Thanks! This has definitely helped me to think about the concept of cheerful prices. Here’s my current position.
I do see the value in avoiding the situation of “I’m paying you to do X, you accept, but are secretly annoyed about it”. By paying instead X + cheerfulness bonus you avoid it. However,
I don’t have much IRL experience with rationalists, but I would expect that if you buy into the idea of exchanging money in these sorts of scenarios, that you’d also buy into the idea of Tell Culture, at least enough such that you can have some back and forth and avoid the “but are secretly annoyed about it” part.
Even if I’m wrong about (1), isn’t the cheerfulness bonus too large? “Cheerful” and “excited” seem like they really overshoot “don’t have secret feelings of annoyance”. Maybe a “non-begrudging/non-reluctant/non-sour price” would make more sense. In practice, I expect that the payer would often feel resentment about paying cheerful prices. “Ugh, do I really have to keep paying this person $100 to clean up the kitchen?”
While in my experience the rationalists have some of the best conversational norms for communicating about conflict and costs and disagreements, I would not say that the rationalists I meet have solved these problems, to the extent where there are not costs that are very difficult to do conscious accounting of. So from one perspective, I’ll take all the tools I can get, and this seems like it may help with some such situations.
That said, I think you’re right that the cheerfulness bonus is probably too large in some of my examples. The actual cheerful price for the one I have in mind would’ve been… I feel confused, somewhere between $50 and $500. Still, I think it would’ve been a bit high for them. But my fair price would’ve been lower.
I guess I’ll look for opportunities to use cheerful prices with the people I know. I’ll see if I can find at least three occasions to use it in the next few weeks.
Thanks! This has definitely helped me to think about the concept of cheerful prices. Here’s my current position.
I do see the value in avoiding the situation of “I’m paying you to do X, you accept, but are secretly annoyed about it”. By paying instead
X + cheerfulness bonusyou avoid it. However,I don’t have much IRL experience with rationalists, but I would expect that if you buy into the idea of exchanging money in these sorts of scenarios, that you’d also buy into the idea of Tell Culture, at least enough such that you can have some back and forth and avoid the “but are secretly annoyed about it” part.
Even if I’m wrong about (1), isn’t the
cheerfulness bonustoo large? “Cheerful” and “excited” seem like they really overshoot “don’t have secret feelings of annoyance”. Maybe a “non-begrudging/non-reluctant/non-sour price” would make more sense. In practice, I expect that the payer would often feel resentment about paying cheerful prices. “Ugh, do I really have to keep paying this person $100 to clean up the kitchen?”Solid points.
While in my experience the rationalists have some of the best conversational norms for communicating about conflict and costs and disagreements, I would not say that the rationalists I meet have solved these problems, to the extent where there are not costs that are very difficult to do conscious accounting of. So from one perspective, I’ll take all the tools I can get, and this seems like it may help with some such situations.
That said, I think you’re right that the cheerfulness bonus is probably too large in some of my examples. The actual cheerful price for the one I have in mind would’ve been… I feel confused, somewhere between $50 and $500. Still, I think it would’ve been a bit high for them. But my fair price would’ve been lower.
I guess I’ll look for opportunities to use cheerful prices with the people I know. I’ll see if I can find at least three occasions to use it in the next few weeks.