Here’s the thing about air-travel-related complaints.
Air travel is really unpleasant. Oh sure, it’s technologically impressive, but the actual experience is terrible: sitting in a cramped space for hours on end, being in close proximity to so many other people; the pressure changes and the noise; the long, tiring process of arriving for your flight, which often takes longer than the actual flight and is quite stressful; the humiliating and absurd security procedures, which these days look more and more like ways for the government to gratuitously exercise its power...
So we’ve got this really impressive means of travel, which our society seems to have conspired to make as unpleasant as humanly possible. Ok, maybe it’s all excusable and inevitable, just for the sheer amazingness of “ooh, we’re FLYING through the AIR and so FAST!” etc. But then, after we pay the airline such impressive amounts of money for this amazing-but-unpleasant convenience, they don’t deign to even serve us good drinks?
And what do the drinks have to do with how technologically impressive flight is, anyway? Are the people responsible for the drinks also the people who build, maintain, and fly the planes? What, are the drinks the pilot’s responsibility, and he just can’t be bothered, what with all that keeping the plane upright that he has to do? Did the Boeing engineer have “serve good drinks” on his to-do list, but just plain didn’t get to it, tired as he was from all that “making sure the wings don’t fall off” he had to do? No! The people responsible for the drinks had one damn job! And they’re doing it badly! And then when people complain, they have the gall to evade responsibility by attempting to take credit for all that amazing science and engineering?!
In short, the quote is analogous to:
“I mean, when you think about it, our society is pretty freaking remarkable. We have computers, and indoor plumbing, and hundreds of channels on cable. Hundreds of millions of man-hours of work and struggle and research, blood, sweat, tears, and lives have gone into the history of all of our modern conveniences, and it has totally revolutionized the face of our planet and societies.
But look anywhere in the world, and I absolutely promise you that you will find someone who, in the face of all that incredible achievement, will be willing to complain about being mugged.
Being mugged, people.”
Yeah, “everything is amazing so why are you complaining about this unrelated bad thing” is a fallacy. At this rate, all complaints about everything, ever, are apparently unwarranted.
You’re using this remarkable set of interacting or interdependent components of interlinked hypertext documents in a global system of interconnected computer networks powered by a flow of electric charge to whine about a rationality quote! How quaint.
Well, there’s the scenario where one person does both the engineering and the drinks, but only has a limited amount of effort in his job to exert, and he chooses to devote all of that effort to engineering the plane and only a tiny portion of it to ensuring the quality of the drinks. That scenario is obviously absurd.
But if you slightly modify that, person->company and effort->money, that’s pretty much what’s going on. The company has a limited amount of money to spend, and spending most of it on engineering and almost nothing on drinks has similar dynamics to a single worker who’s choosing to spend all his time on engineering and almost nothing on drinks. Even if the company internally contains several workers and the engineer and the drink maintainer are different people.
back to the original quote for a bit...Dresden actually complains quite a bit. But after dealing with flaming monkey poo (literally), a white court vampire as a friend, using a cleaning spell to deal with some giant scorpions, and who knows how many dead bodies (some of which were animated)....drinks seem really, really shallow to him. Not to mention he’s trying hard not to think too much about how, if he lets his magic the least bit off the leash, it will crash the plane. (something about complicated technology seems to override the rule “cannot accomplish what you don’t believe in accomplishing”)
Moving back to real life, someone is willing to complain about the drinks while someone else is being mugged.
Furthermore, If the person’s REAL complaint is about the unpleasant security measures, cramped seats, and air pressure changes, complaining about the drinks, even if the complaint gets the drinks to improve, will not really optimize much.
Furthermore, If the person’s REAL complaint is about the unpleasant security measures, cramped seats, and air pressure changes, complaining about the drinks, even if the complaint gets the drinks to improve, will not really optimize much.
Well, my real complaint is about both/all of those things. It is possible to have multiple complaints, you know; and also it is possible to improve more than one thing, ever.
Moving back to real life, someone is willing to complain about the drinks while someone else is being mugged.
But this generalizes. Someone is willing to complain about being mugged while someone else is being violently assaulted. Someone is willing to complain about being violently assaulted while someone else is imprisoned and tortured. And so on...
There’s no law that says we have to find The Worst Problem, devote all our resources to fixing it, and totally ignore every other problem that humanity has while The Worst Problem persists. Such a policy would lead to a rather horrifying world.
There’s no law that says we have to find The Worst Problem, devote all our resources to fixing it, and totally ignore every other problem that humanity has while The Worst Problem persists. Such a policy would lead to a rather horrifying world.
Something similar has been seriously argued here for donations to charity: you should donate all your money to the single charity that would do the most good (unless you’re a millionaire who can donate so much money that the charity will reduce the size of the problem to below the size of another problem).
