist was actually the one reading this comment right now.

Imagine if we found some text in a 500 year old book somewhere plainly asking the same question "why would people 500 years in the future give a shit about us?"

Clearly there will be people in the future that give a shit so long as the human race remains a curious species.

<comment><USER9> Future archaeologists will treat our comments as big data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ok, I get that the author is trying to shake things up common-perception-wise, and really loves the f word.

"So the average person would likely wash daily at home, but once a week or so they would treat themselves to a bath at the communal bath house."

This needs support. "Average" person would go to the bath house once a week? Across all of Europe? That's a pretty extraordinary claim.

"In fact soap is a motherfucking medieval invention. .... Medieval people? Oh you better believe that they had soap."

Let's say soap actually is a medieval invention. (I see this debated, but the author seems to emphatically feel it is an important point) Doesn't that mean, pretty much by definition, that some medieval people didn't use soap? Unless they invented soap on the actual first day of the middle ages and it immediately went viral.

<comment><USER11> > _Let 's say soap actually is a medieval invention. (I see this debated, but > the author seems to emphatically feel it is an important point) Doesn't that > mean, pretty much by definition, that some medieval people didn't use soap? > Unless they invented soap on the actual first day of the middle ages and it > immediately went viral._

Well, the author already notes that in absence of soap earlier they used oil for scrubbing, and/or added herbs to the water for aroma.

> _Unless they invented soap on the actual first day of the middle ages and it > immediately went viral._

Well, whether it was unavailable for the first day or first couple of centuries of the middle ages is not really important for the general claim that medieval people had it. E.g. people in the last 4-5 centuries of the middle ages are still medieval people, still considered "non bathing" by many moderns, and half a millennium is still a good chunk of time.

Especially since the author already covered what e.g. Romans did pre-soap (or rather, in lieu of soap, as soap was available in the empire, but not preferred by Romans until towards the end).

<comment><USER12> I think the Germans and Gauls were making and using soap before the Romans showed up. And eventually Romans were using it too. Would seem to follow that medieval people would find soap to be unremarkable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Minor nit: Soap is not a medieval invention. It has been around since ancient Egypt. One of the most classic soaps is still in production today [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleppo_soap](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleppo_soap) which was the forerunner to Castile soap (I'm not sure how much the Syrian war has affected production, Aleppo was hit hard).

<comment><USER14> The Aleppo and Castile soap connection is mentioned in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't know much about the medieval periods, but in the 16th century, people certainly didn't bath very often.

They tended to wear fresh linen everyday, which did a remarkable job of cleaning the skin of dirt and sweat, then washed their clothes regularly.

"Method" historian Ruth Goodman has described trying this herself, and claimed that it was a very effective way of keeping clean, saying that even after a few weeks, she still lacked significant body odour.

<comment><USER16> Who determined the "lack of significant body odour"? How was it measured? What's the threshold? Was there a control group? Was the experiment repeated at several times of the year?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is a rather blanket claim. My step-dad grew up in crazy-rural Oregon. _His_ dad refused to take a bath more than twice a year. Those long-johns with a trap door stayed on a looong time during the winters. They were still using an outhouse.

I kind of feel like there's plenty of modern examples in which regular bathing is not a priority (or even an advantage, given the lack of warm water during the winter).

<comment><USER18> So did the wife just tolerate the smell during sex? Was there no sex? Just seems so unhygienic for intimacy.

<comment><USER19> There is a running-gag in the gay community "a guy with an unwashed ass" which is used for straight guys.

Also, many women told me that they were in love with guys with bad hygiene, some of them never washing between their cheeks because "nothing goes between my ass cheeks, that's gay shit!"

Some women even going so far as saying "if sexuality was a choice, why in their right mind would anyone choose (unwashed) men?!"

So maybe this isn't that big of a problem in terms of sex and intimacy as you and I would think?

<comment><USER20> Memes aside... Sex has weird and sometimes offensive smells. This holds true for queer folks, straight folks, and even folks with good hygiene. I feel like most sexually active adults already know this.

You aren't always going to get a shower and a toothbrush just prior to bumping uglies.

<comment><USER19> Body odors are one thing. Not having showered for weeks is another.

<comment><USER21> Maybe, when everyone stinks you'd get used to it and think nothing of it?

