I do the same thing every time I price check an item and buy it from the cheapest vendor, every time I use a coupon or a promotion, every time I wait for a sale. Welcome to capitalism.
Wait, what?
First off, buying things from the cheapest vendor only harms other people if you’re destroying the market for higher-quality goods. And it isn’t harming the vendor at all!
Second, buying from the cheapest vendor doesn’t involve deception.
Skiplagging or whatever you call it is buying an airline ticket under false pretenses. It’s like telling a girl in a bar you’re interested in a long-term relationship (full trip ticket) when in fact your goal is to get laid (go to the hub) and you don’t plan to call her again after you skip out (abandon trip at the layover).
IOW, you may engage in a deception because you don’t care about the other party’s welfare, but it doesn’t make you any less of an asshole or a contract breaker. And promoting to other people that they should deceive others for their personal short-term benefit makes you even more of an asshole.
When somebody offers to do something for a specific group of people, and you pretend to be in that group, you’re obtaining their consent by fraud. Not liking the somebody in question doesn’t give you a license to be an asshole, and neither does a feeling of entitlement that the girl or airline “ought” to give you the terms you want.
We can all dislike airline price segmentation all we want. But lying to the airline to get a better deal is fraudulent, and the moral justification for fraud ought to be considerably more substantive than, “welcome to capitalism!”
Firstly, I’m not at all sure that lying to a person should carry the same moral weight as lying to the (useful!) legal fiction of a corporation-as-person.
And secondly, I don’t find it obvious that fraud that harms someone is the same as fraud that doesn’t harm the corporation. Comparing the case where you get off at the layover point to the case where you don’t, it’s hard to see what harm you’ve caused to the airline. Obviously they would like to compare to the case where you bought the higher priced ticket. However, there are clearly four relevant scenarios (buying ticket from A->B and flying A->B, buying A->B and getting off at C, buying A->C and flying A->C, and them selling you the A->C ticket at the price you could buy the A->B ticket for). Obviously whoever gets to pick what single counterfactual scenario to compare to can decide how the comparison comes out.
No one is saying “I will fly these routes”; they’re saying “I will buy these tickets”.
...tickets which the airlines have offered to sell to people traveling from point A to point B, and under terms which expressly prohibit jumping off at point C. Terms that you generally have to check a box saying you’re agreeing to.
In any case, the part that makes it deception is that the seller wouldn’t consent to the sale if you told them what you were up to. If your general approach to interacting with people is that you’ll happily deceive them in order to get better terms in your deals, then by all means proceed.
If you want to say, “well, I don’t think an airline is an entity deserving of weight in my moral calculation”, fine. But let’s not pretend that the act itself is not a matter of obtaining consent through false pretenses, one that we would roundly condemn in another context, where our moral intuition is more inclined to see the object of the deception as a powerless victim instead of a powerful entity that can afford to be deceived.
At the very best, you could maybe say that what you’re doing is Not Technically Lying.
In any event, my other point still stands: telling other people how to exploit anti-inductive loopholes is a dumb idea, even if your moral calculus doesn’t cover the entities upon whom the loophole is being practiced.
PUAs, for example, became victims of their own success when they promoted canned pickup routines to the point that every bar-going female in an area began hearing the same routines regularly from different men, and every stock market strategy destroys itself if it becomes popular enough. Presumably both PUAs and traders—even if they don’t place any moral weight on the welfares of their respective “prey”—do not benefit from having their techniques become irrelevant, and having to develop new ones.
(OTOH, I suppose people who train PUAs or traders actually do benefit from the churning of methods that results… so I guess the rule should be, “you do not talk about anti-inductive loophole club, unless you stand to profit more from its promotion and eventual replacement than you do from the loophole itself”. But that’s getting a bit longwinded and off-point.)
Anyway, I think that some people have drawn the inference that I have a moral objection to people cheating the airlines. I think it’s more accurate to say that I think people who cheat the airlines and then talk about it in public are behaving irrationally.
IOW, I’m not so much saying OP is evil, as I’m saying OP is not evil enough. HPMOR!Quirrel’s rule number two is “Don’t brag”, after all. ;-)
If I knew about an awesome loophole of this nature, I would absolutely not post it on lesswrong. I would not even post it on a super-secret private forum for people who figure out awesome loopholes for exploiting airlines. You cannot unshare a secret.
Not every revealed loophole is as anti-inductive as stock market strategies. Ad blockers, for example, probably won’t destroy the internet unless a major browser vendor includes one and turns it on by default. But if you gain substantial value from a loophole, and you already consider your welfare more important than that of others, it’s an unnecessary risk to publicize the loophole—especially if it involves revealing to the public that you are exploiting that loophole.
