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It definitely seems they could and need to do more to tighten up the accountability on the platform. No doubt about that. I don't know that it's accurate to s

It definitely seems they could and need to do more to tighten up the accountability on the platform. No doubt about that. I don't know that it's accurate to say the contractor doesn't care. If they were a psychopath I could agree with that, but most people have had the experience of having either a pet, friend or relative die and know how deeply it affects people emotionally and to know you were responsible for that would likely generate a strong, negative visceral reaction. Edit: Platforms don't kill dogs; people do. Stop trusting people. Actually this is the part that fascinates me. On some level people expect things to never go wrong. Yet things going "wrong" is kind of the default. It's extremely hard to engineer a situation in which no one ever experiences a negative outcome. To the extent that you can attribute a cause to an outcome, you do. Infact, it's not at all clear whether the frequency of dogs dying while being sat by pet sitters is higher on platforms or higher when not through platforms. You'd actually have to do quite a lengthy, expensive analysis to compute the truth value of that. What can likely agree on is that we want the most safe and convenient system. I'm fascinated by thinking about the various trade-offs made when organizing a system one way vs. another. Are we trading more convenience for less safety? Or are we actually getting both more convenience AND more safety, but also increased observability is skewing our perception of the risk such that we think we have got a less safe system when in fact the opposite might be true? I don't have the answers. But damnit it's important to attempt to look at things the right way in an attempt to compute that actual reality.