<comment><USER22> I once spent a summer working in the equivalent of a knacker's yard. The first day or two there the smell was appalling but it got to the stage where I no longer noticed it. People away from work noticed me though!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's funny that nowadays we look at images in churches, old books, and other old buildings to deduce what medieval people did. What will people use in 200 years to deduce what we did? Will they use social media selfies? Or will those have disappeared?

<comment><USER24> I suspect that our inventory of digital media will survive as long as people do. It would take a complete technological collapse to expunge all the random TV shows and internal discussions floating around the infospher, and even under the worst ecological scenarios, technological collapse everywhere is unlikely. Future scholars will be able to just spool up our mass entertainment as we do. They might even read this comment.

<comment><USER25> Don't be so confident. MySpace lost basically all the original music uploaded to that site, much of which only existed there. I've personally seen one off masters of tons of video and audio content destroyed to make room for new stuff or because the media can't easily be played anymore. Much of our digital archives are only maintained with constant and fragile upkeep.

<comment><USER26> Another case in point:

I used to make electronic music. Back in the 90s, I made a track and uploaded it to mp3.com, back when that was a place for people to share music. It got relatively popular, for what "popular" meant at that. I got messages from people saying they liked it, there were lots of downloads.

As far as I can tell, that song no longer exists anywhere on the Internet.

<comment><USER27> Now I want to listen to it. Why not put it somewhere on the Internet? Maybe it will bring some joy to a few more people. Worst case scenario it will get ignored (it will get one listen from me though).

<comment><USER26> _> Why not put it somewhere on the Internet?_

I don't think I have a copy any more. If I do, it's likely in a format for an old MOD tracker that I may not be able to open any more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> They should probably put the title as Medieval Europeans, the misconception that Medieval "people"/Europeans don't bathe isn't a global notion because Medieval people from other places bathed such as the Japanese.

<comment><USER10> Most definitions of "medieval" or "middle ages" seem to reference Europe. It's considered the time between the Western Roman Empire and the Renaissance / Age of Discovery.

<comment><USER29> Agree. I have never heard Medieval used in, say, Indian history where different timescales are used to denote historical periods - e.g. Vedic period, Ancient, Sultanate and Mughal periods, British raj etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I asked a related question on reddit but no answer yet.

How did taverns handle hygiene of dishes. Especially since it was a crossing of wild varieties of people.

<comment><USER31> Soap and water? Soap was known to civilization by ~2000 BCE, long before the middle ages.

<comment><USER30> did they had enameled ceramics back then ?

soap cannot clean porous things I suppose

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Perhaps a bit more balanced (both in language use as content-wise) treatment of the same topic can be found at the Ancient History Encyclopedia:

[https://www.ancient.eu/Medieval_Hygiene/](https://www.ancient.eu/Medieval_Hygiene/)

</comment><comment><USER33> And why does this matter?

My roomie was a staunch defender of medieval times, when allegedly things were oh so much better. He left me a bit of creatine monohydrate in a closet, he absorbed the stuff by the kilograms. I was thinking with some scorn "they used to grind this from the bones of peasants before, didn't they?".

I feel pity of the people that was before us, grateful for some of their legacy, and very bitter for other parts of it, and I'm extraordinarily, rabid jealous of how much better the coming generations will most likely have it.

<comment><USER34> It matters because most people believe the opposite, because it's a misconception. A lot of people also think that it was believed the world was flat for centuries, but it was known to be spherical or spheroid since greek times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> In fact public baths in Europe were closed in a futile attempt to curb contagion during the Great Plague, during the 14th century. From there on, bathing was frown upon as being dangerous and even unhealthy.

For instance in the late 1500, Henri IV from France was writing letters to his prime minister Sully to pray him not to bathe so often (uncommonly for the time, Sully used to have a weekly bath) because it would destroy his health and be a huge loss to France to lose such a valuable man.

</comment><comment><USER36> Did you ever see the movie, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead"?

An excellent portrayal of medieval baths in that.

</comment><comment><USER37> What an interesting and well-researched article. Also, the tone is hilarious, as appropriate. Bravo!

