Eight Short Studies On Excuses

What Thomas Schelling would do. Partly tongue-in-cheek.

The Clumsy Game-Player: agree to the deal, then perform an identical "finger slip" several turns later.

The Lazy Student, The Grieving Student, The Sports Fan: make the deadline for reports a curve instead of a cliff. Each day of delay costs some percentage of the grade.

The Murderous Husband: if you really don't want these things to happen, make the wife partially responsible for the murder in such cases, by law. (Or the lover, if the husband chooses to murder the wife.)

The Bellicose Dictator: publicly threaten sanctions unless the invading army withdraws immediately. Do this before any negotiations.

The Peyote-Popping Native, The Well-Disguised Atheist: when the native first comes to you, offer to balance out the permission to smoke peyote with some sanction against the Native American church. Then the atheists won't bother asking for a free lunch.

I precommit to acting as if I had made any precommittment I find myself wishing I had made. If I make this clear before iterated prisoners' dilemma, a rational partner would not try the "finger slipped" excuse against me, because I would wish that I had precommitted to punishing defection due to finger slipping.

I would still allow the grieving student to turn in the paper late, because in that situation, I do not wish I had precommitted to rejecting that excuse.

The Music Fan

A month before the paper was assigned a student was talking with their professor and mentioned that the punk band "The Exemplars" was their favorite band and that they would do anything to see them live but that they almost never perform. The day after the paper was due the student comes in and says "I'm sorry I didn't get the paper in on time, professor, but you won't believe what happened. The Exemplars, that band I told you about held a one-time-only surprise concert downtown yesterday and I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to attend. It is true that my excuse isn't traditionally considered a good one like that of the grieving student, but months ago I signaled to you quite clearly that an Exemplars concert would be the kind of thing that would lead me to turn a paper in late. You excused the grieving student because it is assumed in our culture that a death of a family member will give someone reason not to write a paper. But though we don't assume most people will not write a paper because of a concert you could have predicted an Exemplars concert would cause me not to write the paper. This excuse won't be used often by other students since to be successful one has to indicate a stance that would cause them to not write the paper under certain circumstances and then hope those circumstances arise."

"Mahmud Karim, of the Dadolzai lineage, was enraged to learn that a member of a "brother" lineage, the Kamil Hanzai, had carried off the palm trunks he'd prepared to roof his temporary mud-brick dwelling during the seasonal date harvest. Karim quickly mobilized a war party from among his Dadolzai lineage mates (including a few allies from closely related lineages) to retrieve the trunks--by fighting the Kamil Hanzai, if necessary.

But why hadn't Karim first simply walked over to the Kamil Hanzai and tried to clear the matter up? Indeed, it was later discovered that the palm trunks had been taken by mistake. Why risk a battle without first making a reasonable effort to talk the problem out? That sort of question is liable to be posed by someone living where a state monopolizes the legitimate use of force, and police and courts can therefore be relied upon to keep the peace. In a nonstate setting, where anarchy is kept under control only by the threat or use of force, it often makes sense to send a war party first and ask questions later.

A lone emissary from the Dadolzai making an inquiry or offering to negotiate a settlement would have conveyed an impression of weakness. Only by making publicly known their capacity to swiftly unify and fight to preserve their interests would the Dadolzai prevent future abuse in the lawless desert environment, whatever the intentions of the Kamil Hanzai had been in this particular case. The Dadolzai meant to fight only if blocked from retrieving the palm trunks, yet it was crucial that they be seen as willing to do battle. Had the Kamil Hanzai in fact seized the palm trunks with hostile intent, a lone Dadolzai emissary would have been in serious danger. Only after retrieving the palm trunks unopposed did the Dadolzai send an emissary--not a Dadolzai, but a member of a neutral lineage who would not be at personal risk--to inquire after the Kamil Hanzai's intent. And only then was it discovered that the apparent theft of the palm trunks had been an innocent mistake."

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/014/947kigpp.asp?nopager=1

The murderous husband would traditionally have received a reduced sentence in common law jurisdictions, since such a killing would not have been considered murder but rather manslaughter committed in the sudden heat of passion as the result of adequate provocation. A husband’s killing his wife’s lover upon discovering them together is one of the paradigm examples of this sort of manslaughter. (If the husband does not immediately kill the lover, but instead leaves and then kills him at another time, the killing would then be murder because it was not committed in the sudden heat of passion; or if the husband only finds out about the adultery, but does not actually witness it, it would not be considered adequate provocation.)

