alt Hacker NewsGPS and the Lost Art of Getting Lost
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Orienteering is a good skill to have. My wife and one of my best friends could both get lost trying to get out of a cardboard box.
With that said, in the days before GPS, I recall wandering off my planned route for a bit in a new to me city, crossed the wrong street, and ended up in the poorest neighborhood and gang controlled territory. Nothing came of it, other than a lesson learned to be a little more careful about planning potential deviations rather than impromptu ones.
Going into the donut store and having to pass money under bullet proof glass and getting the donut through a revolving bullet proof door was certainly an interesting experience, though not one I'd care to repeat.
The "Derive"[1] app from french collective "Hérétique"[2] his really great to help you wander while still going on your way. I use it a lot when discovering a new city by foot...
It's fascinating to see how reliant our world is on GPS services (GNSS more precisely, not only location, but especially time) and how we still get even more reliant every day while at the same time we can see how fragile all of this is in the conflict zones of the world.
Maybe there is room for a stalker like lost art in navigation in places where it all breaks down but I doubt it.
The future I see is more one of autonomous navigation systems. Ones that pick up locations cues wherever they are and build a local map that helps you or your vehicle to find your way.
I'll be honest, I'm not sure why I should feel nostalgic about inconvenience. Getting lost is a major inconvenience, it creates anxiety, wastes time, and all around just sucks.
GPS greatly reduces all of those things at the expense of... I'm not sure what honestly. The article was short on that part - or at least, to me, the benefits felt like inconveniences reframed as excitement and entertainment. I'll pass on this and most of the 'I miss the good ol days when life was harder ' genre.
I don't miss the days of stopping at a gas station for directions. I don't miss taking the slower route because I didn't have traffic updates redirecting me. I don't miss inconvenience for its own sake.
To each their own, but I really don't get this inconvenience nostalgia period we find ourselves in.
One of my best experiences in Prague back around 2010 was when I had no Google Maps, tried navigating with a hotel pamphlet map, and promptly lost my way towards the student culture house I was trying to find.
Ended up asking some locals where I was, and amused they assured me I was way outside the map and had gone east instead of north. I did not want to backtrack so I asked if there was any nice places to get a beer nearby and they pointed me towards a beer garden. Those were some of the nicest Pilsner Urquells and Staropramens I had during my visit. No tourists to be seen, and good vibes all around.
Nowadays I mostly navigate with GPS and rarely just happen on random places like that. I guess we lose some of the discovery when you always know where you are going.
In India, using Google Maps is far better, but it does have a few instances of failures (some that have been disastrous). When lost, asking people for directions has its own failure modes, due to people sometimes describing directions verbally in one way but pointing in another (opposite) direction with their hands (this is an amusing observation in India). The people who use Apple Maps (maybe a handful of them in the country) are cursed to get lost. That service is so hopeless in finding places that it may list something in another country or state.
It's hilarious how many people avoid lower Wacker drive in Chicago because they're so dependent on gps.
I don't have a car so I don't drive often, but I can't stand gps directions when I do, constantly changing the route and micro optimizing. I just look at the map and try to remember it. (Admittedly, having a map in a car is useful, even if I don't like the directions).
A related atrophied skill is the inability for many people to find a place to stop for lunch on the route, since they only understand turn by then directions, not the map.
I volunteer at the German Federal Agency for Technical Relief (THW) and we recently did some navigation training. We have to be prepared for a situation when we don't have access to GNSS. I recently moved to the place where I currently live and I don't have a car. Navigating someone to places you have never seen before by map was a really fun challenge.
I can proudly say that I have not lead us astray.
To some extent this is what "killed" geocaching too. It's still a good niche hobby but up until to 2013 or so it was more fun when not everyone had a GPS in their pocket. Of course you can still play without a GPS but there was a kind of sense of community where everyone tried to help each other. Now you just look at your phone and follow a path
The good old days. I used to live in a cul-de-sac and out-of-town people often wanted to get to a nearby street. The nearby entrance to that one was blocked for traffic reasons.
Tell people they have to turn right 6 times and drive 4 kilometers and they won't believe you.
It's possible to get "lost" even with modern GPS.
My wife and I went on a backpacking trip in the wilderness some years ago. We decided to take a shortcut, bushwacking down a river drainage (1.5 miles) rather than taking the trail all the way around (7 miles) hoping to extend a later part of our trip.
We got downhill through the bushwhack to the bottom of the river valley just fine, but discovered at the bottom that a fire had come through the area a year or two prior. It had completely obliterated the trail, any markers, etc, and trees were fallen everywhere making moving in a straight line very difficult.
