“If you see a nice thing, someone is leaving money on the table” is a reason we can’t have nice things.
.
Long version:
People seem to think that it is smart and cute to share pieces of wisdom like “if you never missed a plane, you are spending too much time at the airports”. Yay, you should optimize everything to signal how smart you are! The part that is missing from the picture is how going later to airports will create some extra stress, not just for you, but for everyone involved. In this sense you are defecting in a multiplayer Prisoner Dilemma—imagine if everyone started going to airports at last minute! Suddenly it is less cool if your edgy behavior becomes a social norm.
But it gets worse. When the meme gets popular, imagine what happens if all people… okay, that is not realistic, but… imagine if 10% of people start applying the generalized version of same rule in all parts of their life. (These will probably be overrepresented among managers, because it is their job to optimize things.) Why limit ourselves to the airports? “If you have never been sued for sexual harassment… theft… murder...” complete the pattern. Once you have seen it, you cannot unsee it, right?
When the food you bought in a shop makes you sick, imagine that someone in the shop’s decision chain realized that if their food never makes their customers sick, they are spending too much money making sure that their food is okay. (If the car you produce never explodes and burns its passengers alive… yeah, you have seen the Fight Club.) Heck, if the food you produce is nutritious, that alone means you are leaving money on table, you should replace the nutritious parts with some cheaper shit, just make sure it tastes approximately okay, or just add more sugar.
“That only shows you can’t get nice things for free anymore. But I can still pay for the nice things if I want them.” Are you sure? Are you sure someone is not running a calculation that says that making the thing slightly worse in a certain specific way that is difficult for you to detect could increase the company profit, and therefore it would be really stupid of them not to do so? How sure are you that making your favorite product worse in any possible dimension is something you would immediately find out and punish by changing your supplier? “If you have never betrayed your customer in a way they would be shocked to find out...” complete the pattern.
If ethics means anything, it means leaving the money on the table sometimes. Metaphorically, I mean—I am not talking about tipping here. Actually, the culture of paying your workers minimum wage or less because the customers will then feel bad about not tipping them enough is just another instance of the same pattern.
I just don’t think the airport thing you’re describing is at all defection, or that it’s reasonable to leap to applying the ‘same logic’ to murder as an indictment of the former.
It is really important to distinguish “risks and costs I am willing to take on myself” and “risks and costs I am willing to impose upon others.”
But I don’t think Umesh’s airport rule is saying the thing you’re concerned about; and if people are using it that way, they’re missing the point of it. It’s not a license to impose costs on others through risky behavior; it’s a caution about paying arbitrarily large costs to avert risks to yourself.
(If you arrive late to the airport, you don’t get to cut the queue to make your flight, imposing costs on others. You just have to accept missing your flight. And the airline lets a standby passenger take your seat, so at least someone is better off.)
Similarly, the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero doesn’t mean that the optimal amount of fraud for you to commit is non-zero. It just means that we (economy participants, regulators, etc.) shouldn’t spend arbitrarily large amounts of resources to drive fraud to zero. The optimal amount of fraud for you to commit is still zero; but you shouldn’t be made to pay arbitrarily large accounting & audit costs to prove that you’re not defrauding anyone.
In some cases, risks you impose upon yourself become risks imposed upon others. Generally advocating for people to impose more risks upon themselves poses additional risks on everyone. I don’t want to be in an airport filled with people panicking about being late for their flight. That sounds terrible. And I definitely don’t want to be driving on a road where everyone is significantly more likely to be late. That’s more dangerous.
If people came to the airport with less time, fewer people would be hanging out past security. So either there’d be more space and shorter queues for restaurants, or the airport could be smaller and cheaper.
If food were slightly more likely to get me sick, it would be cheaper and could be produced by small companies that can’t afford a big QA department.
On the other hand, some people wait until the last minute to board. If everyone did that, flights would be delayed a lot. So I grant that as an example of your complaint.
Margin for error can be important, but often, going “above and beyond” is just a waste.
I think the general concept provided by Viliam is true, even if some of their specific examples aren’t perfect. Traffic laws are a good example. In the US (and Europe), most people follow traffic laws. They stay in their lane, they stop for red lights, they yield to pedestrians, and generally maintain an orderly movement of traffic. Do they, individually “leave money on the table” by doing this? Absolutely. It’s aggravating to be late and be held up by hitting an unnecessary sequence of red lights.
However, if everyone started ignoring traffic laws, the outcome would not be a better equilibrium. The outcome would be Indian roads, which are both less safe and less efficient than roads in the West, because hardly anyone actually follows traffic laws and the roads devolve into a Hobbesian “war of all against all”.