That is, the law has already pre-committed to the reduced sentence in this peculiar class of cases. At least this is true traditionally; I believe that in at least some jurisdictions, this principle may have eroded somewhat or been changed by statute.

"Like all economics professors, I have no soul, and so am unable to sympathize with your loss."

Relatable. One time my friend was out with his roommate when the roommate got hit by a car, and my friend took him to the hospital and stayed with him all night. He came to his economics professor the next day having gotten absolutely no sleep and asked if he could take the midterm (scheduled for that day) a different day. The professor responded that he would only allow it if my friend paid his $500/hour consulting fee for drawing up and proctoring a new exam. My friend took the midterm as scheduled.

Parfit's Implausible Hero

Omega is crusing through the desert in its dunebuggy and sees a poor, hapless victim dying. It offers to drive him [1] back to the city, but only if he pays it $100 after getting there and stabilized. He says yes, and Omega scans him, looking for any sign of deception, and all it finds is that the victim intends, under all circumstances his mind can conceive of, to honor the agreement. So Omega takes him back.

One in town, he runs off to withdraw the money. Then he comes back a few minutes later and says, "Sorry, I was going to withdraw the money for you -- really, I was -- but an emergency came up. See, this guy took children hostage and ..."

"Oh no! No, no, don't tell me you gave him the money! That just rewards that kind of thing!"

"Please Omega, give me a little credit. I didn't give him anything, except a bullet. I quickly emptied my account to buy a sniper rifle and killed him, saving the children. So, I don't have your money, but really, I didn't expect I'd have to save children."

"Then give me the expensive rifle you bought and we'll call it even!"

"Well, that's the thing ... after the shot, when I put the gun safely away, it malfunctioned and blew up. All that's left is the wooden butt of the rifle. You can have that if you want, I guess."

"I didn't rescue you for a wooden rifle butt!"

"Yeah, but I mean, I really was intending to pay you ... you read my mind and everything. It's just that I didn't count on there being a hostage situation when I went to pay you. And so I figured ... I'm already rescued, but these kids ... It isn't my fault your mind-reading ability dissipates in the city limits."

[1] I've made the victim a him in order to avoid implying that all women are helpless victims of desert conditions.

Typos:

These paragraphs

You say "Like all economics professors [....] I can't grant you an extension.

A third student comes to you [....] the one whose mother died.

should end in quotation marks.

In this sentence

"The student who was here before me, that's different.

"me" should be "you".

This paragraph

You respond "Although my policies [....] sufficient justification for almost anyone breaking any law.

should end in a (double) quotation mark and most of the quotation marks in it are nested so should be single.

(Upvoted, by the way.)

Luckily, we can make a credible story that we were following international law...

Credible, to whom? Implausible deniability is an interesting phenomenon. Everyone knows it's a lie, but we all say the lie to each other, and pretend it is not.

It seems more true (lesswrong?) that laws are for those without power, while those with power act according to interest, making up implausible denials when they want to pretend that laws are for everyone. The need for implausible denials places some small pressure on the powerful to act consistently, but not much.

If the powerful don't feel it is in their interests to protect West Examplestan, they won't. East Examplestan will tailor it's action to allow some implausible excuse, those with power will take it, and the lie of law lives on.

For the Peyote example, the powerful don't really care if a limited number of people can take drugs, while the religious certainly do care to protect religious exemptions. If there were only 10 religious people in the country, probably Peyote gets banned and we're done with it.

"Existing a long time" is just an excuse, one of many possible, and again, one that literally privileges vested interests - those who have had the interest for a long time. But if 100 million people are willing to bomb and kill for a week old religion that wanted to use Peyote as a sacrament, "existing a long time" would no longer be a part of the magic formula granting exemption from drug laws.

Follow the money. Follow the guns. Follow the violence.

I find a lot of game theory suspect. The right action will always depend on your prior for the behavior of the other players, and for any prior P that recommends X over Y, you can find a prior P' that recommends Y over X. Treating Game Theory as if it provides "the right" answer, without explicitly identifying the priors on the other players is hugely dangerous. I didn't see any priors established in this article. I saw rationalizations that would hold for some unidentified priors, and not hold for others.

In the first example, you should just continue playing tit-for-tat, if the other player truly "slipped" and knows you are playing tit-for-tat, he won't defect after you defect, he will continue cooperating and make you cooperate.

The whole notion of pre-commiting to a strategy is to remove the human elements like "negociation" and "excuses". You are a machine and you play accordingly. If the other player is rational, he will cooperate even after he slipped and you defected.