Here’s the thing about air-travel-related complaints.
Air travel is really unpleasant. Oh sure, it’s technologically impressive, but the actual experience is terrible: sitting in a cramped space for hours on end, being in close proximity to so many other people; the pressure changes and the noise; the long, tiring process of arriving for your flight, which often takes longer than the actual flight and is quite stressful; the humiliating and absurd security procedures, which these days look more and more like ways for the government to gratuitously exercise its power...
So we’ve got this really impressive means of travel, which our society seems to have conspired to make as unpleasant as humanly possible. Ok, maybe it’s all excusable and inevitable, just for the sheer amazingness of “ooh, we’re FLYING through the AIR and so FAST!” etc. But then, after we pay the airline such impressive amounts of money for this amazing-but-unpleasant convenience, they don’t deign to even serve us good drinks?
And what do the drinks have to do with how technologically impressive flight is, anyway? Are the people responsible for the drinks also the people who build, maintain, and fly the planes? What, are the drinks the pilot’s responsibility, and he just can’t be bothered, what with all that keeping the plane upright that he has to do? Did the Boeing engineer have “serve good drinks” on his to-do list, but just plain didn’t get to it, tired as he was from all that “making sure the wings don’t fall off” he had to do? No! The people responsible for the drinks had one damn job! And they’re doing it badly! And then when people complain, they have the gall to evade responsibility by attempting to take credit for all that amazing science and engineering?!
In short, the quote is analogous to:
“I mean, when you think about it, our society is pretty freaking remarkable. We have computers, and indoor plumbing, and hundreds of channels on cable. Hundreds of millions of man-hours of work and struggle and research, blood, sweat, tears, and lives have gone into the history of all of our modern conveniences, and it has totally revolutionized the face of our planet and societies.
But look anywhere in the world, and I absolutely promise you that you will find someone who, in the face of all that incredible achievement, will be willing to complain about being mugged.
Being mugged, people.”
Yeah, “everything is amazing so why are you complaining about this unrelated bad thing” is a fallacy. At this rate, all complaints about everything, ever, are apparently unwarranted.
You’re using this remarkable set of interacting or interdependent components of interlinked hypertext documents in a global system of interconnected computer networks powered by a flow of electric charge to whine about a rationality quote! How quaint.
Well, there’s the scenario where one person does both the engineering and the drinks, but only has a limited amount of effort in his job to exert, and he chooses to devote all of that effort to engineering the plane and only a tiny portion of it to ensuring the quality of the drinks. That scenario is obviously absurd.
But if you slightly modify that, person->company and effort->money, that’s pretty much what’s going on. The company has a limited amount of money to spend, and spending most of it on engineering and almost nothing on drinks has similar dynamics to a single worker who’s choosing to spend all his time on engineering and almost nothing on drinks. Even if the company internally contains several workers and the engineer and the drink maintainer are different people.
back to the original quote for a bit...Dresden actually complains quite a bit. But after dealing with flaming monkey poo (literally), a white court vampire as a friend, using a cleaning spell to deal with some giant scorpions, and who knows how many dead bodies (some of which were animated)....drinks seem really, really shallow to him. Not to mention he’s trying hard not to think too much about how, if he lets his magic the least bit off the leash, it will crash the plane. (something about complicated technology seems to override the rule “cannot accomplish what you don’t believe in accomplishing”)
Moving back to real life, someone is willing to complain about the drinks while someone else is being mugged.
Furthermore, If the person’s REAL complaint is about the unpleasant security measures, cramped seats, and air pressure changes, complaining about the drinks, even if the complaint gets the drinks to improve, will not really optimize much.
Well, my real complaint is about both/all of those things. It is possible to have multiple complaints, you know; and also it is possible to improve more than one thing, ever.
But this generalizes. Someone is willing to complain about being mugged while someone else is being violently assaulted. Someone is willing to complain about being violently assaulted while someone else is imprisoned and tortured. And so on...
There’s no law that says we have to find The Worst Problem, devote all our resources to fixing it, and totally ignore every other problem that humanity has while The Worst Problem persists. Such a policy would lead to a rather horrifying world.
As always, a relevant xkcd.
Something similar has been seriously argued here for donations to charity: you should donate all your money to the single charity that would do the most good (unless you’re a millionaire who can donate so much money that the charity will reduce the size of the problem to below the size of another problem).
http://lesswrong.com/lw/elo/a_mathematical_explanation_of_why_charity/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/gtm/when_should_you_give_to_multiple_charities/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/aid/heuristics_and_biases_in_charity/
Some of the comments have good arguments against this, however.
Quite so, and I agree with this argument in the charity case; I just don’t think it generalizes to a strategy for dealing with Problems In General.