Noisy Neighbours

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGrure, for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision-making. I'm here with Nick Hare and Chris Wragg of Aleph Insights, and this week we're discussing musical neighbours. Nick, you're a

Speaker B: 00:00:24

musical neighbour. I am, actually. I must confess that I am. We might get on to our personal experiences in due course, but what we're really talking about is Fiona Faye, who is… Who's she? Actually, I thought she was just a person in the news, but it turns out she's part of a relatively well-known musical group called the Medieval Babes, who are an all-female choir who sing kind of medieval and faux-medieval songs. Quite popular. Anyway, she's a multi-instrumentalist and does things like play the guitar and the piano and something called the low whistle. She got lots of complaints from her neighbours. I'm not sure if it was lots of neighbours or just one particularly aggrieved neighbour. Anyway, Lewisham Council apparently sort of more or less took the neighbours' side in this and said that she was making too much noise and that she got threatened with a fine of 5,000 quid or something if she carried on playing her instruments. I don't think she was playing instruments in the middle of the night or anything like that. I think it was literally during the day, but it's just that the noise it made was sufficiently audible by her neighbours. One neighbour? I'm just looking at the arsenal, one neighbour. Right, so anyway, she has more or less concluded that in order to avoid being fined, she's moved out and is apparently, when her last known condition was that she was sofa surfing with presumably more artistically inclined friends. So, classic, a tale as old as time, or at least, perhaps not. At least going back to medieval times, anyway. Well, it's appropriate. She sounds like she's now a wandering minstrel. So, yeah. So, this is potentially a tale as old as time, but we actually will get on to how long this kind of thing might have been a problem for. But it's certainly a problem now. So, you know, and there are lots of cases. So, the Independent Society of Musicians apparently helps people out. A handful of people a year apparently are in this sort of position. A lad called James Carabino, I think was a young musician of the year finalist, got a notice banning him from practising the piano for more than an hour a day, for example. That's crazy. And it just reminds me slightly of those, you know, the people who sort of move to a village and then complain about the church bells. You know, people out there like listening to music, don't they? But for some reason, they don't like listening to people practice music. But you do have to have that if you want people to play music. So, I think I'm slightly giving away whose side I'm on here. Yeah. And we've already agreed that I'm potentially one of these troublemakers myself. Yes. But it's obviously an issue, not just noise, but everything, isn't it? It's noise, it's the condition of your front garden, it's how you treat communal spaces. In general, the problem of how we should live communally, what should the rules be? What would it be better to allow or disallow? And is it, you know, if you don't like a bit of noise, should you just F off and move to the countryside? And so big load of questions there, I think fairly fundamental ones about the nature of society.

Speaker A: 00:03:51

Well, yeah. Are we really going to get an episode out of this, guys? Do you think? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. We've got there's loads. Isn't it just that some people are gits? Some people are more...

Speaker B: 00:04:02

Who's the git though?

Speaker A: 00:04:03

Not you, right? Not the musician.

Speaker B: 00:04:05

Oh, the person. Oh, okay. I thought it was whoever the other person is, right? Yeah. I mean, if someone's making an absolute racket. Oh, by the way, so this is where I draw the line a bit. If you've never been a musician or you have not lived next door to a musician, you might not know that practicing music doesn't involve playing 20 nice tunes each day, it involves playing the same bar often hundreds of times in a row. Now, I think you could just pretend that was a new composition by Steve Reich or something. But obviously, like listening to someone practice music can be a different experience to listening to them perform. I'm drawing the line at aspiring DJs. Put your decks away, plug the headphones in. That's not the same as practicing music. In your opinion. No. As a matter of objective fact.

Speaker C: 00:05:02

It's not exactly the same as practicing music.

Speaker B: 00:05:04

But anyway, yeah. So there we are. That's the question.

Speaker A: 00:05:08

And we're talking about, sorry, there's a phrase that Chris used once in another podcast that we did that was something about, we were talking about the rights of one individual bumping up against the rights of another one. And Chris, you used a phrase that was already out there, which I hadn't heard before, which I really liked in a concept of law. But anyway.

