Make the Net Bigger

On the need to differentiate the made-up from the real

A few years back, the NHL decided that they wanted to increase scoring. One of the solutions included reducing the size of the goalie’s pads. This increases the number of goals, but it also increases the number of bruises. Despite our technological advancements, we can’t render the human body immune to fast-flying objects. Another part of this equation, however, sits entirely within the realm of human control. Even if you don’t know much about professional hockey, you can probably think of an easy way to ensure that more pucks end up in the goal. You could just make the net bigger. That wouldn’t leave any marks. Strangely, though, that solution feels more extreme than reducing the goalie’s protection. The hockey net has been this size forever, after all, so we can’t just change it now. Except, well, we can. No law of physics or chemistry forces the net to maintain its current size. If a small number of people sign on the right dotted lines, bigger nets would appear in NHL arenas. The bruises that appear after a puck strikes your body are fixed. We can’t change that. But hockey nets? We made up hockey nets. We can change those.

It seems that we often struggle to differentiate the concrete, fixed aspects of the world from the ones we made up. We see a human body blocking too much of the net and think “The person should be smaller” rather than “The net should be bigger.” For hockey, we can laugh this instinct off. Well, maybe goalies can’t. It’s a bit less funny, though, when we realize how much this permeates our society.

I recently spoke to a college transfer student. The transfer delayed her graduation since some of the classes from her old college didn’t count toward the ones at her new college. These included difficult classes in biochemistry. Look, I don’t know anything about biochemistry. I would assume, though, that biochemistry is pretty universal. I don’t imagine there’s much geographic variance on this topic. Yet, her old classes didn’t check the boxes because of some policy implemented by someone who probably knows even less about biochemistry than I do. “The person should take the class twice” feels easier “The university should change its policies.” A real person will have her real-time wasted and her real career delayed because of made-up things on made-up computers at made-up departments at made-up universities.

While she might only waste a semester, I wonder if some of them wasted all four years. One of the most common refrains from recent college graduates is that their job doesn’t involve anything they learned in school. This includes technical positions. We should take this with a grain of salt of course. It’s likely that college students learn generalized mental skills that help with their post-college work, even if the day-to-day specifics differ. Still, though, did we all need four years of time-consuming classes to gain those skills? We could probably increase our mental ability on the job. Either way, we could likely find some method to increase the mental acumen of young people that doesn’t cost the taxpayer or the student hundreds of thousands of dollars. If we eliminated universities tomorrow, companies and government agencies would still want white-collar workers. This would open a business opportunity for any entrepreneur that could fill that gap. It would also leave the door open for scams, so we’d probably see some government regulation. I don’t know what the end result would look like. I just don’t see any reason to assume that we’ve stumbled upon the ideal way of crafting a professional workforce.

This is most obvious when it comes to sports. American NHL and NBA players usually come from college, and NFL players spend at least three years in the NCAA. Once we look at other countries, though, it seems strange to bundle professional feeder leagues with universities. Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo didn’t go to college. McDavid and Draisaitl, the dynamic duo of the Edmonton Oilers, spent no time at a university. Shohei Ohtani, the one-man dynamic duo from the Los Angeles Angels, didn’t either. Even among American players, we can see the pointlessness of tying youth sports to university. After all, Ohtani’s American teammate, Mike Trout, didn’t attend either. The NBA briefly allowed players to join the league from high school, and LeBron James and Kobe Bryant turned out just fine.

Allow me to address the obvious counterargument: universities aren’t job training programs for corporate offices. Universities allow students to expose themselves to a wide array of thoughts and ideas from our magnificent Western canon. To that I say, have you met college students? Or even college graduates? Do these people care about any of that stuff? Yes, we should set resources aside for the people that want to study the traditions of literature and philosophy and carry those traditions to future generations. But that’s not a lot of people. A few Google searches indicate that there are between 15 and 20 million college students right now in the United States. How many would still be there if they didn’t see it as a benefit (if not a requirement) for their careers? Yes, universities should be places people go to learn rather than to obtain a rubber stamp for white-collar jobs. Right now, at least, they aren’t. I know there’s also the research aspect, though a discussion of its usefulness shall remain a topic for another day.

The college requirement continues to creep. A recent Bloomberg article noted the rapid rise in data science MBAs. In the last couple of years, I’ve noticed that more and more new applicants and hires in the field boast some sort of data-specific degree. It may be hard to imagine a world with no universities or one where budding NFL players didn’t attend college, but we don’t need much imagination to picture a world without data science degrees. No one had these degrees ten years ago. Instead, you started your career as an Excel and SQL monkey. If you wanted to move into data science, you pursued data sciency projects at your job and tried to collaborate with the existing data scientists in your department. You might have supplemented this with some $50 courses on Udemy. This wasn’t the world’s greatest system, but it got the job done with less time, debt, and university bureaucrats. Maybe we’ll see some noticeable increase in the quality of work with all these new degrees. I suspect, however, that we won’t see better work than when the offices were staffed with Econ and Math BAs. People are real.

