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Comment by mmirate | Hacker News Reader

Why is it necessary to truly avoid exploiting the other party, instead of merely maintaining for them an illusion that they're not being exploited?

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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18099434 and marked it off-topic.

Most people are happier if they know that they are actively contributing to the world or at least to others people's happiness. Whether that applies to you is a question you have to answer yourself.

I wouldn't want to live my life knowing that I'm trying to pull everyone and everything over the table and that i make others miserable wherever I go.

If you want to find a business reason: long term relationships and trust both are valuable and build future business and new connections. But, really, the first reason should be enough.

Business negotiations are one thing. But the goal of a hostage negotiation is generally to waste enough time (and/or agree upon such a maneuver) so that the enemy exposes themselves all to simultaneous incapacitation by well-placed bullets, no?

The FBI has botched a number of high stakes operations using the tactics you mentioned.

Going in weapons hot is really dangerous for everyone involved and much like lawyers with law, the smartest people will seek to minimize their exposure to risk (ie. courtrooms, raids, etc.)

A better and cheaper solution in a hostage negotiation is to figure out the core motives for the hostage takers (often money [and why they need it]) and lead them to realistic expectations and a feeling of fairness.

Assuming this is a serious question, no, it's not. The goal of a hostage negotiation is to secure the safety of the hostages without capitulating to their captors. While arranging a violent solution is one way to do this, and it does sometimes happen, you'd be surprised how often people will simply surrender peacefully.

Indeed the idea is to make the adversary feel as though they’re getting a fair deal. The risk of exploiting them is that they might find out and now you’ve damaged your own reputation. Forcing the adversary to consider your perspective with empathy will allow them to recognize the unfair aspects of their deal and renegotiate for you.

It’s not that you shouldn’t exploit them (though in most cases it’s grately beneficial to both parties if you don’t), it’s that if you’re doing it right, you don’t need to in most cases.

There’s always exceptions, but the concept of approaching any deal with a core principle of exploiting the other party is a flawed strategy.

Because doing so desensitizes you to the pain and suffering of others.

Maybe a society full of sociopaths can get along just fine, but I'd rather not run that experiment.

Why not? Afraid they'll actually get things done instead of faffing about with thefts and handouts and bureaucracy?

At this point you're trolling. Please stop.

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That’s a really interesting question to consider.

If a business uses your skills to make a profit are you being exploited?

Does it make a difference if you get free lunch, massages, $300k salary, RSUs? Are you still being exploited? Where’s the line...

Also remember businesses are taking risk - they may fail in making a profit but your income is (barring them going bankrupt) risk-free.

Profit is the risk premium.

Because typically people figure it out eventually and then they are really angry. At the end of the day, all you really have is your reputation, and you don't want to be known as an exploitative asshole.

Because uncompromisingly compassionate behaviour towards other human beings is the ultimate and best way to make a world better place. Unless you are a billionare and can compete in funding woth nation states.

Is that supposed to mean something?

We are social animals that thrive in groups, not as lone individuals. This requires certain social behaviors.

Modern technology has made a mockery of the days when it took an entire family's labor just to raise an acre or two of crops.

I'm talking about the hundreds of thousands of years we spent as tribes of hunter gatherers. We still carry much of the social needs and behaviors formed in that landscape.

Right, and I'm saying that the landscape has changed enough that many of the behaviors and characteristics we evolved back then, are maladaptive today; just because most humans happen to have a certain trait, does not mean that others should hold that trait sacred and kowtow+mold themselves to it.

There are other examples, too; ones with even fewer exceptions. Our minds and bodies both help hoard energy; that trait-set was useful when animals were difficult to hunt, but today it just foments carb-poisoning, obesity and a raft of other pointlessly energy-efficient design tradeoffs. (The modern world is so much more energy-abundant than the ancestral landscape, yet we can't actually make use of anything past ~8 MJ a day for anything but high-endurance physical exertion. A human brain is like a Pentium II hooked up to a 500W PSU.)

The environment has changed significantly, yes. However, I don't agree that it has changed in ways that make pro-social behavior maladaptive.

The fact that you engage in this discussion here seems a strong indicator to me that the landscape has not changed that much. Otherwise you would just exploit everybody around you, and not talk about it.

Modern technology is also completely dependent on stable society of individuals working together in mostly amicable fashion.

I don't have to agree with someone else's political beliefs - or even generally like that person at all - to sell them a widget or buy from them a tool or raw-materials package; all I need are skills and a profit margin.

You might have trouble building an effective organization around your product if you ignore human social dynamics.

Yeah as a species we're accomplishing much bigger things now than an acre or two of crops.

I like to think that we're working towards a bigger goal than simply surviving.

Indeed, and we are able to do so via the artifices of trade and commerce - the only thing that need be agreed-upon is the price, the quantity and the quality.

And things like social norms, etiquette, laws, contracts, and so on...

We are not economic robots.

I can't say I like the grandparents "robotic" tone, but I have to disagree with you here on what all is required for coordinated efforts. People disagree locally on norms and etiquette all the time precisely because we are not robots. In fact the simple mechanism of agreeing on a price allows us to coordinate our activities despite disagreeing on so much else. Our differences play a role in making us human. So does our ability to coordinate without all being of the same mind.

On a larger scale, trade persists across legal divides - with much of this facilitated via contracts, which are actually not excluded by the grandparent comment. Here what I am really claiming that contracts are a form of generalized price. So trade, coordinated work, productive efforts large and small, are basically all facilitated by people coming to agreement on price, one way or another (unless the type of coordination involves a group of friends coordinating via friendship - or maybe some generalized version of that). The "price" agreement itself may be long winded (e.g. a contract with many conditions) but it is the basic mechanism of price that coordinates so much. Even world peace. Nations that trade together are less inclined to go to war with one another. (Absent a coercive situation that is. Without coercion, trade is mutually beneficial, by the standards of the parties willfully involved, and nobody wars with their benefactor)

Therefore, I would argue that we only need generalized prices (and a lack of coercion) in order to coordinate peaceably. We do not need to agree on norms and etiquette. Of course, if one party decides to spoil things and coerce another into a bad deal, or into conforming to its norms, etc., law becomes more important. (Of course in reality somebody always tries to spoil things so law is important from the very beginning, especially locally. I might argue that law becomes weaker anyway as we scale up towards nation state scale coordination where laws differ on both sides and contracts sort of blend into treaties). I am making broad statements about large scale action and I don't like that. Maybe better to sum up the position by saying given basic conditions - 1. property rights that try to be consistent, 2. dependable and consistent legal protection, and 3. a functioning price system (the less manipulated the better), we can coordinate imperfectly, but better than expected given the vast swaths of differences of opinion, taste, and preferences, that make us so human.

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