Eulogy To Bad Ideas
Circa November 1970, and a 14-meters-long sperm whale washes ashore at Florence on the central Oregon Coast. The carcass is massive—estimated at more than 7,000kg—and it is rotting rapidly under the sunlight. Oregon beaches are under the jurisdiction of the state's Highway Division, which, after consulting with the United States Navy, has a plan: remove the whale using dynamite, hoping that the resulting pieces will be small enough for scavenger animals to consume.
George Thornton, the engineer in charge of the operation, tells an interviewer that he is not exactly sure how much dynamite will be needed, candidly admitting that he has been chosen to remove the whale because his supervisor “has gone hunting”. A charge of 450 kg of dynamite is selected. Meanwhile, a military veteran with explosives training who happens to be in the area warns that the planned twenty cases of dynamite is too much, and that 20 sticks (3.8 kg) should do. But his advice goes unheeded.
The dynamite charge is detonated on November 12 at 3:45 pm. The resulting explosion is caught on film by cameraman Doug Brazil for a story reported by news reporter Paul Linnman of KATU-TV in Portland, Oregon. The explosion causes large pieces of blubber to land near buildings and in parking lots some distance away from the beach. Only a fraction of the whale is disintegrated; most of it remains on the beach for the Oregon Highway Division workers to clear away. In his report, Linnman also notes that scavenger birds, who it had been hoped would eat the remains of the carcass after the explosion, are nowhere to be seen as they were scared to death by the blast. In a delicious turn of events, the explosives-expert veteran's brand-new automobile has been flattened by a chunk of flying blubber1.
When I commute to work every day, I take the metro at Sörnainen station to the West. The whole area around Sörnainen, including the station, was under heavy construction for two years or so. When the station was ready (or kinda), the first thing I observed was the new flooring the constructors chose; beautiful, pristine porcelain polished floors. And slippery as hell. Finland is known for its snowy winters, and snow tends to easily get indoors carried by passersby and melt, so you can do the math. I could imagine a brazilian architect in charge of designing a metro station in the nordics struggling to understand this, but how can Finnish architects come up with such a terrible idea? It is a matter of time someone will break a bone there. If I was an ambulance chaser, I’d be standing there with a business card at hand.
You gotta love bad ideas, for they give us a chuckle every now and then, especially when observed from a safe distance. In reality, stupid ideas are only stupid after the fact. A terrible idea that works out will be remembered as brilliant, therefore never appearing as a bad idea in the first place. It is only upon the sudden observation of an unholy outcome that we gain the clarity to realize how stupid we were to think that such idea would work out.
The mechanics behind bad ideas is fascinating. Me or you having a bad idea—and, oh boy, we’ve had lots of those—is more or less understandable, because there are not many independent “checks and balances” at play in our isolated minds to raise awareness about the potential stupidity that we are considering unleashing; we work in ‘open loop’ when we are left to our own devices. But bad ideas involving groups of people (see the whale again), are nothing less than amazing. Abominations which pass checkpoint after checkpoint, and due to a variety of biases and behavioral blind spots we carry around with us—groupthink, bandwagon effect, confirmation bias, hierarchies, just to name a few—they roll from formulation to execution to amusing and at times tragic results. All propelled with the mandatory dose of sunken costs when, out of pride, we shall carry on with terrible ideas only to justify the effort it took us to get to that point, even when we already know it’s a terrible idea.
So here’s to all the stupid ideas we have had, and to all the whales we will dynamite down the road. And here’s to George Thornton2 who, at the end of the day, just was one of us.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/11/01/242347861/man-behind-oregons-famous-exploding-whale-dies