In general, we should be wary of this sort of ‘make things worse in order to make things better.’ You are making all conversations of all sizes worse in order to override people’s decisions.
Glad to be included in the roundup, but two issues here.
First, it’s not about overriding people’s decisions; it’s a collective action problem. When the room is silent and there’s a single group of 8, I don’t actually face a choice of a 2- or 3-person conversation; it doesn’t exist! The music lowers the costs for people to split into smaller conversations, so the people who prefer those now have better choices, not worse.
Second, this is a Simpson’s Paradox-related fallacy: you are indeed making all conversations more difficult, but in my model, smaller conversations are much better, so by making conversations of all sizes slightly to severely worse but moving the population to smaller conversations, you’re still improving the conversations on net.
Glad to be included in the roundup, but two issues here.
First, it’s not about overriding people’s decisions; it’s a collective action problem. When the room is silent and there’s a single group of 8, I don’t actually face a choice of a 2- or 3-person conversation; it doesn’t exist! The music lowers the costs for people to split into smaller conversations, so the people who prefer those now have better choices, not worse.
Second, this is a Simpson’s Paradox-related fallacy: you are indeed making all conversations more difficult, but in my model, smaller conversations are much better, so by making conversations of all sizes slightly to severely worse but moving the population to smaller conversations, you’re still improving the conversations on net.