<comment><USER38> I feel the opposite about the tone. Sure, I have also heard that medieval people didn't bathe, and if I asked about it I would have repeated it as the best information I had. Not sure how that warrants being insulted by the author who is upset that not everyone else in the world is a medievalist like they are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> " _The Romans – whomst I don't see a bunch of basics going around accusing of being filthy – did not, in fact have soap, in contrast._ "

"Basics"?

<comment><USER40> Romans did have soap but they mostly used it to clean clothes not themselves.

The article title is correct but whoever wrote this uniformed garbage needs to go back to grade school.

<comment><USER41> The Romans also used human pee to clean clothes.

<comment><USER42> Old pee is basically ammonia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Underlying many of these comment conversations: _don 't you dare challenge my belief that contemporary western society is superior because of [global capitalism, technology, "advanced" knowledge, etc.]._

Narratives of progress are very loud on HN.

Meanwhile, a lot of people _you know personally_ don't really bath all that often. They stay clean. But not by showering every day. And it really is none of your business. No you cannot necessarily detect them with your nose.

</comment><comment><USER44> Finally some good style of writing

<comment><USER45> Is that a joke? I found it absolutely insufferable. You're upset, I get it, now stop using the f word in every sentence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Another telltale sign that the dark ages weren't actually that dark.

The dark ages still brought us:

Windmills

Prostheses

Plow

Just to name a few.

<comment><USER24> First of all, the medieval period comes _after_ the dark ages. The world of the 12th century is a very different and much more prosperous one than the world of the sixth century.

Second, the dark ages were very, very hard indeed. Ward-Perkins, in "The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization", _demolishes_ the pleasant-transition- period interpretation of late antiquing that's been popular for the past few decades. Material culture collapses: trade volume crashes and Britain (being hardest hit) nearly become illiterate again.

Did it work out all right in the end? Yes, clearly. But for several centuries, the level of civilization in Europe was lower than it'd been in a thousand years. A ton of knowledge and literature was lost forever. As late as the seventeenth century, parts of Rome that in 100AD were apartment blocks and fast food joints we'd recognize as such today were still sheep pasture. It does no good to deny that something was lost.

It's a cautionary tale: complexity and interconnected civilizations are more fragile than most people think.

<comment><USER46> > _First of all, the medieval period comes after the dark ages._

Untrue, medieval period and dark ages typically refer to the same time period that lasted until the 13th century.

But agreed with the rest of your post. It was not an easy time to survive. But not as barbaric and barren as previously thought.

And in much of Western Europe (Gaul, Germania etc), life was mostly the same as it had been even during the Roman Empire, generally speaking-- those areas either hadn't been ruled by Rome, or they hadn't exactly been centers of culture and technology even under Roman rule.

Sure, Europe ended up being in a backwards state of decay during the medieval period. But much of it had been during the Roman times that preceded it anyway. And yet there were still valuable advancements that were achieved.

<comment><USER47> _Untrue, medieval period and dark ages typically refer to the same time period that lasted until the 13th century._

The term 'dark ages' is used by some as reference to the early medieval period specifically, which may also be classified as 'late antiquity' ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_antiquity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_antiquity) ).

So depending on who you talk to, the dark ages can be synonymous to the middle ages, be just its earlier part, or predate them...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> The information here is fascinating. But the delivery... I don't even know how to describe it. Is it bro, or ?, or everything-ass-cool? At first it's fun, but then it becomes overdone. Skatergnome did this well, with a measured approach that was such that it didn't become tiresome - [https://everquest.fandom.com/wiki/Skater_Gnome_Stories](https://everquest.fandom.com/wiki/Skater_Gnome_Stories) .

Anyway, "cool story bro".

<comment><USER49> It's because actually determining how often average people bathed is hard, requiring evidence from many different sources across a huge time span and geographic area.

Instead, he went for the secret knowledge approach. People tend to believe things more if you're telling them everyone else is wrong. The f bombs make everyone else seem even more stupid for not knowing this secret knowledge.

<comment><USER50> _She_ 's a PhD that literally teaches the stuff, and you're the person who couldn't even be bothered to read the mini-bio, not to mention the references at the end.

<comment><USER38> If she starts all of her lectures with "I cannot believe I need to explain these things to you basics", she might not be very good at teaching though.

