This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Riffing on this discussion I would like to present a scenario:
I am the CEO of a struggling startup, expecting to take a call from a very busy potential client. We are out of funds and will go bankrupt without the client’s business. The client, a CEO, is busy and if I miss this call he will certainly not bother to call back.
Unfortunately my phone has died at the crucial moment. I’m in a cafe so I run up and down the tables, begging to borrow someone’s charger. Somebody gives me the charger, I take the call, and my startup goes on to make billions. The call, and therefore the charger, has made me rich beyond imagining.
One the one hand, lending me the charger was an utterly trivial act: even ten dollars in thanks would be a little windfall for the lender. On the other hand, without the lender I would be destitute instead of a billionaire. How much of a debt do I owe the person who lent me their charger?
Edit: ‘owe’ in a moral sense, as opposed to enforceable by a court.
It would be virtuous and convey a positive incentive for you to significantly reward the person who leant you their charger. We want people to cooperate and help others, even strangers, and reaping a (presumably highly-publicized) windfall reward for doing so would be a good model. The gesture also is virtuous in that it demonstrates the billionaire's acknowledgement of social, civic, and reliance ties with others in the community, and sets a standard of expecting people to treat those who render them aid well, if they have the means to do so. This is in line with other morality tales from western culture with similar themes, such as the fable of Androcles and the lion's paw.
Which sounds good to me. If I were the billionaire in question, I might get cold feet worrying about expectations from everyone else. @MotteInTheEye is correct that any number of people can claim to have made an important, maybe necessary contribution to my life and my consequent windfall, and might start sniffing around for their own rewards. Being known as generous can be a problem. @2rafa mentioned once that the very-rich of her acquaintance almost never give money to acquaintances for precisely this reason.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Related: As a software developer I can make a small change at work to save the company hundreds of thousands in processing costs or performance SLAs. Is my work really worth that amount, and should developers be paid according to what they're 'owed' instead of just a salary? (Ignoring the boring question of "only the salary was negotiated")
Aside from the practical issues of how to measure each developer's 'worth' (or maybe I am drilling into the details here), the fact is the savings are only possible because of the massive platform and software that the company already has, which I did not create.
The charger is critical to the win, but a bystander demanding too much money is being an asshole. Your struggling startup is obviously providing most of the value.
More options
Context Copy link
With a little creativity you could discover an unbounded number of actions leading up to the phone call without which it could not have occurred. E.g., the guy who let you in in traffic so you would be there on time, the other guy who slammed on the brakes just in time to prevent a major accident which would have stopped you from arriving at the coffee shop, the gal who set her alarm so that she could open up the coffee shop that morning, the engineer who put the final touches on the cell phone communication standard your phone used to receive the call...
There's obviously no moral obligation on you to identify every single event without which your phone call couldn't have happened. You owe a normal debt of gratitude to someone who minorly inconvienced themselves to help a stranger. Of course a bigger gesture would be a nice act since this particular act of kindness looms large in your mind, but there's no coherent case that you owe anything more than you would if the call hadn't earned you any money.
More options
Context Copy link
This is in fact trivial. It would be good to track the gentleman down, take him to a Michelin restaurant and pay for his children’s college education-it’s not like that isn’t equally trivial to a billionaire- but you don’t owe him more than the usual kindness for a trivial kindness just the same as the janitor at your startup headquarters doesn’t strictly need to get a huge payout at IPO, and you don’t have to give your pizza delivery guy from the night you made your breakthrough a million dollars when you sell the patent for it for a billion.
More options
Context Copy link
Larry David directed a movie with a similar premise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sour_Grapes_(1998_film)
I haven't seen it but everyone says it's terrible, including David.
More options
Context Copy link
Isn't the better comparison if you didn't really know the value of your startup, and you offered them half of the company without really thinking about it, would you have the right to renege because the value of the company became larger than the value of the favor?
More options
Context Copy link
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll
Everything is composed of many parts, without which something will fail. Those individual parts are not all worth the entire project, but rather some function of their rarity/cost to create and necessity viewed through a Keynesian beauty contest or such. Normal values and prices already cover everything.
Consider the same story, but where you offer people $10 to use their charger for a little bit. This removes the debt and simplifies the initial acquisition.
More options
Context Copy link
Just because not providing this trivial item at that critical time would have destroyed your chances doesn't change the fact that it remains a trivial amount of the effort, investment, risk and general interest that has gone into this endeavor.