It occurs to me, though, that by arguing about this, I may be making a similar meta-level error as Eliezer did when he deleted the basilisk. By arguing the point, I may have actually brought more attention to the topic, rather than less, while failing to actually educate anyone about the stupidity of the underlying ideas (either the loophole itself, or talking about loopholes).
Perhaps the more important rule is, “Do not try to silence people talking about fight club, because that just makes people more interested in fight club.”
So on that note, I’m going to abandon this thread altogether.
“tickets which the airlines have offered to sell to people traveling from point A to point B, and under terms which expressly prohibit jumping off at point C. Terms that you generally have to check a box saying you’re agreeing to.”
Pjeby, the Austrian Airlines conditions of carriage are 21 pages long, and as far as I know that is not untypical. Yes, you have to check a box saying you have read the terms and agree with them, but I think that pretty much everyone knows that everyone checks this box without reading them, and certainly without actually agreeing to them, since they do not know the terms.
And unless you read the terms yourself when you buy a ticket, which I strongly suspect that you do not, how would you know whether or not getting off at point C was prohibited by the terms?
In fact, the Austrian Airlines terms of service contain this:
“3.3.3. If you do not use the flight coupons in the sequence shown with the intention to circumvent the fare system, we will charge you the applicable price for the actual sequence of transportation you intended to take. This will be done by determining the fare you would have had to pay on the day of reserving your actual sequence of transportation. This may be higher than the originally paid cost of the flight. The cheapest available price in your booking class will be used to recalculate the changed sequence of transportation. If the booking class originally booked by you is not available for the changed routing on the day of making the reservation, the cheapest available booking class will be used to recalculate the changed sequence of transportation. Any taxes and charges for the unused flight coupon will be deducted. Please note that we are entitled to make carriage dependent on having paid the difference in price.”
Note that you are not agreeing to ACTUALLY TAKE the sequence of flights you purchase. You are agreeing to be charged for the actual sequence, so that e.g. you will have no valid complaint to a credit card company when they charge you the fare difference for getting off in London instead of going on to New York.
So if it is simply a question to keeping to your agreements, if you get off in London after purchasing a ticket from Vienna to New York via London, you are not breaking your agreement. Instead, the airline will simply be failing to carry out its threat if it fails to charge you any addition price difference for the Vienna—London ticket as opposed to the Vienna—New York. And if they do, that is more the airline failing to keep its side of the agreement, then you failing to keep yours.
This is not a secret anymore, and the attention I bring to the issue by posting it on LessWrong is pretty marginal. The fact that there’s already been a lawsuit over this is an indication that the airlines think it’s cheaper to try and suppress it that way than to change their pricing structure.
″...tickets which the airlines have offered to sell to people traveling from point A to point B, and under terms which expressly prohibit jumping off at point C. ”
That wasn’t true in Australia for Unknown, and I doubt it is true anywhere.
Think of how impractical it would be. People have plans, but plans change. People miss flights. They get sick. They’re hit by a bus. They just change their minds. So they’d all be opening themselves to litigation? That’s not why people get on a plane.
″ Terms that you generally have to check a box saying you’re agreeing to.”
Non negotiated contracts are just not treated the same as negotiated contracts.
“In any event, my other point still stands: telling other people how to exploit anti-inductive loopholes is a dumb idea”
In most cases, no. I’m often struck by the cheek of people telling other people how stupid they are in the pursuit of their own values.
You’re just making false assumptions about the values that people have. People often share information on tactical advantages that become marginally less advantageous the more other people know about them. They’re not all stupid—they’re generally just obtaining some value other than the value that comes from exercising the advantage when they communicate the advantage.
“you do not talk about anti-inductive loophole club, unless you stand to profit more from its promotion and eventual replacement than you do from the loophole itself”
No. Still wrong. You best decision is not determined by the worst case macro state on the loophole. People share deals primarily because they want to help other deal seekers win too. For many, that’s a value.
I can’t help but notice that only one of your comments on this article has actually addressed (let alone disputed) the substance of anything I’ve said. All the others just bring up something new (and at best tangentially related), with applause and boo lights attached. So I’m going to stop replying to you now.
There is no substance. You have certain moral intuitions—which I do not share—that you wave about in indignation. I can’t help you with your morality and I don’t think you can help me with mine.
Wait, what?
First off, buying things from the cheapest vendor only harms other people if you’re destroying the market for higher-quality goods. And it isn’t harming the vendor at all!
