I don’t know of a principled way to resolve roomate-things like “what is the correct degree of cleanliness”, and this feels sad.
You can’t say “the correct amount is ‘this much’ because, well, there isn’t actually an objectly correct degree of cleanliness.”
If you say ‘eh, there are no universal truths, just preferences, and negotiation’, you incentivize people to see a lot of interactions as transactional and adversarial that don’t actually need to be. It also seems to involve exaggerating and/or downplaying one’s own preferences.
The default outcome is something like “the person who is least comfortable with mess ends up doing most of the cleaning”. If cleanliness were just an arbitrary preference this might actually be fine, especially if they really do dramatically care more about it. But usually it’s more like “everyone cares at least a bit about being clean, one person just happens to care, say, 15% more and be more quick to act.” So everyone else gets the benefits without paying the cost.
It also seems to involve exaggerating and/or downplaying one’s own preferences.
There’s a large portion of auction theory/mechanism design specifically designed to avoid this problem. The “you cut the cake, I choose the pieces” is a simple example. I’ve tried to implement some of these types of solutions in previous group houses and organizations, and there’s often a large initial hurdle to overcome, some of which just outright failed.
However, enough has succeeded that I think it’s worth trying to more explicitly work game theoretically optimal decision procedures into communities and organizations, and worth familiarizing yourself with the existing tools out there for this sort of thing.
There’s no avoiding negotiation—the actual truth is that it’s about preferences (both in what states are preferable and in how much effort to put into it). There is no objective authority you can appeal to. Get over that.
It may help, for longer-term relationships, to negotiate utility functions and happiness of each other, rather than (or as a precursor to) negotiating tasks and chore rotations.
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)
Talk to your roommates and make an agreement, that each of you, in round robin order, orders apartment cleaning service, with period equal to X weeks. This will alleviate part of the problem.
I don’t currently have a problem with roommates (we solved it last time with some ad-hoc negotiation) I’m just more generally annoyed that there’s not a good principled approach here that I can pitch as “fair”.
(We do have apartment cleaners who come biweekly, whose cost is split evenly, but that also just doesn’t address all the various small ways mess can add up on the timescale of hours or days. In the original motivating case it was about hairs getting in the sink-drain, which I prefer to solve once a year with a bottle of Draino, and others preferred to solve much-more-frequently with smaller-dollops-of-draino. i.e. I consider it fine if a sink drains slightly slowly, others found it gross)
((Also, there’s a much more general version of this which is what I was more interested in, which isn’t just the case of roommates in particular—it includes small ad-hoc situations such as some friends going camping and having different preferences about how much to cleanup))
I don’t know of a principled way to resolve roomate-things like “what is the correct degree of cleanliness”, and this feels sad.
You can’t say “the correct amount is ‘this much’ because, well, there isn’t actually an objectly correct degree of cleanliness.”
If you say ‘eh, there are no universal truths, just preferences, and negotiation’, you incentivize people to see a lot of interactions as transactional and adversarial that don’t actually need to be. It also seems to involve exaggerating and/or downplaying one’s own preferences.
The default outcome is something like “the person who is least comfortable with mess ends up doing most of the cleaning”. If cleanliness were just an arbitrary preference this might actually be fine, especially if they really do dramatically care more about it. But usually it’s more like “everyone cares at least a bit about being clean, one person just happens to care, say, 15% more and be more quick to act.” So everyone else gets the benefits without paying the cost.
There’s a large portion of auction theory/mechanism design specifically designed to avoid this problem. The “you cut the cake, I choose the pieces” is a simple example. I’ve tried to implement some of these types of solutions in previous group houses and organizations, and there’s often a large initial hurdle to overcome, some of which just outright failed.
However, enough has succeeded that I think it’s worth trying to more explicitly work game theoretically optimal decision procedures into communities and organizations, and worth familiarizing yourself with the existing tools out there for this sort of thing.
I’m interested in hearing more details about that.
There’s no avoiding negotiation—the actual truth is that it’s about preferences (both in what states are preferable and in how much effort to put into it). There is no objective authority you can appeal to. Get over that.
It may help, for longer-term relationships, to negotiate utility functions and happiness of each other, rather than (or as a precursor to) negotiating tasks and chore rotations.
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)
Talk to your roommates and make an agreement, that each of you, in round robin order, orders apartment cleaning service, with period equal to X weeks. This will alleviate part of the problem.
I don’t currently have a problem with roommates (we solved it last time with some ad-hoc negotiation) I’m just more generally annoyed that there’s not a good principled approach here that I can pitch as “fair”.
(We do have apartment cleaners who come biweekly, whose cost is split evenly, but that also just doesn’t address all the various small ways mess can add up on the timescale of hours or days. In the original motivating case it was about hairs getting in the sink-drain, which I prefer to solve once a year with a bottle of Draino, and others preferred to solve much-more-frequently with smaller-dollops-of-draino. i.e. I consider it fine if a sink drains slightly slowly, others found it gross)
((Also, there’s a much more general version of this which is what I was more interested in, which isn’t just the case of roommates in particular—it includes small ad-hoc situations such as some friends going camping and having different preferences about how much to cleanup))