Disprove quantum immortality without risking your life (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://vankessel.io/disproving-quantum-immortality <comment><USER2> This is a really nice argument and I hope that Kevin and others continue to pursue it. However, I think there is a subtle flaw in the presented argument that is parallel to issues illuminated by Goedel's incompleteness theorem. The problem, I believe, is with the assertion:

> 1\. The many-worlds interpretation is true.

> 2\. Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest.

> If all the previous assumptions are true, then at least one of these two > must be false.

Both of these statements can be simultaneously true if we allow for a third possibility that is logically consistent with the entire argument:

3\. Having near logical certainty and awareness that quantum immortality is true is fundamentally incompatible with living on the subjective immortal multiverse timeline.

This would actually be a robust assumption to have explicitly included at the start, as it also makes intuitive sense. Afterall, if you absolutely knew that quantum immortality was true, then you could (and likely would) walk around taking obviously foolish risks without ever experiencing any consequences. Such a universe would basically lack a coherent sense of cause-and-effect from your subjective point of view. And if it was a universe where cause-and-effect don't hold for you, then how could you have logical certainty about anything?

This means that if quantum immortality is true, you can never have logical certainty of its truth.

This is very similar to how Goedel's incompleteness requires that there be true statements that can't be proven as true because the existence of an explicit proof would negate the statement itself, breaken the consistency of the system of logic (and, hence, making it incomplete by necessity).

<comment><USER3> If quantum immortality is true, and I, knowing that, step in front of a car, how is it going to prevent my bones from breaking?

I remember a haunting fantasy short story about a boy in a small town who accidentally meets and becomes friends with the man who digs all of the graves. Eventually he notices that somehow, the gravedigger knows when a grave is needed before a person dies, but won't say how or who. Often it is possible to guess though. One day, he's told that he'll never guess who the next grave is for, and indeed, he can't. So that night he finds out his parents have been in an auto accident, and therefore one of them is presumably going to die...and so he goes back and kills the gravedigger and buries him in the grave that was intended for one of his parents.

The rest of the story is that once the gravedigger is dead, people in the town stop dying...but that is not a good thing - first his mother is paralyzed, then she has a stroke, then there is a fire... And the end is that the murderer becomes the new gravedigger to restore normality and now old, he hopes for someone to relieve him of the job.

<comment><USER4> "If quantum immortality is true, and I, knowing that, step in front of a car, how is it going to prevent my bones from breaking?"

Quantum immortality doesn't promise health. It promises consciousness.

It is in fact a horrible idea and you better damned well hope it is false, because it looks a lot less like "I'm going to live forever in at least some fraction of the multiverse and be healthy and happy!" and rather a lot more like SCP-2718 [1]. Probably without the pain in question, but certainly with your consciousness stuck in a body that is literally minimally capable of being conscious and _nothing else_ , _past_ the heat-death of the universe, until the point where even quantum randomness isn't enough to keep you conscious, assuming that such a point can even arrive. QI doesn't protect your mobility, your senses, your health or happiness... just your consciousness. On the plus side, "minimal consciousness" doesn't necessarily entail a great deal of awareness of time passing.

[1]: [http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-2718](http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-2718) , for those not familiar with the format of the site, be sure to click the "► Play" on the bottom for the text I'm referring to. On the topic of SCP, the "End of Death" canon rather resembles your story, albeit moreso: [http://www.scp-wiki.net/end-of-death-hub](http://www.scp-wiki.net/end-of- death-hub)

<comment><USER5> It also doesn't necessarily entail remembering who you are. So I think it's not _that_ horrible: you lose more and more of your memories and your capabilities of forming thoughts and intentions, until it's just generic consciousness aware of itself doing nothing and of (what's left from) input stimuli.

<comment><USER6> So, in the limit it's not observably different from death? Then it's death.

<comment><USER4> It's all the things. QI is basically just an consciousness-centric view of the already-understood truth that in the quantum multiverse, everything that can possibly happen does. It just means that there is some way in which you may actually experience some aspect of that, because your future conscious experience excludes all the universes in which you are not conscious. You can draw a subset of future universes in which you are minimally conscious, in which you're just a wee bit more conscious than that, in which you're conscious enough to be aware of your plight indefinitely, in which as I say in another message you're healthy indefinitely. You're not causing anything to be or not to be, you're just carving various subsets of _radically_ differing, but non-zero, size out of the near-infinity of the full quantum multiverse, which exist whether or not you choose to regard them.

So, you know, in a fraction of the universes in which you remain conscious that would require something like 1 over a number in arrow notation to describe, you'll be conscious enough to be perturbed. This is utterly, utterly dominated by the universes in which you're just sort of there. However, if you then choose to exclude those latter universes on the grounds that you consider that to be "dead", then that brings that tiny fraction back to the fore by virtue of eliminating everything else.

It's a lot of definition chopping and manipulating rather enormous exponentials in the probabilities. However, there is still an underlying truth there, if the multiverse is true. It's just more subtle than the casual human view of "survival" or a brief gloss of the argument might entail. You have to think in quantum terms about whether or not this spin goes that way or the other, not in human terms like whether or not the gun fires. The latter is made up of an incomprehensibly large number of the former sort of things, and as you start talking about the fringe cases the quantum events require staggeringly enormous exponential probabilities to describe anything even remotely human-visible.

<comment><USER5> Branching of multiverse on every measurement event is an approximation. The branches aren't fully isolated. I suspect that extremely low amplitude branches undergo merger events, which makes it impossible to have coherent timeline in them. But I'm completely out of my depth here.

<comment><USER4> I don't think that's an official part of the theory. It may be true, but I don't think anyone's proposed it.

Defining "low amplitude" branch meaningfully would be a real challenge. As I like to say sometimes, the probability of anything happening is indistinguishable from zero. 15-16 billion years after the Big Bang, we've already got a pretty low amplitude, one that would require something like arrow notation (as I reference in another comment) to describe where we are now relative to where the universe started. Heck, it takes arrow notation just to describe how much probability mass we're shedding every _second_.

(It actually occurs to me after a discussion of this that I can tweak an argument I've been growing over the years to prove that you can't have all three of "a universe that never ends", "the quantum multiverse", and "a coherent conscious experience".)

<comment><USER5> A world where each and every person still lives would be pretty bizarre. That's around 107 billion people.

