Did my homework: “Old English forca, force (denoting a farm implement), based on Latin furca ‘pitchfork, forked stick’; reinforced in Middle English by Anglo-Norman French furke (also from Latin furca ).”
Four in Latin is quattuor. Scared me there.
Anecdata: When I travel back to the country I've grown up I resort back to being a jerk in traffic and cutting in lines because you have to.
I've always wondered what the JT for different situations is, before the system breaks down, e.g. what percentage of people in a line have to cut in before everybody abandons the concept of forming the line.
Otherwise if there's a sign that says "Left Lane Closed 10 Miles Ahead" everyone will get in the right lane for ten miles.
In practice drivers treat the "zipper merge" as acceptable when the left lane is closed ahead, there is 500 ft of road remaining and traffic in the right lane is already dead stopped. It isn't uncommon to see people approaching at 1.5x - 2x the posted speed limit and trying to "merge" then.
And have 10 miles to get up to speed. As opposed to the zipper merge where everyone waits til the last minute, and everyone has to come to a complete stop.
Supposing of course your observations are true. From what I can tell with the "lane closed in 10 miles", is some asshole invariably sees it as a chance to get ahead of everyone else, zooms through the left lane, almost causes an accident, and then other idiots who think he's being successful in zooming ahead imitate his behavior. You get your "zipper merge" anyway, where everyone has to come to a dead stop at the chokepoint anyway. We're not all one gigantic robotic hivemind, preparing early makes for a smoother experience for all and fewer hostile feelings.
For those who use the shoulder on the interstate who do not have genuine medical emergencies (why didn't you call the ambulance?) I propose that they bring in mobile car crushers. I'm even generous enough to let them exit the vehicle first.
Another way to think of it: if you merge early, then the actual correct time to merge becomes indeterminate. Do you merge when you see the sign? Wait till you see a good gap? What if the person behind you doesn't have a gap, and they drive right past to keep looking? It becomes chaotic, and everyone thinks they are getting picked on when someone decides to merge in front of them or passes them. So much wasted anxiety and anger. It's a lot easier (in congestion) to wait until you need to merge, then merge.
In free-flowing traffic, it's a bit different, but the Minnesota page on zipper merging acknowledges that at the end of the article.
One reason for this is that it only takes one person "policing" from the right lane (i.e. driving down the middle of the road, or worse: swerving out in front of the left lane) to shut down zipper merging.
I grew up and live in Oregon. I've generally thought of our drivers as relatively non-aggressive. But I've seen Californians† who are aggressively merging and weaving (And if you've ever driven down in LA, you know the lay of the land). Then the Oregonians who follow suit, and then everyone is doing it.
†Oregonians have been complaining about Californians since time immemorial. It's just pure tribalism. We blame any negative change on our state as "Californians moving in". My apologies to Californians for unfairly dished blame.
Even when going 65 in the right lane I've seen this happen.
The other thing that seems more specific to SoCal that pisses me off is: "35MPH is a perfectly reasonable speed to merge onto the freeway at. Not just on short ramps, but on ramps that are 1/4 a mile downhill where even a Geo Metro could hit 55. Yes I'm going to go 80MPH eventually, but not until a half mile after merging."
This is how it has become with job applications. So many people started lying on resumes that the job reqs starting raising the requirements for a position, which causes more people to need to lie. If you don't lie, you just don't get a job and starve/die.
As far as I can tell, the formal name is "population dynamics".
Though this concept isn't as pat and reliable as in its most-simplistic formulations – you can't fix all crime with aesthetic enforcement – it captures real human tendencies to 'flock' in the space of norms-of-behavior, using visible cues of what will or won't be tolerated. And, it has applicability outside of just literal 'policing'.
Keeping spaces/communities far from any chaotic boundary where people start to wonder - "what can I get away with? does anyone confront/correct problems?" - can save a lot on overall defection/enforcement losses in the long run.
In the classic prisoner's dilemma, your payoff is +3 if you defect and the other prisoner doesn't, +2 if neither of you defects, +1 if both of you defect, and 0 if you don't defect and they do. There's no Jerk Threshold in this problem - regardless of your opponent's behavior, in isolation, you are always better off defecting.