Human instinct and social conventions already solve the "clumsy defector" problem. The clumsy defector is required to sacrifice any benefit he gained from the defection. Usually this is through the small-loss-of-status of publicly acknowledging their error. But in the game, they must cooperate while you defect.

This restores trust and removes any incentive for the clumsy-defector to do what they did. If they refuse to accept this, then they aren't actually seeking to form a mutually-beneficial cooperative relationship anyway, and thus they must be punished by defection unless or until they accept the penalty by cooperating while receiving a defection in return.

Regarding the "due date" excuses

Two common policies at my school:

1. For recurring assignments/quizzes: your lowest one or two marks don't count, so you can afford to miss/fail a few for whatever medium-good reason you choose. Thus you decide what is "good enough" based on your own expectation.

2. If you want some grace time for an assignment, your excuse better cover the whole working period of the assignment. If you leave something to the last day, and then get sick, it's your own damn fault, that is to say: for assignments emergency excuses are invalid.

My interpretation it perhaps uninformed because I never asked for any grace about deadlines or marking during university.

\#2 was put in place

I am sincerely grateful for all the work that´s been done here. It´s an excellent post!

One question: Is there some book, concept or Author (In Game theory or other) that supports the distinction between religion and a cult, done by ScottAlexander ? The distinction was done in "The well-Disguised Atheist".

I am writing a scientific paper on religious freedom so it would be useful to me. Thank you in advance!

The Clumsy Game-Player

The first thing I thought when I read this first example was "didn't Axelrod discuss the issue of the IPD with noise in his book?" the answer, it seems, is yes but not in his book, (PDF warning!). Essentially they seem to come the conclusion that forgiving the finger slip is optimal if it doesn't happen very often (for their particular choices of values <=1% of the time). Otherwise you should have the strategy where you forgive the opponent if they punish you for a finger slip, but play TFT otherwise.

Where it says:

"They know they won't get extensions unless they kill their own mothers, and even economics students aren't that evil."

I would change it to:

"They know they won't get extensions unless they kill their own mothers, but these are only undergraduate economics students."

I think this post would benefit from a link to some article about the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, since the beginning of this post requires some knowledge about it to be valuable.

RE: The Grieving Student

You don't even need to go as far as society. The school, or school board, will almost certainly have an exception in place for this sort of thing. This is true at all levels for death of an immediate family member. (I speak from experience, having been exempted from final exams one year. My final grade was instead based on coursework, as if there had been no final for the class. )

In fact, odds are the school or department will have a clear policy that says concerts, sports events, and the like are not an acceptable excuse for missed work, but funerals, severe illness, and the like, are. So, to make the story more plausible, the precommitter should be the department head or principal or something like that, rather than the teacher. < / nitpick>

On Hacker News: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1281907

On all of the the teacher examples I would respond that with such a steep penalty for being late the fact that they risked such a situation happening with any substantial probability shows them to be a horrible utility maximizer, so they fail that project and the course, which means there's no reason to grade their paper.

I'm not sure I see the point of these stories. These are all examples of failed precommittment, mostly due to having an ludicrously simple model or imperfect communication about what the commitment actually is.

In all these stories, the first party wants to avoid the work of designing a real precommittment, or of just admitting that there are cases where precommittment doesn't solve the underlying difficulty.

Clumsy game-player: in this one, precommittment DOES work. Stay committed: "I agreed to play tit-for-tat - my agreement had no exceptions to it, and I am continuing. Your best move is to cooperate twice then go back to plain tit-for-tat, and be more careful in the future."

lazy and grieving students: I'm very confused about your use of utility numbers here, and your implication that one player's utility can be traded for another. That's not how it works. If you have a term for the other player's happiness, that's your utility, not theirs. If you have a utility cost for failing a student because of a late assignment, you need to include that in your plan.

The last three are just more cases where much more complicated committments need to be laid out, including policies for adjudicating disagreements.

" to some degree these are devil's bargains, as anyone who can predict you will do this can take advantage of you. "

What if one randomized their response to the acceptable excuse case? I suppose there might still be some gaming to occur but that should greatly reduce the ability for being taken advantage of as prediction is no longer really possible.

This is the most over-the-top (in a good way) post, to make a general point by giving concrete examples first. No other post in my memory comes close. It also has a lot of humor in it. I think most people's writing would be greatly improved by going more in this direction.

But this post also demonstrates how much work it is to create such good examples. This post is over the top in that there are many more examples than necessary (e.g. the examples about school) to absolutely drive home the point.

