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Reneging Prosocially - LessWrong

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Author's note: this essay was originally published elsewhere in 2019. It's now being permanently rehosted at this link. I'll be rehosting a small number of other upper-quintile essays from my past writing over the coming weeks. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Quite often, I will make an agreement, and then find myself regretting it. I’ll commit to spending a certain amount of hours helping someone with their problem, or I’ll agree to take part in an outing or a party or a project, or I’ll trade some item for a certain amount of value in return, and then later find that my predictions about how I would feel were pretty far off, and I'm unhappy. Sometimes, I just suck it up and stick it out. But sometimes I renege on the agreement. In this essay, I’d like to lay out a model for how to renege prosocially, i.e. how to go back on your agreements in a way that strengthens rather than damaging the social fabric (or at the very least leaves it no worse than it was). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- BLACK BOXES AND APIS Once, I was a passenger in my father’s car when another car cut us off on the freeway. “Do you know what he did wrong?” my father asked, gesturing at the other car. (I was maybe thirteen at the time, and would soon be going through drivers’ education.) “Uh. He didn’t use his turn signal?” “Close,” my father answered. “Why is it bad not to use your turn signal?” I couldn’t come up with anything, and eventually my father continued. “It’s bad because it makes you less predictable,” he said. “Just like the fact that he raced up on us on the right, and then cut in front of us. You pass on the left and not the right because that’s what people are expecting. You signal your lane changes so that people know what you’re about to do. If you drive erratically, everybody else has to change the way they’re driving around you, and then nobody knows how to coordinat

x Reneging Prosocially — LessWrong Communication Cultures Social & Cultural Dynamics Practical Rationality Curated 175 Reneging Prosocially by Duncan Sabien (Inactive) 30th Nov 2021 20 min read 15 175 Author's note: this essay was originally published elsewhere in 2019. It's now being permanently rehosted at this link. I'll be rehosting a small number of other upper-quintile essays from my past writing over the coming weeks. Quite often, I will make an agreement, and then find myself regretting it. I’ll commit to spending a certain amount of hours helping someone with their problem, or I’ll ag

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