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Getting in a car is pretty much the most dangerous thing a person does in an average day. You may be trusting a cleaner with you possessions, but you're trustin

Getting in a car is pretty much the most dangerous thing a person does in an average day. You may be trusting a cleaner with you possessions, but you're trusting that Uber driver with your life.

cm2187 11y ago
This is a VaR vs Average risk discussion. Yes the potential harm is higher in an absolute worst case with a taxi but it is a really rare event. Cleaner stealing stuff is unfortunately quite common. When you know the person the risk is relatively low but when it is a complete stranger that has been selected by an online company which itself never met that person, I would say the probability is too high for my own taste.
- ghaff 11y ago
  That's a reasonable evaluation to make. I'd note though that people use cleaning services all the time so Homejoy wasn't in any way unique in this regard (which was one of their problems).
Mickydtron 11y ago
While this is statistically true, people don't act as if this were the case. While trusting someone with your physical safety should be a high-trust decision, we treat it cavalierly enough in our day to day lives that most people clearly don't worry about it. Maybe it makes sense, though, because the other person in the interaction has more incentive to defect when given access to all of your possessions than when given control over you yourself. That is, you have little reason to think that the Uber driver is working at cross purposes to you, and mainly just have to take their competence on faith. With something like Homejoy, it is their character and motivation you are gambling on moreso than their competence. I haven't heard of people abusing Homejoy to rob houses or anything, but it seems not entirely stupid that someone would worry about bad actors more than incompetent ones.
- JohnBooty 11y ago
  While trusting someone with your physical safety should be a high-trust decision, we treat it cavalierly enough in our day to day lives that most people clearly don't worry about it. We just can't avoid it. We assume that nobody's poisoned our food, we assume that nobody is going to go suicidal on the roadways and ram themselves head-on into our car, we don't wear body armor to work because we assume our coworkers won't shoot us. We even assume that the anestheseologist at the hospital isn't housing a wicked hangover that will prevent him from doing his job. Essentially our lives are in other peoples' hands pretty much 24/7!
  - Mickydtron 11y ago
    Right, exactly. I didn't put enough conditions on my "should". I meant that in a crazy utopia, we would never be put at risk because of others, the real world is very very far from this utopia, and we put high levels of implicit trust in other people all the time. There's nothing wrong with this, given the world as it is. Going back to Uber vs. Homejoy, the level of risk differential is much higher with Homejoy, because when using an Uber, you are probably not assuming much extra risk compared to what else you would do to get where you are going. For a cleaning service, then the risk differential is noticeable ('someone has access to my house' vs 'Only I and my family have access to my house') when jumping up from "doing the cleaning yourself". If you're comparing Homejoy to other cleaning services on a risk basis, you'd have to actually look at the numbers. I'm really not trying to bash Homejoy or cleaning services here.
gambiting 11y ago
The driver has no incentive to be in a crash. The cleaner has all the incentive to steal your stuff.
mikeash 11y ago
The difference is that with a driver, our incentives are aligned. My desire to continue living injury-free matches up perfectly with his desire to do the same, and not damage his valuable equipment. With a house cleaner, my desire to keep my possessions is at odds with the cleaner's desire to have more stuff. I have to count on their desire for repeat business, or their morality, to outweigh that.
JohnBooty 11y ago
Lives are infinitely more valuable them possessions. If an Uber driver wanted to hurt you, he would be extremely likely to pay the legal price. After all, there's an electronic paper trail of the ride he gave you. So an Uber driver won't do that unless he's essentially insane and a) doesn't understand this or b) has nothing to lose and doesn't care if he's caught or c) thinks he can get away with it because you're incapacitated/inebriated or something. Whereas with housekeepers, it's more a crime of opportunity. They notice that you have valuable items laying around that won't be missed. Or an acquaintance of theirs pressures them for tips on houses to rob. A housekeeper that's an otherwise "good" person can convince themselves that it's a victimless crime if they decide that you won't even miss the item(s) they take. I mean, who wouldn't be tempted to take a shiny, never-used bauble from the home of somebody with 10x their income if it was the difference between having food on their table or not? Don't get me wrong - the vast majority of housekeepers are great people. I have family members that clean houses. I just mean that an Uber driver would have to essentially be insane to harm you, whereas a housekeeper would just have to give into temptation in order to pinch some items. You may be trusting a cleaner with you possessions, but you're trusting that Uber driver with your life. 1. Everybody I know that's had their house robbed has had reason to believe that it was been an inside job. 2. If you have things worth stealing, each person you let into your house increases the odds that a robbery will happen. Maybe the cable guy isn't a burglar, but how many friends does that guy have? 50? Is one of them a burglar? If you were a burglar and you knew a cable guy, wouldn't you bug that guy for tips? 3. Any home burglary is potentially dangerous to one's life. Who knows what happens if you're home while the robbery is in progress or if you arrive home while it's happening. So yeah, there's a trust factor there!
- landryraccoon 11y ago
  Also the Uber driver can't easily injure you without injuring himself and his car.

Getting in a car is pretty much the most dangerous thing a person does in an average day. You may be trusting a cleaner with you possessions, but you're trusting that Uber driver with your life.

cm2187 11y ago

This is a VaR vs Average risk discussion. Yes the potential harm is higher in an absolute worst case with a taxi but it is a really rare event. Cleaner stealing stuff is unfortunately quite common. When you know the person the risk is relatively low but when it is a complete stranger that has been selected by an online company which itself never met that person, I would say the probability is too high for my own taste.

ghaff 11y ago
That's a reasonable evaluation to make. I'd note though that people use cleaning services all the time so Homejoy wasn't in any way unique in this regard (which was one of their problems).

Mickydtron 11y ago

While this is statistically true, people don't act as if this were the case. While trusting someone with your physical safety should be a high-trust decision, we treat it cavalierly enough in our day to day lives that most people clearly don't worry about it. Maybe it makes sense, though, because the other person in the interaction has more incentive to defect when given access to all of your possessions than when given control over you yourself. That is, you have little reason to think that the Uber driver is working at cross purposes to you, and mainly just have to take their competence on faith. With something like Homejoy, it is their character and motivation you are gambling on moreso than their competence. I haven't heard of people abusing Homejoy to rob houses or anything, but it seems not entirely stupid that someone would worry about bad actors more than incompetent ones.

JohnBooty 11y ago
While trusting someone with your physical safety should be a high-trust decision, we treat it cavalierly enough in our day to day lives that most people clearly don't worry about it. We just can't avoid it. We assume that nobody's poisoned our food, we assume that nobody is going to go suicidal on the roadways and ram themselves head-on into our car, we don't wear body armor to work because we assume our coworkers won't shoot us. We even assume that the anestheseologist at the hospital isn't housing a wicked hangover that will prevent him from doing his job. Essentially our lives are in other peoples' hands pretty much 24/7!
- Mickydtron 11y ago
  Right, exactly. I didn't put enough conditions on my "should". I meant that in a crazy utopia, we would never be put at risk because of others, the real world is very very far from this utopia, and we put high levels of implicit trust in other people all the time. There's nothing wrong with this, given the world as it is. Going back to Uber vs. Homejoy, the level of risk differential is much higher with Homejoy, because when using an Uber, you are probably not assuming much extra risk compared to what else you would do to get where you are going. For a cleaning service, then the risk differential is noticeable ('someone has access to my house' vs 'Only I and my family have access to my house') when jumping up from "doing the cleaning yourself". If you're comparing Homejoy to other cleaning services on a risk basis, you'd have to actually look at the numbers. I'm really not trying to bash Homejoy or cleaning services here.

gambiting 11y ago

The driver has no incentive to be in a crash. The cleaner has all the incentive to steal your stuff.

mikeash 11y ago

The difference is that with a driver, our incentives are aligned. My desire to continue living injury-free matches up perfectly with his desire to do the same, and not damage his valuable equipment. With a house cleaner, my desire to keep my possessions is at odds with the cleaner's desire to have more stuff. I have to count on their desire for repeat business, or their morality, to outweigh that.

JohnBooty 11y ago

Lives are infinitely more valuable them possessions. If an Uber driver wanted to hurt you, he would be extremely likely to pay the legal price. After all, there's an electronic paper trail of the ride he gave you. So an Uber driver won't do that unless he's essentially insane and a) doesn't understand this or b) has nothing to lose and doesn't care if he's caught or c) thinks he can get away with it because you're incapacitated/inebriated or something. Whereas with housekeepers, it's more a crime of opportunity. They notice that you have valuable items laying around that won't be missed. Or an acquaintance of theirs pressures them for tips on houses to rob. A housekeeper that's an otherwise "good" person can convince themselves that it's a victimless crime if they decide that you won't even miss the item(s) they take. I mean, who wouldn't be tempted to take a shiny, never-used bauble from the home of somebody with 10x their income if it was the difference between having food on their table or not? Don't get me wrong - the vast majority of housekeepers are great people. I have family members that clean houses. I just mean that an Uber driver would have to essentially be insane to harm you, whereas a housekeeper would just have to give into temptation in order to pinch some items. You may be trusting a cleaner with you possessions, but you're trusting that Uber driver with your life. 1. Everybody I know that's had their house robbed has had reason to believe that it was been an inside job. 2. If you have things worth stealing, each person you let into your house increases the odds that a robbery will happen. Maybe the cable guy isn't a burglar, but how many friends does that guy have? 50? Is one of them a burglar? If you were a burglar and you knew a cable guy, wouldn't you bug that guy for tips? 3. Any home burglary is potentially dangerous to one's life. Who knows what happens if you're home while the robbery is in progress or if you arrive home while it's happening. So yeah, there's a trust factor there!

landryraccoon 11y ago
Also the Uber driver can't easily injure you without injuring himself and his car.