Can anyone give some examples of “rules to which no legitimate exception will ever be encountered”? This post is being referred to in subsequent discussions, and I realized that I never really understood it due to lack of examples.
Also, examples of “When you do encounter a legitimate exception to a heretofore-exceptionless rule, immediately discard the rule and replace it with a new rule—one which accounts for situations like this one, which, to the old rule, had to be exceptions.” would also be appreciated.
First, let me note that the key to understanding the post is this part:
But why do I say that good rules ought not have exceptions? Because rules already don’t have exceptions.
Exceptions are a fiction. They’re a way for us to avoid admitting (sometimes to ourselves, sometimes to others) that the rule as stated, together with the criteria for deciding whether something is a “legitimate” exception, is the actual rule.
The approach I describe above merely consists of making this fact explicit.
Once again, for emphasis:
… the rule as stated, together with the criteria for deciding whether something is a “legitimate” exception, is the actual rule.
And this is summarized by the title of the post: “The Real Rules Have No Exceptions”.
Now for some examples. I will give three: dietary restrictions, ethical injunctions, and criminal justice systems. We’ll examine each, and see how they fit into the concept I describe in the OP.
Personal dietary restrictions
This is the example in the quoted bit of Chris Leong’s post. You have a rule: “I won’t eat any cookies”. (You have decided on this rule, one imagines, to curb your sugar intake. Or something.) You’ve held strong for a while; you’ve turned down your friend’s signature chocolate chip cookies, and those wonderful black-and-white cookies they sell at the corner deli. But! You now find yourself faced with a bakery that sells what are, by all accounts of the cookie cognoscenti, the best cookies in the state. This, it seems to you, is a legitimate exception to your no-cookies rule. You eat the cookies. (They are delicious.)
The naïve view of this scenario is: “I am following a simple rule: No Cookies. But, sometimes, there are legitimate exceptions. Like, say, if the cookies are the best cookies in the state. Or… some similar situation. No Cookies is still the rule! Exceptions are just… exceptions.”
And I am saying that this view is both mistaken and imprudent. (More on this in a bit.)
Now, the obvious question to ask of the naïve account is: just what is this business of “legitimate exceptions”? What makes an exception “legitimate”, anyway? This is the crux of the matter. Chris Leong’s description of such scenarios says “you encounter a situation that legitimately feels exceptional”—but what makes one exception “feel” legitimate, and another “feel” illegitimate?
Generally, in such scenarios, there is some underlying intuition—which may or may not be easily verbalized or even teased out from examples. Nevertheless, there is (in my experience) always some pattern, some “generator” (to use the local parlance) of the intuition, some regularity—and this regularity sorts situations wherein the stated rule is applicable into the categories of “legitimate exception” and “not a legitimate exception”.
And so the core insight (such as it is) of my post is just this: whatever the stated rule may be, nevertheless the actual rule—the complete, fully described rule that governs situations of the given category—is constituted by the stated rule, plus whatever is the underlying pattern, dynamic, generator, etc., which determines which situations are legitimate exceptions to the stated rule.
Let’s return to our “No Cookies” example. Despite being a fairly trivial matter, this happens to be one of those cases where the underlying intuition behind judgments of exception legitimacy is hard to verbalize. It’s hard to say what may motivate someone to treat this particular situation (“best cookies in the state”) as a legitimate exception to a No Cookies rule… but consider this as one plausible account (out of potentially many other such):
“If I encounter a situation where I have the opportunity to have an interesting, fun, or pleasant experience which is rare, or even unique, and which opportunity I can expect will not repeat itself often, or ever, then it is permissible to suspend certain rules which otherwise would be in effect at all times. This is because, firstly, the benefit to me of having such a rare positive experience outweighs the downside of undermining a generally-unbreakable rule, and secondly, if I do not expect such a situation to recur often, then I run relatively little risk of permanently undermining the rule to an extent that makes following it infeasible.”
Now, again, such an intuition will, for the overwhelming majority of people, not be a consciously held belief. If you ask them to tell you what is their policy vis-a-vis cookies, they will say: “my policy is No Cookies”. If you press them, they will confess that their policy admits of exceptions, in some legitimately exceptional situations. If you ask them to explain just what situations are “legitimately exceptional”, they will be unable to oblige you in any coherent way. Yet this does not, of course, mean that the above-described intuition (or something along those general lines) does not govern their behavior and their thinking on the subject of cookies.
So, what I am saying is: the real rule in this case is not No Cookies, but something more like: No Cookies, Unless Consumption Of Some Particular Cookies Constitutes A Rare Opportunity To Have An Unusual, Or Even Unique, Experience, Which I Expect Will Not Recur Often, Or Perhaps Ever. (Or something along these lines.)
I said earlier that the naïve view (“My rule is No Cookies. But, yes, sometimes there are legitimate exceptions.”) is both mistaken and imprudent. What I meant by “mistaken” should now be clear: the naïve view is substantially less accurate than the fully-informed view; it does not really let you make accurate predictions about your own behavior (not without the aid of that non-verbalized intuition). And what I mean by “imprudent” is this: if you hold the naïve view, then you really have no opportunity to examine that exception-generating intuition of yours, and to endorse it, or revise it, or reject it. On the other hand, if you are fully cognizant of what the real rule is, then you can give it due consideration—and perhaps tweak it to your liking!
Note two things. First: this fully formulated, a.k.a. “real”, rule—is it a “rule to which no legitimate exception will ever be encountered”? Here I must admit that this wording was a bit of shorthand on my part. What I was referring to was something a bit like the notion of conservation of expected evidence; that is, while it is not all that probable that any given rule will survive the rest of your life without having to be updated, nevertheless you should not ever expect to encounter exceptions, any more than you should ever expect to encounter evidence in some specific direction from your current belief. If you do expect to encounter evidence in a specific direction from your current belief, then you should update immediately, because this indicates that you already have some not-yet-integrated evidence (which is the source of your expectation). Similarly, if you have some specific reason to believe that you’ll encounter legitimate exceptions to some rule, then you should revise your rule, because the real rule you’re already following is your stated rule plus whatever is causing you to expect to encounter exceptions.
