Only rational if you’re the last person in line and not moving doesn’t spill people out of the designated waiting ropes.
Why take less space when can take more?
Kevin took that advice to heart
It’s still rational if you don’t care about those people though
Willful denial of the feelings of others is irrational in itself. Everything you know about humanity should lead you to believe that others have feelings too
“Why? Because fuck ‘em. That’s why” turns out is not a rational mind set.
She’s counting on people behind her not doing the rational thing which would be ignoring her and just passing her if there’s lot of empty room in front of her.
I guess it depends on your definition of “rational”. From a pure logic perspective (i.e. the math definition) being rational just means making optimal choices in pursuit of your goals. I can be perfectly rational, understand that others have feelings, and simply not care about them unless they benefit me. Being perfectly rational basically makes you a sociopath, only considering other factors or people when they further your goals. Emotions and feelings are irrational to begin with, but sometimes it’s better to be a little bit irrational
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I think you’re just fundamentally misunderstanding what being rational means. There is nothing inherently rational in being selfish or only caring about your own goals and what benefits you, especially not when you are a member of a species that evolved to be extremely social and community focused. Emotions and feelings aren’t inherently irrational either. They can certainly be expressed in irrational ways, but they themselves are neither rational or irrational. They’re just a fact of nature. You might as well say it’s irrational for living creatures to have to excrete waste. Sure, it may be irrational to take a piss on your boss right before asking for a raise, but the act of taking a piss is not in itself rational or irrational. It’s just a bodily function. So if you refuse to take that factor into consideration because you claim it’s irrational, well that’d just be ridiculous.
Imagine a teacher refusing to let a student get up to go to the bathroom because they claim it’s irrational to need to take a piss, and therefore perfectly rational to force them to stay where they are and ignore their bodily needs. The teacher is being selfish in that situation, only making optimal choices in pursuit of their own goals (to teach the class without interruption), and doesn’t care about the other person’s need to perform bodily functions unless it benefits them. And yet I think most people with even half a brain cell will agree that the teacher in this scenario is not in any way shape or form acting rationally. They’re just being a dickhead.
Sociopaths aren’t more rational than other people or “too rational”, they lack the ability to feel empathy or they only feel a small amount of empathy but not enough to affect their decisions. It has nothing to do with being rational or logical, sociopaths can often be very stupid irrational people. Not to mention, while sociopaths often don’t care about how other people feel, they do often care about how other people perceive them.
Feelings are not rational or not; they are a state and part of the deduction you’re calling logic. Your description of following reason as being sociopathic is wrong. What you are describe is being over-biased to your wants. Nothing about logic says it’s ideal to live only for yourself. Any suggestion of what you should use sense for is arbitrary.
You don’t care about the people behind you inline but you still care enough about the people in front of you to wait behind them? Weird lol
Rationality doesn’t exclude emotions or empathy. That’s just being literal, not rational.
I nearly wet myself laughing
Its only the same if you strictly consider ‘the time I stand in this line’.
Its different because everyone behind her loses a feeling of progress from moving up, and it increases the queue length (at least visually) which can impact other people’s decision on which queue to join which, of course can impact the other queues.
To think the way the image suggests is to be inconsiderate to others around you.
losing a feeling of progress
Right, that’s why it says perfectly rationally. If someone is really being perfectly rational they should only care about how long they wait inine, not a feeling of how long they wait. I don’t think being “perfectly rational” is something folks should strive to do.
Fuck everyone else though right? That doesn’t sound rational does it? In that case why even wait in the line? Just walk to the front because that will shorten your time
Right, it’s illustrating the foolishness of endlessly pursuing “rationality”, it’s not something people should do. I literally said it’s not a good thing. Just because something is rational doesn’t make it good. Humans are emotional beings.
Nice strawman bro
Except being rational is not void of emotional reasoning, so “perfectly rational” does not mean “thinking without any emotional logic involved whatsoever”. This person isn’t thinking rationally, they’re just thinking very literally.
