This article uses a trope that is frustratingly common in rationalist articles: It sets up over simplified straw-man versions of real world scenarios and then knocks them out of the park.
In the real world, a doctor who ignores the complaints of every patients will quickly find themselves the subject of malpractice lawsuits. Not by every wronged patient, but it only takes one or two angry patients with lawyers in the family to cause huge problems. Malpractice insurance is expensive for a reason.
Real-world security guards do a lot more than just catch robbers in the act. I've had security guards catch employees trying to remove company assets late at night, catch doors left open, notice faulty security mechanisms that need to be repaired (e.g. door sticks open), and so on. Not to mention the presence of a security guard is a huge deterrent for getting robbed in the first place.
And so on. Yes, there are situations where you can get away with betting on the most common outcome for a while, but unless the people around you are all oblivious then eventually they'll notice.
And for the robber, crime is a lot more common than he seems to think it is. Metal theft, for example, is extremely frequent: it is rare that an industrial facility would have so little theft that such a proposed heuristic would be reasonable.
If crime were that low, then the guard's position doesn't exist anyway.
So then we're just left with an empty thought exercise with no relation to reality, as an argument for how we should think about reality.
I don't think there's the need to take the examples in the article hyper literally. You can call them strawmen if you'd like but simplification for the sake of presenting a point (which you seem to have ignored) is necessary.
In the real world, a doctor who ignores the complaints of every patients will quickly find themselves the subject of malpractice lawsuits. Not by every wronged patient, but it only takes one or two angry patients with lawyers in the family to cause huge problems. Malpractice insurance is expensive for a reason.
Real-world security guards do a lot more than just catch robbers in the act. I've had security guards catch employees trying to remove company assets late at night, catch doors left open, notice faulty security mechanisms that need to be repaired (e.g. door sticks open), and so on. Not to mention the presence of a security guard is a huge deterrent for getting robbed in the first place.
And so on. Yes, there are situations where you can get away with betting on the most common outcome for a while, but unless the people around you are all oblivious then eventually they'll notice.