<comment><USER4> Such a world is utterly dominated by the worlds in which you are kept conscious, but nobody else is. If QI keeps you conscious for a billion years, you'll be alone.

(I keep typing "you are kept alive", but that's not the promise. Only conscious. Being "alive" will be extraneous to that.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hold on, assumption 2 does not seem right. There should be lots of versions of you cheerfully experiencing timelines that involve an imminent lightning strike, gamma ray burst, etc. Those things haven't happened yet, so those worlds still have a conscious you in them. Retroactively declaring those selves unconscious seems to be a much stronger idea than quantum immortality.

Also, there is a way to test quantum immortality for everyone, not just yourself. Build a world-spanning doomsday machine. Give it to highly unstable, paranoid people, and distribute the ability to trigger it widely. Perhaps add in some geopolitical tensions, technical failures, ego, and military- industrial collusion. Make it really unlikely that it will remain untriggered. The longer we experience a world with such a device armed and ready, the more likely quantum immortality is true. There would be all sorts of bizarre close calls, and the world history would get more deranged by the year as timelines trigger the device and drop out, leaving progressively weirder timelines to survive.

But that would be crazy, nobody would ever build such a thing.

<comment><USER7> Part of the reason 2) can't be right is that there are lots of versions of you that are similar, but not quite the same. Suppose you're born with a severe life-limiting genetic disease caused by a single de novo mutation that will kill you by age 20. But in another timeline, there's a person who was born exactly the same as you were, but without the mutation, who will definitely live longer than you. Are you and them the same person, so you're not conscious? Is your consciousness proof that you're not the same person, after all? Should we consider everyone with a life-limiting disease p-zombies?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like the idea that we're all immortal from our own perspective. I don't think this article contradicts it.

>Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest: Under this assumption we can change the circumstances from a punishment to a reward. Instead of a gun, imagine a doctor has information about your health. If he tells you about it and you act on the information, you will certainly live a longer life. The doctor will only tell you about the information based the result of the quantum event. If the current assumptions are true, then you should always experience the reality in which the doctor tells you about your unknown ailment.

No I think this misunderstands the issue. Consciousness experiences the reality in which it exists. There are two types of 'timelines', if you like: those where your consciousness ends, and those where it doesn't. The only one you can possibly be in is the one where it doesn't. You can't 'extend' your life with QI. You won't live a longer life, you'll always life forever.

It's not quantum longeivity. It's quantum immortality. If the button you were clicking killed you on a random bit being 1 and not on the bit being 0, then you would survive clicking it.

OR, you would just not click on it. Because there're worlds where you click it, and worlds where you don't.

<comment><USER9> > I like the idea that we're all immortal from our own perspective

I think of this everytime I'm in a situation where I _just almost died_. I don't really think it's the case but everytime it happens I update my my credences and add 0.00000000000000001% to the chances that it could be true :-)

<comment><USER10> I think it was the movie "The Darwin Awards" that first introduced me to the concept of "micro-morts". The idea that there are activities that carry a small increase in the probability of death... Since then, I've seen other evidence of that idea.

I read a story about a nomadic tribe that will not sleep under dead trees as it is seen as bad luck. On any given night the chance that a dead tree will fall on you is very small, but if you sleep under dead trees every night, the chance that one will fall on you starts to add up, and it's likely to be your eventual cause of death.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I got the following message:

'j/.uG}mzgP8zs_4=q|_nN'{C@EpQ}=lzSt9+'l~SmqVyusft8BGgt)K"XKcly24N1cmZg_iz\z _$ /pt.`P".W-CwP>w4#2%axJHATmA}xg?_d%(8<W[QN&>7`wQCe3jIl^kPHQI#dp.

I think it would be just as likely for the message to say "Do the following to extend your life" as it is for the supposedly random characters above being interpreted a certain way. In this case, the characters that jump out at me immediately are JHAT, 4 consecutive uppercase ASCII letters. Googling that shows "'jhat' is a heap analysis tool that parses a Java heap dump and enables web-browsing a parsed heap dump..." which leads me to think that by switching over to being a Java programmer (I mostly code in Python/Go) that I can extend my life. So that's something worth considering.

</comment><comment><USER12> >2\. Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest.

This seems like a very strong version of the quantum immortality idea. I was under the impression that quantum immortality didn't suggest that there was only one path among the splitting universes where someone is "truly" conscious and experiencing reality.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't think this really disproves quantum immortality? You never experience the gun firing because in all the universes where it fires you die so quickly you can't sense it. That doesn't mean the gun never fires. It just means that you only experience it in the event it didn't. This is kind of tautologically true. By definition, if you're alive, you haven't been shot in the head at point blank range.

Particularly, assumption 2 is in no way required for the quantum immortality thought experiment to work.

</comment><comment><USER14> First, obligatory short story (free open access on the site below) for this entire concept. It takes things to their extreme conclusion and I liked it very much with the way it experiments with QI: [https://www.tor.com/2010/08/05/divided-by- infinity/](https://www.tor.com/2010/08/05/divided-by-infinity/)

This brings me to my second point: in relation to the death of a close family member a couple years ago from cancer. The end lasted a month and largely consisted in its last days of a slow withering of conscious reasoning and awareness. How exactly would something like that square with the notion of consciousness suddenly jumping to the QI state in which it simply "persists"? An argument around this was already made by Max Tegmark, who suggested that the flaw in that reasoning is that dying is not a binary event. Instead it is very often a progressive degeneration, with a continuum of states of steadily decreasing consciousness. In other words, in most real causes of death (and this squares with my experience), one experiences such a gradual loss of self- awareness that an observer defies all odds only within the confines of a very abstract scenario.

Furthermore, the obvious: QI does not at all save us from the loss of loved ones who do die in our quantum branch. Even if it were true, and each individual continues to perceive consciousness in a sort of immortal state of constantly branching awareness, we objectively know that we see these people die forever in our perception, with no allowance that I know of for a reunion in the future. Thus, its ultimate outcome if you follow this logic is deeply tragic: We keep living, seeing those we love die to our perception, while these same loved ones go through the same process, even if in some other branch other versions of both get to see said loved ones continue to live for a certain time longer.

<comment><USER15> I agree. Under QI it's possible we end up as some disembodied conscious matter in a state of eternal agony; QI only says consciousness will persist, it says nothing about quality of life.