<comment><USER51> How would you know how she teaches? One of her problems as a scholar is having ignorant geniuses claim all kinds of nonsense about the medeival times that are patently false. Her tone is to some extent a reflection of having to deal with those people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Probably a myth.</comment>


The Myth of the Objective - <AUTHOR> http://www.opowell.com/post/myth-of-the-objective/ <comment><USER3> One of the father's of quality, W. Edwards Deming came out very strong against Management by Objective, even though he was very statistically inclined. In his 14 points [0] he mentions _Eliminate numerical quotas for the workforce and numerical goals for management._.

His idea is you should focus on the journey (always improve) rather than artificial endpoints. It's a profound idea, and one I've sometimes struggled to come to grips with.

[0] [http://asq.org/learn-about-quality/total-quality- management/...](http://asq.org/learn-about-quality/total-quality- management/overview/deming-points.html)

<comment><USER4> So how do you know whether you're always improving if you don't measure your performance at consistent points along the way? Just ask everyone if it _felt_ like you improved, followed by a group hug and mutual back-patting?

<comment><USER5> I dont think he said to eliminate the measurements, he said to eliminate the quotas.

<comment><USER3> Exactly.

Going by his theory... If you say, "I am paying you to produce 1,000 cars per month" then that's what you'll get. If instead you rely on intrinsic motivation, and improve the system, you will get more than 1,000, and they'll be higher quality.

This doesn't work everywhere. (Certainly not with Sales commission!) But it is worth thinking through the logical implications of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The article is terrible - it is effectively saying "being objective" is not good for achieving that "objective". This is complete non-sense without untangling the epistemic roots for said words, the author may have had.

It's apparent that it's actually saying that being too "greedy" (i.e too low a horizon) can be bad for achieving an objective. This is well known to both Control theorists, RL practitioners, and many other non-STEM people (in marketing/politics/sociology etc.).

This triviality has nothing at all to do with Zen or any of the things Westerners take for being "rustic" and "warm and fuzzy".

<comment><USER7> Have you read or watched what the picbreeder author is actually about? It's not about a greater horizon. It's that you only get "valuable results" by using a heuristic that only looks at the very next steps, and completely ignoring any goals that would lie further ahead. You could say that he's promoting a greedy search with very broad success parameters.

An example: You plan to be a millionaire, and you currently have nothing in the bank. How do you get there? Any plan would most probably not work, if executed in a rigid manner (or we would all look up the recipe on the internet and be millionaires). You end up trying all kinds of jobs, investments, take opportunities when they arise, etc.. and finally you realize that you probably will not ever make it. Or you get lucky and make your million - who knows. Picbreeder showed that it's quite rare to hit the very desired result you wanted.

However, if you were more flexible regarding your goal, at every step, then you might take the job that agrees the most with you, meet a lot of great people, travel if you are able, start a family.. and end up without a million in the bank but with a satisfying life situation. With pic breeder, certain shapes and beautiful pictures emerged that were not intended or planned from the start. The algorithm went along with whatever was there, and optimized on that.

Looking at the millionaire example again - if you already had 500k, then doubling that might not be that hard (?), or not that many steps away. People keep saying that the more money you have, the easier it is to earn - <USER2> opportunities like buying an apartment in a firesale and reselling it for 1.5 as much.

For me, it's a very counter intuitive way of looking at things. It goes very deep against the wanting of goals or things in our current society. OTOH, it somehow makes sense that things work this way, because every step in our step- by-step plans is SO dependent on things beyond our control. Agile development methods remind me of this very much: Try telling a customer not familiar with agile that the software she orders might look completely different than she imagines it right now - most will think you are crazy or want to cheat them. But you might recognize problems in every sprint, and adapt the end goal accordingly.

<comment><USER8> I find an interesting parallel with hill-climbing and local optima. In your example, the reason everyone isn't a millionaire is mostly to do with the fact that that's a very noisy problem space, there are far far too many random variables at play, not to mention there's a finite supply of money, it's literally impossible for everyone to be a millionaire (well, you could inflate the currency to the point where a million dollars is nearly worthless, but that's just playing semantic games).

To me, one of the big takeaways here is that it's important not to be so hyper-focused on the local problem space that you overlook potentially better solutions and end up at a local optimum to your overall detriment.

As for the rest of the article, it's mostly hand-wavy garbage.

