Posts
Comments
- [Do nothing], and people will be able to get access to the critically necessary items, but it will be much harder and more expensive because there is low supply and high logistical difficulty.
- [Pass laws forbidding/punishing sharp price increases in times of trouble], and people won't be able to get anything at all, because someone erected an artificial barrier to trade.
This is a false dichotomy, evidenced by the fact that presently in the US we have laws against price gouging, AND people are generally able to access critical items in times of emergency.
You're right to say that a law which defines price gouging in a rational, unambiguous way is inevitably going to fail. You can't expect strict price ceilings, price increase percentages, etc to work. There are too many edge cases-- what if prices really do increase that much, what if it's not adjusted for inflation over time, etc. It's the same as the pornography problem: how do you define the thing you wish to ban?
But: just because you can't rigorously define an abstract evil doesn't mean you can't ban it. "I know it when I see it" is a perfectly suitable solution for banning antisocial vices.
Moreover, it's important for bad things to be explicitly declared bad. The oversimplified, mimetic version of Option A is "price gouging is allowed". You can argue that there's no difference between banning it or not (which i disagree with), but even if there is no difference, there is a negative consequence to a widespread belief that "X (vice) is encouraged by society".
Instead of flatly offloading responsibility the "throw me out whenever" way, invite the other person to discuss the modalities of the question together, by e.g. raising the question of when you should leave and then figuring out together what factors this depends on and how you want to make that decision
This fails the sniff test of "bad moods as a fragility test for social norms". You critique Ask Culture for responsibility offloading, but ignore its upside-- much greater computational kindness than "inviting the other person to discuss the modalities of the question together". The primary characteristic of a bad mood (I'm using this term for "normal" bad moods like hungover, tired, caffeine crash) is lowered computational capacity.
I wonder if Responsibility Offloading and Computational Kindness can be thought of as a position/velocity tradeoff; i.e, that one can not perfectly have the one without losing the other.
People often act like this, and they tend to assume they're doing the other person a favor by being so open and flexible. After all, this way the other person will have to make no trade-offs and can spend their time exactly as they please. The problem with this however is that it's computationally unkind: it offloads all the effort
Computational kindness by this definition is equivalent to Emotional Labor, no?