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The pros and cons of placebo buttons

economist.com

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Re: The pros and cons of placebo buttons

#121

Post by cimmanom »

jkingsbery wrote: post #10

I work in New York, but I go to Seattle periodically because that's where my company's headquarters is. How people treat the buttons is wildly different between those two cities. I hardly ever see anyone press the cross button in NY, since the convention is to wait for there to be no cars and then cross (and not bother with the button). In Seattle, I've seen people wait patiently at a cross walk even though there's n…

Also, in New York, intersections whose signals don't change automatically on a (reasonably short) buttonless timer are vanishingly rare.

Re: The pros and cons of placebo buttons

#122

Post by cimmanom »

laken wrote: post #113
r_klancer wrote: post #49

Worse yet, at least in Somerville and the general Boston area, I'm seeing touch-sensitive buttons instead of physical buttons that depress--with no haptic feedback; and only some of them play a recorded "Wait" when you press. I'm gradually training myself not to jam my finger painfully against them to be "sure" I pressed. If it turns out they're also placebos, I think I'm just going to give one a good kick next time…

Those aren't placebo buttons, rather for the hard of sight. The audible "Wait" is to tell to not cross yet, and it will then tick when it's safe to cross, and increasingly tick faster the time lowers.

Which doesn't explain the ones with neither haptic nor audible feedback.

Re: The pros and cons of placebo buttons

#123

Post by AgentME »

it wrote: post #90
winrid wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to clarify your point?

In a country with millions of voters, a single vote isn't likely to be what decides who gets elected. In the limit of infinite voters, casting a vote is a lot like pressing a placebo button. It's not directly useful for the voter, but it makes the voter more likely to accept the outcome.

>In a country with millions of voters, a single vote isn't likely to be what decides who gets elected.

Forget worrying about single votes: even having most of the votes isn't necessarily enough to influence things! (Referring to the 2000 and 2016 presidential elections, and to the concept of gerrymandering.)

Re: The pros and cons of placebo buttons

#124

Post by yholio »

noobiemcfoob wrote: post #79
yholio wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost of smart trafic lights is peanuts compared to the costs of reconfiguring and rebuilding a major intersection.

Your comment is based on no data at all and just a handful of assumptions that are most certainly far from true.

I happen to work for a council and know the general order of magnitude for road infrastructure investments - I participate in their approval. I would file this suggestion of "building smaller intersections", that is, completely re-routing the traffic flows in a given area, in the purely fantastical bin.

If we could squeeze 20% more traffic capacity from a given congested intersection with a one time investment of, say, under €200K, it would be a major breakthrough. We use a complex system that involves periodically measuring traffic flows using pneumatic tubes, then feeding that data to a computerized model that will produce the timing sequences for the lights lights and their evolution during a day. There is a crew moving around the district installing these tubes and counters for a week or so.

The current state of the art are induction loops embedded in the asphalt that measure the number of incoming vehicles and adjust the timings in real time. A purely optical detection that can work in all weather and recognize all types of vehicles or even pedestrians would be quite a feat.

Anyway, thank you for your factual and data infused contribution.

Re: The pros and cons of placebo buttons

#125

Post by msla »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #118
zimablue wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole piece, and to be honest most of the comments here come from such a dark, authoritarian, arrogant perspective. "lying to the plebs modifies their behavior very slightly in a good way or is it in a bad way?" It's irrelevant, treat your fellow humans with some modicum of respect and dignity. Terry Pratchett's first rule of morality "don't treat people as if they're objects". Anyone caught casually deceiving p…

There's a spectrum to "nudges". Some government nudging is actually morally justifiable, IMO. Things like making retirement saving opt-out instead of opt-in, or hiding information about a probable disaster to avoid panic[0]. Placebo buttons I find somewhere between justifiable cost saving (if buttons were working in the past, or could in the future) and being disrespectful to people. But in this case, and in almost a…

> Things like making retirement saving opt-out instead of opt-in

This isn't about the retirees as much as it's about society as a whole and the economics thereof.

Simply: Most cultures are now unwilling to put up with old people dying in the streets. We're even iffy on the idea of workhouses and other accoutrements of the Poor Law. Therefore, we have welfare, in multiple forms, and having a lot of people hitting welfare in their Medically Expensive Years is bad for multiple reasons.

> hiding information about a probable disaster to avoid panic

More like avoiding blame when they're culpable.

> E.g. evacuating a city of million+ will necessarily cause a lot of deaths and heavily disrupt regional economy, leading to further deaths and suffering. Therefore, it's IMO justified for the government to avoid triggering evacuations if the risk is low, even if that means sitting on some information.