<comment><USER11> When we die, our consciousness just gets transferred over to the atoms that make us up. Since there is no longer a self-contained "vessel" for it, specifically a hippocampus, we don't have any short-term or long-term memory anymore, but are still experiencing. That's why we can't remember time before we were born.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've been obsessed with QI ever since I first heard about it. Every time I have a small glimpse of inattention, I always like to think that my consciousness just got transposed to another reality. Sometimes it's while I'm driving my car, and it makes it all the more trippy.

However, I'm not sure I understand the logic behind their reasoning.

> Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest.

> you should always experience the reality in which the doctor tells you about > your unknown ailment.

If you experience the reality in which you live the longest, wouldn't the ailment just never come about?

Going back to the gun and bullet example, your consciousness being transposed to the branch where none of that even happens, wouldn't the same thing apply to any disease that would develop within your body? You would just get transposed to the reality in which no such disease develop, extending your life even further.

<comment><USER17> >Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest.

That formulation doesn't make sense to me. I would say it as "Consciousness can only experience realities in which it exists." Therefore you won't move into futures in which you don't exist.

<comment><AUTHOR> My reasoning behind this was that there can be multiple futures where you could exist and experience, but some of them shorter than others. E.g.

A</comment></comment></comment><comment>B

\ </comment><comment>--C

If you are travelling towards B, once you reach it, you die. But you can't magically jump last second to parallel reality C, you can only branch from the present. Thus you would have needed to branch down to C in advance. Thanks for pointing this out, I will make my reasoning more clear in a future edit.

<comment><USER16> That's what I understood based on the gun example. However the same would hold true for any deadly disease you develop, wouldn't it?

<comment><AUTHOR> True, the doctor example is really just supposed to be segue into thinking about how a direct message could work. Although, perhaps facing death and recovering turns you into the kind of fellow who will live their life in a vastly different way leading to a longer life?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think assumption 4 is in error.

>There exists a message in the encoding that can extend one's life.

If quantum immortality holds then there is no message which will extend your life because you're already immortal.

<comment><AUTHOR> But there must be a mechanism for the immortality shouldn't there be? Let's go back to the gun example quickly. (assuming a perfect gun, no misfires, or lucky non-fatal shots)

If quantum immortality holds and the experiment is run 8 times, you should see the sequence 00000000 right? This is a message too, because it deviates from expectation to shovel you down a reality you can experience. Sort of like Zipf's law where the less likely the result the more information it contains [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law#Applications](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law#Applications)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest.

This is a huge straw-man. The claim is that it is that it takes a probability distribution that inherits from the underlying multiversal one, but weighted by your existence. All this proves is that the none of the n-bit random messages will cause you to immediately divide into at least 2^n copies of yourself.

For more interesting discussion on ideas in this space, see

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle) [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain) [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument)

</comment><comment><USER19> There seems to be a gap in the argument between step 2 and steps onwards from 4.

The experiment assumes that, given the opportunity, the universe will give a person the knowledge of how to extend their life. But of course that knowledge could have been given at any point in their life up to then, and at any point afterwards. Why hasn't a computer glitch emailed you the contents of an immortality potion before now?

The answer I would suggest is that this is not the optimum moment for life extension, and there's no reason the universe has to do anything if a better local minimum can occur.

My corollary for this experiment would be:

4\. There exists a message in the encoding that can extend one's life... but that message will only be given if

a) Having the message actually results in the timeline that does what is needed, and

b) There is not in fact a more optimum time that the universe might use later on.

The problem is that absent points a and b, the experiment proves nothing. It could well be that you wouldn't have correctly responded to any message given here, but instead the universe will choose a moment when you're 65 to announce a life extension drug has just been released into the upper atmosphere.

</comment><comment><USER20> I would say that this test is especially vulnerable to error, because all the auxiliary hypotheses being tested. The problem here is known as the Duhem- Quine thesis:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duhem%E2%80%93Quine_thesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duhem%E2%80%93Quine_thesis)

> The Duhem–Quine thesis, also called the Duhem–Quine problem, after Pierre > Duhem and Willard Van Orman Quine, is that it is impossible to test a > scientific hypothesis in isolation, because an empirical test of the > hypothesis requires one or more background assumptions (also called > auxiliary assumptions or auxiliary hypotheses). In recent decades the set of > associated assumptions supporting a thesis sometimes is called a bundle of > hypotheses.

I'm not going to enumerate the auxiliary hypotheses being tested, but this is a particularly thorny problem in the philosophy of science, and it becomes less tractable as the problems you are solving become more complicated (like this one).

My personal feeling is that the philosophy of science, as a field, is still quite immature.

</comment><comment><USER21> People have pointed out many flaws in this argument, but I haven't seen what I believe is the simplest flaw: specifically, if QI as defined in the article is true, you can't conclude that the universe will take every possible opportunity to extend your life, only that you will always fail to experience life-ending events. A failure to receive a message about extending your life is not a life ending event, as your life could be saved later through other means. And it doesn't matter how unlikely those other means are, because your consciousness will simply follow the path in which it still exists, regardless of the likelihood of that path.

And if you think about that for a minute, the prospect of QI ought to horrify you. What sort of being will you be in 1000 years, if the only thing preventing you from dying is the ability to follow infinitesimal paths through the evolving wave function?

</comment><comment><USER22> One thing to keep in mind is our understanding of physics is only approximate so it's dangerous to draw too extreme conclusions.

Approximate immortality is after all very different from actual immortality.

We may well discover that the number of worlds is enormous but ultimately finite, and that the number of worlds you're in decreases exponentially with every risk you take.

</comment><comment><USER23> It all hinges on #2, "Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest" which is a straight-up mistaken understanding of quantum immortality. I feel embarrassed for the author. With QI, you have to actually die, there's no other way around it.

</comment><comment><USER24> There is an assumption here that all conciousness and experience ceases at the moment of death, which doesn't agree with many people's beliefs. If there is an afterlife, it is entirely possible you'll find yourself in a universe where you have died.

</comment><comment><USER25> >Since you can't possibly experience the timeline in which you are dead

Death is a slow process, of course you experience it from the start to the end.

</comment><comment><USER26> As a counter, the best way to "prove" QI is true without risking your life is to live a really long time.

A-priori that's unlikely unless QI is true.

</comment><comment><USER27> Can you prove a negative?

