The glut of empty containers — or “empties,” in industry lingo — has persisted as coronavirus restrictions continue to snarl operations at ports and depots, and as shipping costs have continued to rise.
“Do we see more empties in port? Yes, we do,” said Emile Hoogsteden, vice president of commercial at the Port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, the largest port in Europe. Rotterdam has had to create extra storage capacity for the containers as “a temporary solution.”
That certainly sounds like something that was in an early draft of Atlas Shrugged but got crossed out as too preposterous for anyone to take seriously.
The article has some reasonable analysis but I think some of it is a just-so story in hindsight. He lists 12 positive attributes of a thing that worked and suggests those are why it worked. He doesn’t do a bunch of critical thinking. (I’m talking primarily about the third list in the article, which comes after the text “It’s a call to positive action. In particular, I notice these characteristics:”. There are some other relevant things though, like the claim that the guy organized signal boosting in advance.).
I think those positive attributes have been tried many times and sometimes they fail.
So I think something else is going on this time. Possibly luck. Possibly something else. If luck is a key ingredient, that’s important to know so people don’t use all the listed positive attributes and then expect reliable success. I don’t think using just the listed attributes will get reliable success.
And I think some of the positive attributes listed are unnecessary: he’s taking specifics of this case and incorrectly generalizing them.
The article concludes by looking at mainstream media coverage and finding that, mostly, there isn’t any. ugh.
I agree with some of what you say and disagree with some. But I’m concerned with a broader problem:
There is no one from your community (that I see broadly as Rationalist and associate with Less Wrong) that takes responsibility for organizing ideas, responding to questions and criticism, and seeing that anything is debated to a conclusion. There’s no leadership that actually engages with the world rationally. You operate on social status hierarchies for who gets listened to or engaged with within the community. So partial outsiders, like me, have a hard time engaging with you guys due to the high risk of any particular point being simply ignored without argument – or with some limited arguments and then an arbitrary cutoff of no more followups at some inconclusive point – which is no fun. There’s also no reasonable forum to use to discuss this; blog comments aren’t really the right place… Less Wrong literally bans dissent; all 3 times I’ve tried to engage there, spaced years apart, my arguments have been suppressed by moderators, which I fear you will take to mean that I’m bad and have no credibility, even though no actual arguments to that effect were ever written by the mods who suppressed my ideas.
Twitter is a terrible place for discussions. It’s disorganized and designed for discussions to end quickly without reasons rather than pursuing issues to conclusions. In my experience, both on Twitter and elsewhere, people are broadly pessimistic about the possibility of rationally reaching conclusions in discussions. But they won’t even try to debate that. I’ve also had very negative results when trying things like asking people, if you won’t argue for X, will you link any literature that argues it that you agree with? I’ve written some things about this at e.g. Fallible Ideas – Paths Forward That particular article impressed a Less Wrong moderator who asked me to come discuss at the site, but the same guy turned against me later when, in a discussion, I suggested that the ideas in the article apply to him and he should try to follow them. It seems he liked levers to pressure others to address instead of arbitrarily ignore his arguments, but did not want any such lever used on himself. The underlying issue of how to ensure arguments get addressed instead of ignored, and not to base this on social status – while also preserving people’s time and energy, and not letting bad actors get unlimited resources allocated to their dumb ideas – is IMO extremely important, and I don’t think your community has serious answers to it. I’ve proposed either try using my solutions to that problem or else offer some alternatives, but have been basically ignored without anything that even claims to be a conclusive argument.
Despite some disagreements (which are minor relative to the more serious higher level issues), I liked your article enough to try again, in a little way, by writing this. I partly want to help but I think your community is too broken, both for me to help and also for me to tell you guys it’s broken. But, since I respected a lot of your writing in this article, and I’ve liked some of your prior articles, I’m trying again anyway.
I’ll check for replies here for a while. I can also be contacted by email at curi@curi.us
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One of its claims is that the super big ships are a bad idea. Originally when they started making ships bigger it had a lot of economic benefit, but the latest generation of even bigger ships didn’t get much benefit from increasing sizes again, and have been causing significant trouble.