Second, buying from the cheapest vendor doesn’t involve deception.
Skiplagging or whatever you call it is buying an airline ticket under false pretenses. It’s like telling a girl in a bar you’re interested in a long-term relationship (full trip ticket) when in fact your goal is to get laid (go to the hub) and you don’t plan to call her again after you skip out (abandon trip at the layover).
IOW, you may engage in a deception because you don’t care about the other party’s welfare, but it doesn’t make you any less of an asshole or a contract breaker. And promoting to other people that they should deceive others for their personal short-term benefit makes you even more of an asshole.
When somebody offers to do something for a specific group of people, and you pretend to be in that group, you’re obtaining their consent by fraud. Not liking the somebody in question doesn’t give you a license to be an asshole, and neither does a feeling of entitlement that the girl or airline “ought” to give you the terms you want.
We can all dislike airline price segmentation all we want. But lying to the airline to get a better deal is fraudulent, and the moral justification for fraud ought to be considerably more substantive than, “welcome to capitalism!”
Firstly, I’m not at all sure that lying to a person should carry the same moral weight as lying to the (useful!) legal fiction of a corporation-as-person.
And secondly, I don’t find it obvious that fraud that harms someone is the same as fraud that doesn’t harm the corporation. Comparing the case where you get off at the layover point to the case where you don’t, it’s hard to see what harm you’ve caused to the airline. Obviously they would like to compare to the case where you bought the higher priced ticket. However, there are clearly four relevant scenarios (buying ticket from A->B and flying A->B, buying A->B and getting off at C, buying A->C and flying A->C, and them selling you the A->C ticket at the price you could buy the A->B ticket for). Obviously whoever gets to pick what single counterfactual scenario to compare to can decide how the comparison comes out.
Neither does this. No one is saying “I will fly these routes”; they’re saying “I will buy these tickets”.
...tickets which the airlines have offered to sell to people traveling from point A to point B, and under terms which expressly prohibit jumping off at point C. Terms that you generally have to check a box saying you’re agreeing to.
In any case, the part that makes it deception is that the seller wouldn’t consent to the sale if you told them what you were up to. If your general approach to interacting with people is that you’ll happily deceive them in order to get better terms in your deals, then by all means proceed.
If you want to say, “well, I don’t think an airline is an entity deserving of weight in my moral calculation”, fine. But let’s not pretend that the act itself is not a matter of obtaining consent through false pretenses, one that we would roundly condemn in another context, where our moral intuition is more inclined to see the object of the deception as a powerless victim instead of a powerful entity that can afford to be deceived.
At the very best, you could maybe say that what you’re doing is Not Technically Lying.
In any event, my other point still stands: telling other people how to exploit anti-inductive loopholes is a dumb idea, even if your moral calculus doesn’t cover the entities upon whom the loophole is being practiced.
PUAs, for example, became victims of their own success when they promoted canned pickup routines to the point that every bar-going female in an area began hearing the same routines regularly from different men, and every stock market strategy destroys itself if it becomes popular enough. Presumably both PUAs and traders—even if they don’t place any moral weight on the welfares of their respective “prey”—do not benefit from having their techniques become irrelevant, and having to develop new ones.
(OTOH, I suppose people who train PUAs or traders actually do benefit from the churning of methods that results… so I guess the rule should be, “you do not talk about anti-inductive loophole club, unless you stand to profit more from its promotion and eventual replacement than you do from the loophole itself”. But that’s getting a bit longwinded and off-point.)
Anyway, I think that some people have drawn the inference that I have a moral objection to people cheating the airlines. I think it’s more accurate to say that I think people who cheat the airlines and then talk about it in public are behaving irrationally.
IOW, I’m not so much saying OP is evil, as I’m saying OP is not evil enough. HPMOR!Quirrel’s rule number two is “Don’t brag”, after all. ;-)
If I knew about an awesome loophole of this nature, I would absolutely not post it on lesswrong. I would not even post it on a super-secret private forum for people who figure out awesome loopholes for exploiting airlines. You cannot unshare a secret.
Not every revealed loophole is as anti-inductive as stock market strategies. Ad blockers, for example, probably won’t destroy the internet unless a major browser vendor includes one and turns it on by default. But if you gain substantial value from a loophole, and you already consider your welfare more important than that of others, it’s an unnecessary risk to publicize the loophole—especially if it involves revealing to the public that you are exploiting that loophole.