Second: what role does encountering what seems to you to be a legitimate exception play in this whole framework? Simply, it is a demonstration that your real rule is not the same as your stated rule, and that there are some hidden parts to it (which are the source of your sense of the given exception’s legitimacy). So, in our cookie example, suppose that you thought (and would have said, if asked) that your policy on the subject of cookies is simple: No Cookies, No Exceptions. Then you encounter the best cookies in the state, and say: “OK, well… no cookies or exceptions… except for these cookies, which are clearly legitimately exceptional”. Your rule, which you thought had no exceptions, turns out to have exceptions—and is thereby revealed not to have been the real rule all along. You should now (I claim) discard your (stated) “No Cookies” rule, and adopt—no! wrong! not “adopt”, because you are already using it!… and (consciously) accept the fully formulated, real rule. (Or, of course, reject the fully formulated rule, and thus also reject your judgment of the given exception’s legitimacy.)
Ethical injunctions
Suppose you have a rule of personal conduct: “no lying; always tell the truth”. Then you find yourself sheltering an innocent person from a tyrannical government, whose agents accost you and inquire about whether you’re doing any such thing. “Clearly,” you think, “this is a legitimate exception to that whole ‘no lying’ business; after all, an innocent person’s life is at stake, and anyhow, these guys are, like, super evil.” You lie, and thereby save a life.
You have now discovered (if you will but admit it to yourself) that your “no lying” rule wasn’t the real rule after all. If you’re now asked whether you have any specific reason to expect that you might encounter exceptions to this “no lying” rule, you will surely say “yes”. The real rule was something more like: “no lying, unless it’s necessary to save a life”. (There might also be some intuition about whether the person(s) you’re lying to are, in some sense, deserving of honesty; but that is more complex, and anyway, overdetermines your behavior—the innocent person’s life quite suffices.) You should (I claim) admit all this to yourself, discard the “no lying, ever” rule (which, if you decide to lie in this scenario, was never truly operative in the first place) and replace it with the fully formulated version. (Of course, as with the cookies, you also have the option of endorsing the simple rule—even after reflecting on the source of your intuition that this is a legitimate exception—and discarding instead your judgment of the exception’s legitimacy; and, of course, then telling the truth to the jackbooted thugs at your door.)
Once you have reflected thus, and either endorsed the fully formulated rule, or rejected it along with your judgment of the exception’s legitimacy, whatever stated rule you now follow is one to which you do not expect ever to find exceptions.
Criminal justice systems
We have (or so we are told in our middle-school civics class) a justice system where everyone has the right to a fair trial with a jury of their peers, and all are equal before the law. Yet even a cursory glance at a news source of your choice reveals that our system of criminal justice routinely finds all sorts of legitimate exceptions to this very just and simple rule.
Clearly, it would be altogether utopian to suggest that our government “should” discard the simple stated rule, and instead either explicitly adopt some rule along the lines of “everyone’s entitled to a fair trial with a jury of their peers, unless of course our courts are swamped with cases (which is most of the time) or it’s an election year and we’re trying to be ‘tough on crime’, or any number of various other things; and everyone’s equal before the law, except of course that if you have money you can hire a good lawyer and that makes people unequal, [… etc.; insert the usual litany of entirely legal, non-corruption-related exceptions to the ostensible fairness of the criminal justice system]”, or (the still more starry-eyed scenario) reject all the exceptions and actually administer the law as fairly as in the civics class fantasy. These things will not happen. But if you were elected Absolute Dictator of America, with the power to make any social or political changes with a wave of your hand, you would (I hope) consider either of these (preferably, of course, the latter) to be good candidates for early implementation.
The point, in any case, is that, once more, the real rules have no exceptions. The real social, political, and economic forces that determine who gets treated fairly by the criminal justice system and who does not, and what the outcomes are—these forces, these dynamics, do not have exceptions (at least, not ones we can ever expect or predict). They operate at all times. They are a constant source of legitimate (which is to say, endorsed, de facto, by the simple fact of being the status quo, and of not changing even if brought to light) exceptions to the stated rules (“all are equal before the law” and so forth) precisely because the stated rules are not the real rules, and the dynamics which determine actual outcomes are the real rules.
nevertheless you should not ever expect to encounter exceptions, any more than you should ever expect to encounter evidence in some specific direction from your current belief.
What does the first “expect” mean, in a technical sense? (The second “expect” does have a technical meaning which makes the statement sensible.)
The problem I see is that if I keep thinking about it, I can find an ever growing (but increasingly unlikely) list of exceptions to any rule. Do you just use an arbitrary probability threshold to define “expect”, or what? For example with the No Cookies rule:
except if someone invents a cookie that’s good for my health
except if someone points a gun at my head and orders me to eat a cookie
except if a doctor prescribes cookies because of some medical or psychiatric reason
except if I’m in a social situation where not eating a cookie is a serious faux pas (e.g., it will seriously offend the person offering me a cookie)
except if I’m diagnosed with a terminal disease so I have no reason to care about my long term health anymore
except if I’m presented with convincing evidence that I’m living in a simulation and eating cookies has no real negative consequences
etc. etc. When should I stop and say this is the real rule? (I could just go to full consequentialism and say the real rule is “no cookies except if the benefits of eating a cookie outweigh the costs” but presumably that’s not the point of this post?)
The question of formalization (a.k.a. “what does ‘expect’ mean in a technical sense”) is a good one; I don’t have an answer for you. (As I said, the idea which I have in mind is like the idea of “conservation of expected evidence”, but, as you say, it’s not quite the same thing.) My mathematical skills do not suffice to provide any technical characterization of the term as I am using it.
It seems to me that the informal sense of the word suffices here; a formalization would be useful, no doubt (and if someone can construct one, more power to them)… but I do not see that the lack of one seriously undermines the concept’s validity or applicability.
In particular, your list of examples is composed almost entirely of cases which quite miss the point. Before going through them, though, I’ll note two things:
First—the purpose of the exercise is to construct more effective rules with which to govern our own behavior (as individuals), and the behavior of groups or organizations in which we participate. This general goal is often threatened by the existence of so-called “exceptions” to our ostensible rules, which can easily turn some apparently clear and straightforward rule against itself, and against the ostensible intent of the rule’s formulator(s). My aim in the OP is to provide a conceptual tool that counteracts this threat, by pointing out that the existence of “exceptions” is, in fact, a sign that there actually exists some real rule which is not identical to the stated rule (and which is the generator for the “exceptions”).