We also made up the fifty states. Some Idaho politicians want to annex some of the neighboring counties in Oregon. People scoff at this, but why not? Is there something intrinsically Oregonian about the 1,500 who live in Hines? Again, we need to separate the real from the made-up. Here’s the real part: people concentrate in cities and these cities extend to a greater metro area. That’s how humans live. We can’t change that without physically removing people from their homes. It makes sense, then, for cities to be in the same state as their suburbs. I would oppose a plan that expanded Idaho in the Portland metro area. But the rural counties? Why tie them to Portland? Speaking of keeping suburbs with their cities, the largest metro area in the US is NYC’s tri-state area. Why not make it the uni-state area? I don’t think we need to organize 21st-century American life around 17th-century British colonial chargers. Every so often, I see a plan to break California into multiple states. People laugh at these, but, again, why not? Canada, with fewer people than California, splits itself into 10 provinces and 3 territories. The Netherlands has 12 provinces, and you could fit that country in a Los Angeles parking lot. I don’t know enough to endorse any individual plan to move state boundaries. I’m just saying that we shouldn’t dismiss the ideas as absurd.

Even the characters on this page are made up. People must learn to read. That’s real. What isn’t real is the idea that there’s a single, correct orthographical representation of a word that doesn’t change over time. Spoken English, like every spoken language, has evolved over time. That’s also real. People complain about language changes, but they might as well tell the Earth to expedite its orbit around the sun. Spellings, though, are made up. In David Crystal’s History of English, he notes that no one considered words to have a proper spelling until the last few hundred years. Before that, people spelled how they spoke. After all, it’s this differentiation in spelling that allows us to track changes to the language in the first place. Our current spellings don’t reflect modern pronunciation, and this makes it harder for English speakers to become literate. To highlight the issue, let’s analyze our number words:

• One

• Two

• Three

• Four

• Five

• Six

• Seven

• Eight

• Nine

• Ten

Few concepts are more fundamental than “one” and “two,” but children and English learners will struggle to spell them. We used to pronounce “one” as we do in “only.” In fact, the word “only” is just “one” + “ly.” I don’t see why the spelling should represent the pronunciation from hundreds of years ago. “Two” features a long-lost “w.” “Five” and “nine” end with a useless silent “e.” You might think that we need to the silent “e” to indicate that “i” is a diphthong rather than a regular vowel. In that case, where’s the silent “e” in “find?” “Six” contains an “x,” a character we usually reserve for Greek words. We pronounce “four” the same as “for,” so why not spell them the same way? “Three” and “seven” might seem fine, but I’m not done with my whining yet. In English, the “th” can represent two different sounds. Say “this thing” aloud and you’ll hear the difference. Linguists refer to the first consonant as “voiced” (i.e., you say it with a vibrating voice box) and the latter as “unvoiced.” Elsewhere, we use different symbols for the voiced and unvoiced versions of consonants, such as “b” and “p.” “Seven” almost works, but the “e” represents two different vowel sounds. Don’t even get me started on “eight.” I approve of “ten,” however. No complaints there. Although I could still complain about the “soft c” orthography when we use the French version in words like “percent” and “century.”

These spellings make it harder for English kids to read. German Kinder and Dutch kinderen don’t face these issues since their spellings represent their speech. Remember, speech is a natural thing. Every human learns to speak (or sign) at least one language growing up. Writing, on the other hand, is an invented and arbitrary one. If spelling “one” as “wun” or “two” as “too” seems absurd, look at the spellings from Old or Middle English. Should we have stuck with those? Should our verbs end in “-an” because they did a thousand years ago? If updated spellings seem ridiculous, consider the fact that Turkish changed its entire alphabet. Japanese uses three orthographical systems, and we have no problem ignoring all of them to spell words like “sushi” and “samurai.”

One of the emergent themes of this blog has been the squandering of human potential. I’ve written many pieces on bullshit jobs, but I think the issue extends beyond that. We don’t just waste human ingenuity in useless bureaucratic roles and annoying cell phone apps. We waste our time when a doctor treats a goalie for an injury that he didn’t need to suffer. We waste our time when kids need to memorize dozens of phonological exceptions for basic words. We waste our time when students spend sixteen weeks studying a topic that they’ll forget in sixteen hours. I’m not advocating for abolishing or making radical changes to all of our institutions. Maybe we have good reason to limit the size of NHL goals or send half our eighteen-year-olds to college, but we should at least consider that we might not. To do so, we need to differentiate the fixed, unchangeable parts of our material reality from the parts we can change with a bit of paperwork.