Fungibility is in my mind quite a narrow concept and I can’t really identify the “traditional approach”.
As I am trying to read whatever this “traditional approach” is would reason: product has a consumer satisfaction as low_cost+high_durablity+high_availability+high_familiarity. Some reference good is good in categories low_cost,high_durablity,high_availabilty and bad in high_familiarity but ranks better in satisfaction overall. How can a “better” product have inferiority in it? 20 points better product offcourse means 5+5+5+5 better and any product that has any negative in any category is off course going to be inferior.
But doing a cost benefit analysis often is about discovering the correct way to funge. If you can make the product 1000 times better by increasing the cost by 0.0001 times you probably should do it. That one can stably and reliable balance the costs and benefits strongly suggets that the things are fungeable. If one could rationally insist that not even an iota of size 0.0001 of damage is acceptable to get a benefit of 1000 times in another category that suggests that things would be holy or infinidesimal in regards to each other. But being able to compromise over damage category boundaries means there is no lexical priority between them.
If you can make the product 1000 times better by increasing the cost by 0.0001 times you probably should do it.
Yes—this is not an argument against making that tradeoff. This is an argument for not treating that tradeoff as a substitue i.e. fungible. Fungibility implies two things are essentially interchangeable and each of whose parts is indistinguishable from another part.
Your weighting or prioritizing didn’t lead to a substitution. You incurred a debt every time you prioritized one category over another. Not all debt is bad, some debt is good—but ignoring debt or incorrectly funging it leads to bad outcomes.
The traditional net-benefit approach leads to exactly this mistake by treating tradeoffs as fungible. Making it ok to incur costs in one category as long as you gain in another category based on some weight and proportion—ad infinitum.
And this actually happens in real life. It’s what leads to things like Technical Debt—where moving quickly is prioritzed over clean code. This can be a good thing for a startup, but treating it as fungible can bring the entire org to a stand-still. The same in City Planning—where housing people quickly, without underlying infrastructure results in permanent slums.
The concept of Non-Fungible Costs is then a useful tool to avoid this tradeoff=substitution spiral.
Ah this really leans into the “indistinguishability” property in the sense of blindness. I was thinking it more as ambivalence, when I go buy orange juice I might not care for the brand that I buy but I can in principle check it.
In the automation example say that there are 1000 jobs about to be born and 1 job about to be lost. Sure just caring about the number of jobs might be blind but if one halts this transition because the loss of the 1 job is unacceptable then that implicitly incurs a heavy weighting between the different jobs (ie the new jobs are about 0.001 worth the old kind of job). Being capriciously impartial could come off as a bias, rather than shooting for general wellbeing you are infact advocating for the well being of some groups over others.
In the technical debt case we could also model it as the step that introduces the standstill to be be a highly harm inducing decision that could not “sneak by” the cost benefit analysis.
I think there is a certain “cost amnesia” that sets in after a “good” decision? Even for fairly large costs. So the “indistinguishability blindness” is often a cognitive response to maintain the image of a good decision rather than determined by hard numbers.
Regardless, this is likely entering speculation territory. It’s something I’d noticed in my own life as well as in policy decisions i.e. a negative reaction to talking about fairly large costs because net-benefits were still positive.
I’ve added an EDIT in the post towards the end that I think responds to this
Fungibility is in my mind quite a narrow concept and I can’t really identify the “traditional approach”.
As I am trying to read whatever this “traditional approach” is would reason: product has a consumer satisfaction as low_cost+high_durablity+high_availability+high_familiarity. Some reference good is good in categories low_cost,high_durablity,high_availabilty and bad in high_familiarity but ranks better in satisfaction overall. How can a “better” product have inferiority in it? 20 points better product offcourse means 5+5+5+5 better and any product that has any negative in any category is off course going to be inferior.
But doing a cost benefit analysis often is about discovering the correct way to funge. If you can make the product 1000 times better by increasing the cost by 0.0001 times you probably should do it. That one can stably and reliable balance the costs and benefits strongly suggets that the things are fungeable. If one could rationally insist that not even an iota of size 0.0001 of damage is acceptable to get a benefit of 1000 times in another category that suggests that things would be holy or infinidesimal in regards to each other. But being able to compromise over damage category boundaries means there is no lexical priority between them.
Yes—this is not an argument against making that tradeoff. This is an argument for not treating that tradeoff as a substitue i.e. fungible. Fungibility implies two things are essentially interchangeable and each of whose parts is indistinguishable from another part.
Your weighting or prioritizing didn’t lead to a substitution. You incurred a debt every time you prioritized one category over another. Not all debt is bad, some debt is good—but ignoring debt or incorrectly funging it leads to bad outcomes.
The traditional net-benefit approach leads to exactly this mistake by treating tradeoffs as fungible. Making it ok to incur costs in one category as long as you gain in another category based on some weight and proportion—ad infinitum.
And this actually happens in real life. It’s what leads to things like Technical Debt—where moving quickly is prioritzed over clean code. This can be a good thing for a startup, but treating it as fungible can bring the entire org to a stand-still. The same in City Planning—where housing people quickly, without underlying infrastructure results in permanent slums.
The concept of Non-Fungible Costs is then a useful tool to avoid this tradeoff=substitution spiral.
Ah this really leans into the “indistinguishability” property in the sense of blindness. I was thinking it more as ambivalence, when I go buy orange juice I might not care for the brand that I buy but I can in principle check it.
In the automation example say that there are 1000 jobs about to be born and 1 job about to be lost. Sure just caring about the number of jobs might be blind but if one halts this transition because the loss of the 1 job is unacceptable then that implicitly incurs a heavy weighting between the different jobs (ie the new jobs are about 0.001 worth the old kind of job). Being capriciously impartial could come off as a bias, rather than shooting for general wellbeing you are infact advocating for the well being of some groups over others.
In the technical debt case we could also model it as the step that introduces the standstill to be be a highly harm inducing decision that could not “sneak by” the cost benefit analysis.
I think there is a certain “cost amnesia” that sets in after a “good” decision? Even for fairly large costs. So the “indistinguishability blindness” is often a cognitive response to maintain the image of a good decision rather than determined by hard numbers.
Regardless, this is likely entering speculation territory. It’s something I’d noticed in my own life as well as in policy decisions i.e. a negative reaction to talking about fairly large costs because net-benefits were still positive.