Second—the point I make in the OP is twofold: descriptive and prescriptive. The descriptive component is “the real rules have no exceptions”. The prescriptive component is “here is how you ought to deal with encountered apparent ‘legitimate exceptions’”. You seem to be objecting, here, to the prescriptive component. I do not think your objection holds (as I’ll try to demonstrate shortly), but note that even if you continue to find my prescription unconvincing, nevertheless the description remains true! There is some underlying pattern which is generating “legitimate exceptions”, and it will continue, unseen, to govern your behavior (and to undermine the predictability thereof)… unless you identify it, and either integrate or alter it.
We’ll do well to remember these two points as we consider the examples you offer. You propose that the following seem like potentially expectable exceptions to the “No Cookies” rule:
except if someone invents a cookie that’s good for my health
Once again, recall that the point of the rule in the first place is to effectively govern your own behavior. The difficulty, after all, is what? It’s that you know that you shouldn’t eat cookies all the time (or perhaps, almost ever), but you also know that without some device with which to restrain yourself, you’ll eat lots of cookies, because they’re delicious. (We can express this in terms of first- and second-order desires, or “goals” vs. “urges”, or some framework along such lines, but I think that the point here ought to be simple enough in any case.) A No Cookies rule is such a device. Its purpose is to enforce upon yourself some rule which you wish enforced upon yourself, in the service of achieving, and maintaining, some goal of yours.
Now, what happens when you encounter the best cookies in the state, and they seem to you to be a legitimate exception to your No Cookies rule? Roughly, what you have discovered thereby is that in addition to your goal of maintaining your health, you also have some other goal(s), which compete with it (such as, perhaps, “avoid turning life into a joyless existence, devoid entirely of sensory pleasures”, or “don’t let rare experiences pass you by, as they are precious and enriching”). Any explicit rule meant to govern the given class of situations, which purports to embody your goals and preferences, must capture this competing goal, along with the “maintain health” goal.
But under this view, the quoted example of a purported exception isn’t any such thing after all! The purpose of the No Cookies rule was to stop yourself from eating lots of cookies and thereby harming your health in the pursuit of momentary pleasures… but this hypothetical “health cookie” doesn’t interfere at all with the “health maintenance” goal, and is entirely consonant with the purpose of the existing rule. If you like, you can say that we take “cookies” to be a stand-in for “delicious but unhealthy sweets”—and “health cookies” don’t fit the bill. (Indeed, such a broad interpretation is needed anyway, as otherwise we would have the absurd situation of abjuring cookies but gorging on brownies—thus utterly ruining the purpose of the rule—and having to engage in philosophical debates about whether “bar cookies” are cookies or a distinct culinary product called bars, etc.)
except if someone points a gun at my head and orders me to eat a cookie
Well, first of all, should you encounter such a conundrum, you really have bigger problems than how best to formulate a rule governing your dietary practices.
Nothing I wrote in the OP (indeed, you may assume, nothing I ever write) is intended to replace common sense. I am not Eliezer; I do not write with the ultimate aim of applying my points to AI design. My prescription is meant for people—not for robots.
That having been said, there is, in fact, a non-ad-hoc way of handling just such cases; one prominent example of such an approach is seen in Jewish religious law, in the concept of pikuach nefesh. Briefly, the point is that there is no need to write into every rule a clause to the effect that “this rule shall be suspended if someone’s pointing a gun at my head”; instead, you have a general rule that if your life’s in danger, almost all other rules are suspended. Whatever goals and purposes your rules serve, they’re not so important as to be worth your life. (This doesn’t apply to all rules, just most of them… but certainly that “most” includes dietary restrictions.)
except if a doctor prescribes cookies because of some medical or psychiatric reason
Essentially the same response applies as that for example #1. If the cookies in question are, in fact, necessary to maintain your health, then eating them serves the goal for which the No Cookies rule was formulated. There is no question, here, of whether this is a “legitimate exception”; no uncertainty, no temptation.
Again, remember that the No Cookies rule is made by you, to serve your goals, to guard those goals against your impulses and your weaknesses. Consider again the notion of “legitimate exceptions”. We have already covered the meaning of legitimate exceptions (they are manifestations of underlying intuitions which serve competing goals), but what about illegitimate exceptions? The possibility of such is implied, isn’t it? But what are they? Well, they’re the manifestations, not of competing goals, but of precisely the impulses or urges which the rule is aimed at restraining in the first place! The question of “legitimacy” of an exception is, then, the question: “I have an intuition that I ought to except this situation from application of the rule, but does that intuition spring from a competing goal which I endorse, or does it spring from the desire I am trying to restrain?”
But in the given example, the question does not arise, because the exception is not generated by your intuition, but by an entirely endogenous factor: your doctor. (And, it must be noted, the question of how the health-related goal of your No Cookies rule stacks up to whatever medical reason your doctor has for prescribing you cookies, can, and should, be discussed with your doctor!)
except if I’m in a social situation where not eating a cookie is a serious faux pas (e.g., it will seriously offend the person offering me a cookie)
(Skipping this one for now; see below.)
except if I’m diagnosed with a terminal disease so I have no reason to care about my long term health anymore
Well, then you can drop the No Cookies rule entirely, and need no longer worry about what does, or does not, constitute an exception to it.
except if I’m presented with convincing evidence that I’m living in a simulation and eating cookies has no real negative consequences
The same response applies as to example #5.
Now, let’s return to the example I skipped:
except if I’m in a social situation where not eating a cookie is a serious faux pas (e.g., it will seriously offend the person offering me a cookie)
Ah! Now, here we have a genuine difficulty—and it is precisely the sort of difficulty which the concept I describe in the OP is intended to handle.
First, a note. In my post and my comments, I have talked about “encountering” various situations (and, relatedly, “expecting” to encounter them). Yet as you demonstrate, one can imagine encountering all sorts of situations, before ever actually encountering them.
Well, and what is the problem with that? This, it seems to me, is a feature, not a bug. Surely it’s a good thing, and not at all a bad thing, to think through the implications of your rules, and to consider how they may be applied in this or that situation you might run into. Suppose, after all, that you run into such a social situation (where refusing an offered cookie is a faux pas), having never before considered the possibility of doing so. You are likely to experience some indecision; you may act in a way you will later come to regret; you will, in short, handle the situation more poorly than you might’ve, had you instead given the matter some thought in advance.