Despite having a phone with GPS and offline maps showing exactly where the trail "should" be, the lack of the trail actually existing combined with the challenging terrain made navigating out of the area a huge challenge. It was very easy to start wandering off in the wrong direction away from where the trail used to run without realizing and having to course correct back. I think we were moving at maybe 1/3 mile per hour, for 5-6 hours, until we finally made it out of the burn to where the trail existed again.
I have been living without a cell/smart phone for about six years now. I am a runner and I'd like to run at every city I visit. I have done many early morning runs in a strange city without a map or a phone. I lost sometimes but always found my way back.
One thing I notice is that I pay more attention to the road names whenever going somewhere without a map or GPS. I try to memorize road names instead of "turn left" or "turn right" notifications in digital maps these days.
Pre-gps, my wife and I used to head to a destination (local trips to pick up something, often a good distance from home) and on the return home pick random right and left turns. Eventually we would wind up headed back home, but not after exploring the countryside. It was always a nice way to spend an afternoon.
The park orienteering course at the end reminds me of a similar development in game design: Even before most people had GPS phones in real life, many video games already had a form of virtual GPS: A map with a marker of where the player is in the virtual world.
Only much later did various games start to abandon that marker (possibly even a map in general), because it made navigation too easy: it disincentivized exploration, orientation, things like figuring out vague verbal directions, and path finding in general.
I find that it's difficult to thread the needle of navigating on my own with also not spending forever in traffic or in train delays. It's disheartening when I do know how to get somewhere, but I land in a +1 hour traffic jam because I chose to not look at GPS.
Maybe I need an app that just yells at you when you take a super-wrong turn, or if you're about to be in a massive amount traffic?
Related: I highly recommend "The Natural Navigator" by Tristan Gooley[0] as a means of training your brain to orient itself.
I still often check the map, albeit now on Google Maps, before I go somewhere I don't know, whether by car or on foot.
I find it provides much better and needed awareness of my surroundings. It sometimes also helps falling for sat-nav bad choices. On foot/by public transport I often don't even need to check my phone and can just walk looking around (I know, who does that?!)
I've been visiting a particular hospital while perfectly healthy, and said hospital is undergoing a lot of construction. Even in normal conditions, a large medical center is challenging to navigate, but with the construction surprises, even more so. Google Maps doesn't have sufficient internal information to help (although I noticed that Maps does seem to know where all the sections are inside the local Best Buy?) I did obtain and scan a comprehensive map of the campus, but sometimes it is not sufficiently interactive to find where I am, or how to get somewhere.
So I spend a lot of time walking and trying to follow the many directional signs, which can be helpful. Hospital navigation is a lot of walking. It is unsurprising that many will punt to a wheelchair with assistant. Anyway, it is often the case that I encounter a VIP administrator or high official (evident from their high heels, elegant dress, and lofty demeanor) and they easily notice I'm very lost, and they offer to help and give me directions. The first time, I accepted because I was just trying to get outside without encountering the E.R. again. But the second time I looked the lady in the eye and I said "no thank you! I rather enjoy getting lost in here!" and she smiled and said she feels the same way.
> “I don’t think there’s enough research yet to say G.P.S. is terrible, that it’s hurting your brain,” Hegarty said. But it’s clear that turn-by-turn directions prioritize stimulus response over cognitive mapping.
Articles like this one annoy me so much, where is clear the author started with a premise and backfilled the "evidence". The New Yorker would never publish this kind of speculative innuendo if the article was for example about vaccine hesitancy, so it's frustrating to see that stanard relaxed for other topics.
We were on our way to Annual Training for the National Guard on a charter bus. I was seated close to the front and could see where we were heading, and knew that we were leaving the small town where the garrison was, getting on the interstate, and heading to the post across the state. I saw the sign on the side of the road pointing straight ahead to the interstate entrance/exit. The bus driver's GPS said "Turn right," and he turned right without thought, right into a neighborhood with narrow streets and deep ditches on either side. He couldn't navigate the turns in the bus to get us back out, and eventually had to back out the way he came. Thanks, Tom Tom.
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You can still get lost today if you want to.
When I go to a new city, I find a landmark than take the train/bus/subway towards it but not to it. I get off ~ 3-5 miles away from it, then I try to find on my own navigating the streets in the general direction of it. Yes, it takes a an hour or two to get there, but I get to see things at random which otherwise I would miss.
I have seen people with phones in their hands asking for directions and not knowing how to tell Google Maps where they want to go.