<comment><USER28> 1\. I _think_ I'm conscious. Therefore, under the axiom "Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest." I must be experiencing the reality in which I live the longest.

2\. I am not the best version of me. I'm 40 pounds overweight, I have poor sleep habits, I wheeze going up stairs, I don't wear sunscreen when going outside in the summer. There is strong evidence that all of these things shorten my life. There's a couple of moles I occasionally worry about yet I do nothing.

3\. So either the versions of me that keep perfectly fit, exercise just the right amount to maintain health without putting too much strain on the body, wear sunscreen, and keep a regular sleep cycle of an appropriate duration are inevitably doomed to die young (is there a 100% chance of a famine across all quantum worlds I exist in, where I'll need to survive off of my body fat for 3+ months?), I am not actually conscious, I just think I am(?), or the proposition "Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest." must be false.

(Now obviously, you can't take my word for me being conscious, because that's exactly what a p-zombie would say, but you can ask yourself if you are conscious and if there is any way you can be better than you are now; if the answer is "yes" to both questions and you still believe in quantum immortality, you should start trying to figure out what inevitable catastrophe your life-shortening vices make you suited to survive, more than not having those life-shortening vices.)</comment></comment>


Shopify's Black Friday Live Map of Sales Revenue and Orders - <AUTHOR> https://datastories.shopify.com/?itcat=blog&itterm=383054184482 <comment><USER2> Dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21661431](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21661431)</comment>


Ask HN: Do you know of bounty based developer programs for Crypto? - <AUTHOR> Do you know of any developer programs that reward developers for development on their platform in the crypto space, things like OST KIT (Developer Alpha) for example? <comment><USER2> Request Network Hub has a 30mm fund available for developers to develop in their eco

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm kicking this list off with two programs I know:-

1\. Ethereum Foundation Grant

2\. OST Kit II Developer Program

</comment><comment><USER3> GitCoin?

</comment><comment><USER4> gitcoin</comment>


Show HN: Shinekits - shoeshine kits and stuff for guys - <AUTHOR> http://shinekits.com?r=hn

<comment><AUTHOR> This one is a bit different, I admit. I'm a web developer and this is my first venture into ecommerce. It's actually been a lot of fun working with my partner to develop and sell a physical product. We found a local woodcrafter to make our shine boxes and we're even making our own shoe shine cloths. We're using the Shopify platform - so far quite happy with it. Any feedback is really appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER2> Because women don't need pocketknives or wear anything but heels...

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, my wife polishes her heeled shoes as well and someday we'd like to market to women. But our target market right now is men. More opportunity for someone (yourself?) to open a competing store for women (or unisex), right?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How does one form business partnerships with universities? - <AUTHOR>

I'm the co-founder of a small US-based startup.  As an applied research company, we'd like to form a partnership with my a certain laboratory in my alma mater that would involve the following:
- Joint research projects in fundamental and applied science. - Joint grant-writing for said projects - Our partial funding of the laboratory - Collaboration with other departments
Patent and publication ownership will have to be negotiated and is outside of the scope of this question.
Beyond piquing the interest of the lab's director, what is the usual process for formalizing such partnerships with the university? <comment><USER2> You'll probably contact the dean of that school or something. I don't actually know either, but I would start by asking the lab's director if he knows. If he doesn't, have him ask his boss. And also get the school's publicly published phone number and give them a call.

Are you looking to pay them to do research?</comment>


Paradise Lost: How Tourists Are Destroying the Places They Love - <AUTHOR> http://www.spiegel.de/international/paradise-lost-tourists-are-destroying-the-places-they-love-a-1223502.html <comment><USER2> I grew up with stories of people like Maco Polo and love of travel but my recent trips to Europe has almost repulsed and disillusioned me. Tiny European countries are being swamped by huge swath of tourists, everyone with Rick Steve's guidebook, they all go look at exact same thing, take exact same pictures and even eat at exact same recommended restaurants. There is a lot to see and little to reflect when you are among herds of camera clicking tourists. I wonder if there are any other guidebooks people use (especially for Europe) that puts them more on path of becoming traveller and less on tourist.

<comment><USER3> I often wait until I have a personal connection to a place, such as a friend or related hobby, before traveling. The experience becomes very removed from that of a tourist, and so much more rewarding.

Am I selfish if I put extra effort into maintaining friendships with foreign friends so I might end up visiting them?

<comment><USER4> This is one of my favourite ways to travel (when feasible), but if there's somewhere you want to go, just go.

I was lucky to work in a city full of expats - so I now have friends all over the world to lean on.

In return, they lean on me when they want to visit my home country and I happily oblige.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Always worth posting Wallace's quote on the subject:

"To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing."

A similar phenomenon is happening in the outdoor industry. Instagram is (depending on your perspective) ruining everything or democratizing access to natural beauty. Most people I know practice some variant of a digital leave- no-trace rule: don't post photos in publicly-trafficked areas of the internet, or if you do then don't say where they were taken. It's not so much gatekeeping as ensuring people who want to experience that beauty have to put in the work - read terribly-designed websites, meet actual people and gain their trust, or even take a backcountry travel class which hopefully instills a healthy respect for the environment you're enjoying.

Another strategy is to delve further into mountaineering, where the obvious danger of the terrain repels everybody with a working survival instinct and ensures some degree of solitude :)

<comment><USER6> "alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have"

I find this hugely classist. (Edit: and I'm generally not someone to use that terminology)

Most (even American) travellers are just trying to see some sights, have a normal and are not particularly rude or problematic.

The issue is now that 'everyone' can afford to travel ... it's causing problems.

This is a problem of prosperity.

<comment><USER7> I really appreciate you using the term "classist". I think that term, and not "racist", needs to be much more widely applied these days.

That being said, I really enjoyed the author's post. If anything, the people who are going to these places are the social climbing, upwardly mobile middle class, determined to burnish their brand on Instagram.

Also the free flow of tourists is a problem that parallels a lot of other things in the world currently. Information, capital, trade, all these things have moved so much and so fast they have loosed control from national government sovereignty that used to regulate them. As the anti-globalization train begins picking up speed, all these will be severely restricted, for better or worse.

<comment><USER6> I get it.

I love travelling and I'm soured at how overrun places are.

But it's not a problem of the 'ugly tourist' it's a problem of just 'too many people'.

I don't go to tourist destinations, I just go to places.

Every French or German village is 'interesting' to those who don't know them. They are all full of history.

