Is it unintuitive? The concept of diminishing returns applies to everything any living thing does. I think it's very natural, even in the 'our brains are wired for this' sense.
The optimal amount of airline catastrophes is non-zero. The optimal amount of pollution is non-zero. The optimal amount of [insert almost anything bad] is non-zero.
Those are all true statements, right?
The ideal amount of anything bad, is zero. But the optimal amount is going to be higher than that, given we don't have unlimited resources to spend.
It's very unintuitive. It's come up on threads here several times, with people incredulous about the statement. It has ramifications for the kinds of discussions we have on HN, because the primary stimuli we get are news anecdotes, and anecdotes about fraud can be galling but still under some sane noise floor that organizations don't bother to stop.
Is it unintuitive? The concept of diminishing returns applies to everything any living thing does. I think it's very natural, even in the 'our brains are wired for this' sense.
It is indeed unintuitive in practice.
One of the key factors is that a large part of the cost is opportunity cost. People tend to get all tangled up when thinking about such counterfactuals. We want to have our cake and eat it too. And if we can't, we persist in trying to find ways to believe that we can, and are surprised that the world continues not working that way.
I believe this is a trivial thing with a misleading title. Of course the optimal amount of fraud for a business is zero. A world with zero fraud would be optimal for them. And (also of course) given that combating fraud has costs, there is a level at which investing more money and effort into anti-fraud has diminishing returns. Therefore it is not worth it to go all in into the fight against fraud, but accept that so…
For me and you it's not surprising, for others it seems it is.
Maybe people have gotten worse at intuitively understanding that tradeoffs need to be made in anything, and that the questions that define systems are never choices as much as what the tradeoff should be.
Is it unintuitive? The concept of diminishing returns applies to everything any living thing does. I think it's very natural, even in the 'our brains are wired for this' sense.
The optimal amount of airline catastrophes is non-zero. The optimal amount of pollution is non-zero. The optimal amount of [insert almost anything bad] is non-zero.
Again this is totally misleading.
The optimal amount of airline catastrophes is zero. It is also impossible.
Should all humans spend all of their effort and all of their resources to lower the amount of airline catastrophes? I believe that pretty much everyone finds it reasonable to say no.
Anti-fraud departments have apparently not gotten the memo, and the whole situation has gotten obscene in the last few years. I regularly travel for work and it's impossible for me to make any purchases on major sites like Walmart, Best Buy, Target, Costco, etc. They all will accept an order, charge my card, and then randomly cancel the order some hours to days later, and refund me. Similarly when traveling internati…
out of curiosity, are you "privacy conscious", as in minimize sharing your location, personal information, etc? I have a pet hypothesis that a lot of the security heuristics they use are based on being able to spy on you everywhere you go, and the trail of digital litter you leave behind "confirms" it's you where you are. It's difficult to draw conclusions from my own experience because the security landscape changes…
I happen to share a name with somebody in my family, and these risk-reduction facets literally cannot tell us apart. I've been told "wrong answer" when giving the right answer to questions about myself, but they're asking me questions about a different person, because again, having the same name is sufficient to get mixed up, apparently.
Is it unintuitive? The concept of diminishing returns applies to everything any living thing does. I think it's very natural, even in the 'our brains are wired for this' sense.
Yes, it's counterintuitive to many people that "the optimal amount of $BAD_THING is non-zero" for a rather large set of possible values for BAD_THING. "You can't put a price on human life" is one common occurrence of this. I thought it was just a throwaway phrase, or a wish of how things could be, but I've regularly run into people who don't understand why we would ever fail to spend absurdly large amounts of money t…
because they somehow have this idea that they own the rights to control others. Once you consider that you can force others to do anything, regardless of reason, you can begin to rationalize anything, and it will be "for the greater good" or "for their own good". They probably even sincerely mean it too.
some kind of bald man once quoted someone: "With the first link, a chain is forged..."
Yes, it's counterintuitive to many people that "the optimal amount of $BAD_THING is non-zero" for a rather large set of possible values for BAD_THING. "You can't put a price on human life" is one common occurrence of this. I thought it was just a throwaway phrase, or a wish of how things could be, but I've regularly run into people who don't understand why we would ever fail to spend absurdly large amounts of money t…
because they somehow have this idea that they own the rights to control others. Once you consider that you can force others to do anything, regardless of reason, you can begin to rationalize anything, and it will be "for the greater good" or "for their own good". They probably even sincerely mean it too. some kind of bald man once quoted someone: "With the first link, a chain is forged..."
> because they somehow have this idea that they own the rights to control others
The flip side, of course, being the folks who believe they somehow have no responsibility for how they use their rights to impact others.
Society can only function with at least some balance between these two extremes. Some of us need a little bit of chain.
I believe this is a trivial thing with a misleading title. Of course the optimal amount of fraud for a business is zero. A world with zero fraud would be optimal for them. And (also of course) given that combating fraud has costs, there is a level at which investing more money and effort into anti-fraud has diminishing returns. Therefore it is not worth it to go all in into the fight against fraud, but accept that so…
For me and you it's not surprising, for others it seems it is. Maybe people have gotten worse at intuitively understanding that tradeoffs need to be made in anything, and that the questions that define systems are never choices as much as what the tradeoff should be.
It's only makes sense when the cost of combating the fraud is greater than the money you are losing to fraud.
I believe this is a trivial thing with a misleading title. Of course the optimal amount of fraud for a business is zero. A world with zero fraud would be optimal for them. And (also of course) given that combating fraud has costs, there is a level at which investing more money and effort into anti-fraud has diminishing returns. Therefore it is not worth it to go all in into the fight against fraud, but accept that so…
100%! There seems to be a proliferation of these long form word soups offering "deep insights" that are anything but.
All you can do is try to realize it early and hit the back button before you waste too much time on it.
Is it unintuitive? The concept of diminishing returns applies to everything any living thing does. I think it's very natural, even in the 'our brains are wired for this' sense.
Yes, it's counterintuitive to many people that "the optimal amount of $BAD_THING is non-zero" for a rather large set of possible values for BAD_THING. "You can't put a price on human life" is one common occurrence of this. I thought it was just a throwaway phrase, or a wish of how things could be, but I've regularly run into people who don't understand why we would ever fail to spend absurdly large amounts of money t…
> Yes, it's counterintuitive to many people that "the optimal amount of $BAD_THING is non-zero" for a rather large set of possible values for BAD_THING.
How much "earth is sterilized" risk is reasonable per year?