It happens to me too, as if I don’t know how to update on Bayesian evidence or something. I don’t even need them to be lying about it. The cheating is enough.
There are partial mitigations, where they explain why something is a distinct ‘cheating allowed’ magisteria. But only partial ones. It still counts. [bolding mine—RC]
I’m curious what you consider cheating then. It is hard for me to come up with a reasonable heuristic for cheating that both retains the meaning of cheating (“violating accepted standards or rules”) and does not lead to bad outcomes if I update noticeably towards “anyone who cheats is a cheating cheater who’s gonna Cheat Cheat Cheat Cheat Cheat” anytime someone triggers it.
Consider someone doing the following:
Behavior
Is it cheating?
Is it reasonable to update in favor of generalized cheating?
Driving 5-8 over the speed limit
It is a violation of the rules for your personal benefit. It increases the risk of harm in an accident. It may or may not increase the likelihood of an accident (highly context dependent).
I expect if I updated noticeably in the direction of “this person is cheating cheater who is never gonna stop cheating”, I’ll be worse calibrated.
Using a bathroom labeled “customers only” without buying anything
It is violating the rules for personal benefit and defecting against a specific person, costing them a small amount of money. They will likely update against the populace as a whole and trivially inconvenience many more customers (with a door code or similar) if many people do this.
While it is not something I personally would do, I again expect if I updated noticeably in the direction of “this person is cheating cheater who is never gonna stop cheating”, I’ll be worse calibrated. I have friends who do this.
Calling in “sick” when you’re actually taking an interview day
Likely is violating the employee handbook/contract you (probably) signed. It is lying to your boss for personal benefit.
I think nearly everyone does this—if my priors do not take this into account I have bad priors. Again, I don’t see a benefit to updating my character judgment of the person.
Breaking HOA rules that some of your neighbors ignore
Again yes, you are violating accepted rules, but in practice HOA rules are often foggy Schelling fences with semi-arbitrary enforcement. The real rules are “don’t be the worst offender” and “don’t antagonize board members”, but those aren’t what you or your neighbors accepted.
Almost certainly not. This is operating within the actual implicit rules rather than the stated ones.
Saying “I’ve read the terms and conditions” when you haven’t
It is lying and defecting against the commons as it becomes common knowledge that nobody reads them and courts increasingly recognize as such.
No. Nearly everyone does this (although that personally frustrates me).
Using a VPN to bypass region locks on streaming sites
Yes, it is another form of internet piracy. It hurts the companies that produce the IP. It is violating the TOS (which you probably didn’t read).
Maybe a slight update is warranted? It might show willingness to cause wildly diffuse harm to faceless entities, but almost definitely doesn’t translate to interpersonal contexts.
Student collaboration on “individual” assignments
Depends on degree. Discussing concepts is expected; sharing answers breaks the assessment system’s purpose. There’s typically a spectrum most understand implicitly, but almost never does the system specify what is or isn’t accepted in reality.
If it crosses into answer-sharing territory, probably yes. If it is discussing concepts, probably no. Are both in many cases technically considered cheating by the school (if it is investigating you)? Probably yes.
Deliberately misleading competitors about your business strategy
You are purposefully misleading someone else and causing them harm for your personal benefit, but also your competitor is probably doing the same. It is also not disallowed by any of the rules of the system.
Probably yes—but this one is less likely to be considered cheating by the common definition.
So when does cheating signal character? I personally know how I would update (or not) in these cases, but it took reasoning through them for a minute for many of them.
I don’t know of a commonly accepted definition of “cheating” where it would be reasonable to consciously update in favor of someone cheating if they do one of the things that counts as cheating.
Caveat: this post holds implicit that agents with the computational bounds of humans have significant trouble updating very small amounts in a given direction after devoting conscious thought to something.
I’m curious what you consider cheating then. It is hard for me to come up with a reasonable heuristic for cheating that both retains the meaning of cheating (“violating accepted standards or rules”) and does not lead to bad outcomes if I update noticeably towards “anyone who cheats is a cheating cheater who’s gonna Cheat Cheat Cheat Cheat Cheat” anytime someone triggers it.
Consider someone doing the following:
So when does cheating signal character? I personally know how I would update (or not) in these cases, but it took reasoning through them for a minute for many of them.
I don’t know of a commonly accepted definition of “cheating” where it would be reasonable to consciously update in favor of someone cheating if they do one of the things that counts as cheating.
Caveat: this post holds implicit that agents with the computational bounds of humans have significant trouble updating very small amounts in a given direction after devoting conscious thought to something.