Same for so many other places.

The only 'non destinations' on planet earth are the suburbs, and places where there are a lot of Starbuckses, unfortunately, that seems to be what we are building everywhere. And I do mean everywhere. The suburbs of Toronto, Singapore and Istanbul are oddly similar in too many ways ...

<comment><USER8> The ugly tourist the piece refers to is all tourists being somewhere the wouldn't otherwise have been except for relative affluence and the opportunity. Lots of people who just go places, which by definition become tourist destinations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting to see Den Spiegel sympathize with the people who "no longer feel comfortable in their neighborhood because they have become a minority in the cafés and restaurants they traditionally frequented."

That's one of the main complaints of the opponents of Germany/Europe's liberal immigration and refugee policies. They admit this in the article but dismiss it instantly.

</comment><comment><USER10> Traveling is overrated. Often times in modern life it feels as thought traveling is a competition rather than for leisure and pleasure. People are often competing to take pictures and say they have been to as many places as possible. Props to travel companies for propagating the travel craze and selling people on the allure of taking pictures and eating food in another spot on Earth. Count the number of people's profiles on social media that do not say they like traveling.

Okay let's be honest for a second what does most traveling boil down to? You basically use a form of transportation to ping pong from one point of Earth to another to say you visited a piece of land named X or Y, a country let's call it, named by some person or group who is no longer alive and maybe started a war with other humans to solidify the country name and its artificial border lines. We are moving people from A to B back to A every day and in the process destroying our planets climate because people are bored with the lives in the place they inhabit.

We need to find out what is causing the boredom. Understand it and work to solve it so that people can enjoy the places they live. To embrace our shared humanity and environment in front of us everyday if we do not overlook it during the hassle of everyday life.

<comment><USER11> I disagree that it's due to boredom, or that it is overrated.

Learning about other cultures and other people's way of life is incredibly important in an increasingly divided world. I strongly believe that if the average American spent time living with an Islamic family in the Middle East for a week, we might break down a lot of barriers between all the folks that share this rock we live on.

It's another question as to whether that's the type of travel people _want_ to do, or whether it's all collecting Instagram photos because #wanderlust is trendy and accessible right now

<comment><USER10> All of this can be done via the internet.

<comment><USER12> You remind me of an old lady I met while living in Southern California. This lady was extremely _proud_ of the fact that she had never set foot outside of California her entire life (by choice, as she was quite wealthy). I asked her about it and she said "Honey, why bother? It's _paradise_ here. If I ever wonder about life elsewhere, I can read about it or watch a documentary!"

I mean, to each his own, but to me it's the difference between reading documentation about code vs. writing code. The former may give you some good information, and may even be essential, but it's not the same as experiencing the real thing.

<comment><USER10> Please don't compare reading and writing code or a book for that matter to getting on a plane and staying in a hotel or a apartment.

<comment><USER12> Your comment lacks substance.

Care to explain why you have an issue with my analogy?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I went with my wife to Hallstatt this year. It's a tiny picturesque town in Austria. I was there not that long ago, maybe something like 10 years and it was nice and memorable but for a local no big deal. This time we went on a wimp and jesus christ there were so many tourists. It was insane how utterly impossible life must be there for people. There are signs in Chinese and Japanese everywhere about local laws, not to fly drones, not to take pictures of little children etc.

I'm not sure what the solution is but that town is effectively ruined for normal people.

//EDIT: also the worst part is that instagram and whatever else people are using now is so ridiculously prevalent that you can literally sit down somewhere and hit the refresh stream to see the selfies of people _right in front of you_ appear on the geo tagged location page. It's literally going there just to make a stupid picture.

<comment><USER14> There is an interesting (but perhaps not very insighful) connection to gentrification in this.

It sounds like that city is still having growing pains with tourism influx, but it also sounds like the local economy is probably doing pretty well, so I don't know if "ruined" is the right term (in absolute terms).

Put another way: the locals will have a much more annoying but (hopefully) much richer existence as a result of that influx. Those that dislike this can either move or work with local governments to transform policies to stop the tourism (and fight those who prefer the income).

<comment><USER13> > It sounds like that city is still having growing pains with tourism influx, > but it also sounds like the local economy is probably doing pretty well, so > I don't know if "ruined" is the right term (in absolute terms).

The actual local economy is suffering but is getting replaced with a new one: tourism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The problem is that limiting access to those with the greatest means (factoring in leisure time as well as money) is horribly elitist. This is similar to a conversation about teleportation that I've had several times with my wife and more recently my daughter.

"Sure, it would be great if we could teleport to some unspoiled natural place without having to deal with the hassle of regular travel and hiking for hours/days to get there. Maybe we could even maintain a place there, so we could visit whenever we want. But wait, if everybody else did that then it wouldn't be unspoiled any more. So maybe if teleportation cost a lot ... but not so much that we ourselves were excluded, naturally. But we're not elitist scum, are we? Oh well, let's keep walking."

I totally understand the urge, I feel it myself, but my aversion to being or becoming part of a new aristocracy is even stronger. The only _fair_ way to keep places unspoiled would be to issue licenses via a lottery. Non- transferable licenses, or else you might as well just sell directly to the rich. Other than that, this is just an unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of giving people freedom (and the means) to travel where they will.

</comment><comment><USER16> Funny that they blame Ryanair and Easyjet, who only serve Europe, in the first sentence, then plaster a big photograph of a field full of Chinese tourists that most likely did not use Ryanair or Easyjet to get there.

<comment><USER17> Lots of tourist from outside Europe use "hub" airports and then travel to their final destinations, often using low cost airlines. This why German and Dutch airspaces are so busy.

<comment><USER16> It would usually be the same airline that did the long flight or one of their partners - but Ryanair and Easyjet don't do those partnerships with Chinese airlines. I've also gotten a lot of their flights and hardly ever see Chinese tourists, mostly local (or other European) tourists in fact.

<comment><USER17> Well that's why airlines like Ryanair exist. If say Lufthansa is booked up by Chinese tourists and prices are rocketing, that leaves a gap in the market that these airlines fill.

Also people aren't stupid. They shop around and find good deals. I've seen many South Americans using London or Amsterdam as hub airports before jumping on cheap flights to Spain/Portugal etc.

<comment><USER16> You're speculating wildly here. When have you ever seen a Ryanair or Easyjet plane full of Chinese tourists??

