Tl;dr: I love this story, but my expectation is that we’re unlikely to find comparable problems to solve by a similar approach. If we can find one more roughly comparable example in, say, the next year or two, then I’ll update significantly toward thinking we’re missing some big wins. I’ll try to remember to keep an eye out for such examples.
If your model did expect it, I’m very curious to know how that is possible, and how you explain the years 2020 and 2021.
There are two aspects to consider.
Why didn’t the rule get changed earlier?
Why did the rule finally get changed? Alternatively, why don’t the rules get changed more often?
For (1), my barely-informed guess is that before the port got backed up, the rule hadn’t created any obviously significant drawbacks. Then, we did, in fact, have a failure of leadership in terms of recognizing a tractable solution to the problem.
For (2), this was a little-known rule with no defenders, tiny benefits, and (suddenly) massive, obvious drawbacks. Ryan Peterson demonstrated the leadership the situation required, and BOOM, problem solved. My guess is that this actually happens pretty often, but it usually doesn’t make the news, or one of Zvi’s blogposts, for precisely the same reason that the rule was able to be changed. It was a little-known rule causing a little-known problem, was changed basically in a timely fashion, and wasn’t worth calling attention to. It wasn’t interesting to people who don’t think this is shocking, and wasn’t controversial. For the same reason, this problem isn’t getting much press either.
Ryan Peterson should absolutely get a credit banana for his efforts. I think this is an interesting story that we can learn from. I think our difference of opinion is that I don’t anticipate that there’s “treasure everywhere,” in terms of lots of totally uncontroversial, obvious, low-hanging fruit waiting to be plucked by a quick change of the rules.
I think that there might be low-hanging fruit if you exclude the risk of PR problems, and allow that it would be obviously a good idea if you thought about it enough. But these are real barriers.
It might be that we can learn from Peterson, and that PR problems and framing challenges can be mitigated by a sophisticated messaging approach. So we then could say that our civilization is bottlenecked by a lack thoughtful, expert messaging laser-targeted on tractable wins.
If that’s true, why? Is this hard to do well? Was Peterson just lucky? Is it rare to find high-stakes problems solvable by this approach? Is it an incentives problem, since Peterson may not be reaping much in terms of rewards relative to the value of his contribution?
Is it an incentives problem, since Peterson may not be reaping much in terms of rewards relative to the value of his contribution?
Peterson is the CEO of a logistics company that suffered due to the pandemic, so while he can’t capture all or most of the rewards here, he and his company should certainly benefit at least to some extent from getting this problem fixed. (As an analogy, Stripe’s lofty mission statement of “growing the GDP of the internet” comes to mind.) Possibly the benefits even outweigh the opportunity cost of how else he could’ve spent this time as CEO, though not if we assume a low prior probability of success.
Ideally he’d benefit much more from this action, to incentivize repeat performances, but at least it’s not necessarily a pure tragedy of the commons where each individual would have been incentivized to defect by ignoring the problem.
It does seem like problems need to at least approach the level of ‘this is worth solving for me simply to get my private benefits’ in order to get solved, but I also think that the fruit is often low hanging enough that this is fine?
“For (1), my barely-informed guess is that before the port got backed up, the rule hadn’t created any obviously significant drawbacks. Then, we did, in fact, have a failure of leadership in terms of recognizing a tractable solution to the problem.”
Is it possible that none of the politicians in authority had sufficient knowledge of Logistics or Operations Management and there was insufficient information flow happening to get that to some of the zoning board guys?
It seems to me, after reading a lot of Deming, this is the cause of a lot of problems: Lack of actual understanding of how a system actually works + Lack of information flow + Desire to impose rules and structures that do not take into account how a system (and mostly the people working in it) actually work.
Is it possible that fixing those things would positively impact a huge number of organizations in a practical way?
I hear a related complaint from people working in jobs like forestry and ranching. They complain that big-city liberals dominate legislatures and impose environmental regulations with no understanding or concern for its impact on their jobs.
If there are specific problems with those regulations, shouldn’t a legislator representing a district with a lot of forestry or ranching be able to propose a sensible solution with little opposition?
Normally, that’s why you have lobbyists. Big companies hire lobbyists to tell politicians about these things. When big companies don’t have their own lobbyists there are often industry lobby groups that are supposed to understand problems like this and then tell the politicians to get the rule changed.
It seems like the Port of Long Beach spend $280,000 on lobbying in 2020. Maybe, that’s too low and they should hire more lobbyists? Or is there some reason why this was not important enough as a policy priority for the port?
Probable reasons for the rule include fire safety, earthquake safety, and safety during biosecurity and drug inspections (yes, of empty containers too). Those are just off the top of my head; it’s likely that there are more good reasons for such a rule. Maybe the cost calculations for these risks were done incorrectly but none of us is qualified to comment on that.
Is it worth suspending this rule temporarily in an emergency? Depends on the emergency. Permanently? Not so much. So the problem becomes “is this situation sufficiently grave that it is worth suspending rules that have solid benefits, and would such supension help very much?” It’s a “balance of costs” calculation, not people being stupid. Peterson will not look so great if 5-stacking results in “The Great Fire of Long Beach”.
