This article is a good excuse to get rid of outdoor advertising for safety reasons.
I was watching some tours of some very nice metro stations in China and Moscow. I didn't quite understand what was so nice about them until one comment pointed it out: no advertising blasting bright colors into your retinas. Advertising in public spaces needs to be banned. It's visual pollution and it's using publicly funded assets to make tangible profits while the losses are externalised easily because they're not well understood.
If profit is all you care about then it's easy to justify turning your house into a brothel.
I'd say the daily "visual clutter" of living in Chinese cities is on par or more than other cities, like Tokyo.
In Shenzhen for example, it's not uncommon to see police wearing flashing sirens on their shoulders as part of their uniform. Motorcyclists share the same road as pedestrians, and with so many delivery app drivers you're always on the lookout to avoid being hit.
On SZ and Beijing metro trains, video ads are projected inside tunnels, matching the speed of the carriage - example: https://youtu.be/sp7KDNKpVhY
Personally I've seen much more advertising on Chinese shopping apps like Taobao, compared to say Amazon. Cluttercore advertising seems to be a deeply rooted culture there.
> In Shenzhen for example, it's not uncommon to see police wearing flashing sirens on their shoulders as part of their uniform. Motorcyclists share the same road as pedestrians, and with so many delivery app drivers you're always on the lookout to avoid being hit.
I don't think this is quite as distracting as semantic-laden graphics like ads. They quite literally pollute the mind as well as the view.
In Moscow metro my personal bane is the mind-numbing amounts of reverberating noise due to open design of stations with no soundproofing, but yes, there are also advertising screens in both trains and on stations.
In Beijing metro while going from the airport I remember the looping propaganda on LCD screens with caricatures of how the West consists of bad, fat, ugly people who should be hated. It’s been like 10 years since I have been there so I forget the details, but I have some photos from the metro where ads ended up in the shot.
In Shenzhen metro, screens with ads, screens everywhere on eye level. The highlight is when a screen is glitching.
I think whether they also blast audible ads, so that you truly have no escape, depends on the train. In Hong Kong, newer trains do.
People are often misled that because a country is ostensibly in opposition to the west, it is somehow immune to inconveniences and issues we associate with capitalism. All of those places are de facto capitalist, just with higher degrees of corruption and oligarchy, and (despite what propaganda paints) they suffer from all of the same issues, multiplied by lack of care from the authorities.
Your heart is in the right place, but you negate all of that with either incorrect reasoning, or unnecessary hyperbole.
First, you can make your point without saying "turning your house into a brothel". You and I both know, you said that to elicit an emotion reaction. It is an appeal to moral values, when you could have much rather said - "profit maximizing at all costs is bad, or not well understood".
Second - "publically funded assets to make tangible profits". This is incorrect. Governments do all sorts of things so that private individuals / companies can make profit. For instance, they build roads and bridges and highways to enable commerce. They give our licenses to establish companies. They put up stock exchanges so that shareholders can speculate and make money.
By doing both of these, you have diluted the core of your argument which is "outdoor advertising is visual pollution" and has some "safety concerns".
I suspect the downvotes are mainly due to the lack of something tangible to latch onto for a continuing line of dialog. The "and" in "Yes, and...".
I wish more comments on HN were as well-presented as yours. "By doing both of these, you have diluted the core of your argument which is 'outdoor advertising is visual pollution' and has some 'safety concerns'." -> Indeed. It's difficult for me to find fault with this.
Since childhood I've found billboards to be a very mildly dangerous distraction - increasingly so over the years as they've gotten colored lights, LED screens, animations, etc. And the proliferation of close-quarters digital ads which add audio feel particularly violating to me. When my Uber/Lyft rides have those tablets with unending ads, when gas station pumps insist on bombarding me with harsh noise from a too-small speaker driven too hard, etc.
Pro-tip for the vast majority of gas station pump TV advertising screens that are in service at the moment in the USA - if it has four rectangular buttons (all/mostly unlabeled) next to the screen, the third button down is an unlabeled "Mute" button about 90% of the time. I have not yet found a mute feature on the newest models that are just starting to replace those.
> profit maximizing at all costs is bad, or not well understood
How is it not well understood ? It does not seem very hard to imagine what the consequences would be since it already happens sometimes... Or do you think abuse when scaled up can have unexpected good social consequences ?