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> At a fundamental level, I think the mysticism and admiration of many of these tourist destinations in Europe has greatly eroded in our internet and social media age. It's not like how tourism was 50 years ago when people mostly relied on anecdotal and literary knowledge of places to get a glimpse of what they are like. It's much more of an experience to have to go see something for yourself to really get a substantial view of it, in a sense. Now, I could go see what Barcelona or Prague or Rome is like today on Google Maps, look through Instagram stories of people who live there, and sort through countless "10 Things to do in __" guides on the internet. Of course, there's pros and cons to each way, but in modern times tourism really is more about "I just want to do predetermined cool stuff in a place for my 1 week vacation" rather than "I want to experience a place and immerse myself in the culture for 1 week".

<comment><USER19> > modern times tourism really is more about "I just want to do predetermined > cool stuff in a place for my 1 week vacation" rather than "I want to > experience a place and immerse myself in the culture for 1 week".

They were always fundamentally the same, the former is just being more honest about what you are doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Isn't this in a sense the goal of globalization? Each region adapts more and more to the niche that they serve best.

</comment><comment><USER21> "hell is other people"

I think most anti tourism pieces are elitist. I also find crowds and queues a drag but either it's a lottery or it's priced out to most people. Which is better?

<comment><USER22> I new this band before they were cool man. Now I can't afford tickets because of all the Johnny come latelies who can't truly appreciate their music like I can.

<comment><USER21> I'm also reminded of US and British tourism in hyperinflation Weimar Germany:. "oooh look you can live like a king for a dollar a month"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Recently, in the german edition of the Spiegel, there was a similar column[1] saying there was "something really going wrong" when a flight from Berlin to Cologne costs 15€ while the train ticket for the same destinations costs 120€. The same article said that the flights were "absurdly cheap" and that the budget airlines are "displaying the type of capitalism that is disconnected from reality".

Im not joking. The question they asked themselves was not why the Deutsche Bahn [2], receiving billions ins subsidies every year, is unable to compete agains budget airlines, but why the government doesn't forbid such low costs flights. The elitism of the authors really scares me. It almost seems as if they want a minimal ticket fee, making flying a luxury once again.

Ryanair and Easyjet are well run companies that are enabling millions of poor people to see the world, visit family members they haven't seen for decades, leave their countries for better opportunities abroad.

[1] [http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/billig-fluege- der-...](http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/billig-fluege-der-airport- kapitalismus-a-1223690.html)

[2] The major german railway company, privatized in 1994, but still fully owned by the government

<comment><USER24> Cheap airlines are unsustainable and subsidized.

I just flew Norwegian from New York to Europe for less than $75. Parking my car at the airport cost more than the flight. That entire airline is some sort of financing scheme and won't exist in a couple of years.

<comment><USER23> Out of curiosity: what was the origin and destination airports?

<comment><USER24> Stewart Airport (Newburgh, NY) to Shannon, Ireland. They fly out of several US cities.

They run specials frequently and you can get flights to London, Bergen, Barcelona, etc. A friend and his wife were able to fly to London to see Hamilton last year for less than it would have taken to see it in NYC!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Everything must be matained forever or it will disappear. Areas of economic unproditivity will be capitalized on. If there were no crowds of tourists filling ancient cities, there'd be less incentive to maintain them or not replace them with new construction. If no one used our national parks they'd be sold off to developers or resource extractors.

You can't have it both ways. Either tourism and outdoor recreation are popular and the market will respond by preserving unique places worth seeing. Or there will be no interest in preserving these places and our very large and resource hungry population will put these places to more productive use.

</comment><comment><USER26> I've been playing tourist in Switzerland and northern Italy recently and had a few thoughts related to this article.

\- Knowing the tourist stereotype and not wanting to be that makes me self- conscious. I've intentionally avoided some popular attractions because I didn't want to be part of the tourist scene. Worse, I've felt pressure to modify my normal behavior so as not to appear touristy. For example, at home I go into the city with my camera fairly often to photograph the streets and trash cans and shit like that, but I hesitated to do that in Zurich because I didn't want to be that tourist walking around with their camera. That's really stupid.

\- The most fun I've had has been taking the wrong bus or a random train and then just going wherever looks the most interesting. The same with restaurants or bars or events: just head out without a destination and pop in wherever looks cool. If you do use Trip Advisor or other popular guides, wander around the destinations and discover what else is nearby. (Atlas Obscura and Google Earth have also taken me some fun places.)

\- With your phone, you never really have to leave home or truly get to know a place. I can always reach my friends and family if I am just board; I can always use Translate; I can always look up transit directions. One effect of this is that meeting people—including other tourists—can be very hard because not only are you in your own little phone bubble world, they are also in their own little bubbles (not that this is any difference from home actually). I can't imagine what it would be like to travel while uploading images or commentary for the world.

\- Tourists are only doing what systems have optimized for. We tourists go to Florence because the tools and infrastructure make it easy, and because the guides tell us that it is somewhere that we _must_ visit. Then we take selfies to prove we were there because our culture values and rewards experience consumption. I'd like to think that we can build tools and culture that has a broader view of what travel can be and what you get from it. Because not only is travel an essential way to learn about and see the world, it also helps you better understand yourself and the place you come from.

</comment><comment><USER27> While I think this is being exacerbated by the social media culture of travel ("I love to travel, crazy wanderlust" reads a profile, next to pictures at every guidebook location), this is just the consequence of a global world, where transportation between places has become cheaper and easier than before, and incomes have made much of the world accessible. I for one welcome the human progress. My grandparents had stories of saving up, leaving from their job, and going on long trips on barges for travel.

Hopefully we can contain the tourists in a small touristy part of town, friendly to travelers.

</comment><comment><USER28> An excellent YouTube channel called Rare Earth did a video on this subject:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8quMliXCIV4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8quMliXCIV4)

</comment><comment><USER29> In my mind, this could be solved fairly simply with government regulation. The government can sell tourism passes to enter the country, therefore socializing some of the profits of tourism, or even just hand them out in a lottery. It seems obvious that this will need to be done at some point; there are fundamental limits on how many people a country's infrastructure can support. Without the government stepping in, it will only get worse.

<comment><USER30> This is actually done with certain destinations in the US. For example, after "The Wave" in Southern Utah became tremendously famous (driven, IIRC, by a very nice desktop photo distributed with Windows), access became permit-only determined by BLM lottery.