toomuchtodo 8y ago
The problem is I can’t tell which ones care, and those are the only ones I’d want to do business with.
- james_s_tayler 8y ago
  I can respect that. You want to maximize the likelihood the dog survives. I call this "The Hard Problem of Delineation". You can't delineate between who will and won't kill your dog no matter what system you use. That's the problem. Though I take your point about the cold, uncaring, capitalist dog walker. Hmmm. Edit: now that I think about your point I can see what you mean. The "sharing economy (Uber for X)" has become a widely known abstraction that people realize they can exploit for monetary gain and thats likely to attract more people walking dogs who wouldn't otherwise care about, be familiar with and/or know how to handle dogs. I agree, at least in principle, that may be a phenomenon that is occurring.
  - masonic 8y ago
    You want to maximize the likelihood the dog survives. Wag, however, has a huge financial incentive for the dog to die even if it could be saved, due to the cost differential between surgery and subsequent care vs. cremation cost.
    - james_s_tayler 8y ago
      Well in the case the dog has already been hit and is facing either death or the possibility of salvation by some means then perhaps I might agree that them sweeping our four legged friend under the proverbial rug might be, not necessarily the most moral course of action, but perhaps the most expedient. The comment that you want to maximize the likelihood the dog survives was referring to the point of market entry after you have decided you want someone to sit your dog but haven't yet selected a provider. They certainly don't have an incentive for the dog to die in that case, unless we invoke a conspiracy theory that they actually also run the doggy crematorium and thus win twice on the deal. But that's a mildly absurb prospect.
    - michaelmrose 8y ago
      This is an interesting point since the owner wasn't involved until the dog was dead we don't even know if any such decisions were made.
  - enjo 8y ago
    RE: Your edit I think that's close as well. One of the interesting things I've noticed is that people who are participating in the gig economy seem to be participating in almost ALL of the gig economy at once. I've met many people who do all of the following almost every day: - Drive for Uber/Lyft - Deliver packages for Amazon - Walk dogs for Wag/Rover - Rent a place on AirBnb - Do some stuff on Task Rabbit - Deliver food for GrubHub/DoorDash/etc... I can't imagine these folks are any particular loyalty to any of it, nor are they developing skills in any of these in a meaningful way.
  - treis 8y ago
    >You can't delineate between who will and won't kill your dog no matter what system you use. That's the problem. I think essentially every dog owner will have done something to "kill" their dog but were saved by chance. Dogs sneak out the door when you're bringing groceries in, yank the leash out of your hand, escape fenced yards, among a number of other possibilities of them getting loose. The saving grace is that 999 times out of a thousand there's no traffic or the driver is paying attention or fluffy comes back before anything happens. In a situation like that it's hard to say if the walker is worse than any random owner or walker, or if they were just unlucky.
- logifail 8y ago
  >> I can’t tell which ones care Question - do you mean service companies that care (Wag/Uber/...), or service providers that care (DogWalker93/UberDriver93/...)?
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    Providers. I only hire child and pet care providers I have performed a background check on, I’ve vetted in person, and who come with references from others. I do not use ride sharing, pet services, Airbnb, or other such P2P platforms.
    - michaelmrose 8y ago
      If people only hire people with references how does one get references?
      - tremon 8y ago
        Through other trust paths. Start by caring for neighbours' pets, or family/friends, anyone that already knows you. Ask them for tips, guidance (aka "education"). Show them you care and want to expand your services (aka "networking"). Then ask them for references (aka "certification").
        michaelmrose 8y ago
        This seems like a lot to ask for something that pays substantially less than McDonalds. Kind of feels like someone should be able to give non dog walking references to walk your dog. Like if people regularly trust their children with person foo person foo can probably be trusted with pets?
        logifail 8y ago
        >> if people regularly trust their children with person foo person foo can probably be trusted with pets Isn't that chain of trust completely backwards? You'd start by looking after pets, then once you have loads of good references, you might just be able to upgrade to looking after kids? Full disclosure: zero pets + three kids
thisisit 8y ago
> Edit: Platforms don't kill dogs; people do. Stop trusting people. I disagree with that notion. Trust has always been a big problem. But when a two way market is built on a platform you trust the platform to carry out it's due diligence on your behalf. Situations like: The walker that was with Winnie when she was killed had a different name in her bio paragraph than was shown on her profile—which makes me wonder if Wag is monitoring whether or not the people walking your dog are who they say they are. Sara asked the walker what her name was, but the walker did not provide an answer. shouldn't happen at all. But it's seems that most of the time platforms forgo the need for verification and think trust should solve itself because "people". It takes a harassment case (in case of Uber) etc for companies to open their eyes and realize "people" are not so simple. It takes a good and concentrated effort to run a clean platform.
- james_s_tayler 8y ago
  I also disagree with my own notion. And I don't. > It takes a good and concentrated effort to run a clean platform Precisely. It's hard. Because people. So I can imagine that without the platform and hence no way to actually have a concentrated effort to do the work required to up the quality you still get the garbage that people bring but without the observability or feedback loop to the entity because they're all just localised cases. But this is my point. It's people that run the platforms and it's people that partake in them. It's people that choose to trust them and it's people that can't be trusted. It's all ultimately a people problem. The platform is just a mechanism to coordinate the actions of people. It's not like this stuff never happens outside of platforms and now that you have platforms platforms are causing this stuff to happen. Caveat: it may be the case platforms cause this stuff to happen due to the type of actors they attract because the economics of certain things actually scale poorly along one axis and brilliantly along another. I address this elsewhere and am happy to concede it. I agree with you. I actually do. I also hope on some level you agree with me too. We want things to be convenient and safe and it takes time and collateral damage for things to mold themselves into the right shape. Coordination of good behavior is a hard, hard, problem to solve. It's not like the default state is "uncoordinated good behavior". Rather it seems to progress through states of "uncoordinated bad behavior", "coordinated bad behavior", "coordinated good behavior". From what I can see of the sharing economy experiment, once you coordinate things you get to coordinated bad behavior and then from there it takes a few incidents to honestly compute the real risks and appropriate responses and appropriate changes are made and you wind up with coordinated good behavior. That's a loose model and I'm sure someone out there can present a much better one than me, but I'm willing to at least say the analysis is in the right direction.