I think rational in this context doesn’t include emotional logic. I see your point though. I’m just saying I think they’re using the word differently than you.
If it doesn’t include emotional logic when humans are fundamentally emotional beings, then it’s not rational.
Which is why I think it’s clear they’re using the term rational differently and not including emotional logic.
I don’t think the person’s behaviour is rational at all. The queues in an airport are set up like they are for a good reason, to maximize the amount of people queuing in a given area. That is the rational behind the setup.
The person in the picture is ruining the system based in the time being spent queueing. But she is not considering the space taken up by the queue as a whole. Not very rational.Being impolite isn’t the same as being irrational.
Not only is it the same amount of wait time, but you have to pick up and put down your suitcase less times.
If you can’t lift your bags, pack less.
It’s not even the same if you strictly consider ‘the time I spend in this line’, which I would assume is to most people the time that actually matters.
Everyone behind her doesn’t just lose the feeling of progress, they lose actual time (granted it’s probably just a few seconds). And she loses that time also.
The actual justification here seems to be that she’s busy doing something on her phone and doesn’t want to be distracted every 30 seconds, which in her mind trumps the handful of seconds she and everyone behind her would gain.
Which imo would be fair enough, if you didn’t have to also add the annoyance of the people behind her to the equation.
Many people standing in such queues are tired, stressed about catching their flight, or otherwise impaired and someone holding up the queue for no obvious reason can become aggravating fast.But it’s just a feeling of progress not actual progress. Whether she moves or not there’s still the same amount of people ahead of you in queue. Plus it’s an airport you queue for the airline that you booked with there’s no decision of queue to impact. The only actual factor is whether or not it spills out past the barriers so she can periodically check and move if that’s the case
The feeling of progress literally affects how our brains perceive time. We experience it passing more quickly when we are moving and feel like we are progressing. To our brains and our perception of time, it very much is the same as actual progress.
Yes and the whole point of the post is about pursuing perfect rationality which means only caring about facts and logic not perception.
True rationality and logic would not dismiss perception. Time is literally relative. How the brain perceives the passage of time and the factors that affect it is a fact of biology. If you perceive time as passing more slowly when you aren’t moving, then being forced to stand still will literally make it take longer for you from your frame of reference.
Absolutely… the subjective experience is an objective fact.
Unless they considered all of those things and only didn’t move because there wasn’t any point, which to me is ultimately what staying in place is about.
In that very specific situation, yes it’s inconsiderate. We’re missing details like how busy the airport is etc so it’s a little unfair to point out though.
I’d argue it’s always inconsiderate if there is even one person behind her
If people don’t more forward, the line ends up overflowing past the stanchions and maybe even outside. It’s not the same :P
5th person in line is a mile away on the side of the road outside the airport.
The 10th is on the moon
Nah, move your ass forwards. It’s no different to you right there in that point in the line.
But at the back of the line its no longer people queuing in the barriers, they have started making up their own queue which has now branched off in two directions and new people arent sure which branch to join. Other people are trying to get to something on the other side of these queues and have to squeeze past people.
I get the logic, and it’s quite a good point if you have unlimited space for the queue, but stop being so entitled and move your stinky ass up the queue.
Another point is the perception of progress. We all enjoy a progress bar that gradually fills up to one that sits at 20% then jumps to 100. It reduces our anxiety.
Looks kinda empty to me in the picture
You can’t even see the line behind the lady that is stopped. We have no perspective here. Looks empty from this specific angle, but what’s behind her in the line? There could be hundreds of people for all we know.
Exactly, we don’t know, so let’s not insult her until we have the full context.
She’s not on trial, there’s no punishment for judgement. We are discussing that the situation that is being caused is non-optimal for society and you should tend to move forward with the line at a comfortable pace.
