In problems like Parfit’s hitchhiker, I’d like to be the kind of agent who pays the driver. But only if the driver asks for a reasonable sum of money. Doing otherwise would create a strong adversarial pressure to ask me for everything I have.
In general, I’d like to be the kind of person who keeps promises they make. But if you make me swear, at gunpoint, that I’ll murder some innocent people later, I’ll say whatever gets me out of the situation alive, and then break the promise.
And don’t get me started on tens of pages of terms and conditions for online services. I just click “agree” and do not care a bit about what those documents say. I’m just going to do the reasonable thing and if that’s not good enough, too bad. While one could say that I have made an oath to follow them, I simply don’t think that’s appropriate for routine activities.
This gets more complicated with, say, NDAs. I generally try to follow both the letter and spirit of such contracts. But sometimes they’re just written in an unreasonable way and there’s too much money on the table to ignore it. In those cases, I work in an adversarial mode where I follow the letter and just the letter, as a far as it can be court-enforced, and not much more. This rarely occurs outside cases where there’s a huge power differential anyway. If I’m given the opportunity to actually negotiate the contents, it’s pretty likely that there’s not much need for the adversarial mode.
I’m trying to be rather meta-honest about this. With legible amounts of illegibility. I’d like to formalize this better.
In problems like Parfit’s hitchhiker, I’d like to be the kind of agent who pays the driver. But only if the driver asks for a reasonable sum of money. Doing otherwise would create a strong adversarial pressure to ask me for everything I have.
In general, I’d like to be the kind of person who keeps promises they make. But if you make me swear, at gunpoint, that I’ll murder some innocent people later, I’ll say whatever gets me out of the situation alive, and then break the promise.
And don’t get me started on tens of pages of terms and conditions for online services. I just click “agree” and do not care a bit about what those documents say. I’m just going to do the reasonable thing and if that’s not good enough, too bad. While one could say that I have made an oath to follow them, I simply don’t think that’s appropriate for routine activities.
This gets more complicated with, say, NDAs. I generally try to follow both the letter and spirit of such contracts. But sometimes they’re just written in an unreasonable way and there’s too much money on the table to ignore it. In those cases, I work in an adversarial mode where I follow the letter and just the letter, as a far as it can be court-enforced, and not much more. This rarely occurs outside cases where there’s a huge power differential anyway. If I’m given the opportunity to actually negotiate the contents, it’s pretty likely that there’s not much need for the adversarial mode.
I’m trying to be rather meta-honest about this. With legible amounts of illegibility. I’d like to formalize this better.
is this resolved with ultimatum game-like strategies? renege with some probability based on how (un)reasonable the terms are.
That’s indeed part of the idea. It’s just rather hard to formalize reasonability of terms.