Sometime in the 1980s, before the internet was in common use, a friend came to me with an odd request. “I’m doing a ten-mile walk for charity,” she said. (I don’t remember what the charity was.) “And I’d like you to sponsor me.”

“Sponsor you? I don’t get it,” I said. “Where are you walking to?

“We’re not walking to anywhere,” she said. “It’s just to raise money. Like, if you pledge two dollars per mile, and I walk the whole ten miles, then you donate twenty dollars.”

“And if you only walk five miles, then I only donate ten dollars?”

“That’s right, she said. “But I’m planning to walk the whole ten miles.”

This made no sense. “If you’re asking me to donate money to this charity, that’s fine. But what does your walking have to do with it? Why does the worthiness of the charity to receive my money depend on how far you walk?”

“That’s just how it works,” she said.

“But I could just donate twenty dollars, because you asked me to,” I said, “and then you wouldn’t have to walk at all.”

“Twenty dollars is fine,” she said. “I’ll put you down for two dollars a mile.”

So she got what she wanted, but I felt like no actual communication had taken place. I still saw no inherent connection between the money and the walking.

I wish I had a more satisfying ending to this story, but I don’t. Nowadays, I see plenty of requests from people who are walking (or running, or biking, or swimming) for charity. And the weird thing is that nobody seems to see anything strange about it! Everyone just accepts that a person’s engaging in an unproductive physical activity is a rational reason to donate money. When I donate, it’s because the charity is worthwhile and a good friend asked me to; I don’t care what my friend does for exercise.

But I’ll tell you what I won’t do — I won’t vote for someone just because they ask me to. The situation is usually like this: A friend will email me (usually as one of many “undisclosed recipients”) with a message like, “I entered Floofy in the World’s Cutest Dog contest, and if he gets the most votes, I win a lifetime supply of pet food. So please vote for Floofy as the cutest dog, and tell your friends to vote for him too!”

Originally, I used to take these requests seriously. I would have to reply, “I’m sorry, but I don’t have time to look at the pictures of all of the dogs, so I have no way to confirm that Floofy is really the cutest.” And they would respond, “What do you mean? I’m just asking you to vote for him. I’m your friend — don’t you want me to win the pet food?”

The thing is, if everybody votes for a particular candidate because someone asked them to, then the adorable dog photos that everyone uploaded serve no purpose at all. The winner of the contest is not going to be the cutest dog; it’s going to be the dog whose owner has the most friends. That makes the whole thing a lie. Why not just call it a popularity contest? I just ignore those kinds of requests.

Unfortunately, the contest entrant’s way of thinking also pops up in more significant situations. When I was a faculty member at Chabot College, in my roles both as a department head and a committee chair, I was often in the position of having to request things from the administration. Naturally, the equipment or staffing that I was asking for cost money, and there were other people whose roles required them to compete for the same pot of money. I would fill out the appropriate forms, in which I would make a compelling argument for why my request was necessary, but I almost never got what I was asking for.

“Of course not!” my colleagues would say. “You can’t just go through official channels. You have to advocate! You have to get in their face! You have to convince them that what you need is more important that what other people need!”

But there’s no way I could do that, because in truth, I had no idea whether my needs were more important than others’. The only people who had the information necessary to prioritize the various requests were the administrators to whom the requests were made. That’s why we had to fill out forms — so that the administrators could do their job, which was to analyze the competing claims and make justifiable decisions. If their conclusion was that other departments’ needs were more urgent than mine, I had to respect that determination.

I don’t want to live in a world where the resources go to the person who yells the loudest, or the dog food goes to the person with the most connections. For that reason, I have to trust that other people don’t, either.