Tl;dr: I love this story, but my expectation is that we’re unlikely to find comparable problems to solve by a similar approach. If we can find one more roughly comparable example in, say, the next year or two, then I’ll update significantly toward thinking we’re missing some big wins. I’ll try to remember to keep an eye out for such examples.
There are two aspects to consider.
Why didn’t the rule get changed earlier?
Why did the rule finally get changed? Alternatively, why don’t the rules get changed more often?
For (1), my barely-informed guess is that before the port got backed up, the rule hadn’t created any obviously significant drawbacks. Then, we did, in fact, have a failure of leadership in terms of recognizing a tractable solution to the problem.
For (2), this was a little-known rule with no defenders, tiny benefits, and (suddenly) massive, obvious drawbacks. Ryan Peterson demonstrated the leadership the situation required, and BOOM, problem solved. My guess is that this actually happens pretty often, but it usually doesn’t make the news, or one of Zvi’s blogposts, for precisely the same reason that the rule was able to be changed. It was a little-known rule causing a little-known problem, was changed basically in a timely fashion, and wasn’t worth calling attention to. It wasn’t interesting to people who don’t think this is shocking, and wasn’t controversial. For the same reason, this problem isn’t getting much press either.
Ryan Peterson should absolutely get a credit banana for his efforts. I think this is an interesting story that we can learn from. I think our difference of opinion is that I don’t anticipate that there’s “treasure everywhere,” in terms of lots of totally uncontroversial, obvious, low-hanging fruit waiting to be plucked by a quick change of the rules.
I think that there might be low-hanging fruit if you exclude the risk of PR problems, and allow that it would be obviously a good idea if you thought about it enough. But these are real barriers.
It might be that we can learn from Peterson, and that PR problems and framing challenges can be mitigated by a sophisticated messaging approach. So we then could say that our civilization is bottlenecked by a lack thoughtful, expert messaging laser-targeted on tractable wins.
If that’s true, why? Is this hard to do well? Was Peterson just lucky? Is it rare to find high-stakes problems solvable by this approach? Is it an incentives problem, since Peterson may not be reaping much in terms of rewards relative to the value of his contribution?
Peterson is the CEO of a logistics company that suffered due to the pandemic, so while he can’t capture all or most of the rewards here, he and his company should certainly benefit at least to some extent from getting this problem fixed. (As an analogy, Stripe’s lofty mission statement of “growing the GDP of the internet” comes to mind.) Possibly the benefits even outweigh the opportunity cost of how else he could’ve spent this time as CEO, though not if we assume a low prior probability of success.
Ideally he’d benefit much more from this action, to incentivize repeat performances, but at least it’s not necessarily a pure tragedy of the commons where each individual would have been incentivized to defect by ignoring the problem.
It does seem like problems need to at least approach the level of ‘this is worth solving for me simply to get my private benefits’ in order to get solved, but I also think that the fruit is often low hanging enough that this is fine?
“For (1), my barely-informed guess is that before the port got backed up, the rule hadn’t created any obviously significant drawbacks. Then, we did, in fact, have a failure of leadership in terms of recognizing a tractable solution to the problem.”
Is it possible that none of the politicians in authority had sufficient knowledge of Logistics or Operations Management and there was insufficient information flow happening to get that to some of the zoning board guys?
It seems to me, after reading a lot of Deming, this is the cause of a lot of problems: Lack of actual understanding of how a system actually works + Lack of information flow + Desire to impose rules and structures that do not take into account how a system (and mostly the people working in it) actually work.
Is it possible that fixing those things would positively impact a huge number of organizations in a practical way?
I hear a related complaint from people working in jobs like forestry and ranching. They complain that big-city liberals dominate legislatures and impose environmental regulations with no understanding or concern for its impact on their jobs.
If there are specific problems with those regulations, shouldn’t a legislator representing a district with a lot of forestry or ranching be able to propose a sensible solution with little opposition?
Normally, that’s why you have lobbyists. Big companies hire lobbyists to tell politicians about these things. When big companies don’t have their own lobbyists there are often industry lobby groups that are supposed to understand problems like this and then tell the politicians to get the rule changed.
It seems like the Port of Long Beach spend $280,000 on lobbying in 2020. Maybe, that’s too low and they should hire more lobbyists? Or is there some reason why this was not important enough as a policy priority for the port?
Probable reasons for the rule include fire safety, earthquake safety, and safety during biosecurity and drug inspections (yes, of empty containers too). Those are just off the top of my head; it’s likely that there are more good reasons for such a rule. Maybe the cost calculations for these risks were done incorrectly but none of us is qualified to comment on that.
Is it worth suspending this rule temporarily in an emergency? Depends on the emergency. Permanently? Not so much. So the problem becomes “is this situation sufficiently grave that it is worth suspending rules that have solid benefits, and would such supension help very much?” It’s a “balance of costs” calculation, not people being stupid. Peterson will not look so great if 5-stacking results in “The Great Fire of Long Beach”.