Paul Graham’s essay The Top Idea in Your Mind seems relevant. The idea in that essay is that what your mind drifts to in the shower—the top idea in your mind—is really important. PG also notes that disputes like this air conditioner thing are doubly costly: 1) on the object level and 2) because they replace whatever cool thing would have been the top idea in your mind.
Turning the other cheek turns out to have selfish advantages. Someone who does you an injury hurts you twice: first by the injury itself, and second by taking up your time afterward thinking about it. If you learn to ignore injuries you can at least avoid the second half. I’ve found I can to some extent avoid thinking about nasty things people have done to me by telling myself: this doesn’t deserve space in my head. I’m always delighted to find I’ve forgotten the details of disputes, because that means I hadn’t been thinking about them. My wife thinks I’m more forgiving than she is, but my motives are purely selfish.
So then, paying attention to it seems like a bad idea.
Of course, that’s easier said than done. I personally am dealing with a bait-and-switch type of thing from a moving company right now and it’s a battle to not pay attention to it.
That’s ignoring the utilitarian/Kantian perspective—by me taking some time to warn other people off this company they will be saved from undergoing the same experience. If everyone does so, then this will be unlikely to happen to me in the future (and very few contractors would dare ripping you off in the first place).
Put another way you have a social duty to advertise bad companies.
Isn’t Yelp the place for that? If people warned of similarly bad companies on LW/personal blogs, the percentage of posts that are warnings of bad companies would be too high IMO.
The issue is that there is not a clear mechanism for your feedback to reach others, and a way for others to know that you are telling the truth and are not just a fake online profile made by a business rival.
As a side note this is a clear and succinct way to use limited AI to help coordinate humans. If we had a 0-5 star score for each business where all score components are probably from actual customers, serious issues like this attempted grand larceny have very high weight, and we don’t give an advantage to “new” fly by night outfits, this would improve the efficiency of the economy and it would not require a dangerous general superintelligence.
This strategy works for something that happens once, but for something that could be a pattern (e.g. getting ripped off by contractors), allocating thought to it would be worthwhile—but only if you are focused on learning from the experience, and avoiding this type of problem in the future, as opposed to just wallowing in the fact that you were wronged. (And that’s also easier said than done.)
I agree with that. I guess where I was coming from in my comment is, at risk of being uncharitable, that there isn’t too much to learn from here and the post was largely a vent.
Paul Graham’s essay The Top Idea in Your Mind seems relevant. The idea in that essay is that what your mind drifts to in the shower—the top idea in your mind—is really important. PG also notes that disputes like this air conditioner thing are doubly costly: 1) on the object level and 2) because they replace whatever cool thing would have been the top idea in your mind.
So then, paying attention to it seems like a bad idea.
Of course, that’s easier said than done. I personally am dealing with a bait-and-switch type of thing from a moving company right now and it’s a battle to not pay attention to it.
That’s ignoring the utilitarian/Kantian perspective—by me taking some time to warn other people off this company they will be saved from undergoing the same experience. If everyone does so, then this will be unlikely to happen to me in the future (and very few contractors would dare ripping you off in the first place).
Put another way you have a social duty to advertise bad companies.
Isn’t Yelp the place for that? If people warned of similarly bad companies on LW/personal blogs, the percentage of posts that are warnings of bad companies would be too high IMO.
I never said it had to be on less wrong
The issue is that there is not a clear mechanism for your feedback to reach others, and a way for others to know that you are telling the truth and are not just a fake online profile made by a business rival.
As a side note this is a clear and succinct way to use limited AI to help coordinate humans. If we had a 0-5 star score for each business where all score components are probably from actual customers, serious issues like this attempted grand larceny have very high weight, and we don’t give an advantage to “new” fly by night outfits, this would improve the efficiency of the economy and it would not require a dangerous general superintelligence.
This strategy works for something that happens once, but for something that could be a pattern (e.g. getting ripped off by contractors), allocating thought to it would be worthwhile—but only if you are focused on learning from the experience, and avoiding this type of problem in the future, as opposed to just wallowing in the fact that you were wronged. (And that’s also easier said than done.)
I agree with that. I guess where I was coming from in my comment is, at risk of being uncharitable, that there isn’t too much to learn from here and the post was largely a vent.