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Comment by marymkearney | Hacker News Reader

This quote from the original article by Robert Sinclair, the CIA analyst, is one of the most profound things I've ever read.

"What do I get out of all this? For a moment, I get to evade modern man's almost complete dependence on secondhand information....We have come to rely on what others tell us about the world beyond our narrow boxes.

"The canoe commute does give me a first hand glimpse of what is going on beyond the various manmade containers I inhabit. I benefit from regular access to information that clearly is unmediated."

PDF of original article embedded here: https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/09/history-of-the-cia-...

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Agree on the quote. I love that our house is bounded on three sides by 100 acres of undeveloped wilderness in Western NJ. In a two minute walk I can get away from houses, see the mountain park across the valley, hear the coyotes and owls, maybe spot a fox. At night, the stars are bright because we have no street lights here.

Humanity can intrude, but even that can be sounds from a bygone era, like the steam train blowing its whistle as it’s leaving the New Hope station across the Delaware from us. There are few sounds more warming than a train whistle echoing off of valleys.

By comparison it takes some getting used to driving into even moderate suburbs.

I read that airports grate on people because there's an omnipresent chance of something occuring that's completely outside of their control, and that possibility is therefore always in their mind.

Nature, for me, is the antithesis of that -- things move and happen in the physical rather than the potential. And that's relaxing!

One of our patio chairs was recently crushed by a falling tree limb, shortly after someone vacated the seat. Not so different!

>...an omnipresent chance of something occuring that's completely outside of their control, and that possibility is therefore always in their mind. Nature, for me, is the antithesis of that -- things move and happen in the physical rather than the potential.

Whether that angry grizzly bear is going to attack you or not is just as much out of your control as anything that happens in an airport.

Ah yes plane crashes are out of control. While earthquakes instead are completely under control!

Changing gates, changing flight times, longer than expected security lines, flight cancellations.

All fairly regular occurrences in an airport that travelers have no control over but must adapt to.

Earthquakes are much more rare, so not worth constantly worrying about.

... security policies changing (shoes on or off?), repeated "ATTENTION, BY IMMEDIATE ORDER OF THE TSA" announcements, people doing dumb things, people being rude, baggage getting lost, flights being overbooked...

There's a lot.

Most of the time it works out, but that was the point of the observation: most can still be pretty stressful.

> baggage getting lost

One way to make the airlines care more about your luggage and make it highly unlikely for them to lose it is to check a firearm as described in Deviant Ollam's famous talk on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfqtYfaILHw

Undeveloped and protected? Or undeveloped only for now?

Underutilized for the time being one assumes

In this case undeveloped. We Also have a lot of preserved land around us, but it is not ubiquitous.

Even then, preserved land can be tricky. A lot of State-preserved farms and lands were recently threatened by a project that was seeking Federal eminent domain rights. Federal ED would have wiped out the State level conservation.

Fortunately we were able to persuade the developer to give up (over the course of 7 or so year fight).

“One assumes”? I don’t.

“Underutilized”, that’s a notable word choice. It implies that the land should be utilized more? With whose interests in mind? Who decides? Over what time frame?

Talking about utilization in this way is a decent predictor of a libertarian framing. It is worth saying in tech forums that libertarianism isn’t the only political philosophy that includes market forces as a key analysis mechanism.

I prefer the study of political economy over traditional economics, because it admits a much wider lens of the underlying aims of a well functioning economic system. It doesn’t have to be economic efficiency as defined by a summation of individual utilities. That is only one mathematically convenient objective function; there are others.

Economics is a big tent. Economists have varying political philosophies. Relatively few educated economists hold idealistic notions about how well actual markets function to optimize a social welfare function.

But from what I’ve seen, relatively few outspoken libertarians rigorously challenge their assumptions about markets or the overall objective function. Many conflate a descriptive theory with a normative value system.

Yes, this is a long reply to a seven word comment. Why bother? Given the context around the thread, plus some consistent blind spots from HN comments, suggests to me that many here should go deeper and ask more questions about political economy.

Some big assumptions there chief

Thanks for the link.