There’s very little upside for leaving that giant gap, and quite a bit of downside if you don’t pay perfect attention to the full situation in front and behind (which you aren’t doing if you’re staring at your phone…)
stinky bum bum
I get it, but I’d be worried that someone approaching the queue would see the big gap and mistake it for the back of the line. Then, instead of zig zagging through from the back, they duck under the ropes in front of her. She’d have her face buried in her phone and wouldn’t notice. SO, this puts me in a position of having to watch out for such an occurrence - which stresses me out.
She should just move the fuck up.
Or the queue could get so long that it is no longer within the allotted space and is now obstructing other passengers. It’s true that it is the same for HER if she moves along or waits, but that is not necessarily true for everyone else.
Yeah if more followed her logic it would be a bad scene
I was going to post saying she isn’t wrong but you changed my opinion. Brb grabbing my pitchfork
There’s presumably people behind her so you’d have to walk past other people in line to do that.
I once got berated by a Costco employee for ducking under the queue ropes instead of zigzagging my way through. There was no one in the queue. Sometimes society needs more logical thinking.
They fear what the ropes cannot contain…
I’ve never seen queue ropes at a Costco, how posh was this place?
Technically they were chains. It was back in the COVID times where they could only allow a certain number of people in the store at a time.
Did you touch or move the queue ropes when you did this? Cause I worked at a movie theatre in the past and while we didn’t really care if people ducked under the ropes without touching them, if they pushed them up or unhitched them or grabbed them too hard then they often broke them because they didn’t realize how delicate they could be, especially if they’re older or already damaged but not quite damaged enough to replace yet. They would also often push them out of line a little bit, which adds up after a while and forced us to re-adjust them, which is kind of annoying when we keep having to fix them over and over again after busy times of the day. So after a point we just told people not to duck under them or try to go through them at all, just to avoid the possibility of them fucking the queue lines up in some way because we couldn’t exactly predict who would or wouldn’t touch something while attempting it. Obviously one person isn’t going to do much but you wouldn’t have been the only person who would have tried it that day by a long shot.
I just ducked under. Maybe my back brushed against it when I did so but that was it. They were steel chains too if I remember well so it’s not like I was going to break something. She claimed that “I could have gotten hurt” which is complete nonsense and I’m pretty sure that she made it up.
There is a certain type of person who when they see someone do something that is different from what they are used to they feel the urge to self-righteously stop it and will invent all sorts of excuses to justify themselves doing so. They’re the kind of people who call the cops on kids playing in a skate park. I’m pretty sure that was one of them.
I mean it’s also entirely possible that it’s the policy of the store and she was just trying to do her job, just saying.
That happened to me at the Atlanta airport. Security person saw and told me “I’ll send you to the back of the line!”, I said “I AM the back of the line!”
Costco thends to groom their employes into becomig assholes or at least very dogmatic since their management seems to be cartoonishly rigid.
Okay but in all fairness, psychologically it isn’t the same. Humans perceive time moving faster when they’re moving around in line or moving while waiting for something than they do when standing still while doing the same thing. So while technically time moves the same either way from an outside perspective, mentally if you aren’t moving periodically as the line moves you perceive the time as passing more slowly.
I was thinking more practically, now the line forms outside of where it’s supposed and can get in the way
That too.
I hate it so much when people do that with their cars. It just makes the traffic jam much longer than it needs to be, possibly even extending it over the previous exit. It’s not rational, it’s just plain stupid and annoying.
Depends. Bigger gaps mean the traffic jam will get better faster since it reduces the stop and go. Ofc the gaps need to be reasonable but the people driving bumper to bumper make it even worse
If everyone followed the one rule “keep as much space in front of me to the next car, as there is behind me to the next car, at all times” it would do the most to alleviate most traffic jams.
I feel so vindicated
keep as much space in front of me to the next car, as there is behind me to the next car, at all times
this is the right way.
