Zvi
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Why Destructive Value Capture?
Amazon to me is a great example of not trying to exploit your customers for short term profits, instead choosing to give them the best possible experience, and now because of that, they are Amazon—that means both finding a way to not charge for shipping by refactoring their prices and offering prime, even if some customers cost them money, to avoid looking like they charge for shipping, and also to actually offer a good deal and a great interface and so on. They’re not trying to get you to buy overpriced stuff, or waste your time or maximize clicks.
The goal should be to provide the best customer experience, so you get people to come back, without making too many sacrifices on revenue per customer. The ads are chump change, I’d even argue having them at all is an error, but intentionally making your product worse to pitch them is a clear disaster. The snacks are more relevant, but the rush to get a seat (and the risk of losing it) cuts both ways, and goodwill towards the theater is likely a big factor in whether people are willing to shell out that much.
Making an actual different-price auction makes people make hard decisions, as you note, so it’s a bad customer experience, same as getting put in a bad spot. So the goal is to design a system avoiding both; encouraging advance purchase of tickets to pick seats is a reasonable compromise, as is avoiding having terrible choices.
Short term thinking; destroying value like that kills you in the long run. But sure.
Any frequent goer returns to the same location multiple times, so even if we consider each one in isolation, this is a very bad plan.
Front Row Center
Simplified Poker Conclusions
Confirmed.
Simplified Poker Strategy
It’s worth noting that against the actual field I faced, you can do much better than Nash.
Against this opponent, yes. Against other opponents, no.
Simplified Poker
Noting that my salience for Ender’s Game (which I like a lot, but not like Duncan likes it) wasn’t about kids treated with respect and given agency. It’s about a system that ruthlessly manipulates and exploits and lies to those kids, especially Ender, despite it taking a huge toll on all concerned, because the world needs saving and it’s time to be the SOBs that do what it takes to get them ready and motivated, and get results. And then the sequels are about him dealing with the consequences of that, plus some Mormonism.
I appreciated the GDP-to-gold graph exactly because it’s not doing the thing the OP thinks it is doing, but rather showing the extent to which gold is a favored store of value slash the growth rate of wealth as opposed to income/production (GDP), and what that implies about the value of gold as an investment and the forward interest rate. It’s much cleaner than how I’d been thinking about it before, and the logic likely extends (amusing graph: GDP-to-Bitcoin, world is clearly ending).
Same with the hypothetical GDP-to-land, here, since that seems to have important implications worth thinking about, as well.
GDP-to-oil is going to have a lot of idiosyncratic movement as oil supply changes and our energy sources evolve.
GDP-to-corn is going to capture some idiosyncratic movement from agriculture, as Paul notes, and also for corn in particular—I’m guessing its subsidies make it a special case? So it’s kind of like we’re multiplying GDP-to-CPI by CPI-to-corn for some smart thing in the CPI slot, but the question of how much food our stuff is worth does seem like a good sanity check. How much food a worker can buy with their labor, better still.
My experience moving is that the annoyance cost of moving—prioritization, search, negotiation, moving and changing your stuff, relearning your surroundings, making new friends, dealing with the kids, and so forth—towers over things like real estate commissions, even if you own a relatively expensive house, especially now that the internet is (finally!) driving them down. When recently considering a move, at first I thought the round-trip commission cost was an issue until I realized it was missing a zero versus other concerns.
I felt bad about using it as the example in my comment, feeling the OP should have picked a different example, but did it anyway because the OP did it. Agreed this was an error, we should use Nazis if and only if we actually mean Nazis, and find a better go-to example. Thoughts on what this should be? Kant’s literal ‘murderer at the door’ feels arbitrary and lame to me.
I wonder how much of the problem is exactly this. Claiming someone is lying is by default, claiming that someone is doing something wrong. So if something isn’t wrong, it must not be lying—thus saying things ‘aren’t really lying’ rather than biting the bullet and saying that lying is OK in a situation.
This does seem to break down in sufficiently clear circumstances (e.g. the Gestapo searching for Jews in the attic) but even then I think there’s a strong instinctual sense in which people doing this don’t consider it lying.
There seems to be an assumption here that the point of debate is to win. Sometimes it is, but most of the time, the goal should be for the goal to be to learn about the world, and to get the right answer, and generally to grow stronger.
Which makes me love getting to debate people who are ‘out of my league’ when there’s a safe opportunity to do so, the same way that I love playing games against superior opponents.
I mean, Sir Patrick Stewart wants to debate acting methods with me? Sign me up. Highlight of my year!
Worth noting that we currently have a lot of discussion going on, and the more we have, the more inclined I am to support moderation raising its standards for what is acceptable, and getting more aggressive. A shift from ‘not generating discussion’ to ‘generating lots of discussion some of which may be bad’ changes the situation a lot.
I assure you the prophecy was rarely fulfilled.
I’ve attended one event under Chatham House rules. Not only was keeping who was there a secret costly, but people reliably considered it unreasonable that I actually kept that secret. “Oh, come on” and variants were used often, because actually keeping to the rule was annoying and they didn’t see the point.
People treating it as unreasonable does make keeping the rule even more expensive, and raises the probability it will be ignored—I believe others took the information part seriously but not the who was there part. But that also makes it really important we find a way to do the full no-one-knows-you-are-there thing when you need to do it, without it giving away that there was true need for it. If you say who attended until the moment you really can’t say, you’re doing Glomarization / Meta-Honesty wrong...