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Comment by larnmar | Hacker News Reader

Indeed. Even the relatively harmless example of going up to a hotel floor to look at the view out of (I assume) the lift lobby is something that only works if you’re the only one doing it.

If a bunch of people start doing it then all of a sudden guests start noticing crowds of people outside their rooms, the hotel is obliged to post security guards to stop it happening, and bingo, suddenly life is slightly worse for everyone.

If you find yourself saying “it’s okay that I break the rules” with a full awareness that if everyone broke the same rules it would be terrible, then you are exactly the kind of selfish asshole that is the usual answer to the question of “why we can’t have nice things”.

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> something that only works if you’re the only one doing it.

Tangential, but I wonder if there's a name for this, and how much it has been studied. While I appreciate the wisdom behind Kant's categorical imperative, there are many activities in the world that lose all meaning and authenticity if you're not the only one, or one of the few, engaging in them. The current zeitgeist seems hell-bent on normalizing and averaging everything out, but assuming something is bad just because not everyone can do it seems to me like a recipe for a duller society.

> If a bunch of people start doing it then all of a sudden guests start noticing crowds of people outside their rooms, the hotel is obliged to post security guards to stop it happening, and bingo, suddenly life is slightly worse for everyone.

I think the problem here is the hotel choosing an obnoxious way of stopping it from happening. I think it should not be generalized into "if too many people do something, doing it will become impossible, which is bad", because arguably nobody doing it is even worse. It's like with non-renewable resources - yes, exploiting them now makes them inaccessible in the future, but not exploiting them ever is as if they didn't exist; the only utility there is is in the exploitation.

The tragedy of the commons[0] seems to be the extended concept

> a situation in a shared-resource system where individual users, acting independently according to their own self-interest, behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling the shared resource through their collective action.

The "tragedy of mass tourism" would be the "1st world problem" equivalent, imo.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

You're right, it's related. But I think it's a special case in which the commons is, from the very beginning, way too small to satisfy all the people interested in it, and one that doesn't have an intrinsic value, so not using it is just as bad as exhausting it (if there's a nice skyline, but no one ever experiences it, it may as well not exist at all).

Tourism is an interesting case. Many aspects of it are an example of the "it's only interesting if very few people are doing it". My go-to example is the leaning tower of Pisa. The first photo of a person leaning on the tower was interesting. But everyone and their dog repeating this is just pathetic.[0]

As for problems of tourism, I think most of them are self-inflicted, and it's not as much a tragedy of the commons as the issue of runaway externalities. Tourism today is mostly about living through artificial, fake experiences, specially created to handle and make money off the masses. But it's just the collateral damage that becomes a problem.

[0] - https://www.tes.com/lessons/tXRD6CgSpPDS9A/art-scale-claes-o...

In economics there is a distinction between private goods, public goods, club goods, and common resources. The view from the tower would be a common resource. The canonical example is a village commons where everyone could graze their sheep, as long as no one abused the grazing area.

> > something that only works if you’re the only one doing it.

> Tangential, but I wonder if there's a name for this, and how much it has been studied.

These non-universalizable actions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universalizability

There have been hundreds if not thousands of philosophy papers written on the subject.

In particular, I think the cases you're referring to are a "contradiction in the will"-- where it's not logically impossible that everyone would do the thing, but it would produce a result that no one would want.

Thanks, didn't know these terms before! I'll read up.

There's an easy way around this phenomenon: just do it and savor the experience. Don't take a photo and post it on Instagram. Don't go back repeatedly to take others. Don't blog about it. Just go, enjoy the moment, and savor the memory.

Not everything needs to be photographed and shared. Some things can just be experienced and forgotten eventually.

> Indeed. Even the relatively harmless example of going up to a hotel floor to look at the view out of (I assume) the lift lobby is something that only works if you’re the only one doing it.

In Singapore, most people (80%) live in public housing. Some even have great views and allow the public to view as well, they just enforce quotas [1]. Thus, it seems to work as long as it was properly designed and intended to work that way - also helps that crime is virtually non-existent.

[1] http://www.pinnacleduxton.com.sg/Public.html

That whole system rides on your last statement. Plus that Singaporeans are generally raised to respect others and the space around them.

Trying something like that in my own hometown, people would blast music from their phones because “hey bro we’re just having fun”, chow down and leave their garbage behind because “not my place so why should I care?”, and generally make a mess of everything.

Letting anyone in would be an absolute disaster in some places.

This article touches on this very point. I think I even found it here on HN, a few months ago.

https://petapixel.com/2019/07/22/photographers-instagrammers...

Maybe certain nice things should be part of the commons anyway, or not exist at all. A luxury hotel by its existence occupies space and resource that could be put to some other use. Some people accessing it for free can be seen as a way of rebalancing that.

I don't think the author would agree it would be terrible if everyone broke these rules. He is opposing rules he does not agree with. Rules made those who have accumulated land over a long period. There is clearly some nuance in how you might apply judgement on the justness of restriction of land, but it seems to me there are many cases it is largely unjustified and would not in practice cause harm to anyone to relax them. See for example the right to roam in Scotland.

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