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The Doorman's Fallacy in action

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Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#251

Post by nkrisc »

GMoromisato wrote: post #249

Replacing humans with automation is common in wealthy societies because the cost of labor is high. That's a good thing! I don't want to live in a place where labor is cheap. I'll either be paid poorly or there will be a great imbalance of wealth. The only real solution is to create better automation.

I’d rather live in a place where waitstaff are comfortably compensated for their labor. Automating it will just lead to one kind of misery after another. Where does it end? Why do we want to go there? We can choose not to.

Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#252

Post by golemotron »

The subtle thing in all this is that it externalizes labor costs. You are the one doing the work. I was thrown by this a while ago checking into a hotel with kiosk. I was out of my time zone and literally half asleep. Typing my name was real labor at that point.

Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#255

Post by SoftTalker »

nkrisc wrote: post #251
GMoromisato wrote: post #249

Replacing humans with automation is common in wealthy societies because the cost of labor is high. That's a good thing! I don't want to live in a place where labor is cheap. I'll either be paid poorly or there will be a great imbalance of wealth. The only real solution is to create better automation.

I’d rather live in a place where waitstaff are comfortably compensated for their labor. Automating it will just lead to one kind of misery after another. Where does it end? Why do we want to go there? We can choose not to.

That sounds nice but falls apart when customers have to actually pay for it.

The most workable solution we've found is for employers to compete for employees, and employees to work for a wage that's acceptable to them. If you pay more than that, a competitor who pays less will take all your business.

Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#256

Post by e28eta »

JsonDemWitOster wrote: post #206
gcanyon wrote: post #200

I'll be the contrarian and take the opposing position: this story -- the doorman fallacy itself, ignores the obvious counter-narrative: - physical menus are hard to update - physical menus are often too simple, requiring asking the server questions they've answered a dozen times before already, hurting their efficiency, or they are book-sized and hard to navigate. - physical menus aren't cleaned between uses, so you'…

You make some good points but some are, excuse me, cringey-wrong. > physical menus are hard to update How often does a restaurant update a menu? Those that need to update frequently already solved that by having a chalk board. > physical menus are often too simple, requiring asking the server questions they've answered a dozen times before already, hurting their efficiency... How does a digital menu solve this? All o…

>> physical menus are hard to update

> How often does a restaurant update a menu? Those that need to update frequently already solved that by having a chalk board.

One advantage of a digital ordering system: it can track inventory and mark a dish as unavailable after N have been ordered.

Some restaurants might have menu updates in the middle of service quite frequently, if they have a daily special with a fixed quantity. Most restaurants probably have an unavailable dish occasionally. Or if a beverage choice becomes unavailable, or a new beer is put on tap.

I don’t think ease of menu updates would be the deciding factor for any restaurant, I think it’s more likely to be based on the experience they want their customers to have

Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#257

Post by SoftTalker »

gorgoiler wrote: post #60

I’d not heard of this fallacy* but it makes perfect sense. Well executed human greeting is such a killer asset if you get it right. There’s a few million years of genetic programming inside us all that responds unreasonably positively to hospitality. If someone enters my home and is not drinking their desired beverage in under four minutes, I have brought shame on me and my family! I think we are all programmed to re…

Seinfeld did a whole episode literally about the doorman fallacy.

Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#258

Post by SoftTalker »

NichoPaolucci wrote: post #207
EvanAnderson wrote: post #65

Aside re: restaurant technology: In a restaurant a year ago with "pay via your phone" service. Server gave us a receipt w/ a QR code. I scanned the code, copied the URL to my clipboard, and looked it over. There was a base64 blob on the URL. I decoded it (because Termux and I'm a nerd) and saw obvious parameters I could fuzz. I changed the check ID (incremented it), left the store ID alone, re-encoded it, and found I…

I saw a team build some payment software a while ago that had a similar, if not exact, vulnerability. If someone had enough time / effort to figure out a not-super-unique ID (Something like 2456733), they could acccess the payment portal for an order. I notified them and they said that this was noted, skipped, and they didn't believe it was an issue. Worst case scenario an attacker could... Pay for someone elses orde…

But it's such an easy vulnerability to avoid, that if they're not avoiding it you have to ask what else did they gloss over in their system? "Felt sloppy" is exactly right, and the assumption should therefore be that the entire system is sloppy.

Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#259

Post by SoftTalker »

hoherd wrote: post #67
varispeed wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such feature is designed to catch people who might not pay attention. Innocent looking money grab. Some better parking apps simply let you start the meter and then stop when you get back to your car, so you don't have to worry you miss it and get a fine.

If you forget to pay when you get back to your car, are you charged the max? That's how it works with other systems like this that I've used.

Yep. Our city had that system, you started a timer in the app when you parked and had to remember to stop it when you left the parking spot. Appeals of "I forgot to stop the meter" were routinely denied (I think there was still a max like 24 hours, so that you could not accrue an arbitrary amount... or maybe it stopped the next time someone else started paying for that spot. I never used the app so I'm not sure how it worked, I always just paid for a fixed block of time using a card).

I have nostalgia for the coin operated meters I grew up with. It was always a little thrill to park and then find there was still an hour or more left on the meter from the previous person.

Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#260

Post by stronglikedan »

kjs3 wrote: post #237
phaser wrote: post #219

I've seen it worse: A team of employees have an entry level engineering job, and work as a bridge between support and the "core" engineering team. They just talk to customers when an issue is escalated, and maybe it will submit a hotfix PR but when the issue must be escalated further the instructions are to send it to the higher-ranked team who will make it part of the next sprint. At every all-hands meetings, core t…

Even more, when the concept of "AI agent" appeared on their radars, they were the first people who they thought they're gonna replace. I worked on a project where they replaced virtually all tier-1 customer service reps with an AI chatbot, which worked ok, because 90% of those calls are things like "what's my balance" and "I need a replacement credit card", which an AI can competently navigate. Phase 2, I was informe…

> how are you going to train up the tier 3 reps

iterative feedback loops using memories for context, of course. just like they trained the first two tiers

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