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The Horse Path Effect

Want an excuse to blame horses for traffic conditions?

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(From Nicolas Reid's Twitter*, but really from Google Images.)


If so, let's go back in time.**


But First, StuFLaW

I'm trying out a new series of companion posts called StuFLaW, an acronym for Stuff From Last Week designed to make it really hard to press the shift key at the correct time while typing it.*** StuFLaW will contain topics from the previous week that are really more suited to a quick paragraph than an entire blog post, but I was thinking about them and wanted to include them. I don't plan on doing StuFLaW each week, but we'll see. The link to the first ever edition of StuFLaW is here


Time Travel

Imagine that you're a white, male, privileged, Christian 16-1700s landowner, and you have a friend who's also a white, male, privileged, Christian 16-1700s landowner.**** You often ride horseback to his house, and he often rides horseback to yours. After years of doing this, you form a path.


This horse path gets ridden, walked, and somersaulted on enough that it becomes a main road. Other people ride their horses down that road, and create side paths along that road that match whoever's house or whatever other building they want to go to at that point.


We Have Cars! 

Later, once cars are invented, and someone decides to pave those roads, they pave along the beaten paths instead of planning a grid system. Whenever a road needs to go someplace else, it is looked at as a one-time issue, instead of something that could affect later roads. 


But the government can't just tear up the horse paths and start over. That would make a lot of residents mad since their house would be demolished, and people don't like their house being demolished*****. The government also wouldn't like that because it would be an ineffective use of the budget.


And this is why we can't have nice things. 

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(From Glenn McAnanama's blog, but also really from Google Images.)


An Official Definition

The Horse Path Effect is defined where a something with a long-term positive impact is impractical because it would have a short-term negative impact.


Final Thoughts

The Horse Path Effect is extremely prevalent throughout society. You can see it with roads,  you can see it with pi and tau, you can see it with the Electoral College, you can see it with healthcare in the United States******, you can see it with old buildings that aren't fire-safe or handicap-friendly, you can see it all over the world. 


Thanks for reading what I wrote. I urge you to try to find the Horse Path Effect in society, and to do your best to plan ahead. 


–beautifulthorns


Originally aired May 08, 2019


*Caption: 

Traffic engineer 1: Five way intersection?

Traffic engineer 2: Roundabout?

Traffic committee: Smoosh 'em both together!

Pedestrian: ...wait, what?

**Not literally; bad things might happen. Like the world dying.

***When you type it ten times fast, you'll probably mess it up around eight times. Hit Command-T and try it. The correct answer is StuFLaW. 

****What a coinkydink! Illuminati confrimed. (And no, that wasn't a typo.)

******It should be government-run in my opinion, but a lot of private companies that sell healthcare would go out of business and people would lose their jobs, and we can't do that. (I'm oversimplifying a bit, but that's the main idea.)

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