Would Scott only write the general point the post would be a couple of hundred words at most, instead of 3000. Only writing abstractly is a lot faster, because you need to write a lot less. Probably the same is true for thinking. But it would make it so much harder to understand for other people.

You are the President of the Snited Utates and you give a dictator in Airys a redline that if he uses chemical weapons all hell is going to break loose, most definitely and for real. He simply ignores you and uses chemical weapons. You decide to not do anything about it, because who cares about political credibility anyway? 

I appreciate that these are being used as simple analogies, but since they are phrased as real-world scenarios I feel that it weakens my visualisation of the situation in hand by not explicitly commenting on the time-scales over which the teacher/pupil wishes to maximise their utility.

Each example refers to the impact of the initial setup, or decision made when faced with an excuse, to the overall utility of the outcome but fails to convey to me clearly the success or failure criteria.

I would find it valuable if we were able to split the scenarios into a timeline decision tree to show how the impact of initial setup and decisions made would affect the utility over time, which would allow me to visualise the most beneficial path once I had decided on the timescale over which I wish to consider. (Taking this even further I would most likely attribute different weightings to my utility function depending on time-horizons and then attempt to maximise over the whole.)

What variation would there be in setup and decision if my consideration was for a one-shot decision versus a long-term career?

I'm sorry, but I have to briefly rant about something that has annoyed me for YEARS:

So instead you say "If you don't turn in your report on time, I won't grade it."

"Not grading it" would be fine with me, as the student. I don't like grades in the first place!

What the teacher means is: "I will automatically assign a failing grade, no matter how good the work is." [EDIT: "...just as if you had turned nothing in at all".] That is distinct from "not grading it", and is what the teacher should say instead (if it is what he or she actually means).

My favourite way to deal with late assignments is to have the option to not do them in the first place. My psychology professor gave each of us three options: 1) do two assignments that count X%, and have the tests count Y% (default option); 2) do one assignment, and have the tests count proportionally more; 3) do zero assignments, and have the tests count for everything.

My ADHD ass chose the last option, and it was the only course that I scored 100% in.

I might be biased about this approach by the fact that I was the student in this scenario, but I'm willing to bet the professor was also happy with this arrangement, since it meant he had fewer assignments to grade.

That professor also had a policy about grading tests, where if almost everybody got a question wrong, he would drop that question from scoring altogether, but still score it for the few people who got it right, who would thus have the possibility of scoring more than 100% (i.e. 50/49).

He also was the only professor I had who always made sure to upload class materials at least a week before the associated class (if not earlier), and always organized them well and labelled them clearly, and at the beginning of each class gave everyone printouts of that day's PowerPoint to write notes on.

I really, really, really liked that professor.

They know they won't get extensions unless they kill their own mothers, and even economics students aren't that evil.

HPMOR vibes.

> "What, exactly, is the difference between a cult and a religion?"--"The difference is that cults have been formed recently enough, and are small enough, that we are suspicious of them existing for the purpose of taking advantage of the special place we give religion.

now I see why my friends practicing the spiritual path of Falun Dafa have "incorporated" as a religion in my state despite the movement originally denied being classified as a religion as to demonstrate it does not require a fixed set of rituals.

Suppose the lazy student had continued to press their case, and had said the following:

"You made this argument because you believed me to be the sort of person who would accept it. In order to prevent other people from making the same argument, I have to be the sort of person who wouldn't accept it. To that end, I'm going to not accept your argument."

The student smiles slightly and responds, “Seeing as you are concerned primarily with maintaining a reputation for not granting exceptions, I must now precommit to actively engage in giving students who have not yet taken this class the opposite impression of you as a person if you do not grade my paper. I will volunteer to mentor incoming first-year students, and I will make sure as many of them as possible believe that you are secretly lenient with deadlines despite the unyielding outward appearance you strive to cultivate—and thus will accept late submissions if they offer a merely plausible excuse. Thus, the optimal way to protect your reputation is to make an exception for me in return for my silence as you previously considered.”

Assuming the response is believably delivered, should the teacher grant the exception?

"Alternatively, you could try writing awful science fiction novels and hiring a ton of lawyers. I hear that also works these days."

What does OP refer to in this line?

I don't seem to understand the atheist examples. I understand that it seems as though the religions hold a special society in society due to their establishment in temporality and rituals, and the overall indoctrination that religions have on civilisation development but wouldn't it rather stated to be true that religions are, in effect, just cults that are 'old enough and respectable enough' that at one point where created to benefit from some archaic law? In that sense, would it not ring true that religions are essentially flawed and should not be given special standing in modern theocracy?

