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Comment by dpeck | Hacker News Reader

This feels more like practical magic/cargo culting than reality.

I’ve heard that if you say “bezos bezos bezos” while spinning around counter clockwise in front of an amazon locker your delivery tips will go up 5%

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It seems that Amazon selects the closest driver. So they are hanging those phones in the closest tree to the warehouse, while the driver is not there.

Doesn't seem like a cargo cult.

>>>"while the driver is not there"

How many deliveries is a cell phone worth? I can't imagine a driver would leave a phone for anyone to take just to make 10 bucks or less.

The article suggests one person runs the set of phones, and sells their service to drivers. So I'd imagine that person has tuned the number of phones to be profitable. You can get older used cell phones for dirt cheap.

They may be wrong but that doesn't make it superstition or cargo cult (although it may seem satisfying to say it is). They have a decent hypothesis of how Amazon prioritizes and they are trying it out. Sounds creative and smart to me.

If your employment was entirely piece-work driven by "the algorithm", which is completely opaque and subject to change at any time, what other recourse do you have? They're basically trying to reverse engineer the weights of various inputs in Amazon's scheduling algorithm to try and have some control over their lives.

I think it is a perfectly natural and very human reaction. But that doesn’t make it any less in the realm of superstition.

It is not superstition if you have a valid theory of why it might be. I mean they don't claim the phones in the tree are charms that give good luck as a token sacrifice to Mammon.

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