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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Excellent post. All it's missing is a callback to Beware Trivial Inconviniences. This is just the same idea from the user-end, right?

I think this point generalizes quite a bit more than people appreciate. An example from elsewhere in the Culture War might be the proliferation of suppressors in the Gun Culture. Acquiring a suppressor requires an onerous and intimidating amount of paperwork and red tape, so for a long time most people just didn't bother. But then people in the gun culture got together and built themselves something analogous to a GUI on top of the bureaucratic command prompt, a system to guide people through the process and, perhaps more importantly, reassure them that the process actually could work for them. Suppressor ownership exploded.

I'm skeptical generally of rules-based systems because it seems clear to me that rules cannot constrain human will. On the other hand, if the rules work, why not use them?

How embarrassing for me to have forgotten that link, it's perfectly on point. I don't think I fully appreciate how much of a setback a trivial hurdle can be. My economics brain thinks "durr cost went up by only 2.6%" which obviously does not reflect in reality for how people are really affected. So it's naive for me to think this can be solved as a call to action to individual users, it's just not at all a realistic ask. This does mean that the pendulum can swing back if you have someone doing the grunt work and creating an accessible tool. This NYT article from 2020 talks about how this happened with DoorDash, but it also talks about a startup called FairShake that tries to automate the dispute resolution process and makes money by taking a cut.