You and your company made this happen ultimately and whilst the charger lender factors in, he doesn't to a significant degree.
The appropriate gratitude is therefore symbolic in nature. Since what you were provided and should give back is serendipity.
I would invite that person to some company gala as the guest of honor, tell the story and give them some memorabilia (maybe a replica of the charger) They are to be commended for their kindness and the story is both nice and useful mythmaking, but you do not owe them a cent for the same reason that you don't owe the people who paid attention to traffic and did not run you over that day.
More options
Context Copy link
You owe nothing. It is a trivial act of kindness. But if you are multibillionaire then buying a house, putting their kids trough college and a modest trust fund is also trivial act of kindness. Of course depending on the situation and their financial conditions the exact needs will be different - but that is the order of magnitude I will be aiming.
But to make things more fun - what will you do if Elon Musk or Peter Thiel lend you the charger - someone that already has fuck you money?
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think there's a real answer to this kind of question. moral norms are developed gradually, in society, from repeated interactions. This kind of crazy, one-off event just doesn't have any standard at all.
But to try and give a real answer, I think it depends on the specifics. If you just went up to the bartender, and they had a charger available normally for customers to use (i've seen bars do this), then I wouldn't feel like I owe them much. Maybe $100 or something. If I was running around to random tablees, disturbing all the customers who are just there to eat, and someone just happened to have a charger in their pocket, I think I would owe them a lot. Like, $100,000 to the charger person and $10,000 to everyone else maybe.
More options
Context Copy link
You don't have to imagine the scenario. That's how all of VC works.
Know-nothing angel investors will fund your pre-seed for 20% of your company. The best angel investors give you their money and fuck off. If you become a billionaire one day, that's exactly what you owe them. It's a standard contract. Similarly, marriage is the most common signed contract. One takes the lead on career, one takes the lead at home. If something goes wrong, we split ways 50-50. Bezos signed this contract, and had to pay out accordingly.
Both VC and Marriage, free you to take risks without devastating your life if you fail. It may not look like it, but Scott McKenzie invested in Jeff, and got paid for placing her faith in him when he was nobody.
Did you sign a contract ?
More options
Context Copy link
Owe? Nothing! In the scenario outlined, there was no offer, and no acceptance; no bargain was struck.
If I were personally made a muti-billionaire in this scenario, and the real alternative was in fact me becoming destitute, I would probably give the cord lender a million bucks as a show of gratitude. Someone who gave the cord lender less than, oh, $10,000 in this scenario I would regard as tastelessly cheap. But I would also regard it as tasteless of the cord lender to anticipate such a reward. In moral or legal judgments, it is appropriate to feel that one is due what one is owed, and that one owes what others are due. But I think aesthetic judgment applies better to scenarios like this one, where no contractual or moral obligations seem to be in play. It is a more beautiful world, where people penny-pinch neither their helpfulness nor their gratitude.
Really? My intuition is that I would give the lender $100 and go on my way. Largest bill there is, big enough tip to make someone's day, small enough to be trivial to me. I would do the same if I won a million bucks at the casino; give the croupier a hundred to satisfy the social obligation to tip after a big win and think no more of it.
I was actually in a similar situation once, albeit on a much smaller scale. I dressed up nicely and drove to my alma matter to do a video interview (because my house was a mess), but when I got there it turned out that my laptop was too old to run the video software (it was still running on Windows Vista!). I asked one of the students I saw there to let me borrow her laptop for the interview, and she agreed. I used it for about 15 minutes in a chair next to her. When I finished, I gave her back the computer, and asked her if she would like something for her trouble. If she said yes, I would have pulled out a twenty and given it to her. She said no, so I just thanked her and went home.
Now, I found out later that I didn't get the job, but if I had, it would have been worth tens of thousands of dollars a year to me, since I was unemployed at the time. Was it cheap of me to have only offered her a twenty, or to have not insisted after she turned me down once?
This dovetails pretty well with my wife's recent argument that America needs a $500 bill, because the $100 increasingly lacks the gravity it once did.
The reason the US doesn't have large bills is because it's convenient for the government that we don't, not because they weren't "needed".
Agreed. Governments hate cash for the same reason they hate crypto; it enables people to escape their control. The state can't get of the cash yet, but they are sure as fuck not going to make it more convenient to use by printing bigger bills. Instead, it will watch as inflation slowly makes the $100 bill as irrelevant as the penny.