I note that while most of the examples seem reasonable, the Dictator instance seems to stand out: by accepting the trumped-up prospector excuse as admissible, the organisation is agreeing to any similarly flimsy excuse that a country could make (e.g. the route not taken in The Sports Fan). The Lazy Student also comes to mind in terms of being an organisation that would accept such an argument, thus others also making it.

(Hm... I wonder if a valid equivalent of the Grieving case would be if the other country had in fact launched an easily-verifiable full-scale offensive large enough to necessitate occuptation in order to stop it and protect the attacked country.)

While in the other cases, the decision-makers seem to maintain consistency regarding their possessed priorities, in the Dictator case it looks as though the only way the decision-maker can be said to have made the right decision is if one assumes the organisation only cares about public approval (a spin favourable to them) and does not in fact care whether or not countries invade each other based on transparent lies.

On a slightly related note, if a country/entity were so stupid/paranoid that it in good faith invaded countries left and right for flimsy reasons, it would be in appropriate keeping with such a decision-making organisation's stated goals to take it down as a mad dog (-equivalent) before it did any more harm to law-abiding countries/entities.

A different interpretation might require the prospector case to in fact be very unlikely, a near-miracle that the dictator leaped on as an unhoped-for opportunity rather than as one of any number of possible {grounds for unjustified action} that would certainly have come up sooner or later if one waited long enough.

Thinking intuitively, though, even if every country freezes its borders in terror to prevent any movements being declared as casus belli, there are all sorts of as-easy-to-see-through things that could be done instead... (Mostly involving forgery/bribery/baseless lying, granted.)

In The Grieving Student, while it may be morally right in society to accept the excuse and let her have more time, how do you know she is not lying? Of course, it is her mother, and it would be horrible to lie about such things, and dangerous, as the mother could call the school or any number of other things, but she could just be lying about it to get more time. Say her mother is dead, but she died when the girl was a child. If you didn't look hard, you could think that she had really died earlier. So, if she gave an extension at all, it should not be long. Say to the end of the day, or until the next day.

I wonder if the Clumsy-Game player excuse could have worked for Peter Fonda in Fail-Safe

Rot13 for spoilers: Va gur zbivr Nzrevpn qrgrpgf jung gurl guvax vf n Fbivrg nggnpx naq qrcybl gurve obzoref. Gurl gura yrnea gur guerng vf snyfr naq erpnyy gurve obzoref. Ohg fbzrguvat tbrf jebat jvgu gur pbzzhavpngvba naq gurl pna'g ernpu bar bs gurve obzoref. Gur obzore pbagvahrf, znxrf vg guebhtu Fbivrg qrsrafrf naq ahxrf Zbfpbj. Gur Cerfvqrag (Crgre Sbaqn) trgf ba gur cubar gb gur Cerzvre naq ceriragf n Ehffvna pbhagre-nggnpx ol nterrvat gb ahxr Arj Lbex Pvgl.

Fb guvf vf gur pnfr bs na npghny fyvc bs gur svatre, cerfhznoyl vg vf zber pbaivapvat gung gur cynlre'f fyvc va gur fgbel. Qvq Sbaqn fperj hc ol abg gelvat vafvfgvat ba guvf rkphfr? Fubhyq gur Fbivrgf unir npprcgrq vs ur unq bssrerq vg?

224 comments, no citations/references to existing mechanism design research on these problems, What happened tho EY's virtue of scholarship?

Excuses, justification, reason, rationality, rationalisation - perhaps they're just synonyms.

At the end of the day they're just language associated with an entity, that may or may not correlate with their behaviour.

In all these stories, the first party wants to credibly pre-commit to a rule, but also has incentives to forgive other people's deviations from the rule. The second party breaks the rules, but comes up with an excuse for why its infraction should be forgiven.

The general principle is that by accepting an excuse, a rule-maker is also committing themselves to accepting all equally good excuses in the future. There are some exceptions - accepting an excuse in private but making sure no one else ever knows, accepting an excuse once with the express condition that you will never accept any other excuses - but to some degree these are devil's bargains, as anyone who can predict you will do this can take advantage of you.

There are no general, dominant solutions unless we can model the other player's behaviour. That means certain game theoretic assumptions about their preferences, which can't readily be applied to individuals without transportable translation behaviour game theoretic research.

Established intuitions don't accept these works but I do accept them. That means those institutions must suck and I don't. If you've actually dropped out of those established institutions, then I can definitely see why it might be the case.

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