I have been pondering Wentworth’s Information vs Assurance post, and I think I have another angle on a similar concept. Wentworth identified the problem of information being mistaken for assurance. I want to explore what it looks like to deliberately construct assurance, and what that costs. Conveying this concept in different communication-cultures is hard — plans get mistaken for promises, and promises for plans.
What’s the difference? Well, plans tell you something about the way the planner views the state of the world, the state they wish the world was in instead, and the process by which they plan to change it. If I tell you I’m planning on taking Route 9 to pick you up from the airport, this tells you something about my model of traffic, my schedule flexibility, maybe even my risk tolerance. Often someone sharing a plan with you is an invitation. Not just to the plan but also the frame that generated it — the worldview through which they see the world and measure risks and opportunities. There’s also often an implicit caveat that plans change. There is an impermanence to plans, indeed that’s part of their usefulness! You can update a plan on new info, change the trajectory you are aiming for, change who is involved. When a plan fails, there are questions about how to predict obstacles earlier or who could have acted differently. People may feel sad the plan failed to succeed, but rarely do people feel trust was broken. Plans are statements of intention, not a commitment to outcome.
Promises are different. People are rightly mad at you if you break one of those. There is weight and expectation built into a promise. A promise is a plan with an assurance your counterpart can put weight on. They can invest in the world where the promise is held, and hold you accountable if the promise is not. Contracts are a close analogy, synonymous in some cases. Breaking a contract comes with legal consequences, in part due to the attempt to recompense the recipient what they lost by investing — on your assurance — in a world that didn’t exist. A promise comes with the expectation that you will sacrifice to keep your promise, you will be willing to undergo some inconvenience to keep your word. What’s at stake isn’t just the trust of the people you made promises with, but also the possibility of that better world that could be invested in.
Keeping promises is hard though, what do you do when circumstances change? What if an emergency arises? Do you become like Wei Sheng[1] — who drowned rather than break his word — or do you lose a bit of trustworthiness and hope it’s ameliorated by the understanding of your counterpart. What happens when there is disagreement about reasonable circumstances? I would feel aggrieved if I put a bunch of resources into a course of action that doesn’t make sense anymore because you broke your promise over something I consider trivial, even if it’s not trivial to you. I might even understand, but that doesn’t change my loss! Does it matter how much I’ve invested? It gets tricky fast, especially when people have different expectations about what constitutes an exception they won’t hold against you.
Enter bonds. They are my new favorite mechanism for making the cost of promises legible. I recently had someone ask to borrow a $180 board game on a trip to Yosemite. I told them if they gave me $180, they could take the game, and I would give them back the money once the game was returned. This sort of thing made it super clear exactly the cost of the promise they were making, and if it failed, I would keep the money as recompense. It was so simple and clean! Expectations were very clear, we both knew the size of the promise and the cost of breaking it. With the cost legible and the bond in hand, I wouldn’t feel betrayed if they lost the game on their trip. I could invest in the world where I had the game. I had assurances. If a very costly promise is made, it matters a lot the promise is kept, and with bonds the cost can go to the person making that promise. If an emergency comes up and I feel like I need to break some promise, but am not sure if the person I made the promise to would agree the emergency is justified, I have to risk breaking trust and having a long-drawn out fight over it. With a bond, I can directly measure the cost of the emergency against the bond amount. It’s much simpler and clearer to everyone involved.
You don’t have to make bonds denoted in money — I think most are implicitly made with reputation — but money has many nice properties, not the least of which is money can be used for recompense should the promise fail. I once made bonds with my roommate denoted in chores.
Many people dislike the cold, calculating nature of bonds denoted in money. They like promises made with trust and reputational costs as the bond. I think this works sometimes in tight-knit communities where reputations are common knowledge. Not only does the promise breaker lose some reputation and trust from the community, but the community can enforce a claim against them to recompense the person they promised. This stops working as soon as any of it gets complicated — the group grows too large to establish common knowledge reputations, or different factions disagree on what’s a fair exception. It gets a lot harder to get reimbursed for a claim of damages when this happens, even if the promise breaker still loses reputation and trust.
Thinking of promises as bonds also reveals interesting things about the way people think of the bounded-nature (or not) of promises. Many promises are implicitly bounded to time or context. But not all are. If I say, “$5 says I can climb that tree” suddenly my friends want to know how many tries I get, how it only counts if one of them can witness it, etc. When there’s money on the line, suddenly people want to get into the details and operationalize the context. When someone asks to borrow my game, I’ll ask for a bond, but I’ll also ask when they’re expecting to return the game. It is wise to have exit clauses and expiration dates for contracts you make, and in a similar manner thinking about the bounded-nature of a promise helps to prevent it from becoming all-consuming.
There’s a relationship here I see no way around. Promises are only as strong as what you would sacrifice to keep them. Yet paradoxically, being willing to lose everything to keep a promise makes it very difficult for me to trust you, because you can’t give me everything as a bond. There isn’t a way for me to collect on that kind of collateral.
There’s a fundamental limit to how strong a promise can be, and if there are many things that are worth everything to you, any one of those things is worth breaking a promise over, and I’m back to not trusting you.
Bonds are not a panacea for all contractual coordination problems, but they do seem underutilized in the interpersonal space. I hope you find ways to include them more, and make the costs of your promises legible — else declare them plans.
By default, when someone tells me they are going to do something, I take it as a plan, a statement of intent. If you want me to take a commitment of yours seriously, show me the bond and I’ll tell you how much it’s worth to me.
Chinese parable about a man who made a promise to meet a woman under a bridge. When she didn’t arrive and floodwaters rose, he clung to the bridge pillar and drowned rather than break his word. As told in the Zhuangzi (Chapter 29, ‘Robber Zhi’).
