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Comment by bruce511 | Hacker News Reader

>> The railway companies sometimes faced concerted resistance from local people who refused to adjust their public clocks to bring them into line with London Time.

The cynic in me doesn't find this even mildly surprising. Faced with an inevitable outcome, which had clear benefits, with no discernable down-sides [1], the population still managed to find the time, energy and will to fight.

This stubbornness seems to be baked into the human condition, this "they can't tell we what to do" sounds suspiciously like small child having a tantrum.

As their world changed, it brought about new challenges, which required cooperation to solve. And it was the cooperation rather than the solution which proved to be a stumbling block.

I'm working hard to resist ending this note with a highly sarcastic sentence.

[1] the differences being small, typically 15 mins or so.

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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State has a whole bunch about how towns protect themselves from centralized authorities by being less comprehensible / requiring local knowledge to navigate. It’s one of the ways that power balances were maintained.

So the downside is “you can more effectively yield your power here”, or more specifically: “you can take more in taxes and conscription.”

Centralized time might be pretty small in the scheme of centralization - and come with numerous other benefits - but, that generalized resistance doesn’t come from nowhere, or irrationality, or stupidity.

IMHO it’s not that “don’t tell me what to do” is baked into the human condition, it’s that we bake into our condition that when people tell you what to do, it’s better for them and not necessarily better for you.

Seeing Like A State seems interesting, Thank you for the reference.

From the Wikipedia article:

> A main theme of this book [...] is that states operate systems of power toward 'legibility' in order to see their subjects correctly in a top-down, modernist, model that is flawed, problematic, and often ends poorly for subjects. The goal of local legibility by the state is transparency from the top down, from the top of the tower or the center/seat of the government, so the state can effectively operate upon their subjects.

I can definitely see that happening with excessive reporting in corporate life. Also seems somewhat analogous to the corporate/state mass surveillance topic (à la Snowden).

I'm not against fighting the good fight, when one side wins and the other loses. But fighting "just because" the other side has a position seems counter-productive.

If we make decisions, to our own detriment, purely to be in opposition, then I think that's irrational.

It's hard to give an example that won't immediately derail this conversation, precisely because every topic seems to be judged on what position the other side has, but its not hard to see this play out every day.

Oh sure - call it “cognitive homeostasis” or something like that, as a baseline thing.

But I do think we socialize people to be obstinate, for a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways, some of which are:

1) How often has someone told you what to do, and been more right, versus times they’ve been more wrong, or missing something about your situation, or lying about their motivations and goals, such that what they were telling you wasn’t actually what you should do?

2) Totally makes sense to me that towns, etc, would have a history of the central authority showing up and saying “change like this”, and only awhile later finding out why that was bad for them.

3) AFAIK, most of the time the experience a town would have with a central authority is that authority showing up to take something the town doesn’t want to give.

So you put all that together, and it makes sense to me that people would resist something like centralized time keeping “just because”.

Of course there are plenty of bad interactions. And yes, we'll remember and weight the bad long after we forget the good.

If you see life as a zero sum game, then you are primed to distrust everyone and everything. This mistrust is often well-placed. The inability to separate good suggestions from bad ones though is a flaw.

Some can be objectively good, perhaps more easily seen by a neutral outsider, and yet still be fought against. Because if we're not fighting then we're fools?

When I walk through a market and someone approaches me with conversation and suggestions, I don’t need to know what their angle is; I can safely assume that they have one, and that it ends in my pocket getting lighter if I follow them to it.

Resistance makes sense unless you have good reasons to trust the other party.

I read a comment on here a while back that explains a lot about the world. Essentially, research shows that a large fraction of the population don't believe one party can win without another party losing. Specifically, in order for them to win, someone else must lose. It's clear to see that when such a person is faced with a request that doesn't obviously benefit them, they will conclude that the other person will win and therefore they must be the loser.

When it comes to government (taxes, spending, elections, etc.), that is the usual case, which is why governments need the backing of law (and ultimately force) to get things done.

That is indeed what 'zero sum thinkers' tend to assume about government.

Government is, though, a solution to 'collective action' problems, which usually have prisoner's dilemma payoff matrices.

A problem could be solved if everyone acted. But individually, none of them have the incentive to act alone, so the default result is for nobody to act.

Government allows a group of people to agree that when there's a collective action benefit available, they'll take it, together.

That is explicitly not a zero sum outcome.

Government also takes many courses of action that aren’t positive sum.

Not intentionally, unless you are talking about corruption.

In your opinion, is the TSA positive sum, corruption, or an example of my thesis?

Yes, seeing the world as a zero sum game leads to detrimental behaviour.

There are of course lots of zero-sum situations. Equally there are lots of mutually beneficial opportunities. Ironically those who can't see those opportunities ultimately end up losing, which reinforces the zero-sum world-view.

This makes intuitive sense. Do you have a link/reference to that research?

It was also around this time that pocket watches were becoming more common, and it was generally being understood how widespread the phenomenon of altering clocks to cheat more hours of work out of labourers was. It even happened that people would bribe churches to ring in particular schedules.

So perhaps its no surprise that there was a general mistrust of attempts to control time

> Faced with an inevitable outcome, which had clear benefits, with no discernable down-sides [1], the population still managed to find the time, energy and will to fight.