I would like to defend that brothel metaphor. You say the goal is to appeal to emotions (brothel bad == advertising bad) but it could be argued that the actual purpose is to be striking: It's unexpected so my brain will notice. To me this is just good storytelling and I didn't feel manipulated. Actually I would feel more manipulated if the metaphor was more discreet.
I don't like marketers or advertising, but I don't understand what you mean by: "Advertising in public spaces". In the US, advertising is always on private property.
> we can’t read out of the corner of our eyes, no matter how hard we try
This is not quite true. Reading via peripheral vision is a skill, but most people never have the right kind of motivation (and perhaps not the right kind of visual stimulus) to learn it. I know this because I have personally known someone who read exclusively via her peripheral vision.
There's an inherited retinal disease that runs in my family. It's a form of 'cone-rod dystrophy'. Cone-rod dystrophies are diseases where the cones and the rods in the eye eventually stop responding to light. The order of the terms in the naming reflects the typical order of the dystrophy: first the cones (responsible for central vision) go, then the rods (responsible for peripheral vision) go, too. As the cones and rods go bad, this results in loss of visual acuity in central and peripheral vision respectively. (It often causes lots of other, less generic problems, too, such as: blind spots, warping/twisting distortions in the visual field, sometimes flickering artifacts, progressive colorblindness, extreme light sensitivity, and an effective reduction of contrast.)
Between individual cases, there's a lot of variation in how the disease presents. There's no fixed timeline or ordering for the progression (even though the disease's genetic cause has been identified as just a single gene!).
Anyhow, in my late aunt's case, her central vision was useless long before her peripheral vision could give out. So she learned, somehow, to do things like read her smartphone using only her peripheral vision.
We chatted about it once or twice. Onlookers often could not comprehend that she was looking at her phone, since her eyes weren't pointed towards it. She once laughed to me about how someone had asked her 'Why are you sniffing your phone?', while she held it up to her face to read a text message.
My impression is that learning to rely on your peripheral vision in this way is extremely counter-intuitive and difficult to do. (This may have something to do with the mechanisms discussed in TFA.) I wonder if it can even be done at all without first obscuring one's central vision (which I guess you could do artificially with contacts). But evidently it can be done.
It makes me think of a common trick in stargazing that is to look at stars with peripheral vision. Fixating them will make them disappear.
That's because the fovea, the "high resolution" part of the eye we use when focusing on some point is entirely made of cone cells, which give you color vision, but are less sensitive, as opposed to rod cells, that make up most of the peripheral vision. In other words, peripheral vision is better in low light situations.
I discovered this growing up when lying in bed at night. I'd always feel like there was light coming under the door. Then I'd look directly at it and it was pitch black to me. I'd look to the side and the light would seemingly come back. Only years later did I discover the cause you described.
I guess what the article means is that it's not possible to read with peripheral vision except with very large font size and up close. Was your aunt able to read normal print besides titles? Also, I just tried out of curiosity. I must imagine only her fovea was unusable, and the area just around it (I think it's like 5° off-axis) was still fine, because I think I have pretty good peripheral vision, and I can't make out anything if I intentionally look away from what I'm trying to read. Certainly not on a phone; I have to get it so close to my face that it goes out of focus.
By the way, while it is true that cones are far more densely packed in the fovea, their function is color vision, not central vision. Rods are responsible for motion perception and vision in low-light environments.
Yeah, it's hard to say what the determinative factors were because her general visual acuity was so low that she generally needed very large fonts very up close anyway. My mom and my sister and I also have this condition and rely on magnification to varying degrees (and for various reasons— sometimes it's truly about acuity but sometimes larger sizes/bolder fonts are a clumsy way to try to make up for contrast issues). But even those of us with usable central vision generally need large fonts anyway. We're also all, for reasons I think are mostly incidental, naturally myopic (although my mom is no longer nearsighted but farsighted (with low acuity— she's legally blind)).
> Was your aunt able to read normal print besides titles?
No. Even titles, like titles of chapters in a paperback, she could likely only read with magnification. And that's if she could get enough contrast at all. At some point, screens become much easier to read than paper, even at equal sizes.
I should learn more about the precise anatomy because it's interesting, but currently I know more about the subjectivity of it than the mechanics.
> By the way, while it is true that cones are far more densely packed in the fovea, their function is color vision, not central vision. Rods are responsible for motion perception and vision in low-light environments.
There may be other factors in these inherited retinal dystrophies that affect the way their progressions affect field of view, idk. But what I said about which areas are first distorted for cone-rod dystrophies is true, and its reverse is true for rod-cone dystrophies (i.e., retinitis pigmentosa), where people with that condition lose their peripheral vision first and their field of view shrinks from the outside-in. My assumption so far has been that this corresponds to those density differences you mentioned.
> Rods are responsible for motion perception and vision in low-light environments.
I do know that much. :)
One of the features of this illness that's very prevalent for me and my sister right now is extreme light sensitivity, presumably because our eyes rely increasingly on their rods even during the daytime and even in high-light environments. One related I've written about on HN before is how the need for lower total light emission pushes both of us to high-contrast dark themes with the lowest brightness possible. OLED screens are really nice when your rods are in better shape than your cones!
One that I don't think I have is that my colorblindness has been getting worse over time. The last time I took a colorblindness test (administered by a medical professional, at my retinal specialist's office), I could hardly read any of the Ishihara plates at all. (When the doctor came in, he asked me if I only saw in black-and-white, which I found mildly irksome but very amusing. I laughed about it with my family afterwards. I do still see many colors! I just have trouble distinguishing a lot of them, too.) My sister, who was not colorblind at all when she was growing up, is now also colorblind, about as much as me based on her tests.
Yep. Before my mom got a correct diagnosis via genetic testing, she was told it was a form of macular degeneration, in part on the basis of those features.
> Anyhow, in my late aunt's case, her central vision was useless long before her peripheral vision could give out. So she learned, somehow, to do things like read her smartphone using only her peripheral vision.
Humans are incredibly adaptable beings, and she proved it. :)
She'd been through a hell of a lot in her life, but it was always important to her to be pleasant company to the people around her, even in tough times. She was always joking and laughing and telling stories. RIP
Anecdotally, I noticed that I am much happier and more focused after I clean and declutter my apartment. Clean, flat surfaces, nothing for your brain to process.
Even if it's your own apartment or a house, your brain will constantly have a "thread" firing on all cylinders that tries to parse what you are seeing, non-stop.
If it's things all around you, small details, objects - it will sap your mental energy and you won't even know why.
I feel this as well, and increasingly as I get older. It drives me to simplify my office over and over, or at least add storage elements that can hide clutter.
Our dystopian future visions for AR always include an extreme visual chaos of ads — maybe the killer app future for AR is actually to remove extraneous visual noise, much like noise-cancelling headphones.
My girlfriend (who has quite severe ADHD) is exactly like you. Before she can get any work done in our office everything needs to be put away/organized/in it's place or she'll get detracted all the time.
I've noticed that you sometimes host scientific articles discussed on HN, but I don't see you on the author list. Are you mirroring a prepublishing archive, or did you ask authors for special permission or are you just ... sharing it?
Why does the effect seem to be reversed when out in nature? When I walk in the woods, the visual complexity is arguably much higher than it ever gets in cities, even on a busy highway. But the mental effect seems to be rejuvenating.
It's partly because you're not paying attention. Next time you're out in the woods, try to still hunt for a while. It's a hunting method where you move extremely slowly throughout the woods from cover to cover while watching for animals. You'll find that it takes a lot of mental focus to maintain that level of vigilance.
I think the fractal patterns match our million year old brains expectations, "stuff" in the article refers to "stuff i need to focus on" (which is everywhere in traffic but mostly in front of you while hiking, and in general, focusing 100 yards away is better for the eyes, and a good walk helps everyone feel better. But this is mostly off topic opinion.
I feel the opposite, in nature I find the complexity much less. Things are not really moving, they are static. Colors are also very much within similar range. You can be very much in passive mode and enjoy the scenery vs actively trying to process.
This reality might be like a quantum observation field - cities are full of conscious minds actively observing/measuring/collapsing probability states. Like millions of wave function collapses happening constantly. Nature lets those quantum states breathe, maintaining possibility spaces longer.
Some people thrive in that urban collapse-field - they want that constant measurement and definition. Others need more quantum coherence time, seeking out spaces where consciousness can maintain superposition longer. It's not about visual complexity or stimulation, but about how much conscious observation is forcing reality into defined states.
Cities vs nature isn't just about peace or chaos - it's about the density of consciousness collapse. Like the difference between metal (constant forced collapse) and ambient music (sustained possibility states).
I noticed intense fatigue wandering Tokyo with my friend who wore magnifying lenses and he could not understand why I was tired. I said it's all the visual stimulation, the signs, the lights, the billboards. I think he was at an advantage with the eyewear, in retrospect.
I found the opposite personally. Something about the neatness and tidiness let my mind relax and see everything similar to a calm flowing stream. Tokyo is one of the most peaceful cities I've been to, even in the busy areas, and by far the biggest and most populated.
I have a (IMO bad) habit of looking away from my computer screen (at visual nothingness) when having concentrated discussions over video calls.
For whatever reason it’s just easier to talk when staring out the window at a tree than staring at a face on a screen. I call it a bad habit because it results in accidentally ignoring body language of the person on the other end
100% with phone calls. I typically just slowly pace around around my house when on a phone call without video.
It goes for locations and activities too but mostly if I look at something it locks and unlocks memories but the thing I'm looking at also becomes part of the active memory.
You have a bunch of stuff hashed against the tree or against a dead gaze or you don't want the person to be part of the thought process.
I forgot the code for the warehouse at a previous job. Typing the wrong one locks the place down. I somewhat panicked but went there anyway, got distracted by something and typed the code without even thinking about it. I also remembered it after walking inside. Took some coffee and it was gone again. I thought, I've been typing that code for years but had never realized I only remember it when looking at the door.
There’s a saddle point of reading body language that improves communication. But at the point you read micro expressions of dishonesty then it becomes problematic. Nobody likes being called on their bullshit. Detectives get away with it because it’s their job. But none of the suspects like them or want to spend any time around them afterward. They’re effective but they’re also assholes by most cultural standards.
This is why I hate the idea that discussions over coding style are "bike shedding". At least for me they have a very real impact on my productivity and likelihood if introducing bugs.
As a painter I would differentiate background from foreground by decreasing its saturation, lightness and hue local contrast, softening edges, decreasing neighboring regional contrast and Lessing its average color values in relation to the foreground. Painters have been doing this for hundreds of years.
Readit News
I was watching some tours of some very nice metro stations in China and Moscow. I didn't quite understand what was so nice about them until one comment pointed it out: no advertising blasting bright colors into your retinas. Advertising in public spaces needs to be banned. It's visual pollution and it's using publicly funded assets to make tangible profits while the losses are externalised easily because they're not well understood. If profit is all you care about then it's easy to justify turning your house into a brothel.
In Shenzhen for example, it's not uncommon to see police wearing flashing sirens on their shoulders as part of their uniform. Motorcyclists share the same road as pedestrians, and with so many delivery app drivers you're always on the lookout to avoid being hit.
On SZ and Beijing metro trains, video ads are projected inside tunnels, matching the speed of the carriage - example: https://youtu.be/sp7KDNKpVhY
Personally I've seen much more advertising on Chinese shopping apps like Taobao, compared to say Amazon. Cluttercore advertising seems to be a deeply rooted culture there.
I don't think this is quite as distracting as semantic-laden graphics like ads. They quite literally pollute the mind as well as the view.
In Beijing metro while going from the airport I remember the looping propaganda on LCD screens with caricatures of how the West consists of bad, fat, ugly people who should be hated. It’s been like 10 years since I have been there so I forget the details, but I have some photos from the metro where ads ended up in the shot.
In Shenzhen metro, screens with ads, screens everywhere on eye level. The highlight is when a screen is glitching.
I think whether they also blast audible ads, so that you truly have no escape, depends on the train. In Hong Kong, newer trains do.
People are often misled that because a country is ostensibly in opposition to the west, it is somehow immune to inconveniences and issues we associate with capitalism. All of those places are de facto capitalist, just with higher degrees of corruption and oligarchy, and (despite what propaganda paints) they suffer from all of the same issues, multiplied by lack of care from the authorities.
First, you can make your point without saying "turning your house into a brothel". You and I both know, you said that to elicit an emotion reaction. It is an appeal to moral values, when you could have much rather said - "profit maximizing at all costs is bad, or not well understood".
Second - "publically funded assets to make tangible profits". This is incorrect. Governments do all sorts of things so that private individuals / companies can make profit. For instance, they build roads and bridges and highways to enable commerce. They give our licenses to establish companies. They put up stock exchanges so that shareholders can speculate and make money.
By doing both of these, you have diluted the core of your argument which is "outdoor advertising is visual pollution" and has some "safety concerns".
I wish more comments on HN were as well-presented as yours. "By doing both of these, you have diluted the core of your argument which is 'outdoor advertising is visual pollution' and has some 'safety concerns'." -> Indeed. It's difficult for me to find fault with this.
Since childhood I've found billboards to be a very mildly dangerous distraction - increasingly so over the years as they've gotten colored lights, LED screens, animations, etc. And the proliferation of close-quarters digital ads which add audio feel particularly violating to me. When my Uber/Lyft rides have those tablets with unending ads, when gas station pumps insist on bombarding me with harsh noise from a too-small speaker driven too hard, etc.
Pro-tip for the vast majority of gas station pump TV advertising screens that are in service at the moment in the USA - if it has four rectangular buttons (all/mostly unlabeled) next to the screen, the third button down is an unlabeled "Mute" button about 90% of the time. I have not yet found a mute feature on the newest models that are just starting to replace those.
How generous of them to allow us to pay to bypass the barrier they put in place
How is it not well understood ? It does not seem very hard to imagine what the consequences would be since it already happens sometimes... Or do you think abuse when scaled up can have unexpected good social consequences ?
I would like to defend that brothel metaphor. You say the goal is to appeal to emotions (brothel bad == advertising bad) but it could be argued that the actual purpose is to be striking: It's unexpected so my brain will notice. To me this is just good storytelling and I didn't feel manipulated. Actually I would feel more manipulated if the metaphor was more discreet.
This is not quite true. Reading via peripheral vision is a skill, but most people never have the right kind of motivation (and perhaps not the right kind of visual stimulus) to learn it. I know this because I have personally known someone who read exclusively via her peripheral vision.
There's an inherited retinal disease that runs in my family. It's a form of 'cone-rod dystrophy'. Cone-rod dystrophies are diseases where the cones and the rods in the eye eventually stop responding to light. The order of the terms in the naming reflects the typical order of the dystrophy: first the cones (responsible for central vision) go, then the rods (responsible for peripheral vision) go, too. As the cones and rods go bad, this results in loss of visual acuity in central and peripheral vision respectively. (It often causes lots of other, less generic problems, too, such as: blind spots, warping/twisting distortions in the visual field, sometimes flickering artifacts, progressive colorblindness, extreme light sensitivity, and an effective reduction of contrast.)
Between individual cases, there's a lot of variation in how the disease presents. There's no fixed timeline or ordering for the progression (even though the disease's genetic cause has been identified as just a single gene!).
Anyhow, in my late aunt's case, her central vision was useless long before her peripheral vision could give out. So she learned, somehow, to do things like read her smartphone using only her peripheral vision.
We chatted about it once or twice. Onlookers often could not comprehend that she was looking at her phone, since her eyes weren't pointed towards it. She once laughed to me about how someone had asked her 'Why are you sniffing your phone?', while she held it up to her face to read a text message.
My impression is that learning to rely on your peripheral vision in this way is extremely counter-intuitive and difficult to do. (This may have something to do with the mechanisms discussed in TFA.) I wonder if it can even be done at all without first obscuring one's central vision (which I guess you could do artificially with contacts). But evidently it can be done.
That's because the fovea, the "high resolution" part of the eye we use when focusing on some point is entirely made of cone cells, which give you color vision, but are less sensitive, as opposed to rod cells, that make up most of the peripheral vision. In other words, peripheral vision is better in low light situations.
By the way, while it is true that cones are far more densely packed in the fovea, their function is color vision, not central vision. Rods are responsible for motion perception and vision in low-light environments.
Yeah, it's hard to say what the determinative factors were because her general visual acuity was so low that she generally needed very large fonts very up close anyway. My mom and my sister and I also have this condition and rely on magnification to varying degrees (and for various reasons— sometimes it's truly about acuity but sometimes larger sizes/bolder fonts are a clumsy way to try to make up for contrast issues). But even those of us with usable central vision generally need large fonts anyway. We're also all, for reasons I think are mostly incidental, naturally myopic (although my mom is no longer nearsighted but farsighted (with low acuity— she's legally blind)).
> Was your aunt able to read normal print besides titles?
No. Even titles, like titles of chapters in a paperback, she could likely only read with magnification. And that's if she could get enough contrast at all. At some point, screens become much easier to read than paper, even at equal sizes.
I should learn more about the precise anatomy because it's interesting, but currently I know more about the subjectivity of it than the mechanics.
> By the way, while it is true that cones are far more densely packed in the fovea, their function is color vision, not central vision. Rods are responsible for motion perception and vision in low-light environments.
There may be other factors in these inherited retinal dystrophies that affect the way their progressions affect field of view, idk. But what I said about which areas are first distorted for cone-rod dystrophies is true, and its reverse is true for rod-cone dystrophies (i.e., retinitis pigmentosa), where people with that condition lose their peripheral vision first and their field of view shrinks from the outside-in. My assumption so far has been that this corresponds to those density differences you mentioned.
> Rods are responsible for motion perception and vision in low-light environments.
I do know that much. :)
One of the features of this illness that's very prevalent for me and my sister right now is extreme light sensitivity, presumably because our eyes rely increasingly on their rods even during the daytime and even in high-light environments. One related I've written about on HN before is how the need for lower total light emission pushes both of us to high-contrast dark themes with the lowest brightness possible. OLED screens are really nice when your rods are in better shape than your cones!
One that I don't think I have is that my colorblindness has been getting worse over time. The last time I took a colorblindness test (administered by a medical professional, at my retinal specialist's office), I could hardly read any of the Ishihara plates at all. (When the doctor came in, he asked me if I only saw in black-and-white, which I found mildly irksome but very amusing. I laughed about it with my family afterwards. I do still see many colors! I just have trouble distinguishing a lot of them, too.) My sister, who was not colorblind at all when she was growing up, is now also colorblind, about as much as me based on her tests.
All I can say is wow.
She'd been through a hell of a lot in her life, but it was always important to her to be pleasant company to the people around her, even in tough times. She was always joking and laughing and telling stories. RIP
Even if it's your own apartment or a house, your brain will constantly have a "thread" firing on all cylinders that tries to parse what you are seeing, non-stop.
If it's things all around you, small details, objects - it will sap your mental energy and you won't even know why.
“Therefore, the detailed visual information you’re getting is from the car in front of you, but the information of interest is outside of your focus.”
This must be one of the reasons you get fatigue and exhaustion during traffic rush hour due to so much visual information.
This reality might be like a quantum observation field - cities are full of conscious minds actively observing/measuring/collapsing probability states. Like millions of wave function collapses happening constantly. Nature lets those quantum states breathe, maintaining possibility spaces longer.
Some people thrive in that urban collapse-field - they want that constant measurement and definition. Others need more quantum coherence time, seeking out spaces where consciousness can maintain superposition longer. It's not about visual complexity or stimulation, but about how much conscious observation is forcing reality into defined states.
Cities vs nature isn't just about peace or chaos - it's about the density of consciousness collapse. Like the difference between metal (constant forced collapse) and ambient music (sustained possibility states).
Checking mirrors often, looking outside your side window, etc.
Whenever I do those things it helps refresh me quite a bit.
if this clutter has negatie affects why has japanese design settled on it?
For whatever reason it’s just easier to talk when staring out the window at a tree than staring at a face on a screen. I call it a bad habit because it results in accidentally ignoring body language of the person on the other end
100% with phone calls. I typically just slowly pace around around my house when on a phone call without video.
It goes for locations and activities too but mostly if I look at something it locks and unlocks memories but the thing I'm looking at also becomes part of the active memory.
You have a bunch of stuff hashed against the tree or against a dead gaze or you don't want the person to be part of the thought process.
I forgot the code for the warehouse at a previous job. Typing the wrong one locks the place down. I somewhat panicked but went there anyway, got distracted by something and typed the code without even thinking about it. I also remembered it after walking inside. Took some coffee and it was gone again. I thought, I've been typing that code for years but had never realized I only remember it when looking at the door.
As a painter I would differentiate background from foreground by decreasing its saturation, lightness and hue local contrast, softening edges, decreasing neighboring regional contrast and Lessing its average color values in relation to the foreground. Painters have been doing this for hundreds of years.