

House-elf Bias - kndyry
http://www.kndyry.com/rationalism/house-elf-bias.html

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jorleif
I have sometimes wondered if technology could be used to make some house-elves
more visible. When I buy an apple or some meat in the grocery store they are
simply opaque to me. Their production is completely invisible. Was it a farmer
in my home country who produced it, driving around in his comfortable tractor,
or was it a hard pressed third world farmer whose children go uneducated
despite his best efforts? Knowing this through some technological means, even
to an imperfect degree, would probably affect my choices.

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jerf
"More" visible, perhaps. Visible in general? No. You've just specified a
staggeringly large torrent of information, all of which your brain will
(correctly) judge as useless in quite short order, at an unconscious level you
will not be able to override. A shopping trip for a single week of groceries
would produce a stack of information that you would still find yourself unable
to do anything about, to say nothing of what it would take to provide that for
every transaction. Do you want to hear about where the tomatoes on your
hamburger came from? And the onions? And the ketchup? And the wheat for the
bun? And... heck, even typing and/or reading the full set of questions for
_just one hamburger_ is sort of tedious, isn't it?

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jorleif
While you are of course right trivially about the sheer amount of information,
I'm not so sure about the useless part. Right now a lot of consumer protection
and activism is driven by someone trying to sift through similar information
and then make a lot of noise about their findings. That is also inefficient in
a way that favors certain kinds of players in the marketplace.

For instance, if I knew the producer of certain items, I might decide to buy
directly from them instead of through a middleman, such as a grocery store,
but now there are all kinds of barriers to doing just that. Furthermore, if I
could somehow contact the coffee farmer who grew my coffee beans, then I could
also ask him for a particular kind of bean that I might prefer. This is less
efficient in the production sense than shipping everything in large batches,
but might be more efficient in the sense of getting what I want. It is quite
common when shopping for furniture to find exactly what you want, except too
wide, narrow, high, etc. Having it hand-made in the west would be
prohibitively expensive, perhaps 10x of the price of the item, so we settle
for the one which is not quite right. But if there was a simple mechanism for
ordering the modified item from the original developing world producer then
that might be very useful.

I guess the question is not whether we could make marketplaces more visible to
better know whom our elves are. The question is whether we want to.

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gormo2
Nice article, but when you say "The world of Harry Potter sets up an
incredible framework for explaining people to people" I think you actually
mean that it sets up a credible framework.

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kndyry
Great catch. Updated.

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RyanMcGreal
You see this with young, cocksure male drivers going like assholes down the
highway, swerving between lanes and telling themselves they're really awesome.
What they don't realize is that they haven't hit anything yet because the
other drivers are all getting the hell out of their way.

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ARothfusz
Thanks for the interesting lens! It made me read the scheduling article
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8177262](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8177262))
in a new way.