Cui bono? If it doesn't benefit the locals much, why should they change? If it does benefit, then why the need to force the change? Just run the two in parallel and if the benefit is clear enough the old way will die out naturally.

And this is why the USA exclusively uses the metric system today.

I mean... the Imperial system was clearly also a centralization effort.

Maybe in the future we'll have federated units, each person able to use their own measuring system - and also universal translation so every individual can speak their own unique language.

> I mean... the Imperial system was clearly also a centralization effort.

More than you probably know: Which weighs more, a pound of feathers or a pound of gold?

The pound of feathers weighs more because for precious metals, like gold, the Troy system is used, and a Troy pound is the equivalent of 373 grams:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_weight#Troy_pound_(lb_t)

Meanwhile the feathers are measured in the Avoirdupois system, where one pound is the equivalent of 450 grams:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoirdupois

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_yard_and_pound

Now: which weighs more, an ounce of feathers or an ounce of gold? The ounce of gold, because there are 12 troy ounces in a pound, while there are 16 (avoirdupois/'regular') ounces in a (avoirdupois) pound, so the gold would be 31 grams and the feathers would be 28 grams.

See also the difference between the 'international' foot (0.3048 meters) and the US survey foot 1200/3937 meters (a difference of only one one-hundredth of a foot per mile):

* https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/geodesy/international-foot.htm...

* https://www.nist.gov/pml/us-surveyfoot

Only for the stuff that actually matters, precise definitions of weights and measures, getting to the moon, targeting missiles, military maps ... for all the plebian things of no real import there's customary units (shhh .. they're defined in terms of metric fundementals).

And Canada, and the UK.

Precise time keeping, while having obvious advantages, has also been, especially during exactly this time, a tool for squeezing ever more work into day.

So from that perspective not liking precise time keeping (and structuring the day not using the sun but the clock) is very understandable.

Many people lost their livelihoods with the coming of the railways. It's not entirely surprising they were against anything that came from them.

Imagine knowing this, and still using the imperial system

Some of us don't have to imagine; your dream is our reality.

Plys, the US uses both systems. Imperial is just more practical for everyday use.

See your foot down there near the ground? Tada! You have a built-in measuring tool. How neat is that?

Because feet are a standard size of course. No variance from person to person.

You can use your hand in a similar way: Spread your thumb and little finger in opposite directions. That's 20cm, with roughly the same accuracy as measuring a foot with a real foot.

Survey foot or international foot?

It could also be about the power balance. These small towns probably always had to do adjustments to fit what London wanted, because bigger cities always have priority. It's not surprising that they fought back against orders from the leaders, questioning authority when you have no power is natural.

I agree with what you write - that there are lots of people who are stubborn just to be stubborn and lots of people who dont like changing things.

However when we discuss local time and adjusting a local time to the central time, we come to some very different conclusions. For example in Europe, countries from Poland to Spain are in the same timezone. This is very good for business - when you schedule a meeting at 9:00 AM, then it is the same 9:00 AM everywhere (on a side note, never schedule meetings at 9:00, be kind and at least do 9:30). The problems is that what is good for conducting business is not good for regular people, because due to the "one big time zone" a lot of people live in.. a wrong time-zone. This is very clear when you look at Spain, where the sun shines after 22:00 (10:00 PM) - while there is no sun when people are supposed to wake up. At the same time, those in Poland live a miserable life - the sun shines very early, but when you leave work -> there is no more sun (meanwhile Germans have around 1 hour more sun after work, the french 2 hours more sun after work and Spaniards have like 3-4 more hours). Here of course I assumed the 9-5 work (9:00 - 17:00) what is typical for office workers. The rule is that if you live east from the correct time you are screwed by having less sun. This impacts your quality of life. Imagine you spent your whole life losing 2 hours of sun every day.

I swear I saw research somewhere that showed the same is in USA, those on the western part of a timezone are richer than those on the eastern part as well, what removes the historical reasons from war-torn Europe, impact of communism etc.

As far as I know China has one big time-zone for the whole country. I wonder how it works when the official 7AM is 4AM "sun time" in another part.

In theory people could somehow adjust their hours to the local time, but usually they dont. Offices start at 8:00 or 9:00 AM (and at least more and more allows flexible start or work from home), so those that live east have simply less sun exposure - more miserable life. When sun shines - you are more keen to go outside, for a jog, or whatever. When it is dark? You cannot quantify this easily.

Or the other way around: imagine you are the "owl" type (I'm not sure it is called this way in English; let's say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_disorder) and you are forced to live your entire lifetime in a sleep deprivation.

My life quality went up when I was able to push most lectures at the college from 10:40. In high-school, we were starting at the "standard" 8:00 and sometimes even 7:05.

If you are an owl, and live in the wrong (shifted west) time zone, it means you dont see sun in the morning (you dont want to wake up early.. say for a jog) and then you dont see the sun after work/school because you are screwed by being in the wrong time zone. Wrong time zone means no sun after work/school.

In Poland 15:30 and no sun in winter. In France (same time zone) there is sun at 17:30. So if you live in France you can get some sun.

Same works if you love across states in USA. The farther west the better for you.

At the time the American railroad interests were enslaving tens of thousands of Chinese and perpetuating genocide against the native people and animals, that's technically not co-operation nor was anything involving the English working class and industrial revolution.

I think the word you're looking for is subordination.

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