Comment by weinzierl
16 hours ago
I know the Doorman Fallacy is an established concept, but where did it really ever apply? The automatic door has won despite, devastatingly so (and no your fancy upper east side building doesn't count and neither does the Regency or the Hilton).
The doorman was called a doorman because its essential task was the door. Everything else was additional and replaceable or unnecessary in the first place.
Same with AI. Once it has replaced the main task, the rest will adapt around it.
When you say the automatic door "has won" do you mean it's won by rendering doormen obsolete? Because if so, that seems very untrue. According to Vanity Fair and NPR there are over 25,000 doormen working in New York City. 1930 there were an estimated few thousand. So since the invention of the automatic door, the number of doormen has skyrocketed.
Maybe, you'd say there are more automatic doors than doormen. I'm confident that is true, but those automatic doors haven't supplanted doormen; they're automatic doors where there would have been manual doors before.
So everything hasn't adapted around automatic doors. We've just got a lot more automatic doors now. And a lot more doormen.
You can't only compare doormen to doormen, because the number of people and doors have increased too. You need to compare doormen to doors. All the apartment buildings I've known people live at on Manhattan have only had automatic doors. You need to show that automatic doors replaced unguarded doors.
1) What proportion of doors had doormen before compared to now?
2) What proportion of the population was employed as doormen then and now?
3) What proportion of the population benefited from doormen then and now?
You would be surprised at how flat the population of NYC has been over the last ~75 years. It was 7.8m in 1950 and 8.1m in 2010. https://www.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/data-maps/n...
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I don't think that's necessary to refute the original point. The point I was disagreeing with was that automatic doors have "won" and doormen are no longer relevant. Whether 25,000 is a higher proportion of New Yorkers now than it was in 1930 isn't really a key point. 25,000 remains a large enough number that it is not true that doormen have been wiped out.
That said, to your actual points, as an intellectual exercise: while the population of New York has increased since 1930 (from around 7m to around 9m), the number of doormen has gone up much much faster (from "a few thousand" according to NPR to 25,000). So on the criteria you listed there, the number of doormen has increased as well.
The doorman example remains true.
NYC seems like a bad example since automatic doors haven’t been widely adopted.
If the automatic door hasn't been widely adopted, that literally proves the point I was making that automatic doors haven't "won".
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Perhaps it's a testament to the fact that life used to be full of things that made it a little nicer that have been ripped out in the name of efficiency and profit.
Look at how beautiful old buildings were. However, now everything is a box, because it is more efficient.
In the name of profit is so misleading though. The reality is most people don't values a doorman enough to pay for one, and costs are now lower for everyone than they would be if doorman were around.
Costs were lower for all of 5 minutes before prices of everything else adjusted to capture the surplus.
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Old buildings were beautiful because the cost of hiring someone to build it, and the price of their lives when they fell off the facade, was lower than the value of the beauty.
Modern buildings draw the line somewhere else. I too wish there would be more beautiful buildings, but not at the old price.
I don't know whether you can really call it winning. Who is actually benefiting from the win here? Another small example: something you see now at restaurants are these QR codes being put on the tables, to remove the need for a waiter to come by and ask, or for you to get up and order, but by automating that away you also remove that little bit of social interaction for both the people ordering and the waiters.
There are many other little examples like this, where beneficial side-effects go lost from automation. I suppose LLMs serve as a prime example of how this can affect people quite negatively (e.g. skill atrophy), if not careful. I think adaptation only goes so far, and we are being arrogant in thinking that we can adapt to everything, because a large part of how we function as humans is not as adaptable as we think, e.g. our emotional and instinctual needs, or how we maintain skills that are essential in the long-term.
It also has been an incredibly short period with incredibly large changes, to be able to say that things will just adapt; perhaps they will, but at what cost, and who wins from it?
The QR codes are an interesting case. Restaurants in my area have been abandoning them. I think it’s because it actually slowed service down.
We stopped going to one favorite place because the wait for a table became interminable. You’d spend forever standing there watching people waiting 15-20 minutes to get a busser’s attention so they could ask a question about the food, and then another 5-10 minutes for someone who actually knows the answer to come out and talk to them. Or, after the meal was over, people would just camp out indefinitely.
My favourite example is the petrol station attendant. Not only something really convenient went away but also the opportunity to upsell.
Loss on every side, still happened.
Anyone who has a positive experience with the doorman is where it applied. The lost family who got directions, the anxious interview candidate who got a boost from their smile, the unsure customer who was warmly greeted on a cold day.
Sometimes I feel like peter theil smokes a bunch of crack and posts antichrist takes on here under hundreds of alts. There is a lot more to life then instaspending money on Amazon, running on social media instead of talking to the kids, calling your dad for advice instead of chatgpt. These takes are exactly why most brands suck and why people will fight in the streets to defend Costco or valve.
Life will always have the intangibles and believe it or not it's still a good idea to hire someone who is only okay at a job but has an awesome personality and work ethic. Or lose a couple bucks on some hot dogs... 99% of purchases above survival are done for emotional needs and desires.
It's sad how the stupidest forms of short term cost saving and efficiency have driven ghouls to think they belong in business long term.
Fair points. But valve have been up to their own shitty anti competitive behaviour too. As far as I understand they don't allow games to be listed on other services at a lower price. Also they take 30 percent compared to epics 12, yet everyone seems to hate epics attempts to break their monopoly. Steam is great, but I try to use gog instead when I can.
It's funny how you throw the words anticompetitive and valve in the same sentence. My friend in that industry there are way bigger bad guys it's not even close. Given what valve has they could be doing actual bad shit. It's so anticompetitive you can run to multiple competitors and valve won't lose any sleep over it...
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The Doorman Fallacy is real but is poorly named. Doormen weren't replaced by automatic doors, they were replaced by simply not having a doorman. People can open doors themselves - doormen have always been a luxury for the most part.
> where did it really ever apply? The automatic door has won despite, devastatingly so (and no your fancy upper east side building doesn't count and neither does the Regency or the Hilton).
The wal-mart greeter is essentially a doorman for automatic doors.
Greeters are an anti-theft measure.
simple test - which hotel would you consider premium ?
the one with a doorman & porter vs the one with just an automatic door and elevator.
people really need to read alchemy by roy Sutherland.
I suppose doorman and porter would be considered more premium, but personally, my preference is definitely automatic door and elevator.
Doorman and porter means more awkward social interactions with strangers, and “premium” just makes me feel like I don’t belong there. I prefer my hotels to be simple and automatic. Airbnbs with self-service check-ins are ideal.
>your fancy upper east side building doesn't count and neither does the Regency or the Hilton
I don't see why it doesn't count. It shows we still value the service but it is out of reach for anyone who can't afford it. It lost in the same way much better food outings went out if business while McDonald's thrives. By making society arguably worse and punishing quality.