In my experience, trade can work well here. That is, you care more about cleanliness than your roommate, but they either care abstractly about your happiness or care about some concrete other thing you care about less, e.g. temperature of the apartment. So, you can propose a trade where they agree to be cleaner than they would be otherwise in exchange for you either being happier or doing something else that they care about.
Semi-serious connection to AI: It’s kind of like merging your utility functions but it’s only temporary.
The trade is sort of the default outcome among people who are, like, reasonably competent adults. But:
a) it still encourages (at least subtle) exaggeration or downplaying of your preferences (to get a better trade)
b) often, fastidiousness is correlated along many axis, so it’s more like “the roommate with stronger preferences isn’t get any of their preferences met”, and “the roommate who doesn’t care much doesn’t have much they really want other than to not get yelled at.” (temperature preference might be one of a few things I expect to be uncorrelated with most other roommate disagreements)
In my experience, trade can work well here. That is, you care more about cleanliness than your roommate, but they either care abstractly about your happiness or care about some concrete other thing you care about less, e.g. temperature of the apartment. So, you can propose a trade where they agree to be cleaner than they would be otherwise in exchange for you either being happier or doing something else that they care about.
Semi-serious connection to AI: It’s kind of like merging your utility functions but it’s only temporary.
The trade is sort of the default outcome among people who are, like, reasonably competent adults. But:
a) it still encourages (at least subtle) exaggeration or downplaying of your preferences (to get a better trade)
b) often, fastidiousness is correlated along many axis, so it’s more like “the roommate with stronger preferences isn’t get any of their preferences met”, and “the roommate who doesn’t care much doesn’t have much they really want other than to not get yelled at.” (temperature preference might be one of a few things I expect to be uncorrelated with most other roommate disagreements)