We experience time, like space,
in a fluid fashion. Ten minutes in the oncologist’s waiting room can feel like four hours, while four hours chatting with a friend can feel like ten minutes.
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“The longest book I’ve ever read was 205 pages.”
—Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes (2010)
As I write this, I’m on the 485 bus with the kids of Wild Side Day Camp heading to the Morgan Arboretum. As usual, I checked with Google Maps for the best possible route; also as usual, I took Google’s advice. But it occurs to me now that Google Maps is wrong about pretty much everything. It tells you what the best route is based on time (measured in hours and minutes by a clock). But we are not clocks. A route that’s ugly and stressful but saves you 30 minutes is—existentially speaking—much longer than a beautiful scenic route that takes you an hour and a half. We experience time, like space, in a fluid fashion. Ten minutes in the oncologist’s waiting room can feel like four hours, whilst four hours chatting with a friend can feel like ten minutes. Likewise, reading 34 pages of a boring textbook can feel like it’s taking forever, while Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain—which I recently reread—flies by (despite the fact that it’s 720 pages long). As the philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb once quipped:
“One of the shortest books I’ve ever read had 745 pages.”
My friend Jean-Louis Rheault is a mapmaker, a rather ingenious mapmaker (see JLR Maps). If you’ve ever worked with a Rheault map, you know that they’re remarkably user-friendly precisely because they do not measure space in miles and kilometers; they represent, instead, the fluid fashion in which we experience a space—the way a place feels. Until Google Maps learns how to think about space and time the way Jean-Louis Rheault thinks about space and time, they won’t know the first thing about the best route.
—John Faithful Hamer, From Here (2015)
Originally published at Committing Sociology. Reprinted with permission.
Photo courtesy of author.
Second prediction: Google will pay said person a great deal of money for the app.
My prediction, Frank: the person who comes up with an app that takes this stuff into account will become very, very rich, very, very fast.
That’s a fair point, but if you want that sort of thing taken into consideration, you’re just going to have to do your own planning. It’s just not something that computers are good at in the present. But with apps like Waze, I’m sure it’s not going to be too long before there are other options that can tell the difference.