You may think of this, if you like, of “encountering” the situation in your mind, which (assuming that your imagined scenario contains no gross distortions of the likely reality) may stand in for encountering the situation in fact. If the imagined scenario contains an apparently legitimate exception to your rule, you can then apply the same approach I describe in my post (i.e., analyze the generator of the exception, then either integrate the exception by updating the rule, or keep the rule and judge the exception to be illegitimate after all).
(Of course, such things shouldn’t be overdone. It’s no good to be paralyzed into anxiety by the constant contemplation of all possible situations you may ever encounter. But this problem is, I think, beyond the scope of this discussion.)
Now, to the specific example. You have, we have said, a rule: No Cookies. But you find yourself in some social situation where applying this rule has negative social consequences. This would seem to be one of those legitimate exceptions. And why is this? Well, we may suppose that you’ve got (as most people have) a general goal along the lines of “maintain good social standing”; or, perhaps, the operative goal is something more like “maintain a good relationship with this specific individual”.
The question before you, then, is how to weigh this social goal of yours against the health goal served by the No Cookies rule. That is something you (that is, our hypothetical person with the No Cookies rule) must answer for yourself; there is no a priori correct answer. In some cases, for some people, the social goal overrides the health goal. But for others, the health goal takes precedence. In such a case, it is a very good idea to have considered such situations in advance, and to have decided, in advance, to stand firm—to reject, in other words, the intuitive judgment of the exception’s legitimacy, having analyzed it and given due consideration to its source (i.e., the goal of maintaining social status or a personal relationship).
Such advance consideration is valuable not only because it saves you from making on-the-spot decisions you would later regret, but also because it allows you to take steps to mitigate the effects of choosing one way or the other—to turn an “either way, I lose something important” situation into a win-win.
Take the case of a No Cookies rule which is challenged by the refusal of an offered cookie being a social faux pas. Suppose you decide that in such a case (or in a specific such case), you will give precedence to your social goal(s), and eat the cookie. What steps might you take to mitigate the effects of this? For one, you might consider the impact of this violation of your No Cookies rule on the goal the rule serves, and compensate by reducing your sugar intake for the day / week / month. Alternatively, you might anticipate the possibility of entirely ruining your diet by frequent encounters of such socially challenging cookie-related situations, and proactively ensure that you only rarely find yourself at cookie-tasting parties (or whatever).
Conversely, suppose you decided that in such a case (or in a specific such case), you will give precedence to your health goal(s), and refuse the cookie. What steps might you take to mitigate the seriousness of the faux pas? Well, you might warn your cookie-offering acquaintance in advance that you are on a No Cookies diet, apologize in advance for refusing their offer of a cookie, and assure them (and solicit credible witnesses to bolster your assurance) that your refusal isn’t a judgment on their cookie-baking skills, but rather is forced by your dietary needs.
I could just go to full consequentialism and say the real rule is “no cookies except if the benefits of eating a cookie outweigh the costs” but presumably that’s not the point of this post?
The point, as I say above, is to provide a conceptual tool with which to better govern your own behavior, and that of organizations and groups in which you participate. Consequentialism is very well and good, and I have no quarrel with it; but act consequentialism is impractical (for humans). Consider my post to be a suggestion for a certain sort of rule-consequentialist “implementation detail” for your consequentialist principles.
It sounds like the actual meta-meta-rule is not “Real rules have no exceptions,” but rather “the full set of all rules, and their relative priorities, fully determines (compliant) behavior, without any specific case exceptions”
Note that the case I’m about to describe has two interesting features which make it a useful case study for the concept. First, the rule in question is a rule meant to bind an organization, rather than an individual (in contrast to, e.g., the No Cookies rule we’ve thus far been discussing in this comment thread). Second, the challenge to the rule (which arose from the apparent existence of “legitimate exceptions”) was, in this case, resolved not by integrating the exceptions and updating the rule, but by rejecting the apparent legitimacy of the exceptions, identifying and repudiating the generator of those exceptions, and retaining the original rule.
Now, to the example. With the release of World of Warcraft: Classic (a.k.a. WoW), I’ve started playing the game once more, and so once more I routinely encounter the challenges of raiding, loot distribution, and everything else I described in my post about incentives and rewards in WoW. (See that post, and the one before it, for explanations of all the WoW jargon I use here.) The following happened to a guild with which I’m familiar.
This guild had wisely chosen the EP/GP loot distribution system (without question, the most rational of loot systems) for use in their raids. The system worked well at first, but soon there began to take place such situations: some raid member would receive a piece of gear (having the highest priority ratio among all those who wanted this item), but—so the sentiment among many of the raiders went—it would have gone to better use in the hands of a different raid member. Or: some item of loot—quite powerful, and potentially beneficial to the raid in the hands of one or another specific raid member—was discarded, and went to waste, because no one wanted to “spend points” (that is, to sacrifice their loot priority) on that item.
The raid leadership began to talk of legitimate exceptions… which, of course, stirred up anxiety and discontent among the raiders. (After all, if the rules only apply until the raid leader decides they don’t apply, then the rules don’t really apply at all… and the benefit of having a known, predictable system of loot distribution—raid member satisfaction and empowerment, the delegation of optimization tasks, etc.—are lost.) Seeing this, the guild’s officers held a public discussion, and analyzed the situation as follows.
Two competing goals, they said, together generate our intuitions (and yours) about how loot should be distributed. On the one hand, we desire that there be equity, fairness, and freedom of choice in the process; those who contribute, should be rewarded, and they should be free to choose how to spend the currency of those fairly allocated rewards. On the other hand, we also strive for raid progression, and to effectively defeat the challenges of raid content [i.e., killing powerful “raid boss” monsters—which are the source of loot]. Certain allocations of loot items, and certain allocation systems, may serve the former goal more than they serve the latter, and vice versa.
However (continued the guild officers), fairness is one of the stated values of this guild—and it takes precedence over optimization of raid progression. Our chosen loot distribution system (EP/GP) is meant to be the fairest system, and to provide an environment where our raid members can reliably expect to be rewarded for their contributions—and that is our top priority. This will, indeed, sometimes result in a less-than-optimal result from the standpoint of whole-raid optimization. We accept this consequence. We say that any apparent “legitimate exceptions” to EP/GP-based loot distribution, whose seeming legitimacy stems from the intuition generated by the “optimize the raid’s overall performance” goal, are not, in fact, legitimate, in our eyes. We recognize this goal, the source of such intuitions, and while we do not in the least disclaim it, we nonetheless explicitly place it below the goal of fairness, in our goal hierarchy. There will (the guild officers concluded) be no exceptions, after all. The rule will stand.
Can anyone give some examples of “rules to which no legitimate exception will ever be encountered”? This post is being referred to in subsequent discussions, and I realized that I never really understood it due to lack of examples.
Also, examples of “When you do encounter a legitimate exception to a heretofore-exceptionless rule, immediately discard the rule and replace it with a new rule—one which accounts for situations like this one, which, to the old rule, had to be exceptions.” would also be appreciated.
Certainly.
First, let me note that the key to understanding the post is this part:
Once again, for emphasis:
And this is summarized by the title of the post: “The Real Rules Have No Exceptions”.
Now for some examples. I will give three: dietary restrictions, ethical injunctions, and criminal justice systems. We’ll examine each, and see how they fit into the concept I describe in the OP.
Personal dietary restrictions
This is the example in the quoted bit of Chris Leong’s post. You have a rule: “I won’t eat any cookies”. (You have decided on this rule, one imagines, to curb your sugar intake. Or something.) You’ve held strong for a while; you’ve turned down your friend’s signature chocolate chip cookies, and those wonderful black-and-white cookies they sell at the corner deli. But! You now find yourself faced with a bakery that sells what are, by all accounts of the cookie cognoscenti, the best cookies in the state. This, it seems to you, is a legitimate exception to your no-cookies rule. You eat the cookies. (They are delicious.)
The naïve view of this scenario is: “I am following a simple rule: No Cookies. But, sometimes, there are legitimate exceptions. Like, say, if the cookies are the best cookies in the state. Or… some similar situation. No Cookies is still the rule! Exceptions are just… exceptions.”
And I am saying that this view is both mistaken and imprudent. (More on this in a bit.)
Now, the obvious question to ask of the naïve account is: just what is this business of “legitimate exceptions”? What makes an exception “legitimate”, anyway? This is the crux of the matter. Chris Leong’s description of such scenarios says “you encounter a situation that legitimately feels exceptional”—but what makes one exception “feel” legitimate, and another “feel” illegitimate?
Generally, in such scenarios, there is some underlying intuition—which may or may not be easily verbalized or even teased out from examples. Nevertheless, there is (in my experience) always some pattern, some “generator” (to use the local parlance) of the intuition, some regularity—and this regularity sorts situations wherein the stated rule is applicable into the categories of “legitimate exception” and “not a legitimate exception”.
And so the core insight (such as it is) of my post is just this: whatever the stated rule may be, nevertheless the actual rule—the complete, fully described rule that governs situations of the given category—is constituted by the stated rule, plus whatever is the underlying pattern, dynamic, generator, etc., which determines which situations are legitimate exceptions to the stated rule.
Let’s return to our “No Cookies” example. Despite being a fairly trivial matter, this happens to be one of those cases where the underlying intuition behind judgments of exception legitimacy is hard to verbalize. It’s hard to say what may motivate someone to treat this particular situation (“best cookies in the state”) as a legitimate exception to a No Cookies rule… but consider this as one plausible account (out of potentially many other such):
“If I encounter a situation where I have the opportunity to have an interesting, fun, or pleasant experience which is rare, or even unique, and which opportunity I can expect will not repeat itself often, or ever, then it is permissible to suspend certain rules which otherwise would be in effect at all times. This is because, firstly, the benefit to me of having such a rare positive experience outweighs the downside of undermining a generally-unbreakable rule, and secondly, if I do not expect such a situation to recur often, then I run relatively little risk of permanently undermining the rule to an extent that makes following it infeasible.”
Now, again, such an intuition will, for the overwhelming majority of people, not be a consciously held belief. If you ask them to tell you what is their policy vis-a-vis cookies, they will say: “my policy is No Cookies”. If you press them, they will confess that their policy admits of exceptions, in some legitimately exceptional situations. If you ask them to explain just what situations are “legitimately exceptional”, they will be unable to oblige you in any coherent way. Yet this does not, of course, mean that the above-described intuition (or something along those general lines) does not govern their behavior and their thinking on the subject of cookies.
So, what I am saying is: the real rule in this case is not No Cookies, but something more like: No Cookies, Unless Consumption Of Some Particular Cookies Constitutes A Rare Opportunity To Have An Unusual, Or Even Unique, Experience, Which I Expect Will Not Recur Often, Or Perhaps Ever. (Or something along these lines.)
I said earlier that the naïve view (“My rule is No Cookies. But, yes, sometimes there are legitimate exceptions.”) is both mistaken and imprudent. What I meant by “mistaken” should now be clear: the naïve view is substantially less accurate than the fully-informed view; it does not really let you make accurate predictions about your own behavior (not without the aid of that non-verbalized intuition). And what I mean by “imprudent” is this: if you hold the naïve view, then you really have no opportunity to examine that exception-generating intuition of yours, and to endorse it, or revise it, or reject it. On the other hand, if you are fully cognizant of what the real rule is, then you can give it due consideration—and perhaps tweak it to your liking!
Note two things. First: this fully formulated, a.k.a. “real”, rule—is it a “rule to which no legitimate exception will ever be encountered”? Here I must admit that this wording was a bit of shorthand on my part. What I was referring to was something a bit like the notion of conservation of expected evidence; that is, while it is not all that probable that any given rule will survive the rest of your life without having to be updated, nevertheless you should not ever expect to encounter exceptions, any more than you should ever expect to encounter evidence in some specific direction from your current belief. If you do expect to encounter evidence in a specific direction from your current belief, then you should update immediately, because this indicates that you already have some not-yet-integrated evidence (which is the source of your expectation). Similarly, if you have some specific reason to believe that you’ll encounter legitimate exceptions to some rule, then you should revise your rule, because the real rule you’re already following is your stated rule plus whatever is causing you to expect to encounter exceptions.