Failure to prepare on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part... and if it does, I demand to know that you failed to prepare, so you can face some consequences.

Re: The pros and cons of placebo buttons

#126

Post by msla »

doublepg23 wrote: post #109
Shorel wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's irrelevant, treat your fellow humans with some modicum of respect and dignity. Terry Pratchett's first rule of morality "don't treat people as if they're objects". If we want to get philosophical, just the existence of a police force treats people as an antagonist, and interaction between people and the police makes it clear that respect and dignity are out of the question. Nothing is more authoritarian and ar…

If we are being philosophical, plenty of left-wing thinkers have advocated for police abolition.

> plenty of left-wing thinkers have advocated for police abolition.

Impossible. Not bad or wrong or even stupid, but impossible.

If you have no police, everyone's police. How is that abolishing the police?

Re: The pros and cons of placebo buttons

#127

Post by doublepg23 »

msla wrote: post #126
doublepg23 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we are being philosophical, plenty of left-wing thinkers have advocated for police abolition.

> plenty of left-wing thinkers have advocated for police abolition. Impossible. Not bad or wrong or even stupid, but impossible. If you have no police, everyone's police. How is that abolishing the police?

If you're reducing terms to meaninglessness yes, "everyone's police."

The thinkers analyze the role police play in modern society. This refers to modern police forces that have their most direct roots in the late 18th century.

Re: The pros and cons of placebo buttons

#128

Post by TheAlchemist »

You don't have this kind of problems in Paris. Nobody cares about the crossing lights here :)

It's pretty impressive, or scary, when you come from a country where people respect the crossing lights, but once you're accustomed to it, you just can't stand waiting for the green light if there is no car in sight (let's be honest, no car in 30m range is enough)

Re: The pros and cons of placebo buttons

#129

Post by munk-a »

doublepg23 wrote: post #109
Shorel wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's irrelevant, treat your fellow humans with some modicum of respect and dignity. Terry Pratchett's first rule of morality "don't treat people as if they're objects". If we want to get philosophical, just the existence of a police force treats people as an antagonist, and interaction between people and the police makes it clear that respect and dignity are out of the question. Nothing is more authoritarian and ar…

If we are being philosophical, plenty of left-wing thinkers have advocated for police abolition.

I don't know where this is coming from but this "plenty" you've spoken to is not at all representative of the left-wing thinkers I've spoken to personally. There's no reason to drag politics into this.

Re: The pros and cons of placebo buttons

#130

Post by kbenson »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #118
zimablue wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole piece, and to be honest most of the comments here come from such a dark, authoritarian, arrogant perspective. "lying to the plebs modifies their behavior very slightly in a good way or is it in a bad way?" It's irrelevant, treat your fellow humans with some modicum of respect and dignity. Terry Pratchett's first rule of morality "don't treat people as if they're objects". Anyone caught casually deceiving p…

There's a spectrum to "nudges". Some government nudging is actually morally justifiable, IMO. Things like making retirement saving opt-out instead of opt-in, or hiding information about a probable disaster to avoid panic[0]. Placebo buttons I find somewhere between justifiable cost saving (if buttons were working in the past, or could in the future) and being disrespectful to people. But in this case, and in almost a…

> To me, lying needs heavy justification - on the level of saving lives.

Agreed, and in case someone is looking for scientific justification, you can just look at it as specialized market economy (as quite a lot of things can be). Lying in this case reducing market information, which reduces efficiency. In this case, that translated into you wasting a small amount time and effort pushing a fake button. But multiply it across all the times you do it, and all the people that do it, and it's actually a fairly large drain overall (not to mention the frustration of expecting your actions to matter and them never seeming to).

I think the common refrain against this is that people don't act rationally or in the best interest of the whole in these cases, but I think that's more often just another case of poor market information leading to inefficiency, even if the source is different. The problem with manipulating the market by reducing information even more (deceiving people) is that if it works it likely only works while existing conditions persist, and may become much less useful later as conditions change. I.e. if people were crossing before the button was pressed and the placebo button helped, what happens when crosswalk sings start showing countdowns and people then become accustomed to noting that and waiting for them regardless if there's a button or not? Better information has make the system more efficient... except for those that still waste their time with the buttons that don't do anything, and now the prior strategy to manipulate people is making the system less efficient than if it wasn't present.

Which is all just a really drawn out way of saying and showing that treating people with respect and giving them as much information as possible (and definitely not giving them false information) should lead to better outcomes overall.

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