"Among the Thugs" by Bill Buford, which looks at football violence and crowd deaths in the 1990s is a great read if you're interested in crowds (and even if you're not interested in soccer/football at all). It's real gonzo stuff, embedded into the fan groups, going to the games, and even getting beaten by police.
Contains some interesting observations. And sure, it makes sense to think about the design of such events. But to claim that "hooliganism", "youth culture", and "religious fanaticism" have nothing to do with crowd crushes seems absurd, and makes it feel like the author has an agenda. The way it's narrated reinforces this feeling.
Why do people find it so hard to grasp that there are multiple factors to such complex events?
> But to claim that "hooliganism", "youth culture", and "religious fanaticism" have nothing to do with crowd crushes seems absurd [...]
Whenever you believe to have identified the root causes for an event, and they're as diverse and disjunct as hooliganism, youth culture, and religious fanaticism, then that's a strong indicator that those factors aren't actually causally related to the event. Blaming crowd crushes on "youth culture" is reminiscent of blaming school shootings on video games.
The common denominator amongst these causes would seem to be that people turn off their critical thinking abilities and value a commitment to some ideology more than being smart about things. I thought that was obvious, so I used the phrase from the video "hooliganism, youth culture, and religious fanaticism" as a synonym for this.
> [...] that people turn off their critical thinking abilities and value a commitment to some ideology more than being smart about things.
That's not at all what is happening in a crowd crush situation. As explained in the video, above a certain crowd density, people physically lose the ability to control their movement in the mass of bodies and involuntarily behave more like molecules in a fluid and less like individual actors. The people in the back of the crowd, who still have agency in their movement, don't know that they're indirectly causing the death of others, they're not homicidal maniacs (for the most part).
Blaming crowd crushes on the lack of "critical thinking abilities" and "commitment to some ideology" is intuitive, easy, and wrong. A wrong model for a problem will prevent you from finding an effective solution – as seductive as that model may be.
> As explained in the video, above a certain crowd density, people physically lose the ability to control their movement in the mass of bodies and involuntarily behave more like molecules in a fluid and less like individual actors.
The people at the interface of that phase change have the choice to move backwards, but still press forwards even though it puts them into physical contact with other people. They can be partially excused for not knowing of the situation ahead of them, but they're still (usually, except in cases of fire/etc) making a free choice to physically touch and press themselves into and against other people. I am talking about people at the interface, not in the middle of it.
If everybody in the crowd refused to voluntarily press somebody else, then no forces would be transmitted through the crowd. But pressing other people, particularly to jostle your way past them, is the nature of crowd psychology. For this reason people should avoid crowds entirely. Being in such a high density crowd is usually a choice.
I understand the argument. The problem with this is just that it requires people who sacrifice their critical thinking abilities to an ideology in order to end up with a mass of people who stand so close to each other that they are best described by the equations of fluid dynamics.
The people in the center of the crowd who die had plenty of opportunities to get out, but they didn't; they committed to their respective ideology.
Sure, if you find yourself in a mass of people that is so dense that you loose any sense of agency, it might help to remember that you're just a molecule in the mass and go with the flow. But if you find yourself in such a situation, it's usually a clear sign that you haven't always been reasonable on the way there.
Wendover production is a good quality channel that I always recommend. That being said, their explinations of the problems at hand are always too simplified and limited. Yes the topic is much more complex, but by the end of the video you will end up with some idea about the topic. It is a way to fill some curiosity and satisfy clicks. It can not be taken as any source of knowledge or 101 introduction into topics.
There could be any cause for the crowd to form in the first place, that crowd dynamic would be similar whatever the motivation of the crowd is. For instance if you're in the core zone that would get crushed if/when the crowd's movement was stopped, blaming avid capitalism doesn't help you in any way, you would have been safe if under the same incentives the organisators of the event had proper crowd management in first place.
