[mhawthorne]

Author here. It's a great analogy.

I had a section in the post I cut out about how optimizing queue selection started out as a technical problem, but transformed into more of a business and ethical problem the more I pondered it.

You're effectively deciding how to distribute suffering across a large group of people.

Comes up in any situation where large metric gains can be accomplished by optimizing for specific groups - recommender and personalization systems are another example.