CaptainZapp 8y ago
It's extremely hard to engineer a situation in which no one ever experiences a negative outcome True; nevertheless: good engineering practice dictates that you design a product, service or component in a way that it gracefully fails. A good example is the regulator for scuba diving (the thing that enables you to breathe and which contains the main valve, through which you breathe and the second stage, referred to as octopus, which is conneted to the bottle and the gauges). Any of those components could fail. The device, however, is designed in a way that if this happens it fails "safely" meaning that it's almost not possible that air flow is completely blocked, but that it flows unrestricted. Meaning you can still breathe, alas for a short time since the bottle empties rapidly and the flow is unrestricted. This gives you a fighting chance and a way out by signalling the distress to your buddy so you can safely mount to the surface using techniques such as buddy breathing. Training for such emergencies is arguably the most important part of scuba diving training. There's still the possibilty that the thing blocks completely, but that's extremely rare and the base design of this equipment part is done in a way to minimize this possibility. [1] Another example is a dead man's switch [2]. You don't anticipate that a train conductor is rendered incommunicado by, say, a heart attack. But this fail safe mechanism is nevertheless there in the extremely rare case when it happens. If the switch is not engaged, when it signals the conductor the train is stopped automatically. I think that when you create something like a dog walking service it's almost rekless not to design your process flows with the consideration that an accident may happen and how to handle it. The question is not if, but when. Wag's panic mode and the waving around of NDAs signals quite loudly that they obviously never thought about it and thus cannot be trusted to care for your animal. And this is actually the most charitable assessment of how they handled this disaster. Chances that one of your consignees is hurt or killed are probably much greater than that your regulator malfunctions or that a train conductor is suddenly dropping dead [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diving_regulator#Malfunctions_and_failure_modes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diving_regulator#Malfunctions_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man%27s_switch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man%27s_switch
- james_s_tayler 8y ago
  I love this comment and I think it's right on the money to say that we ought to engineer things in the best possible way we can. I have a couple of thoughts... There is a sort of dialectic that unfolds with regards to what fail-safes should be engineered and how to engineer them. It perhaps might be possible in some cases to compute a priori what fail-safe mechanisms a system needs to include, but for the most part it seems that a catastrophe (or a string of them) first unfolds which then gives you the necessary information as to what the requirements are for the fail-safe. I think this is a very important point worth stressing. As it relates to this incident, I'll grant you they probably could have done better from the outset, but I stand by the comment that sometimes it's not possible to compute ahead of time what fail-safes you need and experiencing these kind of PR disasters is just part of the journey towards a system that works better. Call it dialectical engineering if you will. If there is another, better, actual name that concept goes by I'd like to know if anyone can tell me. The other comment would be that I like to think about things from a control-theoretic and systems thinking point of a view and that this particular statement of "It's extremely hard to engineer a situation in which no one ever experiences a negative outcome" is a real core, axiomatic belief for me that I base a lot of my thinking and critiques of things around. I like what you have to say about engineering. It's very apt. I always couch my thoughts / analyses in the broadest possible context. So in the case of the regulator for scuba diving my mind flashes back to the terrifying stories I have read about people who let their concentration lapse at a critical juncture in a cave and panicked when they realised they couldn't find their way back and in that case it didn't matter that their regulator worked or not because it was their mind that had failed them. You mention training as being a crucial input to the system and I absolutely agree. I go so far as to include the cave itself as a constraint in the whole system design as well as all the pitfalls of the human mind. So it's not just the device but the entire context in which the device operates that's the important thing. Human engineered machines gracefully fail; humans do not. We have this deep need to play the blame game when things go wrong. We all do it and we all understand it, but it's not always justified and I think that matters. I like to try and get to the bottom of whether the moral outrage suffered by people is justified in situations where they were harmed but it wasn't necessarily the fault of someone. Well, it might be the fault of someone, but that also might just be a necessary part of the process a la my concept of dialectical engineering. It's a complicated topic. Of course you will be outraged or upset if your dog dies while in the care of somebody else and you aren't likely to sit and get all philosophical about it, but when you play the blame game you search for the most salient (to you) cause or potential cause of your effect and you attribute it to that. I think it's often stunningly likely you're making an error in judgement when you do this, because of the hard problem of delineation you can't necessarily compute what the actual cause is with any degree of accuracy so epistemology comes in to play. How do you know that what you're mad at is the appropriate thing to be mad at?

