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cousin_it comments on Eight Short Studies On Excuses - Less Wrong
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What Thomas Schelling would do. Partly tongue-in-cheek.
The Clumsy Game-Player: agree to the deal, then perform an identical "finger slip" several turns later.
The Lazy Student, The Grieving Student, The Sports Fan: make the deadline for reports a curve instead of a cliff. Each day of delay costs some percentage of the grade.
The Murderous Husband: if you really don't want these things to happen, make the wife partially responsible for the murder in such cases, by law. (Or the lover, if the husband chooses to murder the wife.)
The Bellicose Dictator: publicly threaten sanctions unless the invading army withdraws immediately. Do this before any negotiations.
The Peyote-Popping Native, The Well-Disguised Atheist: when the native first comes to you, offer to balance out the permission to smoke peyote with some sanction against the Native American church. Then the atheists won't bother asking for a free lunch.
You sure he wouldn't advise the teacher to pretend not to understand what the student is asking for until they give up? :-P
Yeah, that might work if the teacher has a poor command of English. (Schelling refers to this negotiation tactic as "turning off your hearing aid".) Even better would be to announce that you will leave town immediately after the final date. But I still like my solution best.
We had this system for my second year physics project at university. I hadn't started it when the deadline arrived and decided the penalty rate was too steep to bother starting when the deadline passed. Several weeks later I was summoned to explain why I hadn't handed the project in and I explained that it hadn't seemed worth starting given how little it would be worth by the time I finished it (by this point the penalty had long since reduced the potential grade to ~0). They told me if I completed it before the end of term they wouldn't apply the penalty
Perhaps making students like you feel that it is worthwhile getting started once you have already procrastinated contributes to the success of this strategy.
Perhaps, but my problem was more that I mistook a theoretical interest in physics for an interest in theoretical physics.
It sounds like You were the case, where it was not worth to waiwe the penalty. They should have sticked to their rules. Out of interest, did You ever write and turn in that physics project ?
I've always liked the "drop the n lowest scores" strategy. For example, 10 assignments given with the lowest 2 scores ignored.
You are pre-committing to a set of rules, where any excuse would have a much lower probability of being true. Any excuse would need to include 3 excuses. Combining the probabilities of each of the excuses will likely bring the total under your acceptable threshold. Basically, it's lowering the likelihood that you will want to violate the rules.
You can also look at like this. Your model of people predicts that they are scoundrels, and will try to violate the rules, maximizing their utility at your expense. So build a system where procrastinators can maximize their utility at no expense to you.
"Any excuse would need to include 3 excuses." - not as such; there is then the possibility that someone will wish to have an excuse to turn in an assignment they expect to do well on late to replace the grade of one of the other assignments which they did poorly on (or had no excuse).
Hm, I don't see how this one works. Isn't a threat of sanctions and invasion the standing order of the day?
Nope. In the story Ban Ki-moon phones the dictator first, before publicly announcing sanctions. This is a mistake.
Yes, but I mean doesn't the real world UN have standing orders about invasions? I thought the UN charter mandated defense of its members.
The few examples of UN lead responses to invasions that worked typically involved great powers backstopping the response. UN members are reluctant to expend blood and treasure without getting something in return. I think the only time it worked as intended was the Korean war, and that's because Stalin was sitting out for a bit.
This was standard practice when I did my first university degree. It seemed to work well and while I never handed in anything late myself I approved in principle.
Interestingly in my later courses at universities that were (and are) more prestigious (at least in the traditional and Arts/Science/Medicine kind of fields) they would not consider that sort of practical system. Far too set in their ways to do that sort of thing. (And on a related note I'd never have done a computer science degree there - they teach programming primarily in C.)