[lolinder]

It's not an opinion piece or a study, it's a pretty straightforward application of the law of diminishing returns. It doesn't matter if you're talking about fraud or uptime or test scores, the cost of a 100% success rate is almost never worth the extra effort it takes to get there.

[Sai_]

The law of diminishing returns is not natural law - it is just an observation of something that happens in practice but not always. E.g., people often choose to spend time and treasure treating an incurable cancer or send the Coast Guard to search for five people in a submersible.

Patio11's soundbite as often shared puts the cart before the horse.

He says that the "optimal amount of fraud is non-zero" as if allowing some fraud is necessary for society to function. But what he actually means is that since not all fraud is prosecuted and prevented, allowing some fraud is just the price we pay for actually getting things done.

Take the analogy of food processing. It is accepted that some small percentage of ground coffee will be insect or rodent remains and their feces. It's not like making ground coffee requires animal remains and feces.

I read Patio11's soundbite to mean that ground coffee requires animal remains and feces.

[lolinder]

You keep calling it a soundbite—did you actually read the article, or just the title? It doesn't sound like you actually disagree with him.

> The law of diminishing returns is not natural law - it is just an observation of something that happens in practice but not always. E.g., people often choose to spend time and treasure treating an incurable cancer or send the Coast Guard to search for five people in a submersible.

Most of the time we choose to value human life at approximately infinity (especially our own lives!). When one side of the equation is near-infinite, it makes sense to keep going long after the curve has begun to flatten, but that doesn't prove that returns don't diminish, just that the value of the goal is extremely high.

Diminishing returns isn't a natural law in its own right, but it's the direct result of natural laws. It has its parallels in half lives, in the inverse square law, and in basic probability theory. While the probability of something is high, it's easy to find and eliminate because random chance is on your side. When it becomes lower, random chance starts to work against you.

[Sai_]

> don’t disagree with him

You should (re)read my comparison of Patio11’s framing of our acceptance some amount of fraud with our acceptance of some amount of animal remains in coffee. It couldn’t be more obvious that I don’t agree with his framing.

Also, Patio11 himself says this quote ended up on the cutting room floor and treats it as a catchy sound bite in his article. Which is to say I did read the article and not just the headline…