Science of Crowd Control [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
Why do people find it so hard to grasp that there are multiple factors to such complex events?
There could be any cause for the crowd to form in the first place, that crowd dynamic would be similar whatever the motivation of the crowd is. For instance if you're in the core zone that would get crushed if/when the crowd's movement was stopped, blaming avid capitalism doesn't help you in any way, you would have been safe if under the same incentives the organisators of the event had proper crowd management in first place.
Fatalities at the Hajj weren't reduced by making people less religious, they improved their logistics instead [edited]
For the record, a similar issue happened in Korea not so long ago at a Halloween festival where people weren't even motivated to go a specific way, it was just too overcrowded:
None of the people in the back intend to cause injuries to the people in the front of the crowd, nor do they even know what's happening. The cause of crowd crushes is not the "type of people assembling", as evidenced by the wide variety of crowds that experienced crushes.
Please, please inform yourself.
You are holding some vile misconceptions.
Counting on organizers to fix it with policy is a bad idea, the physical structure of public places needs to be changed to prevent it. Policy-based solutions are great as one layer of defense, but if that's your only defense in a structure that is otherwise prone to crowd crush, you're better of not being there in the first place.
Whenever you believe to have identified the root causes for an event, and they're as diverse and disjunct as hooliganism, youth culture, and religious fanaticism, then that's a strong indicator that those factors aren't actually causally related to the event. Blaming crowd crushes on "youth culture" is reminiscent of blaming school shootings on video games.
That's not at all what is happening in a crowd crush situation. As explained in the video, above a certain crowd density, people physically lose the ability to control their movement in the mass of bodies and involuntarily behave more like molecules in a fluid and less like individual actors. The people in the back of the crowd, who still have agency in their movement, don't know that they're indirectly causing the death of others, they're not homicidal maniacs (for the most part).
Blaming crowd crushes on the lack of "critical thinking abilities" and "commitment to some ideology" is intuitive, easy, and wrong. A wrong model for a problem will prevent you from finding an effective solution – as seductive as that model may be.
The people in the center of the crowd who die had plenty of opportunities to get out, but they didn't; they committed to their respective ideology.
Sure, if you find yourself in a mass of people that is so dense that you loose any sense of agency, it might help to remember that you're just a molecule in the mass and go with the flow. But if you find yourself in such a situation, it's usually a clear sign that you haven't always been reasonable on the way there.
The people at the interface of that phase change have the choice to move backwards, but still press forwards even though it puts them into physical contact with other people. They can be partially excused for not knowing of the situation ahead of them, but they're still (usually, except in cases of fire/etc) making a free choice to physically touch and press themselves into and against other people. I am talking about people at the interface, not in the middle of it.
If everybody in the crowd refused to voluntarily press somebody else, then no forces would be transmitted through the crowd. But pressing other people, particularly to jostle your way past them, is the nature of crowd psychology. For this reason people should avoid crowds entirely. Being in such a high density crowd is usually a choice.
If you say it's "not really about" those things, then you bypass people's knee-jerk moralism and make it possible to actually work on the problem and prevent people from dying, which is important because many sane and reasonable people have no choice but to mix in with the dumbasses if they want to participate in these activities.
The rest of the video is fascinating, such as how crowd crushes happen
On a more serious note, that process can be done online, in particular as a lottery. The main issue would be that some stores actually want the crowd lining up to get news coverage of the event. Covering the event in a more dire light (from the angle of the store being too dumb with their operation ?) could help for those.
Without even realizing it for a while, I started to mistake a video that basically stated someone's collected assertions/opinions/variously supported research with pseudo documentary journalism because of the huge number of video clips being played as the person spoke.
Or these amount of clips are just needed to hold someone's attention if the person making the video is only doing a voiceover? I guess otherwise, nothing distinguishes the video from a podcast.
The sibling channel to Wendover, (which is produced by the same team) 'Half As Interesting' [1] uses this to comedic effect - they will often show what is clearly the wackiest or strangest clip that came up when searching on these clip sites the phrase that the narrator is saying.
> The key to good crowd control is partying with a strong tank that knows when to taunt or use his other abilities while as a dps you're focusing your fire correctly.