Speaker C: 00:05:27

Well, I'll talk about that shortly, I think. But I was just going to I was just going to say sort of my perspective on this particular case, because we sort of the garden behind ours once a year, they they gather in sort of spring time and they have like a folk music recital in the back garden. And it's actually rather nice. Right. So it's always the same time of year. And it's clearly this community of, you know, folk musicians and they get together and they're pretty good. And you hear this sort of, you know, nice hubbub of conversation, you know, and then eventually it culminates in the burning of someone in a giant wicker. That's right. There's a bit of human sacrifice. Yeah. After the barbecue. That's a bit noisy. Yeah. Anyway. But they they essentially sort of, you know, call to order and they have this like recital and, you know, it's outdoors and it's springtime and this music kind of drifts over over the garden fence. And it's quite nice. Right. And so so I'm sort of like, oh, well, that's pleasant. But it's once a year. So I think that's one of the one of the the factors, if they did that all day, every day, I might be less sort of amenable or I might find it less less pleasurable. So I think I think there's something here about the repetitiveness of a professional musician on your doorstep. So something about frequency of this thing.

Speaker A: 00:07:10

Also, something we sort of talked about, kind of alluded to as well is it's, you know, let's say you were a hip young gunslinger. OK, even more so than you already are. Yes. Then, you know, if it was. Yeah. If it was some urban grime, is that what it's called? Maybe. Yeah. Trap. Yeah. Drill. Yes. Yeah. Kind of thing. Then. Yeah. And then you might hear that once a year they have an urban whatever, you know, drill party behind you. And you love that because that's what you're into as well. But then, you know, but then they every other quarter they have folk and that drives you mad. So taste as well. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Fraser. Let's say

Speaker B: 00:07:49

I told you about one property where the neighbours have a drill party every year and another property where the neighbours have a folk music party every year. Where do you think the house price is going to be higher? Now, come on. It's not just a matter of taste. Well, because the drill party is more

Speaker A: 00:08:03

likely to be in London. So it's going to be there. Actually, that is a good point. I take it back.

Speaker C: 00:08:08

Anyway, the other sort of personal sort of experience that comes to mind when I think about this is I'm a whistler, right? I always whistle and I remember sort of and I do it, you know, subconsciously in some way. Something will come into my head and I'll start whistling a tune associated with it. I don't really know I'm doing it. And I consider myself.

Speaker B: 00:08:36

It's not the Horst Vessel song or something, then, you know, that's probably OK.

Speaker C: 00:08:40

But well, I consider myself to be a rather good, talented, good whistler.

Speaker B: 00:08:46

I'd love to be a good whistler. Do you think we could get a recital out of Chris now? Go for it. Well, it's very hard to whistle to order, actually.

Speaker C: 00:08:54

Yeah, it is. But you need to wet your whistle. I'm going to wet my whistle.

Speaker A: 00:08:58

And be prepared for angry, angry beatings on the walls here.

Speaker B: 00:09:03

Can we have Lili Bolero?

Speaker A: 00:09:14

That's quite a difficult one to whistle. I'll be happy with anything.

Speaker C: 00:09:33

Oh, that faded at the end there. It is difficult to whistle to order, I have to say.

Speaker B: 00:09:36

Yeah, and that isn't really Lili Bolero. No, I said I wasn't. He then said I could whistle.

Speaker A: 00:09:41

I was distracted by your intense facial concentration going on.

Speaker C: 00:09:47

It's quite difficult. Anyway, that probably didn't do my whistling justice.

Speaker A: 00:09:52

I can't whistle. I can't whistle very well. I find I can whistle better outdoors. Okay, here we go. Nick's definitely the worst. I'm second worst and then you're way above. Anyway, we got slightly off track.

Speaker C: 00:10:14

Anyway, so I would wander around whistling, whether well or not. But this woman once, who I was working in an office with, said, oh, I really hate whistling. And I was like, oh, okay. So I then concentrated on not whistling. But the point is, she found that noise, for whatever reason, really unpleasant, right? And this boils down to the sense of taste. But it's not just do you like that music and not particularly like that music. There are some people may find particularly high pitch kind of sounds. So if she's practising her low whistle, which may actually be low pitch, but it might be really irritating to that person. Not just, not just, oh, I don't like that. It's a bit of a nuisance. But it could be highly irritating.

