kwekly

"I live in rural France with narrow roads and it's incredibly stressful to be driving with nearly no margin of error preventing a head on collision."

This is the crux -- I think the author is in fact saying that roads are safer while you are in this stressed state.

"This is like reducing the size of your front door to make it harder for thieves to steal your couch."

The problem is fundamentally different in that the agent on the road at not trying to cause accidents.

Pure speculation, but I think heat dissipation is probably the more important bottleneck of spaceship design -- no convective cooling, so you potentially want more surface area to increase radiation.

I think aerodynamics (both lift to weight and streamlining) are the reason for the compact design of aircraft and submarines (also perhaps reducing the profile for military vehicles).

Weight maybe an issue for maneuvering in combat, but there's tons of structural material literally floating around in space, so I'd wager that base material cost would not a limiting constraint.

Very cool -- what about sliders to feed parameters for new ship generation :)

You're reinforcing this point by with even "stronger opinions" but you're avoiding the fundamental issue:

"There's a difference between a person having an unconventional idea, e.g. for a business, and an unconventional theory, which they claim has a sound scientific basis."

Unlike a business proposal, no degree of bizarre circumstance or incredible luck can transform the underlying operation of the brain.

Ironically, you're using a human bias (pushing an analogy outside it's original domain) to argue about human bias. I'm pretty sure 99% of folks involved in this debate are well aware behavioural psychology and the like, so you can spare the "fuck you up" histrionics.

I can't tell if you're kidding or not...

Is your question, do writers and mathematicians also speak of elegance and aesthetic in their work? Do writers engage and practice free writing and side-projects to hone their skills, beside whatever they have to do to pay the bills?

Expand your world man, there's so much more out there.

There's one more aspect at play here too:

If you're brash and "break things" and overall the situation turn out for the worst, if you're a kid, people will tutt and mutter and aww shucks who should have been supervising those rough edges on the young whipper snapper.

If you make the exactly the same mistake in a more senior positions / with grey hair, people will bring your qualifications into question - and I suspect those with political interests will try and leverage the failure against you.

The intuitive cynic in me sees a combination of 1b and 2 explaining this:

1b: Many people barely know the name of, let alone trust their neighbours these days. They are turning to the neighbour out of necessity, rather than old-fashioned good will.

2: Perception of hi-tech security, or rather perception of making an effort at security. Just like the gahzillion dollars spent of on body scanners that don't do very much for air plane safety, certainly not in proportion to their cost.

It's hardly the first first-world product that satisfies a want rather than a need.

If you read to the end of the article, you come across an an interesting comment that might be of relevance here:

"If you think Phillip Roth, one of the greatest living writers, wrote this 2,648 word piece to get a remark on Wikipedia changed, I think you've missed his point.

- GREGPOMEROY

And at this risk of stating the obvious: the Michelin guide then went on to evolve a culture and impact well beyond it's intended use...

I deal a bit with arty types, and they tend to pride themselves on being able to identify products, along with designers and quoting how many hundred $'s something "costs"

I think it's a bit like nerds and bragging rights in being able to produce good explanations for difficult technical questions. Along that line of thinking, perhaps a stackoverflow karma / community recognition style system might be enough.

The analogous concept here is the product of sampling rate and bit-depth, the number of bits per sample i.e the precision of the recording

Neil Stephenson addresses this in his book, Anathem.

He states it's a fact "well known" within the military etc. that a certain percentage of folks respond very well to training for high risk, high intensity, high pressure situations (i.e facing live fire in combat) while a certain percentage simply flub and perform no better than someone who hadn't had the years of prior training.

Thing is, you don't know who's who until the event happens.

Anyway read the book it's really good in you're into this sort of idea, and into hackerish ideas in general