But let's add the extra Antijerk Term - call it A - that you pay to defect. This could be you feeling bad about defecting, or it could represent the chance that you face retaliation for defecting later, whatever - there's some slight cost to being a jerk. We can see how the Jerk Threshold changes.
Your payoff matrix is now [[2, 3-A], [0, 1-A]]. If your opponent has a probability p of defecting, you can compute:
E[cooperate] = p * 0 + (1-p) * 2 = 2 - 2p, with the former term corresponding to you getting screwed and the latter corresponding to cooperation.
E[defect] = p * (1-A) + (1-p) * (3-A) = 3 - 2p - A, with the former term corresponding to the defect-defect state and the latter one being you screwing them.
For A < 1, 2 - 2p < 3 - 2p - A, so you're still in a prisoner's dilemma. But for A > 1, the problem abruptly shifts into a cooperation game, because 2 - 2p > 3 - 2p - A for A > 1.
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In this case, the Jerk Threshold abruptly shifts from 0 to 1 (that is, nothing could make you cooperate -> nothing could make you defect). But in the real world, the A term varies depending on context. The A term with a friend is very high, because you have a lot of opportunity for retaliation and they'll feel especially bad screwing you over. The A term with a stranger you're somewhat hostile to is low (maybe even negative). And A varies from actor to actor - some of us have stronger consciences than others. So you end up with bubbles where there's a stable local equilibrium (because the A values are high internally and that maintains stable cooperate-cooperate equilibria) despite differences with the outside world.
Properly modeling this probably looks something like the Ising model [1] on some complicated social graph. Which explains why we see these kinds of phase transitions - most real graphs are dense enough to have them. The bubbles we just described correspond to magnetic domains, and the incentives not to cooperate while in contact with a defect-bubble (or vice-versa) correspond to the high potential energy of domain walls.
In the office where I work, the main door locks whenever it closes, so the first person to arrive each morning props the door open for everyone else. Well, a new tenant moved in to one of the other units, and they started taking our doorstop. Morning after morning we had to go find it and retrieve it, for weeks! One day it occurred to me that I didn't have to complain to management, or get maintenance to deal with it, I could just buy a bunch of doorstops. The hallway is now liberally strewn with them, more doorstops than there are doors, and we haven't had to retrieve ours since.
But if one buys a bunch of them, people start trusting that they will be available, and will hoard less!
Your solution sounds easier, though.
I once had a friend move out of a place in part because he would often get locked out. I showed him how to change this at his move out party.
Exactly... in the company where I work, propping open the door (maybe not so much the door to the building, but certainly the doors to our office) would be a sure way to get you into pretty serious trouble. Also, opening the door with your own access card for other people (although I occasionally do that for people I know).
I had to remove the door stops that kept being put into the secure entrance ways as well as actual fire doors required (normally open but magnetically released when fire alarm goes off) to keep to fire code. The guy making doorstops was angry with me (I didn't hide my removing the doorstops) until I explained that we'd had multiple cases of people wandering off the streets stealing mail and one guy actually took a fire extinguisher and sprayed the lobby, damaging cars in the parking level, and that keeping a fire door propped open and unable to close in the case of fire could potentially kill someone as well as open him up to liability.
If he wanted to keep the doors open as they were previously he needed to take it up with the building and get the electromagnetic door holders reset.
I do this with utility knives, flashlights, screwdrivers, etc. The $10 of "waste" from buying a couple extra screwdrivers is hugely outweighed by the convenience of "saturation".
When management realizes they don't need to complain that the work doesn't get done, they just do the work themselves
I was teaching a topic on ecology, which required taking the class out into the school grounds to count the number and diversity of species in an ecosystem. The school grounds were extensive; there were about two dozen playing fields, a small farm for teaching Agriculture (which is an actual, examined subject in some Australian secondary schools), and a lot of bushland.
In search of a suitable spot for the lesson, I headed off down one of the paths through the bush that went to the various boarding houses, and soon found a peculiar tree. It had few branches, and few leaves, but an enormous trunk: it was old and close to death. What made it peculiar, however, was the hundreds of knives sticking out of it - clearly pilfered from the dining halls and thrown by bored schoolboys.
