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Comment by brisance | Hacker News Reader

This is Parkinson's Law of Triviality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

It is frightening to see bikeshedding in practice. I used to work for a regional transportation authority that would administer hundreds of millions of dollars in federal/state/local road projects. Local leaders would monthly come in and sit at a huge round table (40-50 cities/counties/regional leaders) and vote on projects. 800 million dollar projects would sail through with almost no questions in the first five minutes, but then the leaders would spend the next two hours of the meeting debating about the $100,000 pilot project to help the homeless.

Why? Do some of them have something against helping the homeless on principle?

In that case it was a jobs program (to help construct roads) and the rationale against it was that they were extending beyond their purview of what the commission was meant to do.

Isn't that sort of rational then?

Definitely rational

I think (at least, I hope) what OP was trying to get at was the relative irrationality of something 1/8000th the cost of the very expensive item taking a very long time to debate through (especially when $100,000 is most probably far less than many of those board members earn as a salary every year)

I once sat in the board of a student organisation management a $3mil investment fund. Which was rapidly declining as funds where being withdrawn to cover budget deficits. At the same meeting where no-one could explain, and no-one seemed to care about a 100,000$ transaction listed as “assorted expenses”, people spend 1,5 hours debating whether the coffee-shop should keep buying newspapers for 200$ a year...

I think it's also kind of an effect that humans don't have an intuitive grasp of big numbers. Add to that the effect that humans think more about what they can imagine. You can kind imagine spending $200 on newspaper in your everyday life. You seldom make $100,000 decisions. Big one-time transactiosn seem intuitively less impactful than many smaller ones.

As Programmers we deal with numbers a lot more often, so this effect is minimized. But still there.

I'm skeptical 800 million dollar projects would pass through local government at that level in 5 minutes, unless everyone who voted in favor had already been canvassed or taken part in intense debates at other meetings or were rubber stamping a special committee decision etc. What regional authority was it where 800 million dollar projects happened so regularly?

This was a transportation authority for a large metro region. CTRMA (Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority) is an example that works with large projects like this all the time, though it wasn’t the one I worked for.

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