<comment><USER9> > not to mention there's a finite supply of money, it's literally impossible > for everyone to be a millionaire (well, you could inflate the currency to > the point where a million dollars is nearly worthless, but that's just > playing semantic games).

Most people who are millionaires don't get there by holding a million dollars in currency, they get there by holding assets worth a million dollars. This is _not_ zero sum - assets can be created (and destroyed), and their value is assigned only at the time of transaction. The total value of all assets in the U.S. is significantly larger (by orders of magnitude) than the total amount of U.S. dollars available.

<comment><USER8> It isn't a question of actual dollars in circulation, you can always print more after all, it's a question of total economic value. All goods in circulation in the U.S. have a finite value, and it definitely is a zero sum game. You can add more goods and therefore value, but that can only happen at a certain rate (this would be tied into population growth, employment rate, and profit margins among other things). There are also close ties with median income as the value of goods tends to be tied directly to wealth distribution. Ultimately at any given time there is a finite amount of "wealth" to go around, if one person gets a bigger slice, then that means someone else has to take a smaller slice. People don't want to be millionaires because they have some unhealthy attraction to U.S. currency, they want to be millionaires because of the goods and services that they can trade that money for (or in many cases because they can use it for rent seeking to generate unearned income). The actual amount of currency in question is irrelevant, it's a question of access to those goods and services, and those goods and services are finite, therefore wealth is finite.

<comment><USER10> If economic value were zero sum, then economies would never grow.

>All goods in circulation in the U.S. have a finite value, and it definitely is a zero sum game.

Except I can create new goods, possibly for free (e.g. writing software, growing crops, mining materials) and directly increase the value of the economy. Contrary to zero sum.

>You can add more goods and therefore value, but that can only happen at a certain rate

Unless you want to try to argue that the rate is so low that the economy is *effectively zero sum in the short term, you've just contradicted yourself. If you can add value to the economy, it is fundamentally not zero sum.

You seem to be conflating the finiteness of wealth and value with the inability to create new wealth or value.

Now, that aside, one could argue that currency exchange itself is zero sum on short timeframes when new money is not printed, but market forces dynamically assign value to currency, such that the economy may still grow with a finite supply of money. Furthermore, I'd like to point out that generally when one purchases goods or services, even in the short term the transaction is unlikely to be zero sum, because goods and services can be used immediately to generate more wealth, and therefore are arguably worth more following the exchange.

<comment><USER8> More or less your first point, the rate of growth is so low, that over short term it's effectively zero sum.

Something else to consider is that in your example of "for free" wealth creation you're not actually getting any of that for free, that's a form of wealth transformation or transfer. Let me elaborate on that point using each of your examples. I'll start with mining as that's the simplest, in that case you're taking a natural resource (which is finite) and extracting it and refining it. You're having to pay your workers (and/or buy and maintain machines) in order to do so, so in part your redistributing the companies wealth to the workers and service providers your company does business with. In exchange you receive raw and/or processed minerals/metals. That might seem like wealth creation but it's really transformation, you've reduced the value of the land you extracted the material from and converted it into a transportable form. The value of that material might seem to be more, but that's only because you've invested value in extracting it, in other words you're passing on your cost of doing business. You haven't added value, the value was already there, you've simply converted it and invested some of your companies value into it, so when you sell it you're simply converting one form of wealth into another, you're converting the wealth of that processed material into cash wealth.

The situation with growing crops is similar, although part of what is being invested there is time. You might think, "well, time is infinite, there's always more time", but each persons time is finite and it has value, even if only to that person (opportunity cost), so once again you're doing a wealth transformation, you're transforming those workers time into money, and ground, seed, fertilizer, water, and sun into crops. When you sell those crops you're once again recouping your cost of doing business. Wealth hasn't been created from nothing, it was transferred and concentrated from a variety of sources. You might think, "well, what about the workers time, that's new wealth", only it isn't, there was a cost involved in those workers upbringing and living, so that's once again just a form of wealth transfer and transformation. Truly the only free wealth in the entire thing is the sun, although even that isn't infinite, even if it is free from the perspective of anyone on Earth (it might be more accurate to say it's wasted/destroyed if you don't use it). Ultimately there is no free lunch, entropy always wins.

