Originally posted 2024-10-20
Tagged: strategy
Obligatory disclaimer: all opinions are mine and not of my employer
When I was once an undergrad, I came across two students in my dorm debating the finer points of bathroom social conventions.
(Our bathrooms were single-occupancy but had no door locks, which explains why nobody had yet tried to simply open the door.)
“Do you think there’s someone inside the bathroom?”
“The convention is that when you’re done using the bathroom, you should leave the door slightly ajar. It’s closed, so there is someone inside.”
“Right, but what confuses me is that the lights are off inside.”
“Well, it’s daytime so someone could be using the natural light from the window.”
“I can’t hear anything either, but that’s no guarantee.”
“What if the person doesn’t know about the door convention? Do we ever actually go over that convention during dorm orientation?”
“I don’t know, but perhaps we should add it to the script, so everybody’s on the same page.”
“The dorm is pretty empty right now in the middle of the day - so that makes it less likely that someone is inside, right?”
“We’ve also been talking outside this door for a while now… if there was someone inside wouldn’t they have said something by now?”
“Maybe they have social anxiety, we shouldn’t assume.”
And on and on it went. I walked up to the bathroom door, knocked, and asked “Anyone inside?” No response. I opened the door to an empty bathroom and gestured to my dormmates.
Useful debates
What makes a debate useful?
- A debate is the only available means to resolve a question.
- The cost of debate is less than the impact of the wrong decision.
- Both sides want to find the best outcome.
Examples of useful debates: Could detonating an atomic bomb set the atmosphere on fire? Should we acquire a company that’s 25% of our current market cap? Does this newly proposed cryptographic scheme have any vulnerabilities? How can we rearchitect tax law to close loopholes while not creating new perverse incentives?
If any one of the three criteria are missing, then I would argue that the debate is not useful. Some debates can be resolved by, e.g. Googling the question, by asking the right person, or by just trying something to see what happens. Other debates go on far too long for how trivial the consequences are. And there are debates where one or more participants have ulterior motives.
We can see why the bathroom occupancy debate is so uniquely bad: it fails all three criteria.
- The cost of debate is greater than the impact of the wrong decision. (worst case scenario: you can slowly open the door while giving the person time ample time to shout if they are actually inside.)
- A simple way exists to resolve the debate. (knock on the door)
- Participants seem to enjoy the process of debating more than the outcome.
Even if the debate is not useful, trying to convince others of this fact could itself become a bathroom occupancy debate. There are two solutions: opt out of useless debates, or just simply solve it for them (by knocking on the door for them, by googling an answer, etc.).