The thing that strikes me most is how the writing culture was alive and well and indeed, the writer is gifted with a style that transcends the bureaucracy that surrounded him. For me, it's like paradise lost since I've said aloud that if Uber did boats, the slowest among them would be superior to any method on land in a city that judged from a plane is a snake's forked tongue of rivers surrounded by traffic on goat paths and train trestles that look like a motocross racetrack.

The fact that CIA was doing this at the time gives you a rough idea of how thoughtful they were and how the choice of time and place many Americans enjoy at work today is a feeble attempt compared to this magical existence. I can only imagine the organizational conversation that occurred to put this commute in place, particularly given my own experience with government and FFRDCs. To me, the improvement in cadence, community, and cognition is clear, but I doubt those views are widely held today. I know I'd sleep better at night if I rowed an actual canoe twice-a-day instead of a water rower.

;->

Uber has a boat service in London.

https://www.uber.com/gb/en/u/uberboat/

It's terrible - it is basically a bus on water and not a personal speed boat taking you where you need to go like you can get in Venice (I highly recommend a fast boat transfer from Venice airport! Beats the water bus and makes you feel like a rockstar)

This is fascinating. Thanks for the link.

I've never been to London but I'll definitely seek it out if I visit.

The picture on the page makes it look better than a bus on water - marketing FTW!

I'm guessing this has something to do with speed or wake limits.

The original article called it "perhaps the most beautiful piece of wilderness musings ever released through the FOIA."

That's hilarious!

The creators of the FOIA could not have foreseen the synchronicity that would stem from the collision of their lawmaking with Robert Sinclair's transcendent writings about commuting to the CIA within a few years of the FOIA's signing.

The fact that the same canoe commute involved bicycling, my own default commute mode, makes it even more heartfelt and resplendent.

"What do I get out of all this? For a moment, I get to evade modern man's almost complete dependence on secondhand information.... We have come to rely on what others tell us about the world beyond our narrow boxes."

Lightly reworded, this could be the first quote from an A.I. placed in control of a physical body.

The canoe club article version which is mentioned for being unredacted: https://web.archive.org/web/20211016001404/https://sycamorei...

> The canoe commute does give me a first hand glimpse of what is going on beyond the various manmade containers I inhabit. I benefit from regular access to information that clearly is unmediated.

How is information gathered while canoeing direct, while information gathered while driving isn’t?

I thought it was along the lines of, road signs and even the implication that the road you are on is going where you think, is information provided to you. Where in nature, it's a direct sample of the situation. Your deductions can still be right or wrong, but at least you can't be misled.

But I am also having trouble reading into that paragraph with certainty.

I've actually pondered this question a lot, while driving, canoeing, and otherwise self-propelling through the world. The closest I can get to it is, there's an embodied intelligence that's activated in the open air in our natural habitat.

Humans have remarkable powers of sensory perception outdoors, evolved over eons. Those skills can atrophy in modern built environments. We mostly use our big brains there, which aren't nearly as smart as all our intelligences put together.

But those powers come alive again, when exposed directly to the elements they've evolved to understand: earth, wind, water, ice, mud, weather, plants, animals.

It's true that we also gather lots of sensory input when, say, driving. It keeps us alive! But it's a recent adaptation, to highways, traffic, concrete, motors, metal boxes, compared to the elements we've evolved to perceive over many millenia.

I think you have the intended sense of the author: (~)unmediated reality forces the thoughtful observer into reflection.

~: there ain't no such thing -- everything we experience is mediated by [our particular] sensory mechanisms -- but arguably there is a baseline directly experienced human reality that being in nature reactives (for some).

Because in a car you are still inside a manmade container?

(And therefore everything filtered)

https://web.archive.org/web/20050322002947/https://sycamorei...

Obligatory paranoia quote

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." - William J. Casey, CIA Director

Now ask yourself if that is not the case. Or I can tell you it is. The answer remains the same.

> I benefit from regular access to information that clearly is unmediated.

No experience is unmediated. There is always an interpretive apparatus attached to perception.

Ah, so being outside in nature...

Even "nature" can be deceiving. Lots of "green spaces" in big cities are equally planned, groomed and manicured into a vision that is projected into the space, as much as if not more so than their concrete and steel counterparts.

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