toomuchtodo 8y ago

The problem is I can’t tell which ones care, and those are the only ones I’d want to do business with.

james_s_tayler 8y ago
I can respect that. You want to maximize the likelihood the dog survives. I call this "The Hard Problem of Delineation". You can't delineate between who will and won't kill your dog no matter what system you use. That's the problem. Though I take your point about the cold, uncaring, capitalist dog walker. Hmmm. Edit: now that I think about your point I can see what you mean. The "sharing economy (Uber for X)" has become a widely known abstraction that people realize they can exploit for monetary gain and thats likely to attract more people walking dogs who wouldn't otherwise care about, be familiar with and/or know how to handle dogs. I agree, at least in principle, that may be a phenomenon that is occurring.
- masonic 8y ago
  You want to maximize the likelihood the dog survives. Wag, however, has a huge financial incentive for the dog to die even if it could be saved, due to the cost differential between surgery and subsequent care vs. cremation cost.
  - james_s_tayler 8y ago
    Well in the case the dog has already been hit and is facing either death or the possibility of salvation by some means then perhaps I might agree that them sweeping our four legged friend under the proverbial rug might be, not necessarily the most moral course of action, but perhaps the most expedient. The comment that you want to maximize the likelihood the dog survives was referring to the point of market entry after you have decided you want someone to sit your dog but haven't yet selected a provider. They certainly don't have an incentive for the dog to die in that case, unless we invoke a conspiracy theory that they actually also run the doggy crematorium and thus win twice on the deal. But that's a mildly absurb prospect.
  - michaelmrose 8y ago
    This is an interesting point since the owner wasn't involved until the dog was dead we don't even know if any such decisions were made.
- enjo 8y ago
  RE: Your edit I think that's close as well. One of the interesting things I've noticed is that people who are participating in the gig economy seem to be participating in almost ALL of the gig economy at once. I've met many people who do all of the following almost every day: - Drive for Uber/Lyft - Deliver packages for Amazon - Walk dogs for Wag/Rover - Rent a place on AirBnb - Do some stuff on Task Rabbit - Deliver food for GrubHub/DoorDash/etc... I can't imagine these folks are any particular loyalty to any of it, nor are they developing skills in any of these in a meaningful way.
- treis 8y ago
  >You can't delineate between who will and won't kill your dog no matter what system you use. That's the problem. I think essentially every dog owner will have done something to "kill" their dog but were saved by chance. Dogs sneak out the door when you're bringing groceries in, yank the leash out of your hand, escape fenced yards, among a number of other possibilities of them getting loose. The saving grace is that 999 times out of a thousand there's no traffic or the driver is paying attention or fluffy comes back before anything happens. In a situation like that it's hard to say if the walker is worse than any random owner or walker, or if they were just unlucky.
logifail 8y ago
>> I can’t tell which ones care Question - do you mean service companies that care (Wag/Uber/...), or service providers that care (DogWalker93/UberDriver93/...)?
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Providers. I only hire child and pet care providers I have performed a background check on, I’ve vetted in person, and who come with references from others. I do not use ride sharing, pet services, Airbnb, or other such P2P platforms.
  - michaelmrose 8y ago
    If people only hire people with references how does one get references?
    - tremon 8y ago
      Through other trust paths. Start by caring for neighbours' pets, or family/friends, anyone that already knows you. Ask them for tips, guidance (aka "education"). Show them you care and want to expand your services (aka "networking"). Then ask them for references (aka "certification").
      - michaelmrose 8y ago
        This seems like a lot to ask for something that pays substantially less than McDonalds. Kind of feels like someone should be able to give non dog walking references to walk your dog. Like if people regularly trust their children with person foo person foo can probably be trusted with pets?
        logifail 8y ago
        >> if people regularly trust their children with person foo person foo can probably be trusted with pets Isn't that chain of trust completely backwards? You'd start by looking after pets, then once you have loads of good references, you might just be able to upgrade to looking after kids? Full disclosure: zero pets + three kids

thisisit 8y ago

> Edit: Platforms don't kill dogs; people do. Stop trusting people. I disagree with that notion. Trust has always been a big problem. But when a two way market is built on a platform you trust the platform to carry out it's due diligence on your behalf. Situations like: The walker that was with Winnie when she was killed had a different name in her bio paragraph than was shown on her profile—which makes me wonder if Wag is monitoring whether or not the people walking your dog are who they say they are. Sara asked the walker what her name was, but the walker did not provide an answer. shouldn't happen at all. But it's seems that most of the time platforms forgo the need for verification and think trust should solve itself because "people". It takes a harassment case (in case of Uber) etc for companies to open their eyes and realize "people" are not so simple. It takes a good and concentrated effort to run a clean platform.

james_s_tayler 8y ago
I also disagree with my own notion. And I don't. > It takes a good and concentrated effort to run a clean platform Precisely. It's hard. Because people. So I can imagine that without the platform and hence no way to actually have a concentrated effort to do the work required to up the quality you still get the garbage that people bring but without the observability or feedback loop to the entity because they're all just localised cases. But this is my point. It's people that run the platforms and it's people that partake in them. It's people that choose to trust them and it's people that can't be trusted. It's all ultimately a people problem. The platform is just a mechanism to coordinate the actions of people. It's not like this stuff never happens outside of platforms and now that you have platforms platforms are causing this stuff to happen. Caveat: it may be the case platforms cause this stuff to happen due to the type of actors they attract because the economics of certain things actually scale poorly along one axis and brilliantly along another. I address this elsewhere and am happy to concede it. I agree with you. I actually do. I also hope on some level you agree with me too. We want things to be convenient and safe and it takes time and collateral damage for things to mold themselves into the right shape. Coordination of good behavior is a hard, hard, problem to solve. It's not like the default state is "uncoordinated good behavior". Rather it seems to progress through states of "uncoordinated bad behavior", "coordinated bad behavior", "coordinated good behavior". From what I can see of the sharing economy experiment, once you coordinate things you get to coordinated bad behavior and then from there it takes a few incidents to honestly compute the real risks and appropriate responses and appropriate changes are made and you wind up with coordinated good behavior. That's a loose model and I'm sure someone out there can present a much better one than me, but I'm willing to at least say the analysis is in the right direction.

