Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 3

OpenThreadGuy

From Costanza's original thread (entire text):

"This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant."

Meta:

How often should these be made? I think one every three months is the correct frequency.

Costanza made the original thread, but I am OpenThreadGuy. I am therefore not only entitled but required to post this in his stead. But I got his permission anyway.

Meta:

I still haven't figured out a satisfactory answer to the previous meta question, how often these should be made. It was requested that I make a new one, so I did.
I promise I won't quote the entire previous threads from now on. Blockquoting in articles only goes one level deep, anyway.

From the last thread:

From Costanza's original thread (entire text):

"This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant."

Meta:

How often should these be made? I think one every three months is the correct frequency.

Costanza made the original thread, but I am OpenThreadGuy. I am therefore not only entitled but required to post this in his stead. But I got his permission anyway.

Meta:

I still haven't figured out a satisfactory answer to the previous meta question, how often these should be made. It was requested that I make a new one, so I did.
I promise I won't quote the entire previous threads from now on. Blockquoting in articles only goes one level deep, anyway.

I classify Julia's actions as inconsistent, mostly.

At time T1, Julia prefers to date me rather than end our relationship and tell my wife.
At time T2, Julia prefers to end our relationship and tell my wife.
The transition between T1 and T2 evidently has something to do with the transient belief that her silence was worth $4k/week, but what exactly it has to do with that belief is unclear, since by Julia's own account the truth or falsehood of that belief is irrelevant.

If I take her account as definitive, I'm pretty clear that what Julia is doing is not blackmail... it reduces to "Hey, I've decided to tell your wife about us, and there's nothing you can do to stop me." It isn't even a threat, it's just early warning of the intent to harm me.

If I assume she's lying about her motives, either consciously or with some degree of self-delusion, it might be blackmail. For example, if she believes I really can afford to pay her, and am just claiming poverty as a negotiating tactic, which she is countering by claiming not to care about the money, then it follows that she's blackmailing me.

If I assume that she doesn't really have relevant motives anymore, she just precommitted to reveal the information if I don't pay her and now she's following through on her previous precommitment, and the fact that the precommitment was made based on one set of beliefs about the world and she now knows those beliefs were false at the time doesn't change the fact that the precommitment was made ("often wrong, never uncertain"), then she clearly blackmailed me once, and I guess it follows that she's still blackmailing me... maybe? It seems that if she set up a mechanical device that posts the secret to Facebook unless fed $4k in quarters once a week, and then changed her mind and decided she'd rather just keep dating me, but was unable to turn the device off, we could in the same sense say she was still blackmailing me, albeit against her own will. That is at best a problematic sense of blackmail, but not clearly an incorrect one.

So it seems pretty clear that the blackmailer's intentions play some role in my intuitions about what is or isn't blackmail, albeit a murky one.

Of course, I could choose to ignore my linguistic intuitions and adopt a simpler definition which I apply formally. Nothing wrong with that, but it makes questions about what is and isn't blackmail sort of silly.

For example, if I say any attempt to get money in exchange for not revealing information, regardless of my state of mind, is blackmail, then the following scenario is clearly blackmail:

I develop a practical, cheap, unlimited energy source in my basement. Julia says "Honey, I work for the oil company, and we will pay you $N/week for the rest of your life if you keep your mouth shut about that energy source." I agree and take the money.

My native speaker's intuitions are very clear that this is not blackmail, but I'm happy to use the term "blackmail" as a term of art to describe it if that makes communication with you (and perhaps Vladimir Nesov) easier.

At time T1, Julia prefers to date me rather than end our relationship and tell my wife.

Something about this confused me.

2Xachariah14y

Sorry. I think I communicated unclearly, which is the danger of using stories instead of examples and is my fault entirely. At the very start of the story, Julia learns about your wife at the same time she learns about the lottery. She had previously thought you were single and the new information shifted her preference ordering. Regarding the example you used (oil company & energy), I also hold it is not blackmail. If I use the previous definition of Blackmail being the act of making an attempt to get money in exchange for not revealing information, then the attempt is the crucial part in this case (whether it succeeds or not). The oil company offering me money is okay; me trying to get money out of the oil company is blackmail.

1pragmatist14y

I think in Xachariah's story Julia did not know prior to seeing you on TV that you have a wife. So there was no time at which she had the preference you describe here.

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Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 3

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Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 3

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