Risto_Saarelma comments on Rationality Quotes: April 2011 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: benelliott 04 April 2011 09:55AM

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Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 04 April 2011 01:03:01PM 30 points [-]

My friend, Tony, does prop work in Hollywood. Before he was big and famous, he would sell jewelry and such at Ren Faires and the like. One day I'm there, shooting the shit with him, when a guy comes up and looks at some of the crystals that Tony is selling. he finally zeroes in on one and gets all gaga over the bit of quartz. He informs Tony that he's never seen such a strong power crystal. Tony tells him it a piece of quartz. The buyer maintains it is an amazing power crystal and demands to know the price. Tony looks him over for a second, then says "If it's just a piece of quartz, it's $15. If it's a power crystal, it's $150. Which is is?" The buyer actually looked a bit sheepish as he said quietly "quartz", gave Tony his money and wandered off. I wonder if he thought he got the better of Tony.

-- genesplicer on Something Awful Forums, via

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 04 April 2011 03:58:53PM 35 points [-]

I wonder if the default price was more like $10.

Comment author: Giles 04 April 2011 06:10:57PM 19 points [-]

Wow, anchoring! That one didn't even occur to me!

Comment author: NihilCredo 05 April 2011 09:49:45PM 13 points [-]

Note to self: do not buy stuff from Nancy Lebovitz.

Comment author: Tiiba 06 April 2011 02:27:01AM *  4 points [-]

Better yet, don't go gaga. And use anchoring to your advantage - before haggling, talk about something you got for free.

Comment author: Yvain 05 April 2011 11:36:38PM *  16 points [-]

Story kind of bothers me. Yeah, you can get someone to pretend not to believe something by offering a fiscal reward, but that doesn't prove anything.

If I were a geologist and correctly identified the crystal as the rare and valuable mineral unobtainite which I had been desperately seeking samples of, but Tony stubbornly insisted it was quartz - and if Tony then told me it was $150 if it was unobtainite but $15 if it was quartz - I'd call it quartz too if it meant I could get my sample for cheaper. So what?

Comment author: Alicorn 05 April 2011 11:42:31PM 11 points [-]

I think the interesting part of the story is that it caused the power crystal dude to shut up about power crystals when he'd previously evinced interest in telling everyone about them. I don't think you could get the same effect for $135 from a lot of, say, missionaries.

Comment author: Desrtopa 04 April 2011 01:43:12PM 9 points [-]

Part of me wants to say that it was foolish of Tony to take so much less money than he could have gotten simply for getting the guy to profess that it was a piece of quartz rather than a power crystal, but I'm not sure I would feel comfortable exploiting a guy's delusions to that degree either.

Comment author: benelliott 04 April 2011 03:57:44PM 4 points [-]

There's no guarantee the guy would have bought it at all for $150. The impression I get is that this was ultimately a case of belief in belief, Tony knew he couldn't get much more than $15 and just wanted to win the argument.

Comment author: Desrtopa 04 April 2011 04:04:28PM 2 points [-]

I doubt he would have bought it for $150, but after making a big deal of its properties as a power crystal, he'd be limited in his leverage to haggle it down; he'd probably have taken it for three times the asking price if not ten.

Comment author: zaph 04 April 2011 02:27:26PM *  10 points [-]

I thank Tony for not taking the immediately self-benefiting path of profit and instead doing his small part to raise the sanity waterline.

Comment author: Giles 04 April 2011 03:10:37PM *  13 points [-]

Was the buyer sane enough to realise that it probably wasn't a power crystal, or just sane enough to realise that if he pretended it wasn't a power crystal he'd save $135?

Is that amount of raising-the-sanity waterline worth $135 to Tony?

I would guess it's guilt-avoidance at work here.

(EDIT: your thanks to Tony are still valid though!)

Comment author: childofbaud 04 April 2011 08:55:09PM *  7 points [-]

And with that in mind, how would it have affected the sanity waterline if Tony had donated that $135 to an institution that's pursuing the improvement of human rationality?

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 April 2011 04:35:44AM 40 points [-]

Look, sometimes you've just got to do things because they're awesome.

Comment author: thomblake 07 April 2011 08:27:45PM 2 points [-]

But would you feel comfortable with that maxim encoded in an AI's utility function?

Comment author: Alicorn 07 April 2011 08:38:20PM 13 points [-]

For a sufficiently rigorous definition of "awesome", why not?

Comment author: benelliott 08 April 2011 07:54:21AM 4 points [-]

If its a terminal value then CEV should converge to it.

Comment author: DanielLC 05 April 2011 12:25:47AM 5 points [-]

I think he would have been better off taking the money and donating it to a good charity.

Comment author: Dorikka 06 April 2011 03:29:18PM 4 points [-]

And then the guy walks away trying to prevent himself from bursting out with laughter at the fact that he just managed to get an incredibly good deal on a strong power crystal that Tony, who had clearly not been educated in such things, mistakenly believed was simple quartz.

Comment author: SRStarin 11 April 2011 01:02:59PM 3 points [-]

Meh. Tony ruined that guy's role-playing fun at a Ren Faire. People pretend to believe all kinds of silly stuff at a Ren Faire.

Last year my husband and I went to Ren Faire dressed as monks, pushing our daughter, dressed as a baby dragon, around in a stroller. (We got lots of comments about vows of celibacy.) We bought our daughter a little flower-shaped hair pin when we were there, after asking what would look best on a dragon. What Tony did would have been like the salesperson saying "That's not a dragon."