I've been trying the lottery w/o success most months of the last year. It's frustrating not to win, but it's a fair way of meeting the demands of both access and preservation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Tons of people would never got chance to enter most of the world. See this third world passport thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17778108](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17778108)

</comment><comment><USER32> [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/30/chinese- villag...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/30/chinese-village- secret-long-life-bama-guangxi)

</comment><comment><USER33> When - not if - cheap oil finally runs out tourism will be a fraction of what it is today.

<comment><USER34> No hope for electric planes then? Or high-speed train travel?

<comment><USER33> It's cheap flights that make this work, electric planes are for now a pipe dream for international and intercontinental flights and high speed trains are not that high speed compared to aircraft.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Author fell into a common fallacy - mistook lust for love.

</comment><comment><USER36> As a side note: I have the feeling spiegel.de is getting worse and worse by the day. Ever increasing click-bait titles, aricles with little depth, more and more content paywalled. And don't get me started on the page filling ads... or is it just me?

</comment><comment><USER37> Why bother traveling? Well I live in the UK and want to experience:

-Swimming with sea turtles in the wild

-Seeing whales breach right in front of me

-The feel of the finest sand I have ever experienced at Whitehaven between my toes

-Swimming in the warm sea

-Learning to surf with the perfect waves

-Sleeping in a ger with a family in Mongolia and getting an insight into how they live, what is important to them, understanding the things which can make people happy (which is very different to what lots of people think makes you happy at first glance)

-Hearing the emotion in a guides voice as he talks about the personal loss his family had due to communism, feeling connected to someone and caring instead of reading a fact in a book and it meaning very little

-Looking up at buildings I have seen countless times in photos and yet speechless, as the photo had zero impact on me yet seeing it in real life is amazing. For example the Taj Mahal blew me away, looking at it from different angles, seeing the detail close up, getting a true feel of the scale and spectacle of it.

-Dancing on the sand in bare feet through the night at a full moon party surrounded by people who are there to have fun and be happy. Sharing moments with other people. Moments that you can recall in a heartbeat throughout your life and mean something to you.

-Going to iconic places from films, tv, books from your childhood and feeling that sense of excitement which seems to erode away as we get older, but as an adult you still get that buzz when it is seeing something that meant something to you as a kid.

-Tasting home cooked food from an Indian family which tastes nothing like any Indian food I have ever tasted in the UK.

-Being surrounded by wild deer and feeding them special deer cookies. Laughing as they shake their heads around and then having to run away as too many of them surround us.

-Experiencing the lack of things, the lack of drinkable water from a tap, the lack of hygienic washing facilities, the lack of western toilets and getting so much more appreciation for what we have.

-Hearing what local Tibetans thinks about Tibet and China and contrasting it to what is put across publicly

-Seeing a sky full of stars reaching out to us from the opposite direction and being in the middle of the ocean or on an island without any lights on and get amazing views devoid of light pollution.

-Seeing how unfair the world is and questioning so much about life and how we are currently living it. Perhaps making life-changing choices, moving to a different country, changing vocations, etc.

-Filling up your senses with things which aren't available in the UK

I mean I could go on and on and on. I am 34 and have taken a year off to travel the world, seeing 20 countries, getting some classic Instagram snaps, drinking with a bunch of British people in remote places, doing things which are cliché and doing something which I don't even like for no good reason. Finding the most British food I can and being happy to taste coke. But that is all just one small part of the experience. When you have been in Asia for 5 months and have basically had a stomach which has never quite been completely right, the most western classic food can be very much welcomed. I personally find it tiresome to hear people for ever complaining about what you should and shouldn't do. If you want a Starbucks in Vietnam then have one, you don't have to drink their (very different) coffee (I have given up coffee so not something for me personally). If you like McDonald's in Malaysia then go have it (McDonald's is great in terms of something safe, reliable, cheap, easy, although not much good for me as a vegetarian).

Taking a year off to travel is one of the best decisions I have made. I am confident it will change my life (it already has) and also confident it will create memories which will stay with me and something I will always look back on positively.</comment>


Content Distribution Networking and Privacy Discrimination [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/normanluhrmann/infosec/raw/master/cdn-privacy-discrimination-20200611.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> I was made the harbinger of death but I realize that nobody wins at war. We need to change our ways for the future digital society.

I humbly ask you to give this whitepaper a look and let me know what your views on this matter are.

We need a fresh discussion about net neutrality in times of proprietary traffic solutions controlling vast amounts of global bandwidth.

We need to consider policy management in automated decision making systems. This is just the start - the problem is everywhere.</comment>


The Boeing 737 Max 8 Crashes: The Case for Pilot Error - <AUTHOR> https://seekingalpha.com/instablog/398764-vaughn-cordle-cfa/5290930-boeing-737-max-8-crashes-case-pilot-error <comment><USER2> Sure, the pilots did the wrong thing.

But they weren't trained to do the right thing. It is normal to get flustered in a stressful situation, the answer is to prepare for it.

If Boeing doesn't want pilots to make the same mistake it should insist that they get trained. My suspicion is that return-to-flight for the MAX is being delayed by Boeing trying to avoid a simulator training requirement for the MAX because the whole point of the MAX was that pilots did not need to be retrained.

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh, it's this song and dance again.

Let me touch on a couple points:

>On overspend and throttle management

The article asserts:

>The Pilots left the throttles at 94% power (normal ascent power) for the entirety of the emergency. >this exaggerated aerodynamic load forces on the horizontal stabilizer, rendering manual wheel retrimming infeasible >This occurred due to lack of pilot training

First off; not managing the throttles at that time is completely understandable.

The AoA sensor being bad causes absolute havoc with the data available to the pilots since the AoA is a value utilized to calibrate several key data points required for successfully flying the plane, the most important being; airspeed. As soon as that AoA sensor was rendered out of whack, they were essentially flying in an airspeed unreliable state, to which the remedy is...

You guessed it: advance throttles to appropriate position for desired flight regime, move on to resolving next problem.

Now; there's not actually any documentation or training material that specifically mentions that remedying an airspeed unreliable could be contraindicated in the presence of some other problems. If you do both have an explicit call out for this sort of thing, you never even incorporate the possibility into a mental fault diagnostic tree; you just try to correct the seeming most present issue.

