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dspeyer comments on Rationality Quotes October 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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-- Introducing the Baen Free Library, Eric Flint
(Which I can no longer find at Baen, but copies are scattered across the internet, including here)
Quite a lot, in my experience. I've seen so many well-paid people fired for fiddling their expenses over trivial amounts. Eric Flint, as befits a fiction author, makes a rhetorically compelling case though!
Even more take home with them papers or pens from their workplace and don't get punished for it.
Quite right, too.
Being able to take paper and pens home from the workplace to work is clearly useful and beneficial to the business. It's plainly not worth a business's time to track such things punctiliously unless its employees are engaging in large-scale pilfering (e.g., selling packs of printer paper) because the losses are so small. It's plainly not worth an employee's time to track them either for the same reason. (And similarly not worth an employee's time worrying about whether s/he has brought papers or pens into work from home and left them there.)
The optimal policy is clearly for no one to worry about these things except in cases of large-scale pilfering.
(In large businesses it may be worth having a formal rule that just says "no taking things home from the office" and then ignoring small violations, because that makes it feasible to fight back in cases of large-scale pilfering without needing a load of lawyering over what counts as large-scale. Even then, the purpose of that rule should be to prevent serious violations and no one should feel at all guilty about not keeping track of what paper and pens are whose. I suspect the actual local optimum in this vicinity is to have such a rule and announce explicitly that no one will be looking for, or caring about, small benign violations. But that might turn out to spoil things legally in the rare cases where it matters.)
Lest I be thought self-serving, I will remark that I'm pretty sure my own net flux of Stuff is very sizeably into, not out of, work.
This post is right on the money. Transaction costs are real and often wind up being deceptively higher than you anticipate.
Including legal concerns, the local optimum is probably officially stating that response will be proportional to seriousness of the 'theft', with a stated possible maximum. This essentially dog-whistles that small items are free to take, without giving an explicit pass.
A better optimum might be what some tech company (I thought Twitter but can't find my source) that changed their policy on expense accounts for travel/food/etc. to 'use this toward the best interests of the company', to significant positive results. But some of the incentives there (in-house travel-agent arrangements are grotesquely inefficient) are missing here.
I'm curious: why the downvote for the parent comment? It seems obviously not deserving of a downvote.
... Oh look, someone appears to be downvoting all VAuroch's comments. Dammit, this needs to stop.
It's not nearly as bad as it used to be (I was one of Eugine_Nier's many targets), but yeah, it's frustrating.
How is this a rationality quote? I can see people thinking this is a good argument, especially if you politically agreed with the author, but it doesn't seem to be about rationality, or demonstrating an unusually great deal of rationality
It would definitely be a rationality quote if it went on to quote the part where Eric Flint decided to test his hypothesis by putting some of his books online, for free, and watching his sales numbers.
Does he say what the results were anywhere?
Huge success. Sales jumped up in ways that are hard to explain as anything other than the free library's effect.
It expresses two ideas: