3 ms·

This is Parkinson's Law of Triviality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
It is frightening to see bikeshedding in practice. I used to work for a regional transportation authority that would administer hundreds of millions of dollars in federal/state/local road projects. Local leaders would monthly come in and sit at a huge round table (40-50 cities/counties/regional leaders) and vote on projects. 800 million dollar projects would sail through with almost no questions in the first five minutes, but then the leaders would spend the next two hours of the meeting debating about the $100,000 pilot project to help the homeless.
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  Why? Do some of them have something against helping the homeless on principle?
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
    In that case it was a jobs program (to help construct roads) and the rationale against it was that they were extending beyond their purview of what the commission was meant to do.
    - philipodonnell 9y ago
      Isn't that sort of rational then?
      - warrenm 9y ago
        Definitely rational I think (at least, I hope) what OP was trying to get at was the relative irrationality of something 1/8000th the cost of the very expensive item taking a very long time to debate through (especially when $100,000 is most probably far less than many of those board members earn as a salary every year)
- tomtimtall 9y ago
  I once sat in the board of a student organisation management a $3mil investment fund. Which was rapidly declining as funds where being withdrawn to cover budget deficits. At the same meeting where no-one could explain, and no-one seemed to care about a 100,000$ transaction listed as “assorted expenses”, people spend 1,5 hours debating whether the coffee-shop should keep buying newspapers for 200$ a year...
  - carlmr 9y ago
    I think it's also kind of an effect that humans don't have an intuitive grasp of big numbers. Add to that the effect that humans think more about what they can imagine. You can kind imagine spending $200 on newspaper in your everyday life. You seldom make $100,000 decisions. Big one-time transactiosn seem intuitively less impactful than many smaller ones. As Programmers we deal with numbers a lot more often, so this effect is minimized. But still there.
- throwawayfpq8 9y ago
  Gee, kinda sounds like Hacker News...
- versk 9y ago
  I'm skeptical 800 million dollar projects would pass through local government at that level in 5 minutes, unless everyone who voted in favor had already been canvassed or taken part in intense debates at other meetings or were rubber stamping a special committee decision etc. What regional authority was it where 800 million dollar projects happened so regularly?
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
    This was a transportation authority for a large metro region. CTRMA (Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority) is an example that works with large projects like this all the time, though it wasn’t the one I worked for.

SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago

It is frightening to see bikeshedding in practice. I used to work for a regional transportation authority that would administer hundreds of millions of dollars in federal/state/local road projects. Local leaders would monthly come in and sit at a huge round table (40-50 cities/counties/regional leaders) and vote on projects. 800 million dollar projects would sail through with almost no questions in the first five minutes, but then the leaders would spend the next two hours of the meeting debating about the $100,000 pilot project to help the homeless.

crdoconnor 9y ago
Why? Do some of them have something against helping the homeless on principle?
- SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
  In that case it was a jobs program (to help construct roads) and the rationale against it was that they were extending beyond their purview of what the commission was meant to do.
  - philipodonnell 9y ago
    Isn't that sort of rational then?
    - warrenm 9y ago
      Definitely rational I think (at least, I hope) what OP was trying to get at was the relative irrationality of something 1/8000th the cost of the very expensive item taking a very long time to debate through (especially when $100,000 is most probably far less than many of those board members earn as a salary every year)
tomtimtall 9y ago
I once sat in the board of a student organisation management a $3mil investment fund. Which was rapidly declining as funds where being withdrawn to cover budget deficits. At the same meeting where no-one could explain, and no-one seemed to care about a 100,000$ transaction listed as “assorted expenses”, people spend 1,5 hours debating whether the coffee-shop should keep buying newspapers for 200$ a year...
- carlmr 9y ago
  I think it's also kind of an effect that humans don't have an intuitive grasp of big numbers. Add to that the effect that humans think more about what they can imagine. You can kind imagine spending $200 on newspaper in your everyday life. You seldom make $100,000 decisions. Big one-time transactiosn seem intuitively less impactful than many smaller ones. As Programmers we deal with numbers a lot more often, so this effect is minimized. But still there.
throwawayfpq8 9y ago
Gee, kinda sounds like Hacker News...
versk 9y ago
I'm skeptical 800 million dollar projects would pass through local government at that level in 5 minutes, unless everyone who voted in favor had already been canvassed or taken part in intense debates at other meetings or were rubber stamping a special committee decision etc. What regional authority was it where 800 million dollar projects happened so regularly?
- SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
  This was a transportation authority for a large metro region. CTRMA (Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority) is an example that works with large projects like this all the time, though it wasn’t the one I worked for.