Also note: there's an immediately observable effect to throttle retardation in engine underslung aircraft. Every pilot would know this. No pilot in their right mind would naturally make the problem worse until they absolutely exhausted their checklist items. It's simply not good form. So, into Stab Trim Runaway we go!

>On the trim oops The monitoring pilot had about 200 hours; the pilot in command had about 8000 hours, alarms and glaciers going off, and a painful amount of pressure having to be held on the controls to try to keep things from getting worse.

They had both seen the emergency bulletin from Boeing, and we're therefore primed for stab trim runaway. In that bulletin, airspeed gets a minor callout at the end. Almost an afterthought really. Somewhat lost in retrospect to the list of symptoms that may arise due to AoA sensor malfunction, and the news of this MCAS thing that might try to kill you.

Now: They cutout the trim switches. I have a question; how many, dear reader, have, when faced with something highly resistive to turning, naturally, without thinking tried turning the thing in question the other way? It takes 40 turns per unit of trim if I recall cotrectly; this means no more than 8 turns of the wheel (which would smoothly actuate in the nose down direction since the screw jack in back is being assisted by the aerodynamic load) accounts for the change from 2.1 to 2.3 units. This strikes me as just about the right amount of time for the human eye to discern movement on an analog gauge if that is what is used, or to filter out from a chaotic interface that the trim problem is being exacerbated.

I can hear the protest from everyone in the back, but the fact remains, that when under pressure, and in the absence of a visual cue, it is more than possible that either pilot fell victim to this most human of heuristics before quickly realizing their mistake.

>on departing from the checklist Having run through everything they had from an authoritative source, the pilot's found themselves in a position where the choice was improvise or die.

They improvised. They reactivated the electric trim motor and slipped the thumb switch to make sure the system could respond.

Unfortunately, this also reset MCAS to activate 5 seconds later, before they could hit the trim again. They had no clue as to the coupling between the trim switches, or disabling of the air-trim override switches in the yokes. They did the best they knew how with the cards they were dealt.

>Conclusion: Did pilot error doom those flights?

In the sense that lithobreaking with the ground is the physical cause of death, yes; but we aren't discussing the physics, we're discussing culpability. The primary point of interest in questions of culpability is: _Were they negligent? Did they unreasonably endanger the plane by doing anything other than a best faith demonstration of mechanical and piloting aptitude in the face of incomplete information and malfunctioning equipment?_ I assert that no, the pilot's acted in good faith, and to the extent of their training and beyond as well as any human being trying to operate a highly complex and unknowingly dangerous piece of equipment can be expected to under the circumstances.

Was Boeing negligent? Did they in good faith do everything they could in order to ensure the safety of these planes while wholeheartedly complying with aerospace design regulations, free of any form of malicious compliance, or free of any willingness to unreasonably sacrifice the soundness of the finished product in the name of greed/dedication to maintaining market share? I assert so. This unfortunate series of reactions could _only have come to fruition through the combined negligence in creating an unsafe design, patching over this danger through poorly evaluated or extrapolated code, removing all mention of the danger from the training material, and refusing to perform their duty as a maker of complex equipment to make sure pilots knew enough to safely handle the plane. All with the intent of maintaining market share, and shareholder value creation at the expensive of the quality of the product, and the process by which said product is handed off to its users_.

No pilot should stand by and let these men be disparaged. No _professional_ should either. This company, on whose auspices and assurances they placed their lives and the lives of their passengers willingly abrogated their responsibility in the name of financial expediency. "The customer already expects the box to be of high quality; we must focus on shareholder value", should clearly illustrate where Boeing's priorities were at the time. That in trying to recover from this negligence on Boeing's part does not justify or release Boeing from ultimate culpability.

If we as a people accept the logic whereby these men must carry ultimate culpability, we accept that it is fine for an organization of people to be negligent in the execution of their duty, just so long as the poor sod who pays the price for it makes a mistake.

Please don't be that group of people.

<comment><USER4> When you write "Also note: there's an immediately observable effect to throttle retardation in engine underslung aircraft", are you referring to the airplane pitching downwards, on account of the thrust line being below the center of drag?

<comment><USER3> Yeppers. That is what I'm referencing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The authors of this article repeatedly ask why Ethiopian Airways did not train the pilots for the situation they faced, ignoring the fact that their training was in accordance with the requirements set out by Boeing and the FAA.

Prior to the Max variants, trim runaway was normally stopped by the pilot resisting it with an opposing force on the yoke; this caused the system driving the trim change to stop. consequently, trim runaways rarely resulted in the airplane being much out of trim.

This is also the case for the Max variants, _except_ for MCAS-commanded changes, as this would defeat its purpose. Training for trim runaway in a simulator goes through the checklist memory items, ending with the toggling of the cutout switches. Any use of the trim wheels, let alone in the 'roller- coaster' maneuver for when they are hard to move, was dropped from training a long time ago [1].

The 737 AFM mentions the possible difficulty of using manual trim when the jack screw is under high load, and outlines the roller-coaster maneuver, but the checklist for trim runaway makes no mention of it and does not say anything about slowing down. Furthermore, the AD, issued after the cause of the Lion Air crash was found, says nothing about these issues. Nor does there seem to be any consideration that the roller-coaster maneuver is infeasible at low altitudes, or of the complication that, as mentioned by Salawat, reducing thrust results in the airplane pitching downwards, on account of the low-slung engines.

So, MCAS raises the possibility of trim runaway being a qualitatively different experience than before, and significantly more difficult to handle, yet Boeing's and the FAA's response was to merely reiterate the existing procedures. Most significantly, they did not require, or even propose, any additional simulator training, even after the Lion Air crash. I think it is likely that no-one in these organizations connected the dots to anticipate the problem, but we should also consider the possibility that someone did, but it was downplayed to avoid the question of additional MCAS-specific training.

As I have written elsewhere, the more you argue that the pilots made mistakes, the more you simultaneously argue that Boeing's and the FAA's response to the Lion Air crash was inadequate. The authors of this hatchet job say that "with hindsight", the situation could have been saved, and maybe they are right, but the one thing no-one has when they need it is hindsight. Boeing and the FAA had a responsibility to substitute training for hindsight, and if they intentionally defaulted on this, and especially if they did so in the name of sales, they are culpable.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4qDLR4s45U&t=296s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4qDLR4s45U&t=296s)</comment>