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.

I can't help but notice that only one of your comments on this article has actually addressed (let alone disputed) the substance of anything I've said. All the others just bring up something new (and at best tangentially related), with applause and boo lights attached. So I'm going to stop replying to you now.

The seller has no business knowing my intentions or trying to discriminate on their basis.

I'll take this to mean then, that you will happily lie to people to get them to have sex with you as well, since you don't believe people should be allowed to condition their consent on accurate information about your intentions.

I don't see much analogy with software piracy and so on, since this would be more like sneaking onto a flight without buying a ticket.

Software piracy isn't theft, so sneaking on without buying a ticket isn't actually analagous. (And in any case, you're thinking about the receiving end, not the giving end.)

When you redistribute something that's sold under terms that say, "don't copy and distribute this", you are breaking the contract you entered into with the seller. And if you intended to do it when you bought the thing, then you entered into that contract fraudulently.

This is analagous to fraudulently entering into a ticket contract to go from point A to point B, when you actually intend to go to the intervening point C.

In both cases, the seller would never have consented to the purchase at the offered price if they knew what your intentions were, which is what makes your purchase fraudulent.

I do the same thing every time I price check an item and buy it from the cheapest vendor, every time I use a coupon or a promotion, every time I wait for a sale. Welcome to capitalism.

Wait, what?

First off, buying things from the cheapest vendor only harms other people if you're destroying the market for higher-quality goods. And it isn't harming the vendor at all!

Second, buying from the cheapest vendor doesn't involve deception.

Skiplagging or whatever you call it is buying an airline ticket under false pretenses. It's like telling a girl in a bar you're interested in a long-term relationship (full trip ticket) when in fact your goal is to get laid (go to the hub) and you don't plan to call her again after you skip out (abandon trip at the layover).

IOW, you may engage in a deception because you don't care about the other party's welfare, but it doesn't make you any less of an asshole or a contract breaker. And promoting to other people that they should deceive others for their personal short-term benefit makes you even more of an asshole.

When somebody offers to do something for a specific group of people, and you pretend to be in that group, you're obtaining their consent by fraud. Not liking the somebody in question doesn't give you a license to be an asshole, and neither does a feeling of entitlement that the girl or airline "ought" to give you the terms you want.

We can all dislike airline price segmentation all we want. But lying to the airline to get a better deal is fraudulent, and the moral justification for fraud ought to be considerably more substantive than, "welcome to capitalism!"

Yes, this reason is airlines trying to make more money through customer segmentation.

I'm perfectly fine with sabotaging their efforts in this regard.

Are you also fine with making it more expensive for other people to fly, for your convenience?

How about file sharing to sabotage the efforts of authors, musicians, etc. to "make more money"?

I'm not saying your position is wrong -- just asking whether it's consistent.

In any case, promoting the use of self-defeating strategies is either foolish or evil. Either you're foolish because you don't realize you're going to lose use of the loophole yourself, or you're evil because you're deliberately creating a tragedy of the commons, destroying multiple sources of value for multiple parties. (When the fares or authors go away, everybody loses, not just the airlines or authors.)

If you find an anti-inductive loophole, for heaven's sake don't talk about it.

The first rule of anti-inductive loophole club is that you do not talk about anti-inductive loophole club.

a problem only counts as solved when it's actually gone.

And there are a surprising number of problems that disappear once you have clarity, i.e., they are no longer a problem, even if you haven't done anything yet. They become, at most, minor goals or subgoals, or cease to be cognifively relevant because the actual action needed -- if indeed there is any -- can be done on autopilot.

IOW, a huge number of "problems" are merely situations mistakenly labeled as problems, or where the entire substance of the problem is actually internal to the person experiencing a problem. For example, the "problem" of "I don't know where to go for lunch around here" ceases to be a problem once you've achieved "clarity".

Or to put it another way, "problems" tend to exist in the map more than the territory, and Adams' quote is commenting on how it's always surprising how many of one's problems reside in one's map, rather than the territory. (Because we are biased towards assuming our problems come from the territory; evolutionarily speaking, that's where they used to mostly come from.)

I discovered lesswrong.com because someone left a printout of an article on the elliptical machine in my gym. I started reading it and have become hooked.

What article was that?

want 'satisficer' to keep the original intended sense of "get X to at least this particular threshold value, and then don't worry about getting it any higher." I think controls point at... something I don't have a good word for yet, but 'proportioners' that try to put in effort appropriate to the level of error.

And yet, that's what they do. I mean, get X to a threshold value. It's just that X is the "distance to desired value", and we're trying to reduce X rather than increase it. Where things get interesting is that the system is simultaneously doing this for a lot of different perceptions, like keeping effort expenditure proportionate to reward.

if something needs to be done, then you need to try, because the effort is more important than the effect.

I don't understand this. People put forth effort in such a situation for various reasons, such as:

• Lack of absolute certainty the attempt will fail
• Embarassment at not being seen to try
• Belief they would be bad if they don't try

etc. It's not about "effort" or "effect" or maximizing or satisficing per se. It's just acting to reduce disturbances in current and predicted perceptions. Creating a new "proportioner" concept doesn't make sense to me, as there don't seem to be any leftover things to explain. It's enough to consider that living beings are simultaneously seeking homeostasis across a wide variety of present and predicted perceptual variables. (Including very abstract ones like "self-esteem" or "social status".)