This seems surprisingly related to a thought I’ve had about the inefficiency of markets in consumer goods. When buying things, people usually only have room to optimize on a small number of taut constraints. One of them is going to be price; you get one, maybe two more if you’re lucky. If some product or service has more axes of variation than “what does it cost” and “does it work at all”, they will typically get almost negligible optimization pressure applied to them.
For example, the problem of buying an airplane ticket already has a bunch of taut constraints—the right place, the right time, the right price. The wifi on planes is generally garbage; whether or not there is wifi has risen up to the point where it gets a bit of optimization pressure, but how well the wifi works is way below the required bar. There is no incentive to improve it. Similarly the food on planes.
(To be honest, this applies to employment relationships, too, which might explain some things about how people generally find jobs to suck.)
This seems surprisingly related to a thought I’ve had about the inefficiency of markets in consumer goods. When buying things, people usually only have room to optimize on a small number of taut constraints. One of them is going to be price; you get one, maybe two more if you’re lucky. If some product or service has more axes of variation than “what does it cost” and “does it work at all”, they will typically get almost negligible optimization pressure applied to them.
For example, the problem of buying an airplane ticket already has a bunch of taut constraints—the right place, the right time, the right price. The wifi on planes is generally garbage; whether or not there is wifi has risen up to the point where it gets a bit of optimization pressure, but how well the wifi works is way below the required bar. There is no incentive to improve it. Similarly the food on planes.
(To be honest, this applies to employment relationships, too, which might explain some things about how people generally find jobs to suck.)