The "Newer-Is-Better" Fallacy

Over the weekend I happened upon an online conversation about a small and specialized computer program, and was surprised to find something vanishingly rare in internet discourse: good sense.

One participant was concerned because there had been no updates to the program in a couple of years. Replied his correspondent, “It works.” The example he offered in illustration was calculators. Calculator applications are not often upgraded because, whinging from the fever swamps that arithmetic is racist notwithstanding, there are few developments in the field of 2+2. In fact, you might have discovered that calculator applications that attempt improvements have become too complicated for convenient use. Navigating around algebraic functions is no fun when you’re just trying to balance the checkbook.

Yet most of us would download the new one anyway, just because it’s new. We assume that “new” means “better.”

Marketers know this. Next time you’re at the grocery store, look at how many product labels contain the word “NEW!” There’s often no explanation. It’s a shiny object. Then consider how many products you wish were still as they once were. The fact is, “new” covers a multitude of sins: New smaller package. New higher price. New manufacturing method that allows us to sell you something not as good.

We like to think that the market cures all of this, but it doesn’t. For every New Coke driven into embarrassed oblivion by outraged customers there are a thousand products that have been fundamentally changed, and not for the better, that customers endure silently.

Not that many years ago a camera with no viewfinder would have been laughed off the shelves — if the product even made it that far. Then, in the early 2000s, Canon, I believe it was, brought out compact cameras that gave users only a screen on the back, no optical viewfinder. But, hey, it came in assorted colors! And it was New!

Now, that lack is standard and you’ll work hard to find a small camera that lets you compose pictures properly.

Added to this, to stick with cameras for a minute, was the megapixels war. This was marketing’s triumph over physics. The amount of light that can reach a surface, in this case the sensor, is fixed in any given situation. Digital camera sensors are small, much smaller than you think. The only way to increase the amount of light reaching a sensor is to make the sensor bigger. But that cost more than increasing the number of photosites on a sensor smaller than the nail on your pinkie finger. It was implied that this would somehow increase the quality of your pictures. It didn’t, because it couldn’t. All it could do is make file sizes bigger by cramming them with useless processing noise, detrimental when it had any effect at all.

Don’t believe me? Then please explain how Sports Illustrated, back when it was a thing, got those stunning full-color cover pictures out of Nikon D1 cameras with their 2.7-megapixel sensors. Those sensors were bigger than the ones in dinky cameras, though at 23.6x15.5mm pretty small by film standards. Nikon knows how to make use of light, and if the situation would have been improved by dividing it into finer bits, Nikon would have done it for their $5,000 (body only, in 2000) flagship camera.

In the 2010s I shot a lot of pictures professionally with Nikon D7100 cameras. They sported a 24.1-megapixel sensor in the same size as that of the D1, but Nikon had by then figured out how to make those pixels useful — and still the sensors were much, much bigger than those in cameras advertising even more pixels. (And assorted colors!) In 2018 I put them in reserve and got a D500, the professional version, and with the same sized sensor the D500, a much newer and more expensive camera, it had reduced the count to 20.9 megapixels. Yet the pictures out of it were astoundingly good, far better even than those from the D7100s. It could make pictures in lower light than anything that had come before. There was more to it than newness.

Which is to say that something being new is not necessarily a bad thing, but to be good it requires more than newness, and too often being new is all a product has to offer. And too often people are expected to fall for meaningless “improvements” that improve nothing and even reduce the quality of the results to save production costs, or we are simply to buy something just because it’s new.

Since the turn of the century, a big thing among marketing types has been “disruption,” meaning “burn it down and then — NEW!” “We will disrupt the industry,” says some slickster with a cockamamie, often borderline illegal, idea. “So give us a lot of money — we’ll be back for more — and you can become an official venture capitalist!” There is usually little or nothing behind it, and the projects usually crash and burn, but people buy into them. I know several such disruptors. They’re the sort accustomed to creeping out of town come nightfall. A good case study can be found in the story of Caldera Open Linux a couple decades ago, but that’s just one of many. It is the investment version of “New!”