Speaker B: 00:11:14

But of course, it might be highly irritating for someone who really likes whistling to have to sit there concentrating on not doing it.

Speaker C: 00:11:22

So this is definitely an episode, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So this brings me to the idea that you alluded to earlier, you know, the idea of sort of positive versus negative liberty, right? Positive versus negative liberty. Exactly that. So as sort of espoused by Isaiah Berlin, I suppose he could be our podcast's second favourite philosopher, perhaps, given that he came up with the whole idea of foxes and hedgehogs, didn't he? So anyway, and this is the idea that, you know, positive liberty is about your rights to fulfil your own purpose and, you know, follow your own desires. And negative liberty being about the freedom from constraints, you know, and it's often associated with the idea of stopping the nanny state and so on. I shouldn't be stopped from doing things. And so then we get into the question of, you know, this woman didn't like whistling. And so, you know, I was sort of imposing on her by whistling. I was sort of constraining her pleasure in some way. But I want to have the freedom to fulfil my purpose, as it were, to be able to whistle. And the same is true here of this sort of musician. And it's at the crux of a lot of these kinds of dilemmas.

Speaker A: 00:12:51

So just before you go on, Nick, this is actually important for me. So two things. One, an observation. Actually, I sit on, as you know, Nick, I'm a multi-instrumentalist and I sit on a lot of folk nights, especially where I live now in Lincolnshire. There's like two or three every night, everywhere up and down the county. I have to go, I have to sort of spread them out a bit and only go once every couple of months because even I, sitting on the fine folk nights, really quite annoying, actually, because it's just the same bloody chords, more or less, all along, jigging along all bloody night long. Anyway, one. Two, this is really important to me because actually I need help on this because I'm having a party soon, a massive party, which is my 50th birthday party. And it's going to be an Elvis extravaganza and I'm holding it outside and I need to tell my neighbours about this. And I need to, I need to... Well, you've left the building. Yes. Soften the ground. Yeah, exactly. So I need advice on this. So help me out. I see there is a problem. When you invite them. Yeah, that's definitely part of it.

Speaker B: 00:13:47

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Invite them. And explain it's once every 10 years in the case of your party and buy them a apologetic bottle of champagne or something. So the transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer societies was apparently around about 10,000 to 5,000 BCE. Yep. Obviously, this is sort of before recorded history, so I don't really know. As it seems to be the case that communal living was more or less the norm in hunter-gatherer societies. Yeah. So in other words, like the concept of you having your thing and I've got mine and it's precisely delineated. And I think that in terms of what most people experienced, I think up until the Feudal Age, people generally lived in the same buildings and slept in the same room. And, you know, in castles, people would sort of bed down in the main hall, most people. And it was only really in the Renaissance and onwards when you started to see the idea of private spaces being normal and having dedicated rooms, you know, having this is the bedroom and that's the living room and so on. And so I think this concept of having your own private living area and therefore having some kind of right to exclude things like noise is probably only a function, something that we've kind of had to come up with over the last couple of hundred years. Allegedly, I'm not sure how true that is, because I sort of I think, well, you know, people living in Jericho must nevertheless have been annoyed by noisy neighbours and stuff. Well, and trumpets in particular, horns. Little did they know it was going to get a whole lot worse, yeah. So just put that in perspective, this may be a hangover or at least a feature of the fact that we have sort of transitioned, you know, into sedentary societies. But as people, we, you know, are still fundamentally hunter gatherers. At least we have hunter gatherer urges and thus we get conflicts like this. Now, you imagine if you were a musician in a nomadic society, you just walk off somewhere else like the concept of being, you know, like it's not this problem just couldn't really have arisen in the same way as it does now. You know, if you didn't like your neighbours, you could just move to a different place and, you know, put your tent somewhere else or, you know, it's so I think this is this is much more of a problem in sedentary societies would be my, you know, hypothesis. And yet we haven't got the solution yet. And I think the solution is suggested by the Coase theorem, which I think we've mentioned before. But well, it's the idea that essentially these sorts of conflicts where you have an externality, in this case, a sort of, well, that's the negative externality in the sense that the person doesn't like the noise, but it's not something that's sort of being bought or sold. If we were able to assign all rights perfectly to who owns what, then this problem would go away. It'd be priced in. So if the neighbour, for example, if their title to that property included being, you know, they could come to a financial arrangement, you know, that that neighbour could sell that right to the musician neighbour. And, you know, it might be that, you know, the house prices would adjust so that, OK, if I get if I get a quiet house, bit like the quiet carriage in a train, you know, it might be more valuable, certainly for some people and other people might want to pay more to live in a house with the right to make noise where, you know, their neighbours didn't have that title. So but I mean, that is undoubtedly the solution. You can prove it using maths. But our institutions haven't really got to grips with that, you know, like our institutions still assume basically that with communal areas, we will behave a bit like, you know, communalist societies that will just sort of get on with each other. And we'll all look after the stairwell equally. And we'll all tidy up, you know, our front gardens. And it becomes really problematic when, you know, when you have people who don't follow the same rules or have really fundamentally different tastes because we don't we haven't put all of these institutions in there to govern that.