Software is the most complicated one, as there's zero unit costs associated with it, but substantial development costs. Once again though, you're looking at wealth transformation/transfer. In the case of software you're transferring/transforming the developers, QA, and other workers personal knowledge and time into software. Similar to the workers in the previous example they've invested time and money into improving their knowledge and living, so you're really paying them for them to recoup their losses (wealth transfer) and then when you sell the software you're simply passing those expenses on to your customers.

Ultimately it's all about wealth transformation and transfer. There is finite natural wealth, it existed before humanity, and if humans vanished tomorrow it would continue to exist. Economies are mostly about taking the existing wealth and distributing, concentrating, and transforming it into forms that are more convenient for people. When you get down to it, the unit cost of a good is really it's intrinsic value, it's a form of wealth transformation. Profit margins on the other hand, are wealth transfer, you're transferring wealth from the purchaser to yourself. No value is actually being created. New wealth only comes from discovering new resources. Want to create wealth now? Do like Elon Musk and others are doing and take a look at asteroid mining.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I appreciate the work and research that went into this.

However, I can't help but feel as if some of these statements aren't very concretely true, or untrue.

For example, ok, if I get tunnel vision and just focus on one objective, I might lose sight of other paths.

I can see what you mean, but let's put that into practice.

"If you focus on profit, you might lose focus on innovation."

Ok, but if I focus solely on innovation, what happens when I'm not selling anything, or selling things at a loss?

The bills come due at some point, and so many people fail.

We don't all have endless sums of money that we can rely on while we wait for our Zen powers to coalesce and then people magically send us money.

<comment><USER12> Think about Zuckerburg's wealth. If he had sat in his dorm with the goal of building a multi-billion dollar empire, do you think he would have started with "thefacebook"?

<comment><USER11> There's a considerable amount of luck in Zuck's story.

Peter Thiel gave him money and he demolished Myspace somehow.

I don't think he got there by daydreaming ^.^

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It would be interesting to test this on academicians: take objectives off of them (grants, large number of publications; hell, even tenure!) and let them wander freely through their field of research. I have the impression this was normality decades ago.

</comment><comment><USER14> Reminds me of (a variation of) a Yiddish proverb: How do you make God laugh? Tell him about your plans.

<comment><USER15> "In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." \-- Eisenhower

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Another interesting manifestation of the same idea is expounded by John Kay, under the title 'Obliquity'. He has a book on that topic, and also several hour-long YouTube talks.

The central theme is regarding how it is better to chase goals obliquely rather then head on, especially when goals correspond to holistic/unspecifiable things like "wellness". He has case studies of companies that managed to innovate or not, depending on how carried away they got with their objective.

</comment><comment><USER17> The article made me realize I do this frequently. I keep an eye out for serendipity. Encountering new problems often makes me take up an adventure from months or years ago where I learned a new piece of technology or a method that _seemed_ like a dead end at the time, but becomes a stepping stone in hindsight.

A dead end only means you're looking at the wrong direction at _that_ moment.

Always chase the yet unlearned.

</comment><comment><USER18> Having spent a lot of time with PicBreeder, I suspect that the "ancestors look nothing like their descendants" thing is more an artifact of how our brains interpret images, rather than implying some deeper insight into how objectives affect the process.

There are AI projects that attempt to approximate a "natural image manifold" – essentially a blob in the space of possible images where you find things that look like photographs to humans. I think the PicBreeder thing has more to do with that; the set of images that people want to create occupies a relatively confined space within the set of all possible PicBreeder outputs. So working off of _any_ previously built image is basically a "shortcut to the manifold", if you will.

Or to put it another way: when you consider the entire space of PicBreeder outputs, any existing image is much closer to whatever you want to make than starting from scratch.

</comment><comment><USER19> Surely the human taking 70 steps to find an interesting image is _less_ aimless than the computer that took 30,000 steps and didn't find anything interesting? In other words a non-local goal was somehow forming in their mind drawing them down a particular path? Or am I missing something?

</comment><comment><USER20> This is mostly a problem when your thinking about objectives admits only one at a time. Many more opportunities arise when we find an interesting compromise in full awareness of the conflicts among multiple objectives.

<comment><USER21> Somewhat related, consider the expression "putting the cart before the horse".

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've read most of the book and I am confused by the fact that it completely skips artificial evolution (especially obvious in the domestication of cats and dogs).

