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This is: Motive Ambiguity, published by Zvi on the LessWrong.
Central theme in: Immoral Mazes Sequence, but this generalizes.
When looking to succeed, pain is not the unit of effort, and money is a, if not the, unit of caring.
One is not always looking to succeed.
Here is a common type of problem.
You are married, and want to take your spouse out to a romantic dinner. You can choose the place your spouse loves best, or the place you love best.
A middle manager is working their way up the corporate ladder, and must choose how to get the factory to improve its production of widgets. A middle manager must choose how to improve widget production. He can choose a policy that improperly maintains the factory and likely eventually it poisons the water supply, or a policy that would prevent that but at additional cost.
A politician can choose between a bill that helps the general population, or a bill that helps their biggest campaign contributor.
A start-up founder can choose between building a quality product without technical debt, or creating a hockey stick graph that will appeal to investors.
You can choose to make a gift yourself. This would be expensive in terms of your time and be lower quality, but be more thoughtful and cheaper. Or you could buy one in the store, which would be higher quality and take less time, but feel generic and cost more money.
You are cold. You can buy a cheap scarf, or a better but more expensive scarf.
These are trade-offs. Sometimes one choice will be made, sometimes the other.
Now consider another type of problem.
You are married, and want to take your spouse out to a romantic dinner. You could choose a place you both love, or a place that only they love. You choose the place you don’t love, so they will know how much you love them. After all, you didn’t come here for the food.
A middle manager must choose how to improve widget production. He can choose a policy that improperly maintains the factory and likely eventually poisons the water supply, or a policy that would prevent that at no additional cost. He knows that when he is up for promotion, management will want to know the higher ups can count on him to make the quarterly numbers look good and not concern himself with long term issues or what consequences might fall on others. If he cared about not poisoning the water supply, he would not be a reliable political ally. Thus, he chooses the neglectful policy.
A politician can choose between two messages that affirm their loyalty: Advocating a beneficial policy, or advocating a useless and wasteful policy. They choose useless, because the motive behind advocating a beneficial policy is ambiguous. Maybe they wanted people to benefit!
A start-up founder can choose between building a quality product without technical debt and creating a hockey stick graph with it, or building a superficially similar low-quality product with technical debt and using that. Both are equally likely to create the necessary graph, and both take about the same amount of effort, time and money. They choose the low-quality product, so the venture capitalists can appreciate their devotion to creating a hockey stick graph.
You can choose between making a gift and buying a gift. You choose to make a gift, because you are rich and buying something from a store would be meaningless. Or you are poor, so you buy something from a store, because a handmade gift wouldn’t show you care.
Old joke: One Russian oligarch says, “Look at my scarf! I bought it for ten thousand rubles.” The other says, “That’s nothing, I bought the same scarf for twenty thousand rubles.”
What these examples have in common is that there is a strictly better action and a strictly worse action, in terms of physical consequences. In each case, the protagonist chooses the worse action because it is worse.
This ch...
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