3 ms·

OK, I admit it. I use the meek strategy. Why? because I believe the parking spots that minimize walking from car to destination should be left empty for people

OK, I admit it. I use the meek strategy. Why? because I believe the parking spots that minimize walking from car to destination should be left empty for people who need them more than I do. On the rare occasion where I need to minimize walking (because I have something heavy to carry, for example) I park to minimize walking even if I have to waste some time and fuel doing it. In that case it helps me when other people use my default strategy. Optimization-theory work like this paper has a fundamental flaw: it assumes the actor is a classic "econ" -- the ideal person (defined by classical economics) working to optimize purely personal utility. In fact, many people work to optimize community utility. Studying that community-optimization model is harder. But it is probably worthwhile. Such large-scale systems as autonomous vehicles will require community optimization to succeed. It's time to reread Kahneman and Tversky, and Richard Thaler.

esotericn 7y ago
Right. I actively want the exercise. I take the stairs at work rather than the elevator when practical for the same reason. I don't think it's fair to categorise being a decent person as "meek". If more people did that, we'd have a far lower need for things like disabled and family spaces because people would fill inwards.
- OliverJones 7y ago
  Agreed, entirely. But the social-science and system-science issues get confused by using ethically charged words like "decent." Modeling "decent" gets confusing without ways of measuring it. (I'll spare us a long digression on how slippery it can be to understand ethical / moral reasoning.) Do I leave parking spots for other people because I'm a "decent" person? I like to think so -- I like to think I put others' needs ahead of my own when I can -- but that's my business. From a systems point of view I do it to help control parking lot congestion. If I were a business owner and didn't leave convenient parking spots for others, I'd be deliberately adding to congestion near my business. That's a cost. What's the benefit? Example: Van Jacobson's slow-start / exponential-backoff algorithm to help prevent TCP endpoints from saturating routers. It's certainly possible to explain this to a roomful of undergrads as a "be nice" requirement on web servers and other sources of large TCP streams. But it's more productive to model it as part of a large-scale system to control congestion.

esotericn 7y ago

Right. I actively want the exercise. I take the stairs at work rather than the elevator when practical for the same reason. I don't think it's fair to categorise being a decent person as "meek". If more people did that, we'd have a far lower need for things like disabled and family spaces because people would fill inwards.

OliverJones 7y ago
Agreed, entirely. But the social-science and system-science issues get confused by using ethically charged words like "decent." Modeling "decent" gets confusing without ways of measuring it. (I'll spare us a long digression on how slippery it can be to understand ethical / moral reasoning.) Do I leave parking spots for other people because I'm a "decent" person? I like to think so -- I like to think I put others' needs ahead of my own when I can -- but that's my business. From a systems point of view I do it to help control parking lot congestion. If I were a business owner and didn't leave convenient parking spots for others, I'd be deliberately adding to congestion near my business. That's a cost. What's the benefit? Example: Van Jacobson's slow-start / exponential-backoff algorithm to help prevent TCP endpoints from saturating routers. It's certainly possible to explain this to a roomful of undergrads as a "be nice" requirement on web servers and other sources of large TCP streams. But it's more productive to model it as part of a large-scale system to control congestion.