I don’t think “often going ‘above and beyond’ is just a waste”, I think it’s the price we pay for living in a civilized society. When someone brings free donuts to the office, we don’t swipe the entire box, we take one, and leave some for everyone else. When stores leave things on open shelves, we don’t simply take products and walk out the door with them. When we see a pedestrian waiting to cross the road, we stop and let them cross. When we see a line we join at the end rather than attempting to barge our way to the front. When we take a shopping cart from the store, we return it to the cart corral, rather than leaving them out in the middle of the parking lot.
I have lived in places where people did not follow those rules. Those places were markedly worse places to live than places where people behaved in an ethical, civilized manner. I push back strongly against anyone who claims that these rules are mostly just waste.
Focusing on choices that essentially affect only the chooser:
“If you’ve never been mugged, you’re taking too few alleyway shortcuts” would be terrible advice, whereas “if you’ve never been turned down for a date, you’re not putting yourself out there enough / aiming high enough” is generally good advice. So now we are talking price.
Setting aside that doing things that are bad for ourselves is often bad for others, and looking at the specific example offered: To me, missing a flight would be like getting mugged. Or at least, it would be much more like getting mugged than getting romantically rejected by a stranger. If it’s a thing that happens once in my entire life, then I haven’t spent enough time at airports.
If it became common knowledge that you can arrive at airports earlier, and people started acting on it, then travelers would notice the new equilibrium and adjust, and on net it would still be positive since people would spend slightly less time waiting at the airport on average. I don’t see how this is defecting—it feels no different than how people change their commute patterns when a new road opens, no?
Also that advice was aimed at frequent flyers for whom missing a flight isn’t a huge deal. For the average flyer it still make sense to arrive early to leave generous margin for delays, which the post acknowledges
imagine that someone in the shop’s decision chain realized that if their food never makes their customers sick, they are spending too much money making sure that their food is okay.”
This is basically how things work and also seems fine? If you wanted to absolutely minimize food poisoning you’d prepare food in a BSL-4 facility, which nobody asks for because it would be ruinously expensive.
How sure are you that making your favorite product worse in any possible dimension is something you would immediately find out and punish by changing your supplier?
This feels overly focused on one direction of change. What I observe at the grocery store is some suppliers make changes that make the product worse and offer me a lower price, while others make their products better (low sugar options, higher protein, ethically sourced ingredients...) and offer a higher price, and the market sorts out which changes which people want
“If you have never betrayed your customer in a way they would be shocked to find out...” complete the pattern. If ethics means anything, it means leaving the money on the table sometimes.
I agree being naively utilitarian and betraying your customers’ expectations is bad ethically, but it’s also bad for the bottom line. Brand reputation concerns and competition from other suppliers (who will loudly tell customers where they have higher standards than the competitor) keeps it in check
This feels overly focused on one direction of change. What I observe at the grocery store is some suppliers make changes that make the product worse and offer me a lower price, while others make their products better (low sugar options, higher protein, ethically sourced ingredients...) and offer a higher price, and the market sorts out which changes which people want
Typically the improvements are announced loudly, while the enshittification happens as silently as possible. Even the notices of improvement need to be read carefully and skeptically. The muesli with “no added sugar”—not added on top of how much already? The “protein” bar or yogurt or whatever—technically that only means that it contains nonzero protein, and yeah in practice often not more than comparable products without the label. The small bar with a big label “zero sugar” on front side, and a small print on the back saying it contains 10% sugar—the small print is regulated in EU, big colorful labels are probably not, make your own conclusion.
Even the brand is something that can be sold, and routinely is. You make quality products until everyone knows that you make quality products. If there is nowhere to expand anymore, the only way to increase profits is to start replacing your ingredients with cheap stuff. Possibly bad in long term, but a huge profit in the next quarter, and that’s what the bonuses depend on. Sometimes you sell the company at the top of its fame, leaving the milking of credulous customers to the new owner.
I don’t think the saying means “you should get to the airport at the last minute”. The point of the saying is that decisions involve tradeoffs, and you should consider the costs and benefits on both sides of the tradeoff.
At the end of the day, how to maintain high trust society in the modern world is the question of our age. It used to be that, if a nation developed under conditions where high trust was vital, it could just stay that way forever, as low-trust individuals were rare enough that they’d be caught, eventually, and shunned. Now, though, many such societies are dealing with people who come in and see free alpha in looting the commons, because they have no investment in them.
Academic cheating and lying on resumes in America, for example, skyrocketed as the American collegiate and employment systems globalized. What’s worse is that many people born there assimilated to the new norm (correctly realizing that not doing so amounted to giving their money to the people doing so). It would be an enormous shame if there were no high trust societies left on Earth after some iterations on this. Many countries (e.g. Japan) have found a solution in strictly limiting migration, but many people here are extremely opposed to that course of action, and I’m curious whether they believe it can be solved by other means.