</comment><comment><USER23> It makes sense to explore outside the box if your problem can't be found in a very limited search space. However the statement

> Many natural processes don't appear to be objective based. Natural evolution > and human innovation are cases in point.

Is not correct. Evolution is highly objective based and micro-incremental.

<comment><USER24> No it's not. Evolution itself does not have the objective of creating something.

Regarding evolution, having read both Kenneth's book and "The Blind Watchmaker" by Dawkins I can tell you that Kenneth rediscovers what Dawkins explained in his book in 1986. The experiment Dawkins describes in his book resembles the picbreeder experiment a lot.

<comment><USER25> Wouldn't humans creating recognizable images by choosing a particular aberration that looks like something familiar be more akin to intelligent design? Without this intelligence and creativity to see something in each new breed and branch, coupled with the ability on the site to rank images and label images. The final images would have ever existed.

According to Dawkins, Evolution has two objectives. Optimizing survival and procreation. We saw how the randomness toward an objective failed to produce anything meaningful in this example so how is this similar to natural evolution?

I see no similarities.

<comment><USER24> the point is that you cannot design it. you're exploring the space looking at what is interesting. So if you're given a start image and an end image (an objective) you cannot reach the end image. In the case of pic-breeder you are playing the role of a fitness function not that of an intelligent designer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > When you have one eye on the goal, you only have one eye on the path.

> Objectives can, ironically, be obstacles to innovation and creativity.

This, like much of the Zen worldview, is self-refuting. If objectives can be obstacles that leave me with only one eye on the path, then the new objective is just to focus on "the path" of innovation and creativity. My objective may have _changed_ , but I still have an objective.

<comment><USER27> A lot of "zen" wisdom is vague and even illogical. Koans are a great (if not the great) example.

They don't intend to teach you anything. Instead, they create doubt in your beliefs so that you can see possibilities you were previously blind to.

In this instance perhaps the difference is using the "objective" as a starting point rather than a desired end result.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> So how do you harness the knowledge that many of the best ideas that have been thought up weren't the original intention or objective. I don't get the point. I think this is saying something like, only fate will create something extraordinary. This is useless nonsense.

Most of the claims of the video and article seem to lead nowhere, or are commonly known and while mildly interesting, are easily explained by logical observation and analysis. Knowing them doesn't help get you anywhere (that would be an objective). If there is no objective to the video, then why watch it. This is starting to sound like some kind of relativism.

The success of PicBreeder is accomplished by individuals ability to see interesting things evolving and the vast number of real world similar objects they had to choose from. Of course an algorithm cannot replicate that because it is not creative. This does more to dis-prove natural evolution IMO because the images that took shape required creative intelligence to facilitate them doing so. As to the point of the final pictures only appearing when there was no particular objective, OK fair enough, but how does this help us? What new thing did we learn? We know that many inventions and innovations were discovered this way. Why is it an epiphany? The computer could not create a recognizable picture because it was only given one. If it had the google images library to match to, it would certainly come up with some very great pictures.

On the Living Image Project, The recognizable images didn't happen, because different people saw different things and voted different directions. This failed precisely because there was no objective. If the Living Image Project stated an objective (A teacup for example), it would have had far more success. This just goes to show that objectives are important because in the real world, there are needs. If the article and video was useful, it would have revealed something helpful about how to fill needs (objectives) in a better way. The majority of problems are solved with objectives in mind. This article and video never seem to recognize that. The conclusion almost seems to say that attempting to fill known needs is a problem in the world today.

In the Novelty search demo that was shown, the biped that used the novel behavior algorithm walked better than the farther distance algorithm only explains the constraints that the failing algorithms had. All it proves is that when an algorithm has more choices to explore, in many cases it did better. To me this would be like telling someone to build the best house, car, ETC but only use the knowledge from 3 books. Tell someone else to do the same but use the internet, unlimited books, Talk to people ETC. Should we be surprised at the result? Kenneth Stanley seemed to be, and seemed to think it revolutionary. What new thing does this teach us in practical terms? Nothing. More stepping stones mean a better result. This is common sense.

It is no wonder the National Science Foundation would not give this guy any money. He hasn't taught us anything new. I want my 30 minutes of life back.

</comment><comment><USER28> Beautiful!</comment>