Baseball has gotten “disrupted” from time to time over the years. This downward slide began, I think, with introduction the infield fly rule at the turn of the last century. Yes, I’m serious. New rules have steadily worsened the game; the ones enacted last year turned it into a joke that could be topped only by requiring players in extra innings to wear clown makeup and oversize, floppy shoes.

One of the most damaging effects of newness was something you probably haven’t given thought to, a bit of legislation that became the 17^th^ Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. It established election of senators by popular vote and it was among the worst ideas ever.

The framers of the Constitution did not undertake their work lightly, and the result was a masterpiece. It carefully apportioned power to the central government, the various federated states, and to the people, to prevent an overly powerful national government on one hand and an overly powerful, fickle populace on the other, one piece of the elaborate framework of checks and balances. It was not for nothing that Benjamin Franklin, when asked by a woman (Elizabeth Willing Powel — spelling of names wasn’t a big deal then) what kind of government he and the others had given us, replied “a republic, if you can keep it.”

The balances were precise. To provide a direct voice to the people, there is the House of Representatives. To act as a brake on those representatives who would too quickly embrace the next big thing, there is the Senate. The former is apportioned by population, the latter, by state. It was brilliant, as was the Constitutional provision that senators be selected not by popular vote but by their respective state legislatures.

The 17^th^ Amendment destroyed much of that wisdom. The Constitution established a Senate selected as it is for a reason. Repealing the 17^th^ Amendment is a much-needed reform, as unlikely as it is ever to happen.

Let’s look at that word, “reform.” It is, like “new,” presented to us as if it, unadorned, means “improvement.” That’s not what it means at all. It means merely to change the shape of a thing. A loon named Laszlo Toth took a hammer to Michelangelo’s *Pietà* in 1972 and reformed it. We act as if “change” is necessarily good, and it isn’t.

Our method of selecting candidates for the U.S. Presidency has been similarly “reformed.” It will probably surprise you to learn that primary elections had practically nothing to do with the selection of candidates until the years following World War II. The first time a presidential primary had significant effect was 1952, when the one in New Hampshire persuaded Harry Truman to abandon his hope of winning a third term. (The Twenty-second Amendment, limiting a president to two terms, was ratified in 1951and did not apply to Truman, the then-current president.) But even that primary served only an advisory role — it told Truman to forget it, because he would ultimately lose. In 1968, Eugene McCarthy, a senator from Minnesota, would have been the nominee under the current system. But he nomination went to Hubert Horatio Humphrey, who hadn’t been in the primaries at all.

It was not until the 1970s and 1980s that primaries came to have their current influence. A system that had given us George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and the others who were great statesmen was replaced by a reform that produced Bill Clinton, Barack Obama (who, sorry, except for a notable first wasn’t a very good president), Donald Trump, and, now, the crispy corpse of Joe “Bugout” Biden.

It is that reform that puts us in the mess we have now. In earlier years, there was no permanent-campaign industry. Campaigning didn’t begin until after the conventions, because until then there was no candidate. The conventions were important events, covered by the media and followed by the people. Now, they’re not-very-good variety shows, the political outcome having been predetermined. (The Democrats plan to have the actual nomination vote, at this point selecting what’s left of Biden, before the convention even begins.)

The voices of those who for instance are dimwitted dupes of Iran must be given supreme power in our reformed political system. But we’re not a democracy for a reason, and this is an example of it.

Democracies collapse under the weight of their own stupidity and waywardness. We’re a republic, because as Churchill described it, it’s “the worst form of government except for all the others.”

New ideas are not always, or even often, good ideas. Those who monkey with things are most frequently monkeys. Government by whim has a long and impressive history of failure. But here we are.

It is summer, and it has been hot and humid here, and as soon as I send this I’m going to take a shower. Using Kirk’s Hard Water Coco Castile Soap, which is pretty much as it has been for 185 years.

Because it’s best not to monkey with what works.