Comment by chasing | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chasing | Hacker News Reader

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As with these sorts of things, I respect the academic exercise, but they always feel really arbitrary. Like, I could pick fifty different decent symbols and color schemes and come up with something that kind of looked good and might be a good Earth flag in a movie or something. If that's the goal, then the challenge isn't really that hard.

If you really wanted to explore a flag for Earth, you'd engage people from around the world. What symbols are important to them? What colors? How do they want to be seen? What does it even mean to them to have a flag that represents Earth as something uniquely ours? And such. Then begin to distill these ideas down into a flag. Or try to create a process by which an idea could be brought about. And try to get buy-in from all of these diverse people. That's the hard part. The interesting part!

(Also, nitpick about the video: 5:8 != the Golden Ratio.)

And that's the fundamental flaw of human nature that prevents collaboration at a large scale: Everything needs a story, a hero and a name. That that slows decision processes down almost to stagnation, and it often results in decisions that aren't based on reason, but on names, heroes and stories. To some extent reputation is certainly a useful heuristic, but at some point everybody has to accept that they are only bags of cells that have to execute the most rational action sequences in order to survive. In that sense I would actually be in favor of a simplistic Earth flag design. We'll likely have to remove any memetic baggage from our decision making in order to survive.

That would lead to analysis-paralysis pretty quickly. Just saying.

Isn't that sort of the point?

"Make a static, single, identifiable representation of a massive, diverse, scattered, irregularly sparse time-malleable dataset"

If you read until the page's end, you'll see this is an undergrad school project. So, I'd guess bringing all the world's nations to consensus was out of scope.

That said, they did a wonderful job, and, as indicated by the fact this is on the front page, they have captured a world wide consensus of sorts.

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