It occurs to me, though, that by arguing about this, I may be making a similar meta-level error as Eliezer did when he deleted the basilisk. By arguing the point, I may have actually brought more attention to the topic, rather than less, while failing to actually educate anyone about the stupidity of the underlying ideas (either the loophole itself, or talking about loopholes).
Perhaps the more important rule is, “Do not try to silence people talking about fight club, because that just makes people more interested in fight club.”
So on that note, I’m going to abandon this thread altogether.
“tickets which the airlines have offered to sell to people traveling from point A to point B, and under terms which expressly prohibit jumping off at point C. Terms that you generally have to check a box saying you’re agreeing to.”
Pjeby, the Austrian Airlines conditions of carriage are 21 pages long, and as far as I know that is not untypical. Yes, you have to check a box saying you have read the terms and agree with them, but I think that pretty much everyone knows that everyone checks this box without reading them, and certainly without actually agreeing to them, since they do not know the terms.
And unless you read the terms yourself when you buy a ticket, which I strongly suspect that you do not, how would you know whether or not getting off at point C was prohibited by the terms?
In fact, the Austrian Airlines terms of service contain this:
“3.3.3. If you do not use the flight coupons in the sequence shown with the intention to circumvent the fare system, we will charge you the applicable price for the actual sequence of transportation you intended to take. This will be done by determining the fare you would have had to pay on the day of reserving your actual sequence of transportation. This may be higher than the originally paid cost of the flight. The cheapest available price in your booking class will be used to recalculate the changed sequence of transportation. If the booking class originally booked by you is not available for the changed routing on the day of making the reservation, the cheapest available booking class will be used to recalculate the changed sequence of transportation. Any taxes and charges for the unused flight coupon will be deducted. Please note that we are entitled to make carriage dependent on having paid the difference in price.”
Note that you are not agreeing to ACTUALLY TAKE the sequence of flights you purchase. You are agreeing to be charged for the actual sequence, so that e.g. you will have no valid complaint to a credit card company when they charge you the fare difference for getting off in London instead of going on to New York.
So if it is simply a question to keeping to your agreements, if you get off in London after purchasing a ticket from Vienna to New York via London, you are not breaking your agreement. Instead, the airline will simply be failing to carry out its threat if it fails to charge you any addition price difference for the Vienna—London ticket as opposed to the Vienna—New York. And if they do, that is more the airline failing to keep its side of the agreement, then you failing to keep yours.
This is not a secret anymore, and the attention I bring to the issue by posting it on LessWrong is pretty marginal. The fact that there’s already been a lawsuit over this is an indication that the airlines think it’s cheaper to try and suppress it that way than to change their pricing structure.
″...tickets which the airlines have offered to sell to people traveling from point A to point B, and under terms which expressly prohibit jumping off at point C. ”
That wasn’t true in Australia for Unknown, and I doubt it is true anywhere.
Think of how impractical it would be. People have plans, but plans change. People miss flights. They get sick. They’re hit by a bus. They just change their minds. So they’d all be opening themselves to litigation? That’s not why people get on a plane.
″ Terms that you generally have to check a box saying you’re agreeing to.”
See Lumifer’s discussion of contracts, presumably in Common Law jurisdictions: http://lesswrong.com/lw/lne/how_to_save_a_lot_of_money_on_flying/bxo2
Non negotiated contracts are just not treated the same as negotiated contracts.
“In any event, my other point still stands: telling other people how to exploit anti-inductive loopholes is a dumb idea”
In most cases, no. I’m often struck by the cheek of people telling other people how stupid they are in the pursuit of their own values.
You’re just making false assumptions about the values that people have. People often share information on tactical advantages that become marginally less advantageous the more other people know about them. They’re not all stupid—they’re generally just obtaining some value other than the value that comes from exercising the advantage when they communicate the advantage.
“you do not talk about anti-inductive loophole club, unless you stand to profit more from its promotion and eventual replacement than you do from the loophole itself”
No. Still wrong. You best decision is not determined by the worst case macro state on the loophole. People share deals primarily because they want to help other deal seekers win too. For many, that’s a value.
Next thing you’ll be telling me that by running adblocker software I’m destroying the internet.
How about this: you go buy things as you like and I go buy things as I like?
I can’t help but notice that only one of your comments on this article has actually addressed (let alone disputed) the substance of anything I’ve said. All the others just bring up something new (and at best tangentially related), with applause and boo lights attached. So I’m going to stop replying to you now.
There is no substance. You have certain moral intuitions—which I do not share—that you wave about in indignation. I can’t help you with your morality and I don’t think you can help me with mine.
You’re free to consider me evil :-D