Why not let the administrator decide?

Why not let the administrator decide?

I would agree with you - I think the opposition to writing down passwords stems, very fundamentally, from "one size fits all" security thinking, with a sprinkling of "I am immune to the $10 wrench attack".

In the end, your authentication method only has to be good enough to force attackers to either give up, or escalate to an attack where you will give them your authentication credentials in the hope of avoiding whatever consequence you're threatened with for not giving them up. If you're going to be quick enough to notice that the written-down password has left your wallet and trigger a password change when that happens, then writing it down is fine unless what we're talking about is something like the password needed to trigger global thermonuclear war (a strange game).

After all, if someone is in a position to get away with murdering me, I'd rather give them my credentials (including hardware tokens, not just passwords) than die, and I don't think I'm that unusual in feeling that way.