The only other solution I can think of is something like Singapore, but that doesn’t feel like “real” high-trust. If people don’t break the law because they fear a caning, they’re still the sort of people you don’t really want in your personal life. The OP advocates not defecting in society’s multi-person prisoner’s dilemma because it’s bad for the commons, but the sort of person who defects doesn’t care about that, and there are many, many such people.
“If you see a nice thing, someone is leaving money on the table” is a reason we can’t have nice things.
.
Long version:
People seem to think that it is smart and cute to share pieces of wisdom like “if you never missed a plane, you are spending too much time at the airports”. Yay, you should optimize everything to signal how smart you are! The part that is missing from the picture is how going later to airports will create some extra stress, not just for you, but for everyone involved. In this sense you are defecting in a multiplayer Prisoner Dilemma—imagine if everyone started going to airports at last minute! Suddenly it is less cool if your edgy behavior becomes a social norm.
But it gets worse. When the meme gets popular, imagine what happens if all people… okay, that is not realistic, but… imagine if 10% of people start applying the generalized version of same rule in all parts of their life. (These will probably be overrepresented among managers, because it is their job to optimize things.) Why limit ourselves to the airports? “If you have never been sued for sexual harassment… theft… murder...” complete the pattern. Once you have seen it, you cannot unsee it, right?
When the food you bought in a shop makes you sick, imagine that someone in the shop’s decision chain realized that if their food never makes their customers sick, they are spending too much money making sure that their food is okay. (If the car you produce never explodes and burns its passengers alive… yeah, you have seen the Fight Club.) Heck, if the food you produce is nutritious, that alone means you are leaving money on table, you should replace the nutritious parts with some cheaper shit, just make sure it tastes approximately okay, or just add more sugar.
“That only shows you can’t get nice things for free anymore. But I can still pay for the nice things if I want them.” Are you sure? Are you sure someone is not running a calculation that says that making the thing slightly worse in a certain specific way that is difficult for you to detect could increase the company profit, and therefore it would be really stupid of them not to do so? How sure are you that making your favorite product worse in any possible dimension is something you would immediately find out and punish by changing your supplier? “If you have never betrayed your customer in a way they would be shocked to find out...” complete the pattern.
If ethics means anything, it means leaving the money on the table sometimes. Metaphorically, I mean—I am not talking about tipping here. Actually, the culture of paying your workers minimum wage or less because the customers will then feel bad about not tipping them enough is just another instance of the same pattern.
I just don’t think the airport thing you’re describing is at all defection, or that it’s reasonable to leap to applying the ‘same logic’ to murder as an indictment of the former.
It is really important to distinguish “risks and costs I am willing to take on myself” and “risks and costs I am willing to impose upon others.”
But I don’t think Umesh’s airport rule is saying the thing you’re concerned about; and if people are using it that way, they’re missing the point of it. It’s not a license to impose costs on others through risky behavior; it’s a caution about paying arbitrarily large costs to avert risks to yourself.
(If you arrive late to the airport, you don’t get to cut the queue to make your flight, imposing costs on others. You just have to accept missing your flight. And the airline lets a standby passenger take your seat, so at least someone is better off.)
Similarly, the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero doesn’t mean that the optimal amount of fraud for you to commit is non-zero. It just means that we (economy participants, regulators, etc.) shouldn’t spend arbitrarily large amounts of resources to drive fraud to zero. The optimal amount of fraud for you to commit is still zero; but you shouldn’t be made to pay arbitrarily large accounting & audit costs to prove that you’re not defrauding anyone.
In some cases, risks you impose upon yourself become risks imposed upon others. Generally advocating for people to impose more risks upon themselves poses additional risks on everyone. I don’t want to be in an airport filled with people panicking about being late for their flight. That sounds terrible. And I definitely don’t want to be driving on a road where everyone is significantly more likely to be late. That’s more dangerous.
If people came to the airport with less time, fewer people would be hanging out past security. So either there’d be more space and shorter queues for restaurants, or the airport could be smaller and cheaper.
If food were slightly more likely to get me sick, it would be cheaper and could be produced by small companies that can’t afford a big QA department.
On the other hand, some people wait until the last minute to board. If everyone did that, flights would be delayed a lot. So I grant that as an example of your complaint.
Margin for error can be important, but often, going “above and beyond” is just a waste.
I think the general concept provided by Viliam is true, even if some of their specific examples aren’t perfect. Traffic laws are a good example. In the US (and Europe), most people follow traffic laws. They stay in their lane, they stop for red lights, they yield to pedestrians, and generally maintain an orderly movement of traffic. Do they, individually “leave money on the table” by doing this? Absolutely. It’s aggravating to be late and be held up by hitting an unnecessary sequence of red lights.