CaptainZapp 8y ago

It's extremely hard to engineer a situation in which no one ever experiences a negative outcome True; nevertheless: good engineering practice dictates that you design a product, service or component in a way that it gracefully fails. A good example is the regulator for scuba diving (the thing that enables you to breathe and which contains the main valve, through which you breathe and the second stage, referred to as octopus, which is conneted to the bottle and the gauges). Any of those components could fail. The device, however, is designed in a way that if this happens it fails "safely" meaning that it's almost not possible that air flow is completely blocked, but that it flows unrestricted. Meaning you can still breathe, alas for a short time since the bottle empties rapidly and the flow is unrestricted. This gives you a fighting chance and a way out by signalling the distress to your buddy so you can safely mount to the surface using techniques such as buddy breathing. Training for such emergencies is arguably the most important part of scuba diving training. There's still the possibilty that the thing blocks completely, but that's extremely rare and the base design of this equipment part is done in a way to minimize this possibility. [1] Another example is a dead man's switch [2]. You don't anticipate that a train conductor is rendered incommunicado by, say, a heart attack. But this fail safe mechanism is nevertheless there in the extremely rare case when it happens. If the switch is not engaged, when it signals the conductor the train is stopped automatically. I think that when you create something like a dog walking service it's almost rekless not to design your process flows with the consideration that an accident may happen and how to handle it. The question is not if, but when. Wag's panic mode and the waving around of NDAs signals quite loudly that they obviously never thought about it and thus cannot be trusted to care for your animal. And this is actually the most charitable assessment of how they handled this disaster. Chances that one of your consignees is hurt or killed are probably much greater than that your regulator malfunctions or that a train conductor is suddenly dropping dead [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diving_regulator#Malfunctions_and_failure_modes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diving_regulator#Malfunctions_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man%27s_switch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man%27s_switch

james_s_tayler 8y ago
I love this comment and I think it's right on the money to say that we ought to engineer things in the best possible way we can. I have a couple of thoughts... There is a sort of dialectic that unfolds with regards to what fail-safes should be engineered and how to engineer them. It perhaps might be possible in some cases to compute a priori what fail-safe mechanisms a system needs to include, but for the most part it seems that a catastrophe (or a string of them) first unfolds which then gives you the necessary information as to what the requirements are for the fail-safe. I think this is a very important point worth stressing. As it relates to this incident, I'll grant you they probably could have done better from the outset, but I stand by the comment that sometimes it's not possible to compute ahead of time what fail-safes you need and experiencing these kind of PR disasters is just part of the journey towards a system that works better. Call it dialectical engineering if you will. If there is another, better, actual name that concept goes by I'd like to know if anyone can tell me. The other comment would be that I like to think about things from a control-theoretic and systems thinking point of a view and that this particular statement of "It's extremely hard to engineer a situation in which no one ever experiences a negative outcome" is a real core, axiomatic belief for me that I base a lot of my thinking and critiques of things around. I like what you have to say about engineering. It's very apt. I always couch my thoughts / analyses in the broadest possible context. So in the case of the regulator for scuba diving my mind flashes back to the terrifying stories I have read about people who let their concentration lapse at a critical juncture in a cave and panicked when they realised they couldn't find their way back and in that case it didn't matter that their regulator worked or not because it was their mind that had failed them. You mention training as being a crucial input to the system and I absolutely agree. I go so far as to include the cave itself as a constraint in the whole system design as well as all the pitfalls of the human mind. So it's not just the device but the entire context in which the device operates that's the important thing. Human engineered machines gracefully fail; humans do not. We have this deep need to play the blame game when things go wrong. We all do it and we all understand it, but it's not always justified and I think that matters. I like to try and get to the bottom of whether the moral outrage suffered by people is justified in situations where they were harmed but it wasn't necessarily the fault of someone. Well, it might be the fault of someone, but that also might just be a necessary part of the process a la my concept of dialectical engineering. It's a complicated topic. Of course you will be outraged or upset if your dog dies while in the care of somebody else and you aren't likely to sit and get all philosophical about it, but when you play the blame game you search for the most salient (to you) cause or potential cause of your effect and you attribute it to that. I think it's often stunningly likely you're making an error in judgement when you do this, because of the hard problem of delineation you can't necessarily compute what the actual cause is with any degree of accuracy so epistemology comes in to play. How do you know that what you're mad at is the appropriate thing to be mad at?