Plans are Not Promises
I have been pondering Wentworth’s Information vs Assurance post, and I think I have another angle on a similar concept. Wentworth identified the problem of information being mistaken for assurance. I want to explore what it looks like to deliberately construct assurance, and what that costs. Conveying this concept in different communication-cultures is hard — plans get mistaken for promises, and promises for plans.
What’s the difference? Well, plans tell you something about the way the planner views the state of the world, the state they wish the world was in instead, and the process by which they plan to change it. If I tell you I’m planning on taking Route 9 to pick you up from the airport, this tells you something about my model of traffic, my schedule flexibility, maybe even my risk tolerance. Often someone sharing a plan with you is an invitation. Not just to the plan but also the frame that generated it — the worldview through which they see the world and measure risks and opportunities. There’s also often an implicit caveat that plans change. There is an impermanence to plans, indeed that’s part of their usefulness! You can update a plan on new info, change the trajectory you are aiming for, change who is involved. When a plan fails, there are questions about how to predict obstacles earlier or who could have acted differently. People may feel sad the plan failed to succeed, but rarely do people feel trust was broken. Plans are statements of intention, not a commitment to outcome.
Promises are different. People are rightly mad at you if you break one of those. There is weight and expectation built into a promise. A promise is a plan with an assurance your counterpart can put weight on. They can invest in the world where the promise is held, and hold you accountable if the promise is not. Contracts are a close analogy, synonymous in some cases. Breaking a contract comes with legal consequences, in part due to the attempt to recompense the recipient what they lost by investing — on your assurance — in a world that didn’t exist. A promise comes with the expectation that you will sacrifice to keep your promise, you will be willing to undergo some inconvenience to keep your word. What’s at stake isn’t just the trust of the people you made promises with, but also the possibility of that better world that could be invested in.
Keeping promises is hard though, what do you do when circumstances change? What if an emergency arises? Do you become like Wei Sheng[1] — who drowned rather than break his word — or do you lose a bit of trustworthiness and hope it’s ameliorated by the understanding of your counterpart. What happens when there is disagreement about reasonable circumstances? I would feel aggrieved if I put a bunch of resources into a course of action that doesn’t make sense anymore because you broke your promise over something I consider trivial, even if it’s not trivial to you. I might even understand, but that doesn’t change my loss! Does it matter how much I’ve invested? It gets tricky fast, especially when people have different expectations about what constitutes an exception they won’t hold against you.
Enter bonds. They are my new favorite mechanism for making the cost of promises legible. I recently had someone ask to borrow a $180 board game on a trip to Yosemite. I told them if they gave me $180, they could take the game, and I would give them back the money once the game was returned. This sort of thing made it super clear exactly the cost of the promise they were making, and if it failed, I would keep the money as recompense. It was so simple and clean! Expectations were very clear, we both knew the size of the promise and the cost of breaking it. With the cost legible and the bond in hand, I wouldn’t feel betrayed if they lost the game on their trip. I could invest in the world where I had the game. I had assurances. If a very costly promise is made, it matters a lot the promise is kept, and with bonds the cost can go to the person making that promise. If an emergency comes up and I feel like I need to break some promise, but am not sure if the person I made the promise to would agree the emergency is justified, I have to risk breaking trust and having a long-drawn out fight over it. With a bond, I can directly measure the cost of the emergency against the bond amount. It’s much simpler and clearer to everyone involved.
You don’t have to make bonds denoted in money — I think most are implicitly made with reputation — but money has many nice properties, not the least of which is money can be used for recompense should the promise fail. I once made bonds with my roommate denoted in chores.
Many people dislike the cold, calculating nature of bonds denoted in money. They like promises made with trust and reputational costs as the bond. I think this works sometimes in tight-knit communities where reputations are common knowledge. Not only does the promise breaker lose some reputation and trust from the community, but the community can enforce a claim against them to recompense the person they promised. This stops working as soon as any of it gets complicated — the group grows too large to establish common knowledge reputations, or different factions disagree on what’s a fair exception. It gets a lot harder to get reimbursed for a claim of damages when this happens, even if the promise breaker still loses reputation and trust.
Thinking of promises as bonds also reveals interesting things about the way people think of the bounded-nature (or not) of promises. Many promises are implicitly bounded to time or context. But not all are. If I say, “$5 says I can climb that tree” suddenly my friends want to know how many tries I get, how it only counts if one of them can witness it, etc. When there’s money on the line, suddenly people want to get into the details and operationalize the context. When someone asks to borrow my game, I’ll ask for a bond, but I’ll also ask when they’re expecting to return the game. It is wise to have exit clauses and expiration dates for contracts you make, and in a similar manner thinking about the bounded-nature of a promise helps to prevent it from becoming all-consuming.
There’s a relationship here I see no way around. Promises are only as strong as what you would sacrifice to keep them. Yet paradoxically, being willing to lose everything to keep a promise makes it very difficult for me to trust you, because you can’t give me everything as a bond. There isn’t a way for me to collect on that kind of collateral.
There’s a fundamental limit to how strong a promise can be, and if there are many things that are worth everything to you, any one of those things is worth breaking a promise over, and I’m back to not trusting you.
Bonds are not a panacea for all contractual coordination problems, but they do seem underutilized in the interpersonal space. I hope you find ways to include them more, and make the costs of your promises legible — else declare them plans.
By default, when someone tells me they are going to do something, I take it as a plan, a statement of intent. If you want me to take a commitment of yours seriously, show me the bond and I’ll tell you how much it’s worth to me.
Chinese parable about a man who made a promise to meet a woman under a bridge. When she didn’t arrive and floodwaters rose, he clung to the bridge pillar and drowned rather than break his word. As told in the Zhuangzi (Chapter 29, ‘Robber Zhi’).