Speaker A: 00:18:23

How do we move beyond? Sorry, Chris. How do we move beyond saying, oh, this is a problem and this is why it's a problem to I mean, how do we I'm sure what we're saying now has been said many times elsewhere.

Speaker C: 00:18:34

Yeah, well, I'm just sort of thinking about some of the things Nick was talking about there and where they sort of move us and, you know, what solutions might be. But sort of just opening up the problem space a bit more, really, which is that he talked about the idea that, you know, you can set preferences, right? And, you know, you might really want one thing, so you would pay more for it. And, you know, Nick might want another thing and he would pay more for that. And you can sort of adjust your priorities. And but of course, that assumes or at least the model of how that would work equitably across society assumes that you're starting off with a similar pot of resource, right? But actually, you know, society isn't sort of equitable in that in that fashion. And, you know, you have people who are more powerful than others and who their preferences, you know, like I don't know, let's say opera. Opera music might be considered tolerable to to society because the people who like opera music might have more power than the people who like drill rights where it might be considered antisocial in some way. So so there's an element of how do you how do you deal with that power in equity? The other thing is there are just some things that look like are the answers obvious to, right? So like my right to take your property, OK, does not exceed your right to hold on to your property.

Speaker B: 00:20:15

Well, it's literally impossible. Having property is precisely the same as somebody not having the right to go and take it. If you had the right to take it, it would be your property or if you both thought you had the right to it, then then we got a problem.

Speaker C: 00:20:30

OK, or my right to punch Fraser in the face is I certainly would not contest that by his rights to not be punched in the face. Right. So there are some things where you're like, OK, this is this is this is obvious or actually, Nick, I find your breathing quite offensive. Yeah. Could you stop it? Yes. Yeah. Right. So so there are these things where you're like, well, we don't have to we don't have to really think that hard. There's an obvious answer to whose rights trump who there. But it's the edge cases. I'm guessing given that we're not all in constant conflict, that there are relatively few edge cases and they sort of annoy people. But but it must be the minority of things. Otherwise, we'd all be at, you know, one or the other.

Speaker B: 00:21:14

Oh, they have but there have been murders and things like over things like people moving their boundary fences. So so is this a problem of developed, wealthy societies as well? Yeah. Well, maybe. I but I think that we're thinking about noise. But bear in mind that this actually is the same problem as, you know, and I know that's it is within between household. We think of between households maybe in a different way as within households. But it's not it's different. It's the same as if you're sharing a house with five other people, you know, there's a common area, which is the kitchen. And you've got to agree what's what you can do there. It's so it's not it really is that kind of how do we manage communal spaces? And since the since the sound is it the air is in some sense a communal space that that's part of that problem. Right. So how and so and I don't think there's ever been, you know, a group of flatmates who've all lived together. And there hasn't at some point been some sort of problem about who's buying the toilet rolls or whose turn it is to do the washing up. So so I think we you know, it's easy to say this doesn't happen very often. But I think as a fundamental issue, this is everywhere.