However, if everyone started ignoring traffic laws, the outcome would not be a better equilibrium. The outcome would be Indian roads, which are both less safe and less efficient than roads in the West, because hardly anyone actually follows traffic laws and the roads devolve into a Hobbesian “war of all against all”.
I don’t think “often going ‘above and beyond’ is just a waste”, I think it’s the price we pay for living in a civilized society. When someone brings free donuts to the office, we don’t swipe the entire box, we take one, and leave some for everyone else. When stores leave things on open shelves, we don’t simply take products and walk out the door with them. When we see a pedestrian waiting to cross the road, we stop and let them cross. When we see a line we join at the end rather than attempting to barge our way to the front. When we take a shopping cart from the store, we return it to the cart corral, rather than leaving them out in the middle of the parking lot.
I have lived in places where people did not follow those rules. Those places were markedly worse places to live than places where people behaved in an ethical, civilized manner. I push back strongly against anyone who claims that these rules are mostly just waste.
Focusing on choices that essentially affect only the chooser:
“If you’ve never been mugged, you’re taking too few alleyway shortcuts” would be terrible advice, whereas “if you’ve never been turned down for a date, you’re not putting yourself out there enough / aiming high enough” is generally good advice. So now we are talking price.
Setting aside that doing things that are bad for ourselves is often bad for others, and looking at the specific example offered: To me, missing a flight would be like getting mugged. Or at least, it would be much more like getting mugged than getting romantically rejected by a stranger. If it’s a thing that happens once in my entire life, then I haven’t spent enough time at airports.
If it became common knowledge that you can arrive at airports earlier, and people started acting on it, then travelers would notice the new equilibrium and adjust, and on net it would still be positive since people would spend slightly less time waiting at the airport on average. I don’t see how this is defecting—it feels no different than how people change their commute patterns when a new road opens, no?
Also that advice was aimed at frequent flyers for whom missing a flight isn’t a huge deal. For the average flyer it still make sense to arrive early to leave generous margin for delays, which the post acknowledges
This is basically how things work and also seems fine? If you wanted to absolutely minimize food poisoning you’d prepare food in a BSL-4 facility, which nobody asks for because it would be ruinously expensive.
This feels overly focused on one direction of change. What I observe at the grocery store is some suppliers make changes that make the product worse and offer me a lower price, while others make their products better (low sugar options, higher protein, ethically sourced ingredients...) and offer a higher price, and the market sorts out which changes which people want
I agree being naively utilitarian and betraying your customers’ expectations is bad ethically, but it’s also bad for the bottom line. Brand reputation concerns and competition from other suppliers (who will loudly tell customers where they have higher standards than the competitor) keeps it in check
Typically the improvements are announced loudly, while the enshittification happens as silently as possible. Even the notices of improvement need to be read carefully and skeptically. The muesli with “no added sugar”—not added on top of how much already? The “protein” bar or yogurt or whatever—technically that only means that it contains nonzero protein, and yeah in practice often not more than comparable products without the label. The small bar with a big label “zero sugar” on front side, and a small print on the back saying it contains 10% sugar—the small print is regulated in EU, big colorful labels are probably not, make your own conclusion.
Even the brand is something that can be sold, and routinely is. You make quality products until everyone knows that you make quality products. If there is nowhere to expand anymore, the only way to increase profits is to start replacing your ingredients with cheap stuff. Possibly bad in long term, but a huge profit in the next quarter, and that’s what the bonuses depend on. Sometimes you sell the company at the top of its fame, leaving the milking of credulous customers to the new owner.
who am I defecting against by arriving 45 minutes before my flight?
I don’t think the saying means “you should get to the airport at the last minute”. The point of the saying is that decisions involve tradeoffs, and you should consider the costs and benefits on both sides of the tradeoff.
At the end of the day, how to maintain high trust society in the modern world is the question of our age. It used to be that, if a nation developed under conditions where high trust was vital, it could just stay that way forever, as low-trust individuals were rare enough that they’d be caught, eventually, and shunned. Now, though, many such societies are dealing with people who come in and see free alpha in looting the commons, because they have no investment in them.
Academic cheating and lying on resumes in America, for example, skyrocketed as the American collegiate and employment systems globalized. What’s worse is that many people born there assimilated to the new norm (correctly realizing that not doing so amounted to giving their money to the people doing so). It would be an enormous shame if there were no high trust societies left on Earth after some iterations on this. Many countries (e.g. Japan) have found a solution in strictly limiting migration, but many people here are extremely opposed to that course of action, and I’m curious whether they believe it can be solved by other means.
The only other solution I can think of is something like Singapore, but that doesn’t feel like “real” high-trust. If people don’t break the law because they fear a caning, they’re still the sort of people you don’t really want in your personal life. The OP advocates not defecting in society’s multi-person prisoner’s dilemma because it’s bad for the commons, but the sort of person who defects doesn’t care about that, and there are many, many such people.