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There's a fun dramatic little scissor statement happening in the rationalist / post rationalist corner of twitter at the moment. Started by @_brentbaum talking about his girlfriend's high agency:
I, and many others, chimed in saying hey wait a second... this is actually kind of concerning! Some of the negative responses:
and my personal favorite:
As I said though, this is apparently a scissor statement because a ton of people also had the OPPOSITE reaction. Some examples:
etc etc.
Now the reason I find this fascinating is that it's one of the clearest breakdowns between consequentialists and virtue ethicists I've yet seen in the wild. Most people defending the girl of 'scarfgate' are basically just saying "what's the harm? nobody ever goes back for those scarfs. besides they're like $20 most of the time anyway."
Unfortunately a lot of folks get drawn into this argument, and start saying things like well, what if somebody comes back for it later and it's gone? Or what if someone's grandma knitted them that scarf?
To me, going down the consequentialist route is doomed to fail. You can justify all sorts of horrible things in the name of consequentialist morality. (Same with deontology, to be fair.) My take is that this is wrong because she directly lied to someone's face, and then proceeded to steal someone else's property. The fact that most people think it's cute and quirky is probably down to a sort of Women are Wonderful effect, imo, and then they use consequentialism to defend their default programming that women can't be bad.
Either way, curious what the Motte thinks? Is scarfgate just salty sour pusses hating on a highly agentic women? Or are there deeper issues here?
If you're prepared to go in and steal scarves, why not steal from a self-checkout machine? The corporation is not going to miss the $20. But when everyone does it, stores close and we have to go back to cashiers rather than an efficient, human-free experience.
Why not just torrent games for free or get repacks? I'm not totally innocent on this but it's still bad to do even if I'm tempted to say 'oh well the marginal cost of distribution is zero and i probably wasn't going to buy it anyway'. When everyone does it, all we get is AAA slop catering to people too stupid to torrent.
Consequentialism should consider the long-term consequences of behaviours.
What kind of machines do they have where you live?
They replace one checkout worker manning a single line with that worker overseeing half a dozen self checkout lines.
It is enormously more efficient.
Enormously more efficient for the store, maybe. As a customer my perspective is that they just moved the cashier's job to you and gave you a shittier and slower interface to do it with.
The local self-checkout I'm familiar with requires you to scan items one at a time, takes a second to check the change in weight after you put each item in your bag, and if anything goes slightly wrong in this process you need the cashier's manual intervention which takes at least a minute. I'll usually take waiting for a couple people in line over that awful experience.
This whole thing only looks more efficient because the store isn't having to pay the customers to do this.
It's true that the actual act of scanning items and paying for them takes longer, but with one nominal cashier thus overseeing "half a dozen" self-checkout lines (not an unrealistic number) also spreads the customers that would normally wait in line for one cashier over six lines, which should cut waiting times by a lot more than the time lost to slower scanning.
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The self-checkout stations that I've used (at Costco, Target, and Home Depot) do not have this problem.
Yes, because this process is the source of 90% of the problems self checkout machines create (the other 10% are alcohol purchases), and an employee has to come and fix those problems.
In my casual survey of self checkout machines across cities and countries, I've come to the conclusion that only supermarkets in extremely low-trust cities use the scales. For everybody else, it's just not worth it, since you can literally increase the machines/employee ratio by 10 if you don't need to use the scale functionality.
My local supermarket doesn't sell alcohol ind is in a high trust region. Tens of self checkout machines are running without employee oversight, if there's a problem the store manager comes to deal with it.
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