Speaker A: 00:22:22

It's absolutely profound than that. Because when you were talking, Chris, and talking about, you know, the potential weight of opera lovers versus drill lovers remind and how do you mitigate that and rule for that legislate for that? It reminded me, I think, of the American voting system, where precisely I think because I think it's the Senate where every single state has two senators. I think that was initially so that the less populated states right out in the middle or in the south at the time, didn't get outweighted by more popular states, which, you know, much smaller in the east and so on. But what that means is 150 years later, then it gets distorted even further still. But it's trying to legislate for the same thing. Don't we do I mean, so I guess what I'm trying to say is absolutely is is pretty profound and it crops up everywhere.

Speaker C: 00:23:13

Yes, it does crop up everywhere. I suppose the point I was trying to make is that it's on. So it appears regularly, but it must be about the minority of things. We don't have arguments all the time about everything we have. Arguments occur, but, you know, about in communal living, but in the sort of, you know, around a small number of things, unless you build up a strong resentment.

Speaker B: 00:23:37

Well, it might be that we are simply well, I say we let's just say people who are good at living in a city are simply better at managing that sort of conflict implicitly. Right. In other words, they kind of agree to abide by the rules. You know, yeah, we all we all more or less. I mean, I I don't play the piano after, you know, nine o'clock in the evening, for example, not because there's some something somewhere which says I can't, but because it seems reasonable to me, you know. And and and and yet I mean, I've lived in I lived in a well, my mum's flat where I grew up. You know, she she'd always played the piano. I'd always played the piano downstairs. Neighbour was fine with it was during the day. No problem. They got a tenant. They moved out and a tenant moved in and I was playing the piano one day shortly after they moved in and bash on the floor with one assumes a broomstick handle. This makes me just my blood is boiling as we speak at 1pm or something. And then I went down and knocked on the door. I was like, what's the problem? And this guy was like, you know, you are my baby's trying to get to sleep and you're making all this noise. Well, the infuriating thing there wasn't. I mean, I took fine. Why not just come and chat to you? Why not come and chat to me? Why is the first response a bash on the floor? I find that so infuriating.

Speaker C: 00:25:10

You were irritated by his broomstick in the same way as he was irritated. Oh, I would. I get you knocked on the door and he was probably irritated by that.

Speaker B: 00:25:18

Yeah. I mean, but the but the point is that that, you know, I he I don't think let's just say he wasn't as good at conflict resolution as as I was. And, you know, he that's what he should have done. He should have said, oh, really sorry to be a pain in the bum. But, you know, I've got this baby and it likes to go to sleep between midday and two or whatever. Is it OK if you don't play the piano? And I've been like, yeah, sure. You know, and so I think that the fact that we probably have really internalised a lot of conflict avoidance means that this is much less of an issue than it could be an issue.

Speaker C: 00:25:51

He might have been a very good conflict resolver, but he had a young baby. And I think I think all of us, yeah, I think all of us have been in that situation where you can lose your rationality quite quickly. I thought you were going to say where you can lose your baby.

Speaker A: 00:26:07

Yeah, no, no, I've never lost my baby.

Speaker B: 00:26:09

But he just moved in. Yeah, he just moved in. He was an interloper. Yeah. You know, it's like coming to a new tribe and then telling them what the rules are. It's like, no, that's not how it works. No. Right. You can ask for me to be quiet, but you can't demand it.

Speaker C: 00:26:25

I was going to sort of think about. So one of the things I think is quite interesting that Nick raised there was about, you know, perhaps city dwellers are of a type and perhaps country dwellers are of a type. And, you know, whether or not that makes them more social because they live in more densely populated areas or less, less social is an interesting question, because, you know, in sort of, I suppose, intuitively, you think about cities as being anonymous spaces. Right. Yes, there's lots of people around you, but you're perhaps not intimately familiar with all of them, whereas actually village life, there are fewer people. But, you know, maybe everybody knows everybody's business. So it's maybe the same amount of sort of communality. It's just more concentrated in fewer people. But I was thinking that what it made me think of was this idea of like mindedness. And actually, that's quite a critical enabler of communal living. And there's this idea of intentional community, which is residential communities that are designed to have a cohesiveness and involve team working and actually to have similar forms of thought. So if you think of, you know, collectives, kibbutzes, communities, sort of religious communities like the Amish and so on, you know, that idea of, oh, the people we're choosing to live with and, you know, work alongside are ones who share similar goals and values to us. And that's maybe a more sort of a better recipe for, you know, if you can select those you cohabit with, there's perhaps more chance that you share values and you're all like, yes, opera music's fine. Of course, opera music's fine or whatever it might be.

Speaker B: 00:28:29

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I know that this is somewhat similar to Nozick's vision of utopia was this sort of entirely voluntary rules system. So there weren't any overarching rules. What there would be is you effectively identify the set of rules that you want to live under and you move to that community. So instead of prescribing a set of rules that we all ought to live by, he said, no, we should have this almost set of meta rules where we can choose our own rules. But what you don't get to do is impose your rules on other people. But going back to that thing of are there different types of people, that actually maps really well onto Robin Hanson's sort of distinction between farmer norms and forager norms, which is really interesting. It's an interesting thought. He said that so foragers, I mean, he's literally talking about their lifestyle, but it also maps onto their kind of morality, have more complex jobs, work fewer hours, do more exercise, more varied diet, like exploring, tend to have fewer kids, spend more time on leisure, music, et cetera. Whereas farmers travel less, they're politer, they care more about order and cleanliness. You know, those are the things that are actually important. Self-sacrifice, self-control, they're much more important if you're going to be a farmer, right, because your kind of behaviour and effort is directly tied to your output. So you will be interested in this, particularly, Fraser. I found a theory that Tom Hartman said that he thinks that the diagnosis of ADD and ADHD, the increase in that diagnosis is the result of hunter type people or forager type people having farmer type norms imposed on them. What that means in terms of morality is that farmer minority tends to deal very well with conflict between people by effectively drawing lines between them and avoiding communalism. Like farmers effectively set up institutions so that we have less communalism, so you have more hierarchy, for example, whereas forager norms are much more about sharing and communalism. And weirdly, I feel like cities, which are a result ultimately of the agricultural revolution, in fact, allow people to be foragers more. I don't think so. I think because those people, for example, so Hanson says that forager norms are basically left wing and farmer norms are basically conservative. And obviously you find far more left wing people in cities. So Hanson's theory is that increasing wealth effectively unlocks a return to forager norms rather than the slightly artificial farmer norms. Anyway, I'm not wholeheartedly signing up to it, but I like it.

Speaker A: 00:31:27

I like it, but two things. One, we need to wrap up. We need to come to a conclusion. By the way, I think this has been good. But second, although that sort of makes sense and you could sort of say, hey, if there's this kind of people, forager type people and farmer type people, hey, then you can solve some of the issues by putting them in communes together or living over that. But actually, all that does is kind of shift the problem along and up because what happens when those two groups of communities are living next door to each other becomes an issue. Anyway, unless someone's got anything really burning they want to say, question time.

Speaker C: 00:31:59

I was just going to say there's quite an interesting model that came out of Denmark called co-housing, which I think potentially gives you the opportunity to have your cake and eat it. And this is this is the idea of sort of communal housing that has private space and communal space. So you have your own kitchen, but there's also a sort of communal kitchen. It sounds like student halls. I suppose a little bit, except it's family housing and they share resources across the house. So, you know, they have one lawnmower for the street or whatever. It's a kind of cooperative element where it makes sense. But you've then got your space to go and be whatever kind of person you want to be on your own. But it sounds very hippie. It sounds brilliant if you're Danish or Swedish.

Speaker B: 00:32:46

Yeah, it kind of sounds like it already relies on a lot of shared norms. Yeah, classic Nordic.

Speaker C: 00:32:52

Which is where the Nordic model is starting to break down now. Exactly. That sort of social contract that they all signed in the 60s. It's been torn up as we speak.