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Sure…and if you were the 18 wheeler, you would give the proper stopping distance to the car in front of you, but it would be up to the person behind you to make sure they give you the same birth from behind. If they are on your (the 18 wheelers) ass, they would be causing traffic.
This isn’t meant to be a license to speed up it someone is riding your ass, it’s a rule that if EVERYONE followed, it would dramatically cut traffic jams.
Every time you touch the brakes on a highway, you risk fucking up the flow for countless others behind you.
Yeah, it’s really fun trying to “fix” minor traffic jams by holding back a while then moving forward very slowly. If you time it right you never catch up to the car in front, because they reach the front of the queue before you reach them. Then there’s no traffic jam left behind you, because everyone is moving.
I’m kinda in between. When the car in front of me drives off and stops I’ll creep slowly with my car 50% of the time I can keep a slow pace without start and stop.
That’s not a problem, in fact it even helps the flow. What I meant was when folks keep an excessive distance to the next car, like in the OP (that lady could advance like, 10 places or so, translated into car lengths that would be 50 meters).
There are people who literally turn off their engine and don’t start it again until they can go for 100 meters or more. This wastes road space and encourages lane-hopping, which also makes the traffic jam worse.
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It’s the same for her, not for everyone behind her. She’s a perfect example of thinking only of herself.
It’s the same for everyone, unless they plan to jump queue.
It’s the same until the line backs up enough to be out of the roped off area.
Technically, same until just before then, unless everybody responds very quickly and joins the line in order with no issue
Its the same for everyone behind her as well, unless you forgot how lines work. Id rather stand still for 5 minutes and move 15 feet than 18 inchs every 30 seconds.
Have you never been to a busy airport before? The lines already fill the breezeway even when they move forward. What do you think is going to happen with the constant flow of people arriving at a line that doesn’t move? It’s going to quickly become a safety hazard.
This is exactly the mentality in the roads on my country “either way there’s traffic so I stop 10 meter from the car in front of me when on the traffic light” then less cars pass the light which means mor traffic waiting at the lights. People just do t get it but they only think about themselves
Been to quite a few, only one that has ever been packed to the point it would matter would have been Dulles. I tend to go to smaller airports.
What is rational for YOU might not be optimal for SOCIETY. This is the first lessons taught to toddlers when they learn about social ettiquete and mores.
Lubricate don’t agitate, is another neat saying. Some things just help everyone stay calm and feel in control in shitty situations, it’s not the time to make edge lord points.
Hyper rational in one dimension of thought.
A perfectly rational agent should choose behavior that works when other agents apply the same behavior.
If everyone uses her strategy, the queue can only get shorter if there’s exactly one person left in the queue, but it gets longer each time someone joins it.
In an idealized world where everyone can instantly teleport, this doesn’t technically reduce the throughput of the queue, however it does still increase its size unnecessarily. (and in the real world it also decreases throughput, potentially by a significant amount if the queue is physically long enough)
Even granting that she doesn’t care about anyone else, the strategy is still slower for her even if she’s the only one using it.
Judging from the picture, she will lose at least a few seconds when the person in front of her leaves the queue and she still has to walk the remaining distance to the front of the queue.
For a more extreme example, imagine the queue is a kilometer long. Assuming everyone before her shuffled along like the average queue enjoyer, she would now be one person-width away from the goal had she shuffled along with them.
If she used her “perfectly rational” strategy instead, she would now have to walk a full kilometer which, being very generous to her, would cost her an additional 12 minutes.Perfectly rational behavior, if your only objective is to annoy others.
(there is perhaps an argument in favor of some variant of her strategy, if there is a high time/effort/opportunity cost associated with starting and/or stopping, but I think realistically this will rarely if ever be the case in an airport security queue)
I feel validated
I think you’re there with the last bit of your comment. The goal isn’t to only move once, the goal is to minimise stops and starts. If everyone does this is a self sorting system. If someone has the rule “try to only move forward once every x minutes (unless you are at the front or the queue overflows)” then the queue gets into a rhythm that works.