Second: what role does encountering what seems to you to be a legitimate exception play in this whole framework? Simply, it is a demonstration that your real rule is not the same as your stated rule, and that there are some hidden parts to it (which are the source of your sense of the given exception’s legitimacy). So, in our cookie example, suppose that you thought (and would have said, if asked) that your policy on the subject of cookies is simple: No Cookies, No Exceptions. Then you encounter the best cookies in the state, and say: “OK, well… no cookies or exceptions… except for these cookies, which are clearly legitimately exceptional”. Your rule, which you thought had no exceptions, turns out to have exceptions—and is thereby revealed not to have been the real rule all along. You should now (I claim) discard your (stated) “No Cookies” rule, and adopt—no! wrong! not “adopt”, because you are already using it!… and (consciously) accept the fully formulated, real rule. (Or, of course, reject the fully formulated rule, and thus also reject your judgment of the given exception’s legitimacy.)
Ethical injunctions
Suppose you have a rule of personal conduct: “no lying; always tell the truth”. Then you find yourself sheltering an innocent person from a tyrannical government, whose agents accost you and inquire about whether you’re doing any such thing. “Clearly,” you think, “this is a legitimate exception to that whole ‘no lying’ business; after all, an innocent person’s life is at stake, and anyhow, these guys are, like, super evil.” You lie, and thereby save a life.
You have now discovered (if you will but admit it to yourself) that your “no lying” rule wasn’t the real rule after all. If you’re now asked whether you have any specific reason to expect that you might encounter exceptions to this “no lying” rule, you will surely say “yes”. The real rule was something more like: “no lying, unless it’s necessary to save a life”. (There might also be some intuition about whether the person(s) you’re lying to are, in some sense, deserving of honesty; but that is more complex, and anyway, overdetermines your behavior—the innocent person’s life quite suffices.) You should (I claim) admit all this to yourself, discard the “no lying, ever” rule (which, if you decide to lie in this scenario, was never truly operative in the first place) and replace it with the fully formulated version. (Of course, as with the cookies, you also have the option of endorsing the simple rule—even after reflecting on the source of your intuition that this is a legitimate exception—and discarding instead your judgment of the exception’s legitimacy; and, of course, then telling the truth to the jackbooted thugs at your door.)
Once you have reflected thus, and either endorsed the fully formulated rule, or rejected it along with your judgment of the exception’s legitimacy, whatever stated rule you now follow is one to which you do not expect ever to find exceptions.
Criminal justice systems
We have (or so we are told in our middle-school civics class) a justice system where everyone has the right to a fair trial with a jury of their peers, and all are equal before the law. Yet even a cursory glance at a news source of your choice reveals that our system of criminal justice routinely finds all sorts of legitimate exceptions to this very just and simple rule.
Clearly, it would be altogether utopian to suggest that our government “should” discard the simple stated rule, and instead either explicitly adopt some rule along the lines of “everyone’s entitled to a fair trial with a jury of their peers, unless of course our courts are swamped with cases (which is most of the time) or it’s an election year and we’re trying to be ‘tough on crime’, or any number of various other things; and everyone’s equal before the law, except of course that if you have money you can hire a good lawyer and that makes people unequal, [… etc.; insert the usual litany of entirely legal, non-corruption-related exceptions to the ostensible fairness of the criminal justice system]”, or (the still more starry-eyed scenario) reject all the exceptions and actually administer the law as fairly as in the civics class fantasy. These things will not happen. But if you were elected Absolute Dictator of America, with the power to make any social or political changes with a wave of your hand, you would (I hope) consider either of these (preferably, of course, the latter) to be good candidates for early implementation.
The point, in any case, is that, once more, the real rules have no exceptions. The real social, political, and economic forces that determine who gets treated fairly by the criminal justice system and who does not, and what the outcomes are—these forces, these dynamics, do not have exceptions (at least, not ones we can ever expect or predict). They operate at all times. They are a constant source of legitimate (which is to say, endorsed, de facto, by the simple fact of being the status quo, and of not changing even if brought to light) exceptions to the stated rules (“all are equal before the law” and so forth) precisely because the stated rules are not the real rules, and the dynamics which determine actual outcomes are the real rules.
What does the first “expect” mean, in a technical sense? (The second “expect” does have a technical meaning which makes the statement sensible.)
The problem I see is that if I keep thinking about it, I can find an ever growing (but increasingly unlikely) list of exceptions to any rule. Do you just use an arbitrary probability threshold to define “expect”, or what? For example with the No Cookies rule:
except if someone invents a cookie that’s good for my health
except if someone points a gun at my head and orders me to eat a cookie
except if a doctor prescribes cookies because of some medical or psychiatric reason
except if I’m in a social situation where not eating a cookie is a serious faux pas (e.g., it will seriously offend the person offering me a cookie)
except if I’m diagnosed with a terminal disease so I have no reason to care about my long term health anymore
except if I’m presented with convincing evidence that I’m living in a simulation and eating cookies has no real negative consequences
etc. etc. When should I stop and say this is the real rule? (I could just go to full consequentialism and say the real rule is “no cookies except if the benefits of eating a cookie outweigh the costs” but presumably that’s not the point of this post?)
The question of formalization (a.k.a. “what does ‘expect’ mean in a technical sense”) is a good one; I don’t have an answer for you. (As I said, the idea which I have in mind is like the idea of “conservation of expected evidence”, but, as you say, it’s not quite the same thing.) My mathematical skills do not suffice to provide any technical characterization of the term as I am using it.
It seems to me that the informal sense of the word suffices here; a formalization would be useful, no doubt (and if someone can construct one, more power to them)… but I do not see that the lack of one seriously undermines the concept’s validity or applicability.
In particular, your list of examples is composed almost entirely of cases which quite miss the point. Before going through them, though, I’ll note two things:
First—the purpose of the exercise is to construct more effective rules with which to govern our own behavior (as individuals), and the behavior of groups or organizations in which we participate. This general goal is often threatened by the existence of so-called “exceptions” to our ostensible rules, which can easily turn some apparently clear and straightforward rule against itself, and against the ostensible intent of the rule’s formulator(s). My aim in the OP is to provide a conceptual tool that counteracts this threat, by pointing out that the existence of “exceptions” is, in fact, a sign that there actually exists some real rule which is not identical to the stated rule (and which is the generator for the “exceptions”).