Fatalities at the Hajj weren't reduced by making people less religious, they improved their logistics instead [edited]
One you're already in the crush zone nothing is going to help you, not even blaming the event organizers for lacking proper crowd management in the first place. Once you're in that situation, your life remains imperiled no matter who or what you point your finger at. The solution is to avoid getting into that situation in the first place, and until public places are fixed that means not being where a crowd is. Not going to the event in the first place is the best solution, but you can also leave early (my preference) or leave late, or leave through a lesser known exit.
Counting on organizers to fix it with policy is a bad idea, the physical structure of public places needs to be changed to prevent it. Policy-based solutions are great as one layer of defense, but if that's your only defense in a structure that is otherwise prone to crowd crush, you're better of not being there in the first place.
I find it easy enough to imagine a type of people that would not engage in such barbaric actions under any circumstances. Say a group of 10000 physicist assembling to discuss quantum physics. But, sure, if you can't change the type of people assembling, improving logistics is your only option.
The same would happen if they were all tightly packed in a small venue, and at the end of the conference there was only one exit down a narrow path.
For the record, a similar issue happened in Korea not so long ago at a Halloween festival where people weren't even motivated to go a specific way, it was just too overcrowded:
> I find it easy enough to imagine a type of people that would not engage in such barbaric actions under any circumstances.
None of the people in the back intend to cause injuries to the people in the front of the crowd, nor do they even know what's happening. The cause of crowd crushes is not the "type of people assembling", as evidenced by the wide variety of crowds that experienced crushes.
I agree that it's annoying not to spell things out literally, but what I hear is that if we talk about those aspects then people get in a moral huff and refuse to do anything to solve the problem, and innocent people who aren't hooligans, dumbasses, or fanatics die along with the hooligans, dumbasses, and fanatics.
If you say it's "not really about" those things, then you bypass people's knee-jerk moralism and make it possible to actually work on the problem and prevent people from dying, which is important because many sane and reasonable people have no choice but to mix in with the dumbasses if they want to participate in these activities.
I mean the paradoxical observation is that more chaotic and more hostile crowd gatherings somehow doesn't result in a crush while ones that's (initially) not as violent ends in deaths. I find that a more interesting question is why disaster like this doesn't happen more often.
For the first example in this video, I immediately thought that the staff should create tickets that guarantee purchase of the item, and then walk down the line and hand out tickets in order. Once all 500 tickets are handed out, the rest of the crowd has no choice but disperse.
The rest of the video is fascinating, such as how crowd crushes happen
On a more serious note, that process can be done online, in particular as a lottery. The main issue would be that some stores actually want the crowd lining up to get news coverage of the event. Covering the event in a more dire light (from the angle of the store being too dumb with their operation ?) could help for those.
I have a side question. Is there just an entire industry of anonymous low cost labor countries that YouTubers outsource their video compilation to, where the service is to gather 300 random clips that vaguely relate to the text being spoken, but are not the person's own work or research?
Without even realizing it for a while, I started to mistake a video that basically stated someone's collected assertions/opinions/variously supported research with pseudo documentary journalism because of the huge number of video clips being played as the person spoke.
Or these amount of clips are just needed to hold someone's attention if the person making the video is only doing a voiceover? I guess otherwise, nothing distinguishes the video from a podcast.
> vaguely resembling whatever they're talking about
The sibling channel to Wendover, (which is produced by the same team) 'Half As Interesting' [1] uses this to comedic effect - they will often show what is clearly the wackiest or strangest clip that came up when searching on these clip sites the phrase that the narrator is saying.
I think Wendover is a team of like 6-12 people? I just paged through the video and there's a lot of world map stuff (time consuming), Google Earth stuff (fairly quick) and crowd-specific CGI (super time consuming). Then they still need to fill the rest of the time, so yeah, stock footage will have to do.
If I want to watch a Wendover Productions video, I might as well read the wikipedia article myself and have a few tabs of stock videos open in the background.
> The key to good crowd control is partying with a strong tank that knows when to taunt or use his other abilities while as a dps you're focusing your fire correctly.
