what do the space shuttle, porn, and comedy have in common?

In a word, vanity. In 12 words, they are creative projects that tend to cripple themselves with naïve pride. And in 1,090 words:

The Space Shuttle program is (soon to be was) a bold and daring technological adventure. It's mostly a failure. Bold and daring things usually are. That's why they're bold and daring. But that doesn't excuse it. We can still learn from this failure, and we really should have seen it to begin with. By the way, this post is a lot of extreme simplifying and I hope you're okay with that.


The Shuttle program was conceived when we realized regular rockets were too old and inefficient. We needed something faster, cheaper, and safer; a sleek new high-speed low-drag reusable paradigm for getting us to space. And by "us" I mean bold and daring human crews. Screw that automated shit. Don't want to get too efficient. So how did we improve on the rocket? Old school rockets are divided into stages, stacked one on top of another. You know how they work. But with the Shuttle, we mounted the stages side-by-side. And old school rockets have a stout, rigid capsule in which to return the crew. But the Shuttle is an extremely complicated, tragically failure-prone capsule-airplane hybrid. What I'm getting at here is that the Shuttle is needlessly complicated. None of its "innovations" did anything to improve its performance. All they did was make it look cool and explode.


How did such brilliant engineers make such simple mistakes? Faster, cheaper, and safer were not their real motives. Looking cool was. We wanted a high-tech vehicle, but we don't know what high-tech really means. We think it means complicated, trendy, and weird. And of course manned. We lost lives. We tied up almost half of NASA's operations on a vehicle that couldn't get further than low Earth orbit, that didn't help us explore one cubic inch of universe. Yes, I know the Shuttle has been used for a lot of science. It launched and serviced the Hubble. But I'll bet five dollars there hasn't been one science mission done by the Shuttle that a conventional rocket system couldn't have done better.


I have to fight the urge to backpedal. I want to say I really do love the Shuttle, even if I don't always agree with it, and every time I see a launch on TV, I get a tear and a boner. That's what everyone says when the criticize the Shuttle, and I know I feel the urge. I feel it deep down in here. But that's exactly the problem. Pride killed common sense. And its accomplice was naïvety. We don't believe in simple, elegant, useful innovations. We believe in brave Americans riding elaborate deathtraps up and down the atmosphere. We believe in pushing our technology to the limit for no clear purpose.


And we pushed it past the limit. Every launch is fraught with delays. Sometimes we had to let things slide because we've got to get off the ground some time. That's what happened with both Shuttle disasters. We knew about the problems beforehand, but we just crossed our fingers. NASA never had the technical skill to properly operate this beast. That's not an easy thing to say, and not just because it stings the pride. Technical skill isn't an easy thing to measure. For comparison, what if I said a program is impossible because it's over budget? That doesn't sting the pride, because it's about simple numbers. There's no room to argue.* But I can't say, "This project would take X technical skill, but we only have Y technical skill available." Actually NASA does have ways of making such measurements, but they're not perfect, and we do have to partially rely on our guts for such judgements. And that's how pride becomes a factor.

Pride can be very poisonous to innovation. At worst, it makes us act as if innovation is an unlimited quantity, causing us to spend it disproportionately on things we don't need. And then it can make us forget our original goals, and proceed with plans we should know are self-defeating. When we can't honestly face our limits, we can't innovate.

Which brings me to porn. The clear goal of porn should be to show people doing it. But in the early days, a lot of producers seemed to think that wasn't proper. We thought even porns needed plots.


I'm not saying they shouldn't have plots. Just that plots shouldn't be obligatory. We shouldn't be ashamed to have a simple goal with a simple solution. In recent decades we've figured this out, so it's not as much of a problem anymore.

So far, I've only used my "pride vs. creativity" theory where it's supported by hindsight. I don't yet have any ideas where I can use it for foresight, but there's one place where I can use it for present-sight. There is a revolution occurring in the world of comedy these days, a new tendency toward absurdity. Let's just say it works by forgetting the setup and focusing on the punchline. The revolution's critics think it's stupid and lazy. I consider "stupid" to be a plus for comedy, so I'll just worry about the "lazy".

"Lazy" is less of a crime when you realize that creativity is limited. Not just in the writer's brain capacity, or the reader's time, but in the abstract sense of how many possible outcomes a story can have. If your setup is elaborate, or if it's confined by the need to make sense, there aren't as many places you can go with it. And this is why the advantage of absurdity is so much more than mere efficiency. It actually can go places conventional comedy can't. It can tickle parts of your brain you didn't even know were there. That's what innovation is really about. But some people's pride won't allow it. Simple pleasures are wrong.


I'm not writing all this just to say you're an asshole if you don't like Aqua Teen Hunger Force, but Scott Adams happened to be pessimizing about complexity while I was writing this, and this post provides a partial counterpoint. Complexity isn't quite that necessary. It's often just an irrational desire. That's something we can fight, with bold and daring blog posts such as this. So it's not as inevitable a doom as Scott portrays. You're welcome, buddy.

Finally, I don't want to leave the impression that pride is all bad, or even most bad. It's a key part of America's success. It's like America fuel. I just hate when it goes wrong.

*Not true for a government agency, but the example still serves.