In a queue like this there is extra effort in picking up your bags and stopping so the worst case scenario is everyone moving exactly as space is available.
Problem is that “unless the situation doesn’t allow it” means you have to constantly be aware of how the situation is evolving, so you’re trading “move your bag a couple extra times” for “stay hyper aware of the environment and ensure you’re not starting a chain reaction of assholery” cause that can happen real quick at an airport.
I have agreed with that first line of yours for a long time. Some of the behaviors that seem the most asshole-ish in other people are those that both would cause chaos if everybody did it, and are easy to avoid or fix.
I guess that’s why even mundane things like this lady in line or shitty parking make people stand out is such a bad way.
Well put. There’s just something about airports that turns off people’s cooperative reasoning abilities. I’m sure I’m guilty in numerous ways too, but when I really focus on the little things that people do with complete disregard for others, it just makes me feel like they simply don’t care about anyone else but themselves. Most of the time I’m sure I’m just being uncharitable, but other times…!
Had a guy losing his fucking mind behind me in bumper to bumper traffic. I always like to keep about 1.5ish vehicle length (obviously not a real metric, just a guess) between me and the person in front in case people need to switch lanes or if I’m hit from behind.
When I say the guy behind me was mad, he was fucking LOSING it. He was screaming, he was flailing his arms, he was beating on his steering wheel, he was honking a shit ton.
He eventually just cut the lane beside me and the person next to me, just to get into the 30 feet of empty space in dead slow traffic. No idea why he thought this would somehow make any difference.
I honked at him several times just to fuck with him
My father taught me to leave enough space in front of me in case of being hit, but also in case I need to get out of the line for some reason. I’ve had to get out of line a number of times over the years due to accidents. I have 3 routes I can take to get to work, so once I realize there’s an accident I can just turn around and go another way. Works out well, but sure does piss off people behind me sometimes.
Most importantly, you need enough space to account for your reaction speed + the time your vehicle takes to brake. On slow traffic that’s one or two cars but as you approach highway speeds it’s like 15, which no one observes. And higher during snow or rain.
There’s something like a spring effect, you should try to keep the same distance between the car in front of you and the one behind you, watch this it’s very informative: https://youtu.be/iHzzSao6ypE
Most importantly you should do your best to drive at one, single, steady, speed, and not stop and go. In civilised countries that kind of thing gets taught in driving lessons, three or four people acting correctly can dissolve a traffic jam.
We (United States) were taught this in 1987 when I took drivers ed at school. When my oldest got her license there was no longer a driver’s ed course. Must have cost more than the conservatives wanted to pay.
It’s better to build multi million dollar football stadiums and buy sports equipment than it is to actually give an education, obviously. Why else would we send them to school everyday?
(sidenote: the real solution to traffic is getting all the reluctant and unnecessary drivers to not take the car during rush time. I.e. providing viable alternatives to driving & the freedom to choose the means by which to go from point A to point B)
Totally agree with this
I’ve had people pass me in traffic when I’m leaving a couple car lengths between me and the person ahead of me. It’s like, what’s the point?
As if … Where’s he going? That many feet changes nothing. I live in a city famous for leaving a lot of space between cars, there are memes about it. So for this thread I’ll explain a couple of why’s:
- Me personally , it became a habit when car jackings became a possibility. A less easy target mentality.
- Insurance is crazy high here and so ,as you mentioned, the not being forced into the car ahead of you .
- There have been multiple shootings in road rage in this city over the last year. Everyone kinda wants space and eyes on others or what may be happening, room to react or move. Also not into riding a cars bumper and maybe causing another incident.
I’m sure there are as many reasons as there are people, but these are the obvious ones.
Behaving rationally in a society means taking into account other people, as that’s literally what a society is. This is irrational and selfish behavior.
Yeah nah, there’s etiquette to proper queueing, and that ain’t it
Found the Brit.
