>[!abstract] >The **doorman fallacy** is the mistake of reducing a multifaceted human role solely to its simplest, most visible task, and eliminating it for automation. British economist Rory Sutherland coined the term in his 2019 book *Alchemy*. In it, he presented the illustrative case of a hotel wanting to improve operational efficiency. To save on salaries, the hotel replaced the human doorman with an automatic sliding door. Soon enough, guests struggled with luggage, taxis weren't getting hailed, unwelcome visitors hang around the hotel entrance, and the overall prestige of the hotel dropped. The mistake was to confuse a measurement (efficiency) with value (what effectively matters to the hotel and its patrons). >[!note] >I find this concept to be adjacent (in the positive) to [[Chesterton's fence]], which is (in the negative) the ill-considered removal of a literal or figurative barrier, in the hope of streamlining an access or a process, and not fully thinking through the unintended consequences that the initial placement of the fence was designed to avoid in the first place. >[!related] >- **North** (upstream): — >- **West** (similar): — >- **East** (different): — >- **South** (downstream): —