From "In Praise of Cash" by Brett Scott:
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Technically there are 500 dollar bills that are legal tender. But they haven’t been printed since 1945.
More options
Context Copy link
1/4-ounce platinum coin ≈ 250 $
1/2-ounce platinum coin ≈ 500 $
1-ounce platinum coin ≈ 1 k$
1-ounce gold coin ≈ 2.5 k$
No one accepts those. Technically American gold eagles are legal tender and you could tip for very large favors with an ounce of gold- and the government has consistently ruled that regardless of face value they are to be regarded as worth the value of their metal content, not their face value.
I think the previous commenter was specifically talking about "gravity" as a tip, not acceptance by a business.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Some distinctions: zeroth, you didn't get the job, and you didn't find out until later, and both of those things matter. First, even had you gotten the job, the laptop would not have been the difference between you and "tens of thousands of dollars," but between you and the opportunity to earn tens of thousands of dollars. Options are valuable, but they are not equal in value to the exercise of the option. Second, "only" a twenty is a similar offer, proportionately, to $10,000 to a multi-billionaire--or even a million dollars, if we factor in diminishing returns. So while I do not think it was cheap of you to sacrifice a twenty, I do think it was maybe impolite of you to ask. People are conditioned to refuse rewards for their good deeds. Aesthetically, I would have offered her the twenty; aesthetically, it would still be appropriate for her to turn it down, if she just had no particular need of twenty dollars.
But probably I get most of my aesthetics from fantasy novels and video games.
I once lost my wallet in an Uber coming back from AC. It had about 800 dollars in it. A woman found it and took pains to reach out to me. I wanted to give her one hundred dollars as a tip but she refused as she said she was just doing the right thing. I told her to give the hundred to the charity of her choice and then she accepted. I doubt she actually gave it to a charity but I was okay with that.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Tipping the dealer or croupier a hundred on a million dollar win is cheap af. In the other scenario, I'd consider "I got rich, here's a hundred dollar bill" to be insulting.
I mean, there’s not really a not-awkward way to tip more than that.
If a friend gave me a stock tip that lead to me becoming a millionaire in a short time, I’d probably take them to fogo de chao- because that’s the default in my social circle for getting someone a six figure job, and it seems like the closest fit to a rough equivalent. But a stranger doing something personally low effort which results in a big windfall is the sort of thing which our society doesn’t have a script for.
More options
Context Copy link
Duly noted. If I'm ever in either scenario, I simply won't give them anything.
I ain't telling you how to live your life, man. Merely observing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'd say you owe them nothing in debt. The person who lent you the charger presumably did so without you promising him some share of the proceeds from your use of the phone that's capable of being used due to the charger. The person presumably did so out of the goodness of his heart, because lending a charger is a very low cost act, so low that they were presumably willing to do so for no expectation of payment. Let's meet that expectation.
Otherwise, then we can raise the question of how much do you owe the cafe for using their energy (freely provided from their plugs) to power your phone to make this call that led to you earning billions of dollars? What about the phone company that connected you to this client, with the expectation that all they'd get out of it is your monthly subscription fee? What about the phone manufacturer who sold you the device that enabled you to talk to your client, with the expectation that all they'd get out of it is the upfront payment for the device?
I say, these people made their bed when they decided to provide their goods or services to you at whatever price they set; let them lie in it.
More options
Context Copy link
Enough money to make a good-sized newspaper headline, maybe a million dollars? That's not much for a billionaire.
We should try to cultivate a pro-social atmosphere where hospitality is rewarded, where people are generous and helpful to strangers.
More options
Context Copy link
I think someone covered this a while ago: "my kingdom for a horse!"
The concept of value breaks down in illiquid markets, but it's just an extension of the same gap between bid and ask price as any other sale. If you are willing to buy a stock for $1.02, and the lowest seller is willing to sell for $.99, what's the real value of the stock to you? Do you owe him the extra three cents you were willing to pay over what he wanted? It's exactly the same issue in microcosm.
More options
Context Copy link
If there are about 8000 potential one-phone-call-away-from-billionaires in 8 billion people, and everyone else's call would be worth about 1 "thanks", then the expected value of a phone call assist is about 1b/(8b/8k) = $1000. I pulled the math out of my ass here.
So, this sounds like a good ballpark for an upper limit to your gratitude here.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link