Second—the point I make in the OP is twofold: descriptive and prescriptive. The descriptive component is “the real rules have no exceptions”. The prescriptive component is “here is how you ought to deal with encountered apparent ‘legitimate exceptions’”. You seem to be objecting, here, to the prescriptive component. I do not think your objection holds (as I’ll try to demonstrate shortly), but note that even if you continue to find my prescription unconvincing, nevertheless the description remains true! There is some underlying pattern which is generating “legitimate exceptions”, and it will continue, unseen, to govern your behavior (and to undermine the predictability thereof)… unless you identify it, and either integrate or alter it.
We’ll do well to remember these two points as we consider the examples you offer. You propose that the following seem like potentially expectable exceptions to the “No Cookies” rule:
Once again, recall that the point of the rule in the first place is to effectively govern your own behavior. The difficulty, after all, is what? It’s that you know that you shouldn’t eat cookies all the time (or perhaps, almost ever), but you also know that without some device with which to restrain yourself, you’ll eat lots of cookies, because they’re delicious. (We can express this in terms of first- and second-order desires, or “goals” vs. “urges”, or some framework along such lines, but I think that the point here ought to be simple enough in any case.) A No Cookies rule is such a device. Its purpose is to enforce upon yourself some rule which you wish enforced upon yourself, in the service of achieving, and maintaining, some goal of yours.
Now, what happens when you encounter the best cookies in the state, and they seem to you to be a legitimate exception to your No Cookies rule? Roughly, what you have discovered thereby is that in addition to your goal of maintaining your health, you also have some other goal(s), which compete with it (such as, perhaps, “avoid turning life into a joyless existence, devoid entirely of sensory pleasures”, or “don’t let rare experiences pass you by, as they are precious and enriching”). Any explicit rule meant to govern the given class of situations, which purports to embody your goals and preferences, must capture this competing goal, along with the “maintain health” goal.
But under this view, the quoted example of a purported exception isn’t any such thing after all! The purpose of the No Cookies rule was to stop yourself from eating lots of cookies and thereby harming your health in the pursuit of momentary pleasures… but this hypothetical “health cookie” doesn’t interfere at all with the “health maintenance” goal, and is entirely consonant with the purpose of the existing rule. If you like, you can say that we take “cookies” to be a stand-in for “delicious but unhealthy sweets”—and “health cookies” don’t fit the bill. (Indeed, such a broad interpretation is needed anyway, as otherwise we would have the absurd situation of abjuring cookies but gorging on brownies—thus utterly ruining the purpose of the rule—and having to engage in philosophical debates about whether “bar cookies” are cookies or a distinct culinary product called bars, etc.)
Well, first of all, should you encounter such a conundrum, you really have bigger problems than how best to formulate a rule governing your dietary practices.
Nothing I wrote in the OP (indeed, you may assume, nothing I ever write) is intended to replace common sense. I am not Eliezer; I do not write with the ultimate aim of applying my points to AI design. My prescription is meant for people—not for robots.
That having been said, there is, in fact, a non-ad-hoc way of handling just such cases; one prominent example of such an approach is seen in Jewish religious law, in the concept of pikuach nefesh. Briefly, the point is that there is no need to write into every rule a clause to the effect that “this rule shall be suspended if someone’s pointing a gun at my head”; instead, you have a general rule that if your life’s in danger, almost all other rules are suspended. Whatever goals and purposes your rules serve, they’re not so important as to be worth your life. (This doesn’t apply to all rules, just most of them… but certainly that “most” includes dietary restrictions.)
Essentially the same response applies as that for example #1. If the cookies in question are, in fact, necessary to maintain your health, then eating them serves the goal for which the No Cookies rule was formulated. There is no question, here, of whether this is a “legitimate exception”; no uncertainty, no temptation.
Again, remember that the No Cookies rule is made by you, to serve your goals, to guard those goals against your impulses and your weaknesses. Consider again the notion of “legitimate exceptions”. We have already covered the meaning of legitimate exceptions (they are manifestations of underlying intuitions which serve competing goals), but what about illegitimate exceptions? The possibility of such is implied, isn’t it? But what are they? Well, they’re the manifestations, not of competing goals, but of precisely the impulses or urges which the rule is aimed at restraining in the first place! The question of “legitimacy” of an exception is, then, the question: “I have an intuition that I ought to except this situation from application of the rule, but does that intuition spring from a competing goal which I endorse, or does it spring from the desire I am trying to restrain?”
But in the given example, the question does not arise, because the exception is not generated by your intuition, but by an entirely endogenous factor: your doctor. (And, it must be noted, the question of how the health-related goal of your No Cookies rule stacks up to whatever medical reason your doctor has for prescribing you cookies, can, and should, be discussed with your doctor!)
(Skipping this one for now; see below.)
Well, then you can drop the No Cookies rule entirely, and need no longer worry about what does, or does not, constitute an exception to it.
The same response applies as to example #5.
Now, let’s return to the example I skipped:
Ah! Now, here we have a genuine difficulty—and it is precisely the sort of difficulty which the concept I describe in the OP is intended to handle.
First, a note. In my post and my comments, I have talked about “encountering” various situations (and, relatedly, “expecting” to encounter them). Yet as you demonstrate, one can imagine encountering all sorts of situations, before ever actually encountering them.
Well, and what is the problem with that? This, it seems to me, is a feature, not a bug. Surely it’s a good thing, and not at all a bad thing, to think through the implications of your rules, and to consider how they may be applied in this or that situation you might run into. Suppose, after all, that you run into such a social situation (where refusing an offered cookie is a faux pas), having never before considered the possibility of doing so. You are likely to experience some indecision; you may act in a way you will later come to regret; you will, in short, handle the situation more poorly than you might’ve, had you instead given the matter some thought in advance.
You may think of this, if you like, of “encountering” the situation in your mind, which (assuming that your imagined scenario contains no gross distortions of the likely reality) may stand in for encountering the situation in fact. If the imagined scenario contains an apparently legitimate exception to your rule, you can then apply the same approach I describe in my post (i.e., analyze the generator of the exception, then either integrate the exception by updating the rule, or keep the rule and judge the exception to be illegitimate after all).
(Of course, such things shouldn’t be overdone. It’s no good to be paralyzed into anxiety by the constant contemplation of all possible situations you may ever encounter. But this problem is, I think, beyond the scope of this discussion.)
Now, to the specific example. You have, we have said, a rule: No Cookies. But you find yourself in some social situation where applying this rule has negative social consequences. This would seem to be one of those legitimate exceptions. And why is this? Well, we may suppose that you’ve got (as most people have) a general goal along the lines of “maintain good social standing”; or, perhaps, the operative goal is something more like “maintain a good relationship with this specific individual”.
The question before you, then, is how to weigh this social goal of yours against the health goal served by the No Cookies rule. That is something you (that is, our hypothetical person with the No Cookies rule) must answer for yourself; there is no a priori correct answer. In some cases, for some people, the social goal overrides the health goal. But for others, the health goal takes precedence. In such a case, it is a very good idea to have considered such situations in advance, and to have decided, in advance, to stand firm—to reject, in other words, the intuitive judgment of the exception’s legitimacy, having analyzed it and given due consideration to its source (i.e., the goal of maintaining social status or a personal relationship).
Such advance consideration is valuable not only because it saves you from making on-the-spot decisions you would later regret, but also because it allows you to take steps to mitigate the effects of choosing one way or the other—to turn an “either way, I lose something important” situation into a win-win.
Take the case of a No Cookies rule which is challenged by the refusal of an offered cookie being a social faux pas. Suppose you decide that in such a case (or in a specific such case), you will give precedence to your social goal(s), and eat the cookie. What steps might you take to mitigate the effects of this? For one, you might consider the impact of this violation of your No Cookies rule on the goal the rule serves, and compensate by reducing your sugar intake for the day / week / month. Alternatively, you might anticipate the possibility of entirely ruining your diet by frequent encounters of such socially challenging cookie-related situations, and proactively ensure that you only rarely find yourself at cookie-tasting parties (or whatever).
Conversely, suppose you decided that in such a case (or in a specific such case), you will give precedence to your health goal(s), and refuse the cookie. What steps might you take to mitigate the seriousness of the faux pas? Well, you might warn your cookie-offering acquaintance in advance that you are on a No Cookies diet, apologize in advance for refusing their offer of a cookie, and assure them (and solicit credible witnesses to bolster your assurance) that your refusal isn’t a judgment on their cookie-baking skills, but rather is forced by your dietary needs.
The point, as I say above, is to provide a conceptual tool with which to better govern your own behavior, and that of organizations and groups in which you participate. Consequentialism is very well and good, and I have no quarrel with it; but act consequentialism is impractical (for humans). Consider my post to be a suggestion for a certain sort of rule-consequentialist “implementation detail” for your consequentialist principles.
It sounds like the actual meta-meta-rule is not “Real rules have no exceptions,” but rather “the full set of all rules, and their relative priorities, fully determines (compliant) behavior, without any specific case exceptions”
In keeping with my habit of illustrating things using World of Warcraft, here is an additional, real-world (… more or less) example of applying the concept I describe in the OP.
Note that the case I’m about to describe has two interesting features which make it a useful case study for the concept. First, the rule in question is a rule meant to bind an organization, rather than an individual (in contrast to, e.g., the No Cookies rule we’ve thus far been discussing in this comment thread). Second, the challenge to the rule (which arose from the apparent existence of “legitimate exceptions”) was, in this case, resolved not by integrating the exceptions and updating the rule, but by rejecting the apparent legitimacy of the exceptions, identifying and repudiating the generator of those exceptions, and retaining the original rule.
Now, to the example. With the release of World of Warcraft: Classic (a.k.a. WoW), I’ve started playing the game once more, and so once more I routinely encounter the challenges of raiding, loot distribution, and everything else I described in my post about incentives and rewards in WoW. (See that post, and the one before it, for explanations of all the WoW jargon I use here.) The following happened to a guild with which I’m familiar.
This guild had wisely chosen the EP/GP loot distribution system (without question, the most rational of loot systems) for use in their raids. The system worked well at first, but soon there began to take place such situations: some raid member would receive a piece of gear (having the highest priority ratio among all those who wanted this item), but—so the sentiment among many of the raiders went—it would have gone to better use in the hands of a different raid member. Or: some item of loot—quite powerful, and potentially beneficial to the raid in the hands of one or another specific raid member—was discarded, and went to waste, because no one wanted to “spend points” (that is, to sacrifice their loot priority) on that item.
The raid leadership began to talk of legitimate exceptions… which, of course, stirred up anxiety and discontent among the raiders. (After all, if the rules only apply until the raid leader decides they don’t apply, then the rules don’t really apply at all… and the benefit of having a known, predictable system of loot distribution—raid member satisfaction and empowerment, the delegation of optimization tasks, etc.—are lost.) Seeing this, the guild’s officers held a public discussion, and analyzed the situation as follows.
Two competing goals, they said, together generate our intuitions (and yours) about how loot should be distributed. On the one hand, we desire that there be equity, fairness, and freedom of choice in the process; those who contribute, should be rewarded, and they should be free to choose how to spend the currency of those fairly allocated rewards. On the other hand, we also strive for raid progression, and to effectively defeat the challenges of raid content [i.e., killing powerful “raid boss” monsters—which are the source of loot]. Certain allocations of loot items, and certain allocation systems, may serve the former goal more than they serve the latter, and vice versa.
However (continued the guild officers), fairness is one of the stated values of this guild—and it takes precedence over optimization of raid progression. Our chosen loot distribution system (EP/GP) is meant to be the fairest system, and to provide an environment where our raid members can reliably expect to be rewarded for their contributions—and that is our top priority. This will, indeed, sometimes result in a less-than-optimal result from the standpoint of whole-raid optimization. We accept this consequence. We say that any apparent “legitimate exceptions” to EP/GP-based loot distribution, whose seeming legitimacy stems from the intuition generated by the “optimize the raid’s overall performance” goal, are not, in fact, legitimate, in our eyes. We recognize this goal, the source of such intuitions, and while we do not in the least disclaim it, we nonetheless explicitly place it below the goal of fairness, in our goal hierarchy. There will (the guild officers concluded) be no exceptions, after all. The rule will stand.