When I returned to the science department, I told my colleagues what I had discovered. One of them was an old boy of the school, and another lived in one of the boarding houses, and yet none of them had any idea about the knife tree.
We bought over 50 teaspoons. I think we're down to 5. We got 10-15 each of knives forks and spoons and they were predated, but not as much.
The body corporate tut-tutted and said they wouldn't do it, I think it's ok to accept some people just wind up pilfering these things, and you deal with it. If you need flatware that badly, I don't mind.
Its 4-5 years in, we probably need to recommit. I don't know I'd go to the bother of etching or stamping anything.
My sister and I fought over who got the NAAFI (british army PX) fork with a hole in the handle. The hole was for a chain, which clearly somebody broke, to steal the fork, which wound up in our cutlery drawer at home in the 50s/60s.
Though at attrition rates of under 10 per year, it could also be partly careless disposal leading to spoons in the bin rather than only deliberate pocketings of 30p teaspoons!
But, in essence we don't care, and I also think its not always wonton theft, I know I've shed spoons into the waste bin being uncareful.
I'm sure I've thrown a non-reusable utensil in the garbage more than once in my life by accident. While I of course would feel bad, I'm also not going to dig it out of a 50gal trash can in nice clothes.
Surely that happens many times over 5 years when you have dozens or hundreds of employees.
My partner and I somehow ran out of butter knives in our first apartment in under a year. We discovered that we'd leave a knife in a desert tin in the fridge (to cut a slice) but then someone would inevitably throw out the whole tin and the knife with it.
In your example, the person who left out the chairs isn't worried about being paid back for the chairs. Someone has excess, they shared it freely without expecting anything in return, and the community is better for it.
If I understand you correctly, mutual aid theory explains the author buying cheap forks just to do something good. At the same time, in the absence of penalties people will steal forks until barely any remains. So why should one believe that the balance will favor the fork buyers more than the fork stealers?
What counts as an ideal size/shape/material for your cutlery? I no longer use any metal because I once chipped my tooth on one, and often bang it against my teeth.
Anyway, one question I did have which made me a little suspicious of the neat ending: why is the fork in the last picture obviously of a different type to that shown in the engraving picture? The order was 180 forks all of the same type.
Maybe Henry bought his own forks to donate?
I think that last bit is tongue-in-cheek. That’s my read, anyway.
I have also been quite generous with friends, trying to teach them the way. However, I've found that I'm just enabling bad habits in careless people, and before you know it I've run out of anything popular. So now, I still flood my zone, in secret, and let others fend for themselves.
From this, we can perhaps extrapolate a "fork drift" factor that the school could then use to determine future fork ordering? ;)
It's a good problem to think about, and I hope most people consider it in their work.
That might explain the appeal to me of spoons that have the very noticeably rounded edges, more rounded than they need to be. :)
The problem could have been solved in many ways but it was a nice hobby for me. I ended up switching to work there as an employee and have been for ten years. I still use the mugs so it worked out OK.
And, for what it's worth, I personally think Silicon Valley just gives a microphone to egomaniacs, which is different from turning charming tech people into egomaniacs. Zuck didn't need fame/money to produce Hot or Not. The quirky people I knew in college doing cool things are still doing quirky, cool things.
I think I've found the explanation for the original shortage.
That's not how altruism works.
I don't like it how people suggest altruism should always amount to zero (or even negative!) benefit to the person doing all the giving of value. It's not how altruism should work.
Are you only a true altruist if you go to help some poor kids in some poor country and hate every second of it? If so, I'm against altruism, it's something for sociopaths then.
To be clear - I'm not at all against doing good things for others and getting recognition for it, there's nothing wrong with that. But that's not altruism.
Kids shouldn't go to college
After your manager makes it clear multiple times that they do not want to spend any money, even on things that are important, many sane people will stop caring.
He may have told the boss multiple times that they were running out of forks, and the boss said "well, we have over 200 forks, that should be enough".
But in the end, I blame the higher-level main manager. Stupidity, poor communication, stinginess, these are all very common. The workers, even first line managers, can only fight so much against it.
The first manager may have already bought a ton of spoons on his own.
