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. "
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 yo...
I was going to wait to post this for reasons, but realized that was pretty dumb when the difference of a few weeks could literally save people hundreds, if not thousands of collective dollars.
If you fly regularly (or at all), you may already know about this method of saving money. The method is quite simple: instead of buying a round-trip ticket from the airline or reseller, you hunt down much cheaper one-way flights with layovers at your destination and/or your point of origin. Skiplagged is a service that will do this automatically for you, and has been in the news recently because the creator was sued by United Airlines and Orbitz. While Skiplagged will allow you to click-through to purchase the one-way ticket to your destination, they have broken or disabled the functionality of the redirect to the one-way ticket back (possibly in order to raise more funds for their legal defense). However, finding the return flight manually is fairly easy as the provide all the information to filter for it on other websites (time, airline, etc). I personally have benefited from this - I am flying to Texas from Southern California soon, and instead of a round-trip ticket which would cost me about $450, I spent ~$180 on two one-way tickets (with the return flight being the "layover" at my point-of-origin). These are, perhaps, larger than usual savings; I think 20-25% is more common, but even then it's a fairly significant amount of money.
Relevant warnings by gwillen:
Additionally, you should do all of your airline/hotel/etc shopping using whatever private browsing mode your web browser has. This will often let you purchase the exact same product for a cheaper price.
That is all.