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Comment by pembrook | Hacker News Reader

Think folks are missing the point here.

The idea of this thread isn’t that bicycles are uniquely singled out for ridicule.

These article snippets all come from a time when the bicycle was just invented and usage was growing fast (eg like any new tech). In fact, I think they were taken from a defunct Twitter account called pessimists archive.

The point is that mass media will always court controversy and bemoan any new change in behavior regardless of what it is.

Those headlines look silly now, but they are the Industrial Revolution’s version of “AI/smartphones/social media/video games/ridesharing/etc are ruining everything” articles.

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Those headlines look silly now, but they ... were featured in reputable publications at the time, said by reputable and in some cases domain expert people at the time.

I say that not to be one of those "mainstream media blah blah" people, its just that when it comes to new things or change in general nobody has a f'ing clue.

The scary thing about your knowledge, is that you don't know what you don't know.

as long as you don’t know that you don’t know what you don’t know, there’s no reason to be scared.

it’s only scary once you know.

true but..

it is fear of uncertainty. not knowing how to deal with something or even assess because you don't know the problem.

there is big business in people with answers as well con men.

Its con men all the way down.

Is that really in-line with reality though?

Cycling was becoming quite common in the UK and it was actively suppressed by urban planning because the stance was that "it was for the poors" and car travel (a newer mode of transport) was much preferred because it was luxurious.

Jay Foreman has a good video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gohSeOYheXg

The popularity of the bicycle predates the rise of the automobile by a few decades.

None of the article snippets in the linked thread even mention the existence of automobiles.

But don’t worry, I’m certain these same type of articles were written about automobiles as well during their rise in the early 1900s.

People can't help but make this whole thread about cars vs bikes. It's a shame because there's a way more interesting story here about the humans instinct to blame "insert current thing" for everything.

I do not see how it can be anything other than cars vs bikes, or really, personal cars vs walking/bicycling/public transit.

The space and design parameters optimizing for personal cars, especially at US vehicle sizes, is contradictory to design parameters for other modes of transport.

Nowadays you can buy a great bike for $1000 and be totally satisfied with it, ride it for years, or you can shell out $15000 for the top of the line model. And I'm talking about regular bikes, not e-bikes.

I paid 400€ for mine and it was the most expensive bike I've ever bought. And I honestly still consider that too much.

There's people who cycle as method of transportation, and those who cycle as a sport. It's only the ones cycling as sport who need this expensive stuff.

You don't get much bike for 400€ nowadays, maybe an entry level Decathlon model. I think I built my last classic road bike for a bit more than that amount out of a mix of second hand parts and a new cockpit, tires, chain and brake pads.

This is the one I've got: https://boc24.de/products/bocas-bari-trapez it was on sale for 350€, I added https://www.bumm.de/de/produkte/dynamo-scheinwerfer/produkt/... and now I'm more than happy for what I use my bike for (fietsen). Obviously, I wouldn't enter a race with it, but why would I?

It's ok to move around town if you don't have any hills, I suppose.

The city I grew up in and used this kind of bike just fine in has ~70m height difference between the hilly parts and the flat parts.

Sure, you won't be able to cycle up to the Zugspitze with it, but for cycling in a regular hilly town it's enough, 7 gears are fine and the brakes are good enough as well.

https://www.internet-bikes.com/1013656-amigo-classic-c1-26-i...

Perfectly functional sports utility vehicle for less than €200

If you want to add some cargo space in the front, you're in the price range the GP mentioned: https://www.omafiets-online.nl/omafietsen/Spirit-Cargo-Trans...

This is how I read it too. It highlights an intersting pattern, but how should that influence how we see new technology? I would hope people don't think it means we should just dismiss potential problems as needless fear mongering.

There's pretty legit concerns with social media and the engagement economy. It's better to be concerned when these technologies are new, rather than when they have potentially adjusted peoples' lifestyle for the worse.

Also, this bicycle case is clearly absurd in hindsight - but I question whether it may have been kind of absurd back then too. Sure, there are some major publications in these examples, but are these just cherry picked examples or were people genuinely concerned? Does this actually represent a large chunk of media coverage at the time?

Precisely. See this same trend with online shopping, social media, and app-based food delivery. If they sucked, they wouldn't be so ubiquitous. But they are.

VC subsidization has at least something to do with the ubiquitousness.

Some of these things did suck - just for someone who is not the customer, so it didn't impact their ability to keep going.

Clickbait of their time. No need to incorrectly cute a study either!

Agreed. The lesson I take from this is that people/the media love to say X is bad because of Y. If they don't present evidence then we should probably ignore the claim.

Outrage over something new garners attention, and attention means more readers, more readers means more profit. The underlying takeaway here is that news organizations and their journalists have been successful manipulators for generations.

It just shows that people were confusing correlation and causation for far longer than we could have imagined.

It has been the entire history of the human species.

We are slightly overtuned to find patterns, and apparently that has allowed us to exist better. The cost of missing something seems to have been higher than the cost of false positives. Having a bad explanation for something was better than no explanation and the struggle now is to teach people to know the limits of their knowledge and be comfortable with just being unsure while pursing the truth.

Indeed, many people now don't know that the rise of the bicycle predated rise of the car by a couple decades so people complaining about bicycles were also complaining about changes in the pace of life.

And generally new tech and new ways of living have gone together and so people who don't like a new order naturally use the tech as a short-hand and indeed simplify the situation imagine it the cause. And, of course, various new orders have always had desirable and undesirable qualities (from most points of view) and reducing the changes to the tech isn't correct, the tech is often necessary.

Pessimists Archive does not seem defunct fwiw https://twitter.com/PessimistsArc just tweeted yesterday

Jason Feifer did change the name of the podcast, which i do recommend: https://www.jasonfeifer.com/episode/did-pessimists-archive-c...

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