Comment by ThrustVectoring | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ThrustVectoring | Hacker News Reader

ThrustVectoring

Game theory is extraordinarily helpful for understanding what's going on, IMHO.

First off, not every capability is positive value to have. If you can irreversibly give someone a million dollars from your phone, people have a pretty big incentive to stick a gun in your face and make you do that. "It's physically impossible to do that" is an extremely useful negotiation stance; the winning strategy in a game of chicken is to make sure your opponent knows you threw the steering wheel out the car window.

Your emotional system is a really powerful decision-making engine that is almost completely immune to reason. It's extraordinarily hard to use logical reasoning to convince someone to not be sad that their dog died. This is a feature, not a bug. Anger is a much more relevant emotion for this - someone with a hair trigger on their temper has figured out that wielding that implicit threat serves their interest.

For all of that theory crafting you forget the person holding you at gunpoint is emotional as well and would just shoot you for having ruined their chance to get money. What use are you to them at all now?

Outside of extreme irrationality, this is difficult to imagine: murder is a much bigger crime than theft, and a much, much bigger crime than threatening someone (but ultimately doing nothing).

The detterance from simply being shot is that theres nothing to gain, and doing so increases your risk substantially.

Now, if there was little risk, such as you're in a shithole that the cops have gave up on anyways, or you're a known and hated gang member that no one will particularly miss, then its another story. But this why an eye-for-an-eye is an almost necessary strategy in lawless areas: the threat of your kin means that killing just you doesn't end the story. In lawful lands, the police play that role.

Of course, some will just ignore the risk and shoot you anyways, but thats just how it goes. After they take your money, they could shoot you too. Hell, if they're really stupid they might even shoot you before.

If they're going to ignore the risk associated with the act, regardless of how risky it is, then there's not much you can do about it. Except shoot them first, I guess.

That's a different situation that trades off against it. Being able to pay extortionists helps when you randomly encounter vindictive extortionists. It hurts when extortionists do research to figure out who to target.

It's probably not a bad idea to have like $40 in your wallet.

"the winning strategy in a game of chicken is to make sure your opponent knows you threw the steering wheel out the car window."

Unless your opponent also knows "the winning strategy."

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