On the poverty of compromise

During debating training one day in high school, a smart friend in the middle of a tirade about The Greens and their role in Australian politics quipped “if we want to get rid of the Greens, then just get everyone to vote for them once. Let them in, let them mess everything up, and then no one will ever vote for them again.”

He was being facetious (and certainly didn’t say “mess”), but there’s a level at which he’s right — merely continuing to vote them in as cross-benchers achieves very little in terms of finding out whether they are good or not.

We are often urged to compromise with those around us. A great virtue, supposedly, of many university group projects is that they teach compromise and teamwork and collaboration (or something like that).

But it is not obvious that compromise is always the best way forward in searching for the truth.

Consider two colleagues, Adam and Becky, who both present marketing proposals at your company’s next meeting:

Adam says you should commit your marketing budget entirely to digital marketing, and that only with the full spend going to digital will you achieve your goals.

Becky says that your spend should be entirely on billboards, and in fact that only by purchasing a large number of billboards will you be successful.

Both Adam and Becky are resolute and appear not to be budging. Unable to choose between their plans, and given both plans have identical odds of success and failure, you decide to hedge your bets and split your budget between Adam’s plan and Becky’s.

Fast forward 6 months and the plan has failed. “See, I was right all along!” protest Adam and Becky in unison.

Not only has the plan failed, but you have learned nothing new. By pursuing a plan of action that no one actually advocated for, what have you learned? Certainly, you have learned nothing about whether Adam or Becky has better ideas.

All you know is that your 50–50 split was wrong, but then again no one thought it was right in the first place. For a provocative question on what this means for democracies, see Naval’s blog post of the same title as this one, The Poverty of Compromise.