Speaker A: 00:33:05

Brilliant. So, look, quick question. When have either you been a super... When do you think you've been at your most annoying as a neighbour or in a neighbourly situation? You don't have to be strict in that sense of the word. Or when have you most been annoyed an instant by someone else? Yeah, I mean, you can do one or the other or both. Up to you. I can kick us off if you want, because I'm always annoying people and always getting annoyed by people. I remember once years ago, about 20 years ago, I on purpose went in the quiet carriage of a train, which I rarely do, but it had been a long, stressful day, working hard as always. And I just wanted to relax on the way home, my commute home. And it was a relatively quiet carriage, just in terms of the amount of people. But then this one person, this woman, young woman, sat down near me and proceeded to get her mobile phone out and started calling, having a really long... And as we know, there's always this direct relationship between volume and just general... Banality. Banality. There you go. And so because I'd specifically chosen a quiet carriage, I did go over, excuse me, would you mind at this point? And...

Speaker B: 00:34:13

I think the thing to do is to not even say anything, but simply to point to that this is a quiet carriage. Do the alter, keep lips sealed symbol.

Speaker A: 00:34:21

Suffice to say, she sort of took umbrage at this. Oh no. And just started having this long sort of ranty conversation about me with her boyfriend, clearly her boyfriend, and just going, yeah, what an idiot and all this kind of stuff. And I just sat there just fuming and I did nothing about it apart from...

Speaker B: 00:34:39

You didn't get a burly guard to come and evict her.

Speaker A: 00:34:41

No, but I did grab her phone and throw it out the window. Yeah, that's reasonable. In my imagination afterwards.

Speaker B: 00:34:48

Well, this is, I think, is a good example of sort of... There's no incivility, but a good example of sort of how hard it can be to resolve things like this is our next door neighbours, very sweet family. The dad, who's now sadly passed away, fairly elderly, but all like first generation Italians. Not the best English speaker in the world and would sometimes something would have annoyed him. But so, for example, you know, if there was a leak in the pipe that the drain came from or there was some kind of something was dripping or there was a problem with a wire or something in the communal space, he would it would take him absolutely forever to get round to talking about what we should do about it. He would come over and start telling us about what was going on. And, you know, it's a real problem for him. And isn't it annoying? And it's the leak is coming through to my basement. And and have I told you about my basement? It's where I make the wine. Oh, I get these Sangiovese grapes. And now you've got to come down and sit. And it was like, whereas I think I've probably almost like come from a probably a bit more of a direct let's resolve the conflict kind of culture where I would want to say, right, what are we going to do about it? Do you want to get it repaired? Should we split the cost? But I think, you know, from his point of view, that would have seemed incredibly forward and rude. So, yeah, I used to have to endure these interminable conversations about any communal issue. And I and I sort of felt like, well, I get it. I get where he's coming from. He's trying to turn this into just, you know, an us problem rather than a him and me problem. But I was like, I was just perfectly happy, perfectly happy to go. Oh, yeah, that's a problem.

Speaker A: 00:36:45

Let's get it fixed. Let's split the cost. I'm starting to see that maybe you're the problem here because this sounds like quite a pleasant interaction to me. Anyway, let's let's let's sort of draw a veil over that, Chris.

Speaker C: 00:36:56

Well, I suppose I would pick an example of un-neighbourliness that I'm aware of. I mean, aside from, you know, me sort of breaking neighbours greenhouses, playing cricket or something, something like that as a child. A friend of mine at school, he was a bit of a sort of latchkey kid. So he would go home and let himself in. And he he forgot his keys and he really needed to go to the toilet. And so and it wasn't it was the less convenient of of the two excretion processes. Anyway, he decided he decided to disburthen himself in his neighbour's front garden, not his own, but his neighbour's front garden. And I always thought that was a good example of one of those things where you don't need you don't need some set of rules to decide whether or not that is acceptable or not.

Speaker B: 00:38:03

Well, it would have been less problematic if his neighbour hadn't been sitting in a deck chair reading the paper three feet away.

Speaker A: 00:38:09

But yeah, yeah, quite right. All right. Let's stop there. That was very enjoyable. Went to some surprising places, but all the better for it. So thank you as always for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Nick